I’m assuming that you’ve seen the latest bit of The Internet directed at Kate Beaton¹; her unwillingness to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous dickishness in silence is commendable in and of itself, but I’m actually more interested in a broader reaction she had. Namely, to reinforce the idea that, despite their general shouty volume and unwillingness to Just Stop It Please, the dicks aren’t in charge, Beaton spent some time on Saturday soliciting for names of and links to webcomics that she could share with her followers. When more came in that could be easily re-tweeted, she put ’em on her Tumblr; there’s more than 150 listed there — some new, some established, all potentially My New Favorite That I Wouldn’t Have Know About Otherwise.

• Speaking of new to me (and maybe to you) webcomics, almost two years ago Danielle Corsetto² pointed me at Space-Time Condominium, “based on a failed Canadian sitcom” about a guy named Griff and all of his parallel-universe alternate self roomies. I hadn’t thought about S-TC since I archive-binged season one, and quite frankly I’m sure I’ve forgotten most of it (though I remember enjoying it, particularly the Griff from the cow dimension). Fortunately, S-TC has gone and published season one in handy book form, which fact I overlooked until I happened to see it on this week’s release list from the always-hip-to-webcomics Midtown Comics. Well done, Griffs.
• Let’s end on what may be a somber note.

  I spoke last week (Friday, to be specific) about how we need to be careful not to overestimate the potential of Kickstarter as [web]comics Next Big Thing. I started digging a bit and have some numbers that you might be interested in. As of this writing, the number of comics projects submitted to Kickstarter is somewhere between 420 and 940. My methodology is as follows, and I’ve got to warn you, it’s inexact.

  I searched Kickstarter for the term “comics” as a literal, but did not go to the “comics” category. This is because the category shows editor’s picks, most-funded, and other called-out projects. The search for the word reveals each project that incorporates the literal string “comics” in its description — not all of which may be actual comics; there were 422 results, at least two of which in my casual examination were not actually comics. Similarly, a search on “comic” as a literal showed 940 results, which likely include the vast majority of the 420, but which I have not attempted to confirm beyond casual skimming.

  Now here’s the fun part. If you look at all the pages of results from those searches (up to twelve projects per page; 79 pages in all for the 940 superset, 36 pages for the 420 subset), all of the successful projects are at the front of the list, and the unsuccessful ones at the end. That made it relatively easy to determine that the number of successfully projects were 543/940 and 243/420, respectively; those ratios are remarkably close to each other: 57.77% vs. 57.86%.

  In any event, it appears that more than four out of ten comics-related Kickstarts fail, and when they do, they frequently really fail. Without getting into names (no need to embarrass anyone), a random sampling of those failed projects revealed results like:

  • 22 backers, US$1013 of US$8500 goal
  • 1 backer, US$10 of US$8500 goal
  • 0 backers, US$0 of US$10,000 goal

  And that’s before we get into active campaigns that likely are going to fail, but haven’t yet, so they’re still listed at the front:

  • 15 backers, US$165 of US$7500 goal, 15 days to go (project approximately six days old)
  • 3 backers, US$210 of US$3000 goal, 19 days to go (project approximately ten days old)
  • 0 backers, US$0 of US$2100 goal, 21 days to go (unknown project age)

  There’s one other project that I’ve been keeping my eye on that looks like it might finish just shy of goal, which is heartbreaking; it’s under two and a half days from completion, sitting at some 85% of goal, but has been trickling one or two supporters for each of the past several days.

  What makes this project interesting to me is its supporter breakdown. Out of not quite 50 backers, a full 45% pledged US$25, which is just enough to get a signed copy of the book. Add in a few more people looking for unsigned copies and you come to 55% of backers, and 61% when you get to the lesser rewards. There’s a few people in the mid-ranges (book + assorted goodies), and then nobody until you get to the very top reward at US$100.

  18% of the backers sit at that mega-support level. I’m left with no possible interpretation other than the creator has a few dozen loyal readers, of whom a portion are willing to get a book. He’s also got close friends and family that really want him to succeed and have put their money where their respective mouths are. I wasn’t watching this project from the beginning, but I’d be willing to bet that they were among the earliest supporters, which could easily have made the project appear more viable than it actually was.

