There’s certain things that make you feel good, like being solicited for your opinion on the year in comics by Heidi Mac or having The Spurge say something nice about something you wrote. No resting on laurels, though — got to keep moving forward.

• If I were interested in saving significant figures for some other purpose, I’d point out that 1.95 is practically 2.0, and therefore 1.95 million is almost exactly the same as 2.0 million. Which, if expressed in US dollars, is the amount raised by Child’s Play 2011 to date, making the US$2 million threshold pretty much a mathematical certainty. Heck, a full US$351,000 was raised on Monday night alone via the annual charity dinner/auction; there’s still some distance to go to continue the Child’s Play tradition of raising more every year, and since 2010 brought in US$2.29 million, I’m thinking that US$2.5 million makes for a nice, round number to shoot for. There’s still two weeks to go, so get to it.
• Lot of talk about comics going day-and-date with electronic publishing, but from what I gather the big publishers aren’t doing much to get their enormous back catalogs (especially out-of-print material) into the Kindles and Nooks of the world, or at least not at a realistic price point. Enter Howard Tayler, who’s put the first four Schlock Mercenary books into e-form. Further, it seems he’s wrangled a deal where he doesn’t have to host the transfers, as they’re being sold through the Baen e-books storefront (cf: our discussion yesterday about deciding what it’s better to get somebody else to do, without giving up ownership).

  I’m sure you’ve seen the same analyses of digital pricing I have, how publishers are leaving money on the table by not providing a compelling economic reason to go digital, and it seems that Tayler read them too. The first two SM volumes cost US$25 each in print, and vols 3 & 4 US$15 each or US$20 for the pair. E-version costs:

  • Volume 1: US$16
  • Volume 2: US$16
  • Volume 3: US$9
  • Volume 4: US$9
  • Four book bundle: US$45

  That’s a discount of 36% to 40% for single books or the four book bundle (the already-discounted two-book deal “only” gets a 10% further discount in digital). That’s how you do it.

• You guys remember when I teased you that there was something potentially very cool on the horizon that I’d been invited to participate in? Look, just pretend you remember, it was only two weeks ago. In any event, said PVCT is now definitely happening (barring unfortunate world-ending disasters or me walking in front of a bus). That’ll have to do on details until the middle of February or so.

Then again, who’s to say? At least one person involved in each of these stories think they’re pretty important events, but you aren’t here for a philosophical discussion as to what constitutes “breaking news”.

• Steve Wolfhard is somebody that you can never talk about too much; his Cat Rackham comics are beautiful and revelatory and sometimes surprisingly intimate. In the latter category is the comic that went up yesterday, referring to the events of Monday, to which only one thing can be said — congratulations to Steven and Leslie, and big ups to MaxFunCon for the assist.
• God DAMN, Chris Onstad has gone from total Achewood stasis to the sort of weird, crazy-go-nuts stories he produces when at the top of his game in three strips. Ray In Rehab (tentative title) may only be updating every ten days or so, but it’s already showing the potential to be another New Kings of Sapphic Erotica/Lash of Thanatos or North Korean Magical Realism. Well done, mysterious sir.
• I’ve been waiting to mention the much-discussed experiment in downloadable comedy because I wanted to see raw data on how it all worked; yesterday Mr CK gave us that information. Short version: the disintermediation and lack of DRM surrounding the Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater is a success, and bears some instructive lessons for independent creators that seek to make their living by trusting their audience. I found this bit to be particularly telling:
  

  The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of [13 December], we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.

  I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked. If anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it. And so now we all get to know that about people and stuff. I’m really glad I put this out here this way and I’ll certainly do it again. If the trend continues with sales on this video, my goal is that i can reach the point where when I sell anything, be it videos, CDs or tickets to my tours, I’ll do it here and I’ll continue to follow the model of keeping my price as far down as possible, not overmarketing to you, keeping as few people between you and me as possible in the transaction.

  Much has been made in the many (sometimes quite loud) discussion about webcomics business models (and the viability of same) about whether or not any money can be made via variations of the 1000 True Fans model. It’s been loudly declared that only working with a publisher can possibly pay, or that transitioning from a major-media publisher model to an independent producer model couldn’t possibly scale.

