Too many things I talked about on busy days all at once, instead of pacing myself; ah, well — it’s just a couple of days until every pert-near webcomicker east of the Continental Divide makes their way to Bethesda for SPX. So while you’re waiting for that, please enjoy the following:

• PONY COP, the most adorable buddy-cop story of all time, gets the fandub treatment and it is glorious. All we need now are the pulse-pounding third and heartbreaking fourth installments in the PONY COP saga and all will be well in the world.
• Math meets snacks.
• She’s got your number, cat.
• Just guessing here, but I think that the Stretchladder of the Homestuck Kickstarter will be seeing an update on the “new perk” and “???” entries soon. We’re almost certainly going to hit the US$1.25 million level by end of the day, meaning that the game will be available on a physical Homestuck-branded medium¹. If Andrew Hussie is smart (and all available evidence is that he is, very much so), a carefully-revealed tease could pump up the response and drive people to ever-higher monetary support in exchange for exactly the right reward.

  Again, just guessing, but I’m thinking that a response equivalent to that for the SNOUTPACK² (and higher tiers) with the Senator Lemonsout and Pyralspite plushies, could be achieved with the right merch. Imps? Plush cuddle-cthulhu? Bec? Highly disturbing puppets? It’s like a totem lathe card for the making of money.

________________
¹ And if there’s one thing that Rich Stevens has taught us, it’s that custom USB drives will motivate the heck out of your reader base.

² Which has increased by another 50 slots, to 700 backers, selling out as quickly as it’s expanded.

Nothing, I tell you!

• Okay, maybe this, from a little before midnight (EDT) last night:
  

  ONE. MILLION. DOLLARS.

  Mister Smiley refers, naturally, to this — only the twelfth million-dollar project in Kickstarter history — which is actually accelerating the pace of pledges instead of dropping as would be usual at this point. Chalk that up to the addition of several more supporter tiers (mostly incorporating the now-legendary SNOUTPACK) in the high-dollar range and stretch goals getting revealed.

• Two pieces of really neat comic work that’ve gone up in the past day or so that I want to recommend to you. On the one hand, Renée French’s Baby Bjornstrand is subtle, moody, spare, and plays with your head in all the right ways. Even better, it looks like it will be a continuing story!

  On the other hand, Lucy Knisley’s Vanishing Into My Head has a bright exterior, and a chewy center of memory, philosophy, identity, and the desire to be truly understood by another. They’re both top-notch examples of what can be done in comics that can’t be done elsewhere.

The spiritual/cartoonical heirs of Harvey Kurtzman had their shindig on Saturday night, and as near as I can tell from the winners list, the most calls to the podium were for various Daredevil properties and one Ms Kate Beaton, who won for Best Online Comics Work, Special Award for Humor in Comics, and (most impressively) Best Cartoonist. The exceedingly modest Beaton remarked on her Tumblr:

To have won these awards is touching, and reaffirming, and I was not expecting so much faith in my work, but I thank you for your votes and your confidence. God knows, I am not the greatest cartoonist drawing breath at the moment, but I will try to always improve, and produce the best work I am capable of. I hope that I live up to your present opinion in further endeavors.

Also grateful for all of the wins: Mrs Brad Guigar. See, Brad was Kate’s designated award-acceptor, which meant he got in a lot of cardio sprinting to the podium and back three times, which means that he’s healthier today that he would have been otherwise, and why on earth wouldn’t a healthier Brad be a wonderful thing?

Continuing the webcomicker presence at the podium — Ramón Peréz hasn’t been able to keep up with Kukuburi so much due to the demands of paying work, but since one piece of that paying work was the stellar (and twice-honored) Jim Henson’s Tale of Sand, I’d say that Pérez made the right decision. And rounding things out, Vera Brosgol will always be a webcomiker in my heart, no matter how unfinished Return to Sender remains; she was justly recognized for Best Original Graphic Publication for Younger Readers for Anya’s Ghost, about which this page has had much good to say.

One more thought regarding Maryland’s annual designation as Center of the Comics World: this Friday, the day before SPX kicks off in Bethesda, the University of Maryland (College Park)’s Stamp Student Union will be holding a special panel discussion on webcomics:

“Pixels and Paper: Comic Art in the Digital Age,” is a panel discussion at the Hoff Theater in Stamp on September 14th from 2:00pm – 4:00pm about the creation and dissemination of comics in the digital age.

FREE and open to the public, the panel will converse on a number of topics related to the creation and dissemination of comics using both analog and digital methods, and how those choices are made.

Participants include Sally Carson (Fixpert), Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson (Tiny Kitten Teeth), Jeph Jacques (Questionable Content), and Rob Ullman (Atom-Bomb Bikini).

Not listed there, but also participating: Holly Post, Vice President in Charge of Kicking Your Ass for TopatoCo. This panel will feature much good information, and probably hugs.