  Also worth remembering: a lot of those successful projects were from long-time established creators with long-time established audiences and they squeaked by with 103% or 104% support. The super–jumbo–mega successes are few and far between, and they’re driven by the people that are already making a living at comics.

  Despite the news making the rounds over the weekend that Kickstarter may disburse more monies this year than the NEA, that does not translate into free money for all [web]comickers who are smart enough to just ask for it. So what’s the lesson here? Same as everything else in business matters — you can’t buy into your own press and think yourself more important than you actually are. Do the work, build the audience up to something substantial, then look at it as a business. There’s no shortcuts.

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¹ More precisely, two separate instances of The Internet were lobbed at Beaton. The first was her finding yet another of her comics posted without attribution (just as common: other people claiming credit over the funny for themselves, having excised references to Beaton). The second, and more vile, was somebody sent Beaton a pornographic representation of herself because That’ll Show Her And Now She’ll Behave As I Want Her To.

² Who’s got me on tenterhooks with her current story-arc; I have a sinking feeling that Hazel really doesn’t realize what thin ice she’s on in her relationship and hope she works it out before things with Zach are really damaged.

As a side note, posts may be wonky for the next couple of weeks; I’ll be working from a client site, and the extent of network access during the day isn’t known. Somehow, I know you’ll cope.

• From MoCCA comes word of their programming for Will Eisner Week (celebrating what would have been the master’s 95th birthday), centering on a panel discussion at 7:00pm, Thursday 1 March. The panel composition caught my eye — couple of comic book guys¹, an academic², and Judith Hansen.

  If I were going to be in town (cf: irregular updates for the next couple of weeks³), I’d be attending this panel and listening to Ms Hansen very closely, as she is the literary agent to [web]comics. Name a major creator, Ms Hansen’s repped them⁴. She has Ideas and Thoughts about where this creator-driven industry has been, where it is, and where it’s going. Also — and this may be my favorite thing about her — she’s tremendously knowledgeable about Belgian beer, and she and I have pointed each other in the direction of some seriously tasty stuff. Anyway, 7:00pm next Thursday, at the Museum (594 Broadway, fourth floor), $7 general admission, members free.

• Let’s contrast on the Business of Comics angle for a moment; you may have noticed this week that Corey Pandolph announced that he was discontinuing his syndicated strip, The Elderberries, on Sunday 4 March. Relevant parts from Pandolph’s blogpost:
  

  Put simply, my career is going in another direction. I’ve been writing and performing more comedy, finding my cartoons in the pages of The New Yorker and discovering new ways to work in comedy, while still keeping myself happy and food in the refrigerator. I’ve done a daily comic strip in one form or another for nearly 15 years. There have been some real breaks along the way — a few reasons to really get excited about a future in comics strips — but nothing seemed to manifest itself into a solid career path.

  As I mentioned, this is all on me. I chose the manner in which I wanted to find success in the world of comic strips. I chose to not involve myself in today’s artist-owned business model of embracing the Internet and constantly hustling my own work to make a buck. I tried all that for a time with Barkeater Lake and I knew it was just not for me. Those who find success at being both creator and salesman in this world have my respect. It is very hard, very disciplined and it is not my bag.

  Best of luck to Pandolph — and especially thanks to him for that second paragraph quoted. With the Golden Age of Syndicated Strips fading ever further, I think that history will eventually come to observe it as a temporary blip in the great continuum of Art, where the usual condition always was (and likely always will be), To be an artist, you gotta hustle. It’s hard, it’s an entirely different skillset from the art itself, and it must be mastered at least as much as the creative portion.

  I’ve been having a back-and-forth with a creator of my acquaintance about a possible dark side to all of the Kickstarter successes that [web]comics have been seeing lately. The crux of the matter is, by focusing on the tremendous successes — which by definition are noteworthy — and not the many failed kickstarts, are creators who don’t have established audiences and a reputation for high-quality work going to be falsely convinced that raising money (read: success) is easy? The more I think of it, the more I’m convinced that making a go of comics is just like joining my volunteer EMS agency.

  Bear with me.

  As the Membership Trustee for my organization (also: Vice President, Cadet Advisor, Captain, and all-around datagathering and IT guy), I spend a significant amount of time telling prospective members that riding with us isn’t what they think it is. It’s not wall-to-wall excitement, dramatically shouting Live, dammit! until the CPR works, and walking away from explosions in dramatic slo-mo. Not only does none of that exist, most of our time is spend on the business of keeping everything running: inventory, supply management, raising money, paying bills, keeping the grounds and rental hall bathrooms clean.