  Truth be told, the dozens of webcomickers making their living aren’t a large enough sample to be statistically valid (not have they been at it long enough to draw conclusions from duration), and what was really lacking was any evidence as to how far the model could scale up.

  Louis CK would seem to indicate: pretty damn far. Again, one datum may be an outlier, but I’m pretty confident that Louis CK can turn another show into a similar-sized success — which could provide the impetus to scale further up into funding the production of a feature film:

  Keep in mind, however, that it’s not sales of Beacon that would fund the film: He says that if Beacon “really tears an asshole into the money monster who then shits dollars into my mouth,” he would then use those shit-dollars to “buy a home and get some security which I NEVER have had in my life and have certainly not gotten from my low-budget show.” However, if he sells enough downloaded copies of this one to justify trying the experiment again, then the proceeds from his second special will all go toward making a movie.

  Crowdsourcing a motion picture has been bandied about a couple of times (hello, Browncoats), but this is a little different. This isn’t asking a lot of people to donate/finance/invest for the costs of the movie, it’s following a traditional production model, using the proceeds of a success to bankroll the next, hopefully more successful, project. It’s the sort of thing that has, in the past, been pretty much the exclusive province of large corporations. It’s the sort of thing that every webcomicker that rolls the profits of a book into a run of shirts has been doing, on a smaller scale. It has the potential to change how lots of independent artists¹ do things for the forseeable future.

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¹ Who need to have drive, ambition, and damn good business instincts — maybe not the skills to do all the business things themselves, but the self-awareness to figure out what they can do versus what they need to farm out (without giving up ownership), and the bullshit detector to figure out who’s trying to screw them.

Fleen has learned exclusively what this mysterious tweet from Bill Barnes actually means. As we all know, Barnes does not believe in webcomics monogamy, partnering with Gene Ambaum on Unshelved for going on a decade, and with Paul Southworth on Not Invented Here for two years, two major storylines, and two books¹.

But Barnes has never been a one-partner guy and has been recently seen canoodling with Jeff Zugale. “Zugs”, as he is sometimes known, has been doing a lot of painting for things as varied as Little Fuzzy books and fanfic-inspiring Wil Wheatons. It’s been a while since he was able to update his own webcomic, but what the heck — you never forget how to ride a bicycle. While webcomicking. Or something.

Those worrying that Zugale’s style and Southworth’s are very, very different, well, that’s where you’re right. But Southworth is just relinquishing the art duties, and will continue on as co-writer of Not Invented Here, making NIH the second major three-way² partnership to launch this year.

And yeah, the news is actually up at NIH now, but when I got the tip³ it wasn’t, so that totally counts, right? Hey, you got an extra post today, so no whining.

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¹ Okay, just one book so far, but there’s material sufficient for a second and no good webcomicker leaves a potential source of money untapped, so I expect a second in the future.

² Yes, yes, “He said ‘three-way’.”

³ It came in while I was asleep — damn time zones.

I am slowly expanding the list of Officially Suspect sites, which now includes The Onion¹ but not The AV Club. Also, Twitter is not blocked, but any attempt to click through to a particular tweet or image results in a “that page doesn’t exist” error. In the meantime, I am working around the filters by various means because I am crafty. Okay, mostly it means surfing the Officially Suspect sites from the hotel and being behind the times, but whatever works.

