The Rules:

1. Consider keyboards to have a definite lifespan and discard them without question at the end of that period
2. If you disregard item 1, never, ever wonder why the spacebar on your twelve year old keyboard has suddenly failed; discard the keyboard without question
3. If you disregard items 1 and 2, never, ever pry up the spacebar to see if it’s something you can fix; what lurks beneath your view is a horror that should never be unleashed, yea, like unto a nightmare that eldritch horrors from outside time have when they can’t sleep¹

So, new keyboard, nice action, bunch of time wasted today so I’m behind². Thus, let me direct you to people from Webcomicdom that are off bein’ smart:

• From the far reaches of the SMBC Media Empire, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith³ have got themselves a podcast wherein they Do Science To It. All manners of science, all manners of it, they wanna have a conversation and make you more clever in the process. The Weekly Weinersmith episode 1 launched yesterday, and I believe we’ll see them on iTunes and Stitcher in the immediate future — possibly in time for episode 2.
• From the far reaches of time, Jennifer Babcock (cf here, do yourself a favor and ignore the comment thread) has made a fortunate habit of working far ahead on C’est La Vie, because she’s gonna spend the next couple of month in Egypt digging up stuff [o permalink, but the announcement is currently on her main page]. Babcock’s perhaps the only person that occupies the middle bit of the Venn diagram that overlaps “Webcomics Creators” and “Egyptologists”.

  I’ve read some of her research and it’s really cool how she’s found things that are essentially comics-as-popular-art from ancient Egyptian times (and no, we’re not talking tomb and temple hieroglyphics). The closest description of them is they’re ceramic plaques that function like McCloud’s Five Card Nancy deck. Comics! Plus, I was able to have a really cool discussion over lunch with her once about ancient Greek ostraka and I knew what those were because of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe. There’s nothing comics can’t do.

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¹ Seriously, it was gross.

² Also, I am possible never eating again. Ick.

³ Heh, heh, they said weiner.

Some of you are subscribes to Webcomics Dot Com, wherein Brad Guigar does his best to enlighten and aid those who are serious about their webcomickin’. On occasion, he writes on something important enough that I feel the need to draw attention to it, and today is one of those days. It started with a notice on the front page of Brad’s own comic yesterday:

I’ve been getting reports that Evil Inc has been delivering an ad that hijacks the reader’s browser, presenting a full-screen ad along with one of those “are you sure you want to leave” boxes that require the user to click a Yes or No.

I hate those things. They invariably lead to scams or deposit nastyware on your computer. I avoid a lot of them by using a browser that lets me control Javascript down to the domain level — the number of sites that I turn on JS for can be measured in the low tens — and I still have to resign myself to getting hit by these parasites every once in a while. It’s for this reason that I do things like banking on a netbook that runs a no-persistence Linux install off a USB key. Yes, I am paranoid.

Guigar followed up on his adventures in cleaning up the payload that snuck through one of his ad brokers today; from the public summary of the WDC posting:

Facebinks.com is delivering a malicious, pop-over ad to Web sites, offering readers a chance to win a free iPad — and implying that the deal is an exclusive