  Everything that I just said that doesn’t involve a lights-and-sirens ambulance call? That’s the business of being a cartoonist. No matter how cool the creation, business remains paramount if you want it to be your living. There’s no shortcuts, no magic fountain of free money, no way to get around both putting in the work to build the audience, and putting in the work to make it pay. By all means, create because you can’t contemplate not creating, but don’t convince yourself that it’ll be easy; the best things never are.

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¹ Paul Levitz and Dennis O’Neil, both from DC.

² Karen Green, librarian for Columbia University’s Ancient & Medieval History and Religion collections; she started the Columbia libraries graphic novel collection, which seems a deliciously broad range of interests to span from ancient times to modern graphic novels — but not one that’s unprecedented. Jennifer Babcock has done plenty of research tying ancient Egyptian art and ancient Greek ostraka to modern comics. Fascinating stuff.

³ Speaking of which, anybody I know in Boston want to get a drink?

⁴ Just names like Eisner, Brosgol, Gran, Kibuishi, Larson, McCloud, O’Malley, and Smith.

Honestly, though — it’s fascinating. There’s a tweakability to to, but it’s working with so many variables that the likelihood of every coming up with a simple, reproducible formula to ensure maximum response/value is very, very low. I imagine it will help if you’re a good chess player and like managing your city outputs in Civilization¹. In the meantime, how about some things that are entirely not related to fundraising?

• Let’s start with another theme that I was repeating for a good long while — how awesome Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol. Having taken a number of recognitions and honors (including those of YALSA, CYBILS, Kirkus, and the prestigious “Fleenie”), Brosgol’s story is a nominee for a Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association in the category of Graphic Novel².
• From Ryan Estrada’s Google+ stream and/or Tumblr, evidence of the popularity of webcomics in Korea:
  

  I was in a Love Hotel. The super fancy kind, with an in-room hot tub overlooking the ocean, and a private theater. When I turned on the home theater, there were three options. Movies, TV, and webcomics.

  Porn was not even among the first set of options. That was several clicks through the menu. That means that a large enough group of people will come to this place, look at all their options, and say “Baby, let’s snuggle up in bed and read some webcomics on the big screen.”

  I think I speak for everybody when I say that I’m both proud and a little scared that webcomics are easier to obtain than porn in a setting that is deliberately designed to promote sexytimes. Also, I want to thank the operators of that love hotel, in that they’ve provided a wonderful excuse for anybody caught there with the wrong person: Baby, we were just catching up on webcomics!³

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¹ Where meeting your goal in plenty of time is like discovering Railroad and Flight while your opponents are still fielding armies of longbowmen and knights.

² Where her competition are the likes of Mike Mignola and Alan Freakin’ Moore.

³ If that ever happens to anybody, I solemnly promise that I will get Brad Guigar to illustrate it and send the original to the offending party.

Sorry for the late posting; been doing a lot of thinking in opposite directions today.

On the one hand, I heard a throwaway piece on the local cut of Morning Edition yesterday¹ about how 50 New York City taxis are going to be part of a pilot program where they get rid of the adutainment-heavy “Taxi TV” screens in the backseat in favor of iPads with Square credit card readers — the same one every webcomicker and thon² dog uses at conventions to take payments — so that you can play games or engage in commerce while hauling from the airport to Midtown.

A custom system was almost certainly considered that would do about the same thing, but off-the-shelf is easier and robust enough that it became the preferable solution. Look for Square to move from “ubiquitous” to “it’s weird if you don’t have one” sometime this con season.

On the other hand, I want to draw your attention to Jon Rosenberg’s Kickstarter to print color volume four of the sadly-hiatused Goats. Blah, blah, halfway there before he wrote it up on his site, blah, blah, 100% funding³ in less than 18 hours, standard stuff. No, what I wanted to mention was something that caught my attention about six hours ago, when Rosenberg’s total:contributors ratio was running an astonishing US$91.09.

By contrast, Rich Burlew’s just-concluded blowout finished at a ratio of US$83.33, and the Double Fine record destroyer sits (with, admittedly, 20 days to go) at US$33.16. What makes Burlew and Rosenberg’s readers more likely to drop the big bucks?