• SMBC Thee-ah-tuh finished up the funding for their second DVD massively over goal, which means they’ll have to make good on their promise to do weekly sketches (instead of the monthly schedule in preparation for their web series in which they destroy James Ashby² in space). Comparing to their earlier effort, it now seems like a given that SMBC projects will hit 500% of goal funding in everything they do. Wow.
• Santa plus Dinosaurs in comics form from the mind of Ryan North over at Comics Alliance on Mondays and Wednesdays until Christmas, complete with all the vocal rhythms³ you’ve come to expect from The Toronto Man-Mountain. Speaking of Ryan North, there is now a form of plush T-Rex that looks large even next to a Ryan-sized man, which appears to be both the highest-priced item ever procured via TopatoCo, and limited (as of this writing) to only 37 more examples. If I had space in my living room for one of this things, it would freak my dog the heck out. Also unwary visitors.
• An instructive tale regarding a blatant piece of design theft, via David Malki ! popped up yesterday. Background: Malki ! endeared himself to my professional tribe with a piece of pithy wisdom that became a shirt featuring explosions. A catalog nominally associated with public broadcasting appropriated the idea (which, given the laws regarding slogans and short phrases, is permissible, if lazy) and implemented a hideously ugly design of their own for a dollar more than Malki !’s version; we’ll let him pick up the story from there:
  

  I wrote them an email. The reason I’m sharing this story — when I usually don’t bother to bring up situations like this, and give attention to entities that deserve to die in obscurity — is because I thought my approach might be instructive.

  The knee-jerk response is “Cease and desist! Sue! Call a lawyer!” This implies that (a) the issue cannot be solved through more amicable means, and (b) I have a lot of time and money to throw at this kind of problem. The latter is not true, and I like to at least allow for the chance that the former isn’t either. There’s a lot of double negatives in that sequence, so I’ll restate: Being aggressive puts people on the defensive. Being friendly gets people to help you.

  Also, always give the party in the wrong the ability to back off gracefully.

  Learning this is one of the biggest things that has helped me in life: avoid putting people on the defensive. Sometimes it is necessary to be firm, or to express dissatisfaction, or to press for remedy of a situation. But I have never found yelling and shouting to be the easiest way to that end — at least, not as an opener. [emphasis original]

  The email that Malki ! sent is a marvel of firm, yet utterly courteous, assertion of one’s rights; you should go read the excerpt that he posted right now. The practical upshot is that Signals will be carrying Malki !’s version of the shirt from Spring (at a horrible royalty rate, but one which is greater than the Nothing he was making before, and whoever ripped his design will no longer get that horrible rate), with the bonus that the incredibly ugly, lazy design (seriously, that rounded, noodly-looking typeface is as far from anything that evokes “engineering” or “explosions” or even “loud” as anything I’ve ever seen) will fall back into the obscurity it so richly deserves.

  It might not be an optimal win (that would be one where Signals apologized and gave all their ill-gotten gains to Malki !, along with the heart of the “designer” who shat out such a weak interpretation of the slogan), but the net result was a decrease in Total Ugliness instead of a screaming match that would have increased it. Now in addition to his varied skills in film production, podcasting, improv, rapping, design, printmaking, metal fabrication, editing, publishing, heavier-than-air piloting, and freelance firearms special services, we should recognize Malki ! as webcomics’ premiere corporate communications liaison and kick-ass demand letter drafter.

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¹ For violence, not sexual content [link NSFW].

² History’s greatest monster.

³ We get it, Ryan, you like the compound plural. iPads 2, jeezum crow.

Dealing with unexpected web filtering today; a little testing reveals that Oglaf is banned for hot, hot sexiness, and LiveJournal for general principles, I get that. But Little Gamers and the currently-hiatused¹ You Damn Kid for violence? Weird.

I’ll do what I can to work around it (but even the cell data signal here is pokey, so tethering doesn’t help much). In the meantime, please enjoy a picture that Kaja Foglio once posted that includes for future use of The Winslow².

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¹ But I’ll never quit it. Never!

² Which, I’ve just discovered, is from LiveJournal. Irony!

For several reasons, actually. At the moment, the most significant reason is that I’m presently dealing with the first cold of winter and I’m far less likely to have these vicious headache/sore throat combos in April than December. Rest assured, however, that there are other reasons.

• Such as, sometime in the Spring is when we can most likely expect to see Stripped. Although half of Freddave Kellett-Schoeder was beat down by days of continuous travel and interviewing, the other half joined me for dinner last night, leading to an extensive conversation about the film, its direction, and the logistics of getting a rental car full of moviemaking equipment from Central New Jersey to the least accessible corner of Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan, and on toward Connecticut during prime commute hours. Vaya con Dios, plucky documentary makers.