How about: I’ve seen the epilogue of Starslip, and you should, too? Fortunately, you can with the general availability of Starslip’s fifth collection and also a handy-dandy five-book bundle with bonus embroidery. Read ’em straight through and marvel at the möbius strip that K’thris Stribe crafted to twist and turn and end up (almost) where it started.

There’s something about Lord Baltimore’s stomping grounds that just grabs hold of comics in September and won’t let go. Three weekends, three shows, serving three different constituencies. Let’s run ’em down.

• Up first, this weekend brings the return of Baltimore Comic Con to Charm City, with its big-name companies in a comics-centric show. With an awards ceremony and Stan Lee, it’s got everything the very largest shows have, with the exception of a million media companies crowding comics off the floor and a non-PDF programming guide. Lotsa people from the webcomicky world listed as showing, including your Brads and Sohmers and Braden & Shellis and Cubes and Speeds.
• One week later, Bethesda hosts the indy- and art-comics types at SPX, with the Ignatz Awards and more webcomickers and their natural allies than you can shake a stick at. I know I missed a lot of people from the list (including repeats from BaltoCon) so give it a good going-over, yes? On the off chance you don’t find somebody you want to meet in person, you can see some of the brainiest comics panels around or hit the handy hotel lobby bar.
• One week on, Intervention hits, also in Bethesda, and less “comics” than “things made on the internet”, with a real focus on programming late into the night, but with a preponderance of webcomics types on the guest list, including some repeats from the prior two shows, and a rare East Coast sighting of webcomics resident West Coast Tiki Queen and one third of the Nexus of All Webcomics Realities¹, Shaenon Garrity, and her Skin Horse writing partner, Jeffrey C Wells.² I don’t know if there’s a lobby bar, but it there is and any of the drinks come in glasses with faces on them, don’t get between them and Shaenon if you value your life.
• A little further in the future, Matthew Inman and the Little Gamers crew will continue webcomics traditions in 2013 by, respectively, presenting at the next SxSW Festival and driving from London to Ulan Bator. Gonna be a busy year next year.

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¹ The other two thirds being The Tall Man and The Smiling Man.

² I’m pretty sure I just set a record for the longest single sentence at Fleen.

One of the three (3) people backing the Homestuck Kickstarter at the US$5000 has canceled the pledge, leaving two (2) people there.

This is apparently because said person upgraded their pledge to the US$10,000 level. Canon, baby!

It too a little longer than the 18 – 20 hours that my original projections indicated but the Homestuck Kickstarter campaign just rolled over its goal of US$700,000 in approximately 32 hours, 6 minutes. There was a sprint there as quite a bit of money came in a quick burst, as (I suspect) people tried to be the one to put the whole thing over the top.

The numbers:

• Backers: 7701
• Total raised: $700,049
• Dollars per backer: $90.95
• Dollars per hour: $21,819.60

Just as interesting were the breakdowns in the support levels:

• $15 and up: 2118
• $25 and up: 1693
• $55 and up: 794
• $80 and up: 280
• $105 and up (unlimited): 579
• $105 and up (limited reward #1): 671 of 1000
• $105 and up (limited reward #2): 132 of 1000
• $180 and up: 84
• $255 and up (unlimited): 141
• $255 and up (limited reward): 600 of 600
• $405 and up (limited reward): 458 of 1000
• $5000 and up (limited reward): 3 of 25
• $10,000 and up (limited reward): 0 of 10
• No reports of God Tier rewards 2 ($100K) through 6 ($1B) yet

Interestingly, if you add up those numbers, it comes to 7553 (if I’ve got my sums right), which means 148 people have donated less than $15, with no hopes of tangible reward — they just want to see the project succeed.

Regarding the bits in bold, this campaign is completely screwing with my earlier analysis of successful webcomics Kickstarts, which said that the high-dollar values aren’t going to make up a significant number of backers. Here, Andrew Hussie has 1202 people (15.6% of his total backers) ponying up at least $250 each¹, accounting for a total of $389,445 (55.6% of total money raised), giving me a big enough outlier that all my prior conclusions now have to have a footnote attached².

Oh, and in the time it’s taken me to type this up, it’s up to 7890 backers and $714,964. That’s going to lead to a non-stop cycle of not being able to type numbers in quickly enough to keep up, so do your own calculations from there.

One last note: the trending predictions at Kicktraq only get graphed once per day, so while today’s point is going to be down from yesterday’s by several million dollars, that graph isn’t going to show the changes in trend that took place during today. When I first checked Kicktraq this morning, Homestuck was trending toward US$8.3 million; by the time of meeting goal, it was up to more than US$10 million.