Better question: why is Rosenberg’s ratio (as of this writing) down to US$79.24? I believe it’s because of high-value rewards Burlew had more than two dozen different tiers above his average donation, and Rosenberg has approximately 2/3 of his tiers above the average (which is a moving target, so take it with a grain of salt). More to the point, all of Rosenberg’s high-ticket items are limited-availability, and the ones with the biggest take-ups aren’t the ones marked ___ of 500 remaining or even ___ of 100 remaining, they’re the ones marked 0 of 3 or 6 of 10.

I think that scarcity prompts a True Fan (who’s already primed by a lack of Goats lo these 18+ months) to think, I’d better jump on this now or I’ll miss out entirely, even if that’s more than I wanted to spend. Rich Stevens saw a similar effect in some of his extremely limited (typically to of 3 or of 6) Lego creation rewards, which have prompted him to dole out very few re-stocks of those rewards, which were promptly snapped up.

Takeaway — it’s not just the dollar value (and not undervaluing your work), it’s also making the audience think the equivalent of This is a limited-edition, con-exclusive variant which they fear they’ll have to buy on eBay after at tremendously jacked-up prices. Watch Rosenberg’s campaign closely; I suspect that ratio is going to edge back up with just a little careful expectation-prodding.

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¹ WNYC represent.

² It’s growing on me.

³ About 30 minutes ago.

As I write this, Rich Burlew’s Kickstarter has just closed, with a total of US$1,253,509 [see update below]. There may be some late updating due to catching up on transactions and all, but I think I speak for all of us when I say Dang. I will never again doubt the power of pent-up demand; the slope of the line in the graph is the steepest of the entire campaign here at the end. It’s practically vertical. I wonder how much Burlew’s last pre-close update had to do with it:

PS: Regarding the Mystery Prize, that was a real nail-biter. I kept expecting to hear the Team Fortress 2 announcer declare Oh-va-time.

Edit to add: At publication time, the number cited above was what Kickstarter reported; in the time since it has shifted to US$1,254,120, which we’ll take as the actual, official, for-reals final total. Thanks for playing along at home, everybody!

How many? How about the announcement that Jim Zub will be translating old videogame IP into new webcomics will have to be disposed of here in the intro, because there’s just that much stuff to talk about. Or that fact that Tom Siddell just dropped the mother of all surprise twists¹ on us after 1002 updates? Naturally, this means the rest of the week will likely be dead. Ah well, thems the breaks in the exciting world of hack webcomics pseudojournalism.

Let’s start with new follow-ups of recent stories:

• John Allison’s soft-launched subscription drive (referenced here) has, in its first week, attracted some US$6000 in support, with a majority of the activity in the middle ranges. Looks like my suggestion that the Silver tier of support was appropriate was more accurate than I thought.
• As we saw yesterday, Rich Burlew is up over US$1,000,000 on Kickstarter², but today Dave Kellett reminded us that my flip characterization of temporary millionaire should more correctly have been theoretical millionaire:
  

  So, to review: Burlew will pay ~10% in Kickstarter/CC fees, and >40% in Federal/State tax. Same thing happened to Stripped. A huge downer.

  Burlew did write an update noting that he’d not calculated all of the costs for the drive correctly and noting the adjustment of certain calculations eleven days ago, and also noted an estimated cost of US$200,000 just on postage to mail out all of the merch (at a time, it should be noted, when he was sitting at about half the monetary total he’s at now, so drag that number upward).

  Moral of the story: anybody expecting that Burlew has joined the financial elites as a result of this campaign, he hasn’t. The general operating fund he’s establishing out of any residual overage doesn’t alter the fact that Kickstarter is, essentially, a per-project funding mechanism that works on a pre-orders model³.

• Announced just about a month ago, Penny Arcade’s foray into daily editorial reportage on the videogame industry launched in the wee small hours of the morning as The Penny Arcade Report. And talk about launching with a bang, as PAR editor Ben Kuchera both interviews Valve honcho Gabe Newell and tours the Valve offices.

  To be perfectly honest, this probably won’t be part of my daily content trawl, but I imagine I’ll be poking my head in from time to time because it isn’t really possible to keep up on the breadth of popular culture without some passing knowledge of videogaming (and much as the AV Club keeps me up to date on nearly all aspects of popular culture, their VG coverage is mostly limited to reviews rather than trends and analysis).