  On this swing (the last of the filming schedule, although they may squeeze in a couple final interviews back home in LA), Freddave Kellett-Schroeder have managed to rack up another half-dozen interviews, talking with vets of the webcomics scene, the print scene, and super-vets of the glory days of newspaper comics; there were also tidbits and details regarding the film that can’t be revealed just yet, but once they are, will cause at least one of your heads to explode.

  If you don’t want it to be your head that explodes, start acclimating yourself to small doses of incredibly cool, unexpected news now (huh, the A Girl And Her Fed books are shipping¹) to progressively larger doses (huh, the NY International Children’s Film Festival is showing all 15 Ghibli films); by the time Stripped comes out, you’ll be ready to deal with the news I have in mind.

  But because you’ve been so good and patient, I am prepared to exclusively share one piece of exclusive information that I confirmed exclusively with Dave Kellett last night: his daughter is freakin’ adorable. What do you mean, Everybody that’s ever met her knows that? It’s an exclusive!

  In all seriousness, Stripped is impressing ever more, as I learn all that Schroeder and Kellett accomplished so far, and learn about the plans they have for it. There will be days worth of visuals and interviews that serious students of cartooning will want to pour through for decades to come. I can’t help but think that it’s going to form a definitive record of the state of cartooning at this point in time and in 20 or 30 years, some future historians or documentarians will be asking to use clips in future projects².

• Also coming around in the Spring, the comic convention circuit will be kicking into full swing. I got an email pointing out that space for C2E2 ’12 is now available, but what most caught my eye about an otherwise-routine announcement was a section on changed union work rules, which should make exhibiting far more practicable. From the email:
  

  Recent rulings and legislation have improved work rules throughout McCormick Place. Exhibitors can bring in outside food, use power tools to build their own booths with full time staff and benefit from decreased crew sizes. Click the button below for additional information directly from McCormick Place.

  The referenced button leads you to this PDF from the exhibition space, which details reduced work crew sizes, reduced double-time rates, and the ability to use personal vehicles at loading docks. Hopefully Reed Exhibitions and other showrunners will be able to promote similar changes at other convention sites; with comics increasingly the province of independent creators, having realistic overhead costs will be critical to keeping comics shows from becoming the exclusive province of movie and videogame companies.

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¹ I love AGAHF and creator “Otter” Spangler, but would it kill her to have permalinks to individual newsposts on her site? No permalink to the books-are-in story, so here’s a picture for proof.

² I have a suspicion that Kellett and Schroeder might be a bit more willing to share clips of their work for future projects than they have found present licensors to be.

I was all set to tell you about how I picked up the second SMBC collection at Midtown yesterday, and was pleased to see the return of the Choose Your Own story told in micro-squiggle-comics-vision in the top and bottom margins of the pages. This one picks up directly from the CYO in SMBC volume 1, and since most of those adventures ended with you miserable and/or dead, this one starts from the moment of your death and proceeds from there (possible endings include compromising pictures of the Pope and Sexy Curling in the afterlife). A clever and funny thing, starting from death.

Then I saw that Ricky Garduno died.

Garduno was a storyboard artist and contributor to Dumm Comics, occupying the Thursday slot with 1930 Nightmare Theatre from the collective’s founding in 2008 (shifting eventually to Mondays) until he drifted away in October of this year without finishing the story. He managed a couple of dark comics on Tumblr in the weeks since, and then he was gone.

I didn’t know you, Mr Garduno. I never met you, I didn’t follow your creative work, but looking through it now it’s clear that you were talented and possessed a vision and voice all your own. I’m sorry that I can’t say anything that will ease the loss and hurt of those that did know and love you. I offer my deepest condolences, and hope each can heal in their own way. Rest in peace.