As I write this (and Kicktraq only recalculates once per hour, so this is for 11:01pm EDT), it’s up to US$11.1 million. I have not ever seen a Kicktraq trend go up that much in the early part of a campaign, when there tends to be a huge dropoff. Even in the frenzy of the last days of an exciting campaign, trend delta tends to be downwards, flat, or very slightly up; a 33% uptick in the course of a day is (once again) Not Something That Happens. We’re officially into uncharted territory. It’s going to take the combined math skills of Randall Munroe and Zach Weinersmith to make sense of this one.
_______________
¹ I’m pretty sure the 458 people at $405 is unprecedented.

² Namely, All predictions are moot if your name is Andrew Hussie, but it probably isn’t.

Let me tell you a little bit about Andrew Hussie and Homestuck: I have been struggling to read it, because it’s damn voluminous, dense, stuffed silly with music and interaction and games and self- and forward- and back-references and completely, utterly not for me.

It is the opening shot of the native culture of the second generation of internet users — the ones that have always lived there, not those of us that immigrated from the Old (nondigital) Country within our living memory. And here’s a hint for everybody that still remembers the Old (nondigital) Country: there’s more of them and fewer of us every day, so maybe if your livelihood depends on putting content in front of eyeballs in some fashion, you ought to be paying all the attention you can muster to Mr Hussie and the fans whose brains he lives in.

The Homestuck Kickstarter campaign is — to my mind, somewhat arbitrarily — categorized as a videogame, but that doesn’t really describe what’s being built, I don’t think. MS Paint Adventures as a whole (and Homestuck especially) has always been equal parts comic, interactive, animation, music (how many soundtrack albums has Hussie released so far?), and amalgam that couldn’t exist in its full form anywhere except online.

Homestuck started (and for a year, continued) with a user-participation component that was key to its aims — to make something that was a comic, but more. One could could argue that the game isn’t really a spin-off of Homestuck, it’s just more of Homestuck; it’s always been a participatory community (and when the explicit reader participation portion came to and end for logistical reasons, it merely shifted to a galaxy of blogs and tumblrs and fora), and while the description of the game on the Kickstarter page doesn’t explicitly say so, I’ll wager that multiplayer/social capabilities will be key. What’s the point of having your own fan troll if you can’t mess with your friends on Pesterchum? This is just the next form of the community, and however tight the new, self-contained story will be, I believe it will be hacked and mutated by the players until they’re living the SBURB life.

I speculate, of course, but here’s things that we know about the Homestuck Kickstarter Campaign as of this moment: It hasn’t broken into the wider culture yet; the major comics sites haven’t yet discussed the campaign with their readers, it’s only starting to filter into the videogame news sphere, and it certainly hasn’t been picked up as a quirky story by major media. It is still building mindshare and still:

• In one day, it made just about the same amount of money as a major studio motion picture with a production and marketing budget of US$60 million that was released in more than 2000 theaters over a long weekend.¹
• In one day, it made more money than all but three comic books released in North America in July, and those three were, respectively, the 100th issue of a comic with a TV tie-in, and the 7th and 8th issues of a crossover between the two superhero teams best-known to the wider culture. Note that people who recognize The Walking Dead, The [adjective] Avengers or The [adjective] X-Men from movies or TV are legion and have never heard of Homestuck. Homestuck beat freaking Batman in a day. It’ll be above the third of those comics within minutes; Edit: calculation error, my apologies, but the remainder of this sentence holds true before the end of tomorrow, it’ll be above all of them.
• It is a very real possibility that Homestuck will displace the current (all-time; best-funded) Kickstarter projects; what those super-top-funded projects have in common is an unusually high per-backer average (#1 had a ratio of $149.95; #2: $135.57; compare the Order of the Stick ratio at $83.88). In a day, Homestuck has a ratio flirting with the $100 level, I don’t think it’s dropping anytime soon. If the current funding rates hold for the entire 30 days (and they won’t, but if they did), Homestuck would be looking at the vicinity of eighteen million dollars.

I won’t post this until 2:26pm EDT, as that will be 24 hours since the Homestuck Kickstarter campaign launched, and I want very much to see how much money he’s raised in that time and make sure that the following numbers are up to date:

6217 backers
$593,044 raised
$95.39 dollars per backer
383 pledging $405 or more
2 pledging $5000 or more
average rate: $24,710 per hour

All
the
attention
you
can
muster.

Because this? This is when the game changed.

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¹ Okay, anybody could have told you that something called The Oogieloves was going to lose a mountain of cash, but seriously, a return of $600K on a $60M investment? That is literally a return of one cent on the dollar. You have to have been trying to lose that much money.