On to new items:

• Darryl Cunningham, comics creator/champion of the reality-based approach to life, has an advanced copy in hand of something I think you’re going to want to see: the print version of his non-psychiatric comics⁴, Science Tales. With any luck, that means the rest of us will have an opportunity to get our own (non-advanced) copies in the near future.
• You know who in the world of webcomics I like and — more to the point — feel I understand on a near-genetic level, because our shared weltanschauung⁵ is based on not just one, but two voluntary tribal affiliations⁶? Angela “Jam” Melick. Despite the name of her autobio comic, she wastes no talent, as no fewer than three major things are coming together right now for her:
  1. Her recent talk at the Vancouver Public Library on comics writing is now up on YouTube
  2. Her second book, Welcome to the Real World⁷ is perhaps three weeks away from dropping
  3. She’s jumping from a large company to a small one (employee #3), which is a scary and exhilarating time in the life of any young geek⁸
• She kicked the ass of first of these three things, and the two that are yet to/about to occur are going to get theirs kicked as well. And joining her in some of that ass-kickery will be fellow British Columbian and webcomicker Sam Logan, who has his own career shift to consider:
  

  For those who don’t know, aside from drawing Sam and Fuzzy comics for a living, I have also spent the last 8 years designing and illustrating a pair of children’s science magazines called KNOW and YES Mag. Well, I’m sad to say that a few days back, we received word from the company that owns the magazines that they were shutting them both down and letting us all go. Like, immediately.

  So, what am I going to do? Well, I’m going to what I’ve always said I’d do if this happened… go full-time cartoonist and focus entirely on my own stuff. [emphasis original]

  Anybody that reads Sam and Fuzzy regularly will probably suspect, as do I, that in a few years Logan will regard this involuntary⁹ change as one of the best things that ever happened to him, possibly even matching the day he first tasted Rice Krispies¹⁰.

• Finally (!), may I recommend to your attention this digression on creativity by David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) on the nature of creativity? I believe I may, with a special emphasis on these bits:
  

  Recently I made something. I thought some people might enjoy it. I posted it on the web. One of the comments I received was, “You have way too much spare time.”

  This is one of the worst things you can say to someone who shares their creativity. For starters, it’s wrong. It’s not merely wrong, it’s incredibly, blatantly wrong. It’s so wrong that it breaks the wrongness barrier, emerges into another universe, and is wrong there also. I wish I had too much spare time! Then I might actually achieve half the stuff I have ideas for and want to do. Creative people never have enough spare time.

  Thankfully, criticism does little to deter people who really want to make stuff for their own sake. Again, I have no solid statistics, but my experience makes me suspect that most creative people fall into this category. They make stuff not for the recognition, but because it’s in their nature to make stuff. They can’t not make stuff. They go around with their heads full of ideas, lamenting the fact that they don’t have nearly enough spare time to make all the cool things they can imagine. [emphasis original]

  I usually call out Morgan-Mar’s longer thoughts because they explore a piece of science or physics in a way I find particularly compelling, but I (to my detriment) forget sometimes that he also has a strong philosophical streak. Despite destroying the universes that one time, his drive to create takes my breath away. Bravo, sir.

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¹ I refer, naturally, to the fact that in a place so full of technology as The Court, Jones continues to use a Motorola RAZR. So very 2002, Jones.

² As of this writing, US$1.094 million, with 20 hours to go; he’s also posted a target for how much has to be raised to actually receive a million dollars (however temporarily) after the Kickstarter/Amazon cuts and assuming a 5% rejected credit cards rate: US$1.14million. At present growth rates, he’ll hit that in about six hours.

³ And rather handily, too, seeing as how PayPal rules basically prohibit that model.

⁴ Which already had their own print collection, Psychiatric Tales.

⁵ Look it up.

⁶ Webcomics and engineering, a select confraternity also inhabited by Kean Soo; if we ever touch the rings worn on the small fingers of our working hands, we gain absolutely nothing because engineers don’t friggin’ need superpowers to get shit done, we do it because it needs doing and that need is like crack to us.

⁷ My thoughts on her first book, We Are The Engineers, may be found here.

⁸ I did a couple years as employee #8 at a small tech firm, which is slightly less jarring as there’s more people to learn from before you have to fly on your own.

⁹ In the sense that its timing was imposed rather than chosen.

¹⁰ No kidding, dude eats Rice Krispies every day of his life. Also, I believe this is the first time that I’ve broken into double-digit footnotes.

Rich Burlew, temporary millionaire, is slowly shaking his head wondering where he went right.

Things are coming up — some on the horizon, some in the more immediate future.

• For example, if the worst were to happen and the MS Westerdam were to encounter bad fortune¹ next week, not only would Jonathan Coulton, Paul, Storm, the Honorable John Hodgman, Wil Wheaton, and numerous other luminaries of our popular culture be forced to live out a sitcom existence like monkeys, so too would be lost some of society’s waste products. One would hope that the inherent value of personages such as David Willis and Joel Watson might be recognized but let’s face it — they’re gonna be the first ones cannibalized³. Sadly, this means we may never learn the outcome of Willis’s slash contest, wherein he is inviting you to draw his characters making out — and if you can’t draw, cosplay is acceptable.
• Looking a little further out to the future, the first really big conventions of the season are coming up; oh, sure, Katsucon and MegaCon are serving as warm-ups this weekend, but the real six-months-plus slog/death march starts in earnest mid-March with WonderCon and hits full stride with Emerald City⁴ two weeks later. Any/all webcomickers planning to hit the shows, feel free to drop a note to us so we can include you in the lists; Jennie Breeden has already started the listing/map for Calgary at the end of April.
• Finally, looking forward to the end of summer, the Baltimore Comic Con will once again host the Harvey Awards, which will again be emceed by Scott Kurtz⁵. But since the Harveys are both nominated and voted upon by comics industry pros, we should point out that the nominating ballot [PDF] is now available and due back 16 April. Let the bloc voting begin!

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¹ Not sunk with all persons aboard consigned to a watery grave; more like the episode of The Love Boat where all the regulars except Isaac the bartender² wound up stranded on an island by a storm.

² Oh sure, leave the black guy behind.

³ While we all know that Wheaton won’t let anybody die on his watch, he is down one fan-hugging arm and that may impede his heroic intentions.

⁴ A mere one day after the hotel scramble for this year’s San Diego Comic Con.

⁵ Check out his Harveys 2009 intro Blam, or the intro in 2010 via Fake Stan Lee.

As I sit here, thinking about webcomics for your amusement, that is what a motor inside my house’s furnace sounds like. A very nice man named Jared has just gone to fetch the part that will fix my furnace so that I may have heat; the price attached to this part is not something I wanted to hear¹. My dog² just knows that a new person was in the house and will be coming back soon oh boy oh boy oh boy. Forgive me if I’m rambling; it’s a combination of cold and carbon monoxide paranoia, yay.

• The idea of storyline as ebook proof of concept appears to be gaining steam, as Brad Guigar³ compiled a recent Evil, Inc storyline (with roots going back four years or so), one that threatened to change everything you know forever!! Naturally, being comics, “change forever” lasted about six weeks (and brought Guigar some criticism from his readers; I thought he might have milked it another six months easy and really cheesed ’em off), but we’re getting away from the major point here.

  Much like Rich Stevens’s recent foray into free e-books (not to be confused with his future foray into free e-books), Guigar’s testing waters, figuring out what works for various devices, and learning how to best make things tablet-friendly. I’m guessing in another few months, this experimentation will be common enough that we won’t even notice when a creator mentions they’re diving in.

• Wanna see something pretty? Chris Yates has photos of the second tranche of mass-market Baffler! puzzles, due this spring. Start here and work your way through the pretty pictures.
• Have you heard of Solid Saints? Long story short, they’re a charitable works aggregator — people that want to make a difference (but lack large economic resources) are matched up with people who are looking for goods/services of a unique nature (and don’t mind the proceeds being used for something more meaningful than lining the pockets of a heartless corporation⁴.

  The goods/services are auctioned by Solid Saints, and all proceeds go to Child’s Play, and the ramp-up period comes to an end at 9:00pm PST (GMT-8) tonight when the auctions launch. Three days later, all the cash gets totaled up and we find out how much it was.

  Of particular interest to readers of this page, perhaps: an original comic by KC Green, a bundle o’ fun from Anthony Clark, and custom art by Nic “Tynic” Carey, who some of you may recall was an original contributor to this site and who presently spends her days creating robots with meat brains⁵. Now who wouldn’t want to have art created by a woman that has meat-brained robots⁶ at her disposal? Only people who have lost all joy in life, that’s who. Get bidding.

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¹ Were I a creator, it would sound like, “Time to sell some originals and take some commissions.”

² Portrait by Mary Cagle.

³ He’s dreamy.

⁴ Foreign sweatshop/migrant labor optional.

⁵ I’m oversimplifying here somewhat, but when you start throwing around terms like neurobiology and mechatronics, most people start to tune you out.

⁶ Possibly of the “killer” variety.

It seems we’ve hit the season of accomplishments.

• About six weeks back I was doing a mini-crawl through the Gunnerkrigg Court archives and noticed that the current strip appeared to be the 983rd one in Tom Siddell’s exploration of consciousness, myth, technology, friendship, plus bozos, jerks, numbnuts, doofs and jabronis¹.

  Making a mental note to scan the archive picker a bit more closely over the ensuing month, it appears that the pages are, in fact, numbered sequentially. That means that today marks the 1000th update of Gunnerkrigg Court, which as we all know is the hallmark of quality in the struggle against a sea of schmendricks and crumbums. One should also note that this most recent ninnyhammer-heavy story is going to look great when volume 4 hits the shelves; so that you’re all caught up by then, mayhap you ought to pick up the earlier books?

• Likewise, if my math (and a helpful note from Bill Barnes) may be trusted, tomorrow would appear to be the tenth anniversary of Unshelved, which began its long march to dominance of the library science departments of the world on 16 February, 2002. They were younger then, Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum, a little freer, a little more lighthearted perhaps.

  But in the passing of their youth they have gained wisdom, the sort that only comes from hitting the ALA convention floor and having a crowd of librarians threaten to tear their clothes from their bodies so as to absorb some of their mighty essence. If this makes Ambaum and Barnes sound like a sort of thinner and less musical Tenacious D, well, there are merits to the analogy. Unlikely superstars within a specific milieu, varying degrees of bald and middle-aged, but still able to pull down the groupies like nobody’s business?

  Yeah, okay, I ain’t buying the groupie thing either², but the Unshelved Crüe remain the epitome of niche appeal, which makes for a pretty comfortable environment when an underserved cohort decides you’re their #1 favorite entertainment provider. Congrats to Ambaum and Barnes for not only having one of the long-term successful webcomics, but also one of the long-term successful webcomics partnerships. If the library thing ever grows old, they could take what they learned from dealing with each other for a decade and hit the marriage counseling circuit.

• Okay, it’s not a power of ten, but how about 200 comics over at All New Issues, with an extra-special Jamie Noguchi guest strip? You don’t need to know anything about the fictional comic book character of Lobster Boy, or the various relationships and infatuations (requited and not) in the strip to get the message of today’s strip. It’s all there in the last panel.

Some other quick numbers, with thanks to the Harpers Index:

• Likelihood that Rich Burlew will clear $US800,000 and 10,000 backers in the five days left to his Kickstarter project: 100%.
• Likelihood that the George Rohac conspiracy (okay, okay, “Benign Kingdom”) will hit US$50,000 and 1000 backers in the nine remaining days of their Kickstarter project: 100%
• Likelihood that Rich Stevens will have to take a road trip to deliver a Pac-Man arcade machine to Wil Wheaton in the twenty two days remaining in his Kickstarter project: 100%
• Further likelihood that somebody will make Rich eat at least one more pound of bacon (that would be the second) and/or force him to do a month of strips on a Windows machine instead of his beloved Mac and/or give up coffee for a month: 2/3^{3, 4}

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¹ Especially jabronis.

² It’s not like they got Brad Guigar in the band.

³ Unlike the other Kickstarter items noted, which are based on uplifting possibilities of joy and happiness, this one has only the potential for schadenfreude. Shame on you person(s) that make it happen, and bless you at the same time.

⁴ That “3” is a footnote, not a mathematical exponent. Likewise, so that I can avoid an infinite series of footnotes explaining that yes, the previous footnote was also a footnote, the “4” is a footnote and not an exponent.