At this point, if there’s some kind of award or “Best Of” list that could conceivably be stretched to include humor, literature, cartoons, or Canadians, assume that Kate Beaton is on it. In the latest iteration, Hark! A Vagrant comes in as #7 on the Time magazine Top Ten Fiction Books of 2011 list. In the words of presenter (noted author and general webcomics appreciator) Lev Grossman:

It’s tough to say what list this book belongs on, but it’s the debut of a smart, funny, wholly unique voice, and it ought to be somewhere, so let’s put it here…. Whatever else it might be, Hark! A Vagrant is the wittiest book of the year.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

And within the past half-hour the one-fourth of the Cyanide & Happiness crüe known as Rob¹ tweeted a link² that informs us that Comedy Central has a C&H project in development:

From the creators of the Cyanide and Happiness web comics and shorts comes a half-hour animated show featuring the twisted humor of a world populated by glorified stick figures. Executive produced and created by Kristipher Matthew Wilson, Robert Andrew DenBleyker, David McElfatrick and Matthew Melvin.

I’m smelling back-to-back programming with South Park. Oh, and I hope whoever it was at ICE that initially decided that C&H co-creator Dave McElfatrick didn’t need to be admitted to the US has finally come to learn the error of his or her³ ways. Dave, Kris, Matt, and Rob may have a long road ahead of them before things actually make it to air, but since they have a habit of knuckling down, doing their work, and bringing the funny on a daily basis, I’d say the odds are in their favor.

Congrats to everybody at Explosm Amalgamated Laugh-Chuckles, and note that the time until the Family Research Council [no link ’cause screw those guys] issues its first my-stars-and-garters we’re shocked, shocked I say! press release decrying the C&H show as causing the the utter downfall of Western Civilization begins now.

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¹ Mr DenBleyker if you’re nasty.

² Also, one should note that DenBleyker got scooped on his own announcement, as comics reporting supastar Heidi MacDonald tweeted the news a full half-hour earlier and had a news posting up even before then. I don’t know how she does it, but some day I have to learn her secret powers.

³ Fine, fine … thon ways. Happy now, Ryan North?

Regular readers of this page (both of you — hi, Rick; hi, Helen) know that I don’t let Javascript load on my browser without a damn good reason, but when Jess Fink tweets about awesome comics that can only be done online, and they require it? That’s a damn good reason.

Hobo Lobo of Hamelin is a take on the old Pied Piper story, but one that achieves a depth (both visually and storywise) that’s almost unique. The art is laid out in different planes, at varying distances from the viewer, and which move at different rates as you scroll from left to right. It would look like a storybook without the Javascript effects, but with it, you become an observer — but not quite a participant — in something that’s not animated in the usual sense of the word, but in the original sense: the scene has been brought to life.

Hobo Lobo is made by Stevan Živadinović, and you can see the progress of the story on his About page; he’s powered through a nominal three pages since 26 Jan 2011, but considering that a “page” consists of as many as 17th multi-field “panels” (which run continuously together, not like the panels you’re used to), the updates every couple days are a pretty impressive feat. Best of all, Živadinović is open to sharing his code which makes this parallax-as-comics possible, so we may see more sites that merit the inclusion of Javascript for actual reasons in the future.

Speaking of Neat Things:

• Shopping for the various end-of-year holidays continues apace, and webcomickers (many of whom derive from these end-of-year sales intangibles like rent) want you to remember to buy stuff from them. But because they’re a collegial bunch, all over the place you’ll find creators that a pointing their readers towards colleagues with neat stuff. You got your neatly-formatted, easy-to-browse version from Mr Willis, your full-of-pictures version from Mr Guigar, your enthusiastic version from Ms Corsetto … basically, start at any of those pages (or from your favorite webcomicker’s front page), follow a link to an esteemed colleague, and you’ll likely find more recommendations to follow. Happy Propping Up of a Tottering Economy with Consumer Spending Holidays!
• The third chapter of Tyler Page’s Raised on Ritalin has released, and hoo boy, it’s a good ‘un. Moving away from the personal history portion of the story for a bit, Page engages in a Larry Gonick-like exploration of brain function, the history of amphetamines, and how Ritalin in particular came to be used for ADD and similar disorders in children (despite the fact that we’re not quite sure how it works). Fascinating stuff, and just the breather necessary before we dive back into Page’s personal story.
• Webcomics readers may recall that Help Desk creator Christopher Wright has, on occasion, been slightly erratic with his timetable. From a starting point in 1996, he’s sometimes gone months or even most of a year between updates. But (and this is a big but), he’s always come back. And when his life permits him to get into the proverbial groove, he knocks down updates like nobody’s business.

  Which is pretty much what he’s been doing since the end of October, cranking out the Monday-to-Friday releases like they were going out of style. As a result, he dropped the 1997th episode of Help Desk today, putting him on track to hit the Big Round Number of 2000 on Friday. As we all know, 2000 updates is the number that separates the adults from the children, and if there are a few more comics to have hit that threshold than back in 2008, it’s still pretty damn impressive.

Soooo … Gareb Shamus, who led the ever-contracting Megan Fox Tits Wolverine¹ empire, did two notable things last week:

1. He abruptly quit, effective immediately, on 1 December
2. On his way out the door, or possibly before leaving, or maybe after (the timing isn’t clear), he tried to get a webcomicker fired from his day job

Let’s examine that second item a little more closely, shall we? From today’s update of The Gutters, written by Ryan Sohmer and drawn by a rotating cast of artists:

Should you find yourself the subject matter of a Gutters page, and take offense to it, don’t go after my artists. Should you be so offended that you attempt to get someone fired from their day job, don’t be a coward.

Come after me.

My e-mail is Sohmer@blindferret.com, I will gladly provide you with my contact information, as well as that of our legal department.

I take sole responsibility for every comic and news post on this site.

Don’t you dare go after one of my artists.

Now let’s look at The Gutters #222 from last Monday, as drawn by Sohmer’s partner-in-crime² Lar DeSouza; the topic of this particular update is, by a peculiar coincidence, one Mister Gareb Shamus. Thing is, last Monday, #222 had originally been posted with art by another creator (since Sohmer implies strongly that said art was pulled at the artist’s request, I’ll forbear naming him at this time).

Boy, you sure showed Sohmer and an artist just trying to pick up a little work for hire, Mr Shamus! If your reputation was so very, very poor in the comics industry as to be made fun of previously, how much better it must be now. It’s a good thing we live a in a world where Google doesn’t exist, the original art for #222 can never be found again, you can simply bully DeSouza into being fired by his day job boss³, and the words Streisand Effect don’t have any particular meaning.

On to things with infinitely less jerky behavior.

• Per the Twitter account of Stripped, news that the end is in sight:
  

  This week: Final interviews with Guisewite, McDonnell, Feiffer, Munroe, Walker, Beaton ‘n Gran … then it’s full focus on post-production!

  The “Walker” referenced is ambiguous, but I’d guess probably represent cartooning stalwart Mort Walker. One might also note that Kate Beaton and Meredith Gran were already interviewed by Schroeder and Kellett at NEWW last year; of course, these past twelve months have been the Year of Beaton in the comics world, and Gran is doing the best work of her career, so it makes sense to go back for followups.

  Given that one of the challenges of any documentary (at least, one that doesn’t follow a single subject) is how to come up with a storyline to unite all the disparate elements, using one or two creators as representative of the growth and development of webcomics makes perfect sense. Put another way, the future of comics is going to be a lot more creator-owned, niche-topic-oriented, and female-created than it is right now, and Beaton/Gran look an awful lot like that future.

• Speaking of repeat visits, Saveur Magazine’s Recipe Comix have been revisiting some of their early contributors. Two weeks back, Dorothy Gambrell showed us all how to deal with Thanksgiving Alone (hint: bourbon), and today Carly Monardo brings us her grandmother’s lasagna recipe. My friends, if anybody knows what an amazing lasagna should taste like, I’m gonna guess it’s a lady named Monardo from Staten Island, who named her internet-based art collective after the dish. Dig in.

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¹ Also known as Wizard magazine and Wizard World; cf: here.

² Or possibly “hetero life-partner”, I can never keep it straight.

³ Ryan Sohmer.