Andrew Hussie launched a Homestuck videogame Kickstarter approximately 1 hour and 53 mins ago as I’m finishing this. In that time, the following landmarks have been met:

• 20 minutes in: 163 backers, $13,145 raised
• 30 minutes in: 300 backers, $24,573 raised
  NB: within that time, 14 people had pledged $405 or more
• 40 minutes in: 450 backers, $38,573 raised
• 60 minutes in: 721 backers, $64,129 raised
• 90 minutes in: 1,054 backers, $95,017 raised

If these rates hold, the desired $700,000 will be raised in between 18 and 20 hours; please note that as the word of this campaign spreads, the dollars/backer ratio is actually increasing and presently sits at just over $90.

Here are some pictures for you (slightly out of date as in the time it took me to create them, Hussie has raised approximately $17,000 more.

Total raised and backer count:

Just the money:

Dollars per backer ratio:

Note also that Hussie has also announced “God Tier” rewards at $10,000, $100,000, $1,000,000, $10,000,000, $100,000,000, and $1,000,000,000 (that’s a cool billion dollars); at this point, it’s even odds that he gets at least one person to go for Tier One. It all depends on how many of the Homestucks that flock to him at shows have trust funds; alternately, they might all chip in together and choose one of their number by lot to be canonized (however temporarily).

Update: two hours, 1378 backers, $122,143 raised, $88.64/backer, 65 people pledging $405 or more.

Okay, screw it: twelve hours, 5244 backers, $501,755 raised, $95.68/backer, 307 people pledging $405 or more. That’s as close to an even half million in twelve hours as you could hope to get, and it’s middle of the night for a lot of the people who would be backing this thing. If this campaign follows the usual trend of the final days outpacing the beginning, we could be looking at seven digits to the left of the decimal by the time it’s done. More on this around the 24 hour mark.

Let’s start with a quick clarification from yesterday, wherein I conflated my concerns for Java (in general and particularly browser plugins) with my separate concerns for JavaScript in such a way that it would be possible to read them as being the same thing. They aren’t, and thanks to alert reader Rsty, who made that point in the comments. We at Fleen apologize for any confusion that may have resulted.

• So end of last week, I noticed that It’s Willis! has got a new site set up, ready to go with a day-for-day re-presentation of the Its Universe! comics, in the best reading order, on account of next Monday marks the fifteenth anniversary of his various comickin’ endeavours.

  Along those lines, next Monday also marks the second anniversary of Dumbing of Age. If I’m following the story’s chronology correctly, there have been two weekends since, which means we’ve got a rate of approximately one week (story time) per year (real time). At this rate, we can expect the DoA characters to hit midterms in around 2018, finish up the first semester and head out for Christmas break around 2024, and to graduate (assuming that Willis! only focuses on in-school time and everybody gets the classes they need on their schedules) sometime around SDCC 2138.

  That is gonna be one monster of a collected-strip omnibus edition, with a cost estimated upwards of US$14,000 (in 2138 dollars; adjusting for inflation, you ought to be okay if you set twenty or thirty bucks aside in a savings account and let the miracle of compound interest do its thing¹).

• There’s one less webcomic hanging about this morning² as Jason Viola’s Herman the Manatee flaps his flippers one last time. It’s actually been a long time coming, with the final story arc starting last year, getting interrupted by the vagaries of life, reaching a formal finish to the storyline last month, and finishing up on a rather sweet little coda today. Having an oft-interrupted strip finally reach an end ordinarily wouldn’t be enough for me to post about it, but Viola’s valedictory post caught my eye:
  

  Herman the Manatee began four years ago as a joke among friends. It has, of course, remained a joke among friends, but there are now many more of them. Still just the one joke, though. I had no idea I would be drawing it for this long; in my mind, I’ve always been six months away from ending the strip.

  The sixth month has finally arrived. I’m sad to say goodbye to Herman but relieved as well – he has always made it difficult when I want to work on new things. I have more stories I’m excited to tell and I’m looking forward to having the time and space to draw them.

  It’s that bit about feeling held back by a creation, wanting to tell new stories and finding an existing work getting in the way; it’s a larger version of the writer’s dictum to kill your darlings, and I expect that being willing to send Herman off to that tropical lagoon in the sky means that what we see next from Viola will be the better for it. Le lamantin est mort, vive le comique prochaine.

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¹ Predictions may need to be adjusted due to intervening global monetary collapses, Mayan apocalypses, Ragnaroks, alien invasions, or societal evolutions into a more enlightened politico-economic model that no longer predicates itself on the accumulation of wealth from a basis of scarcity. Consult a qualified financial advisor for any questions regarding the tax implications of the DOGSTORM.

² Let’s be realistic — there’s probably anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand webcomics that have ceased updating today; if you want an approximation of how many there might actually be, feel free to hit up Randall Munroe with that particular puzzler but don’t expect a satisfying answer as webcomics are well known to defy the laws of physics. In any event, we are for the moment talking about webcomics that had a regular, ongoing update history and an audience that would come out to shows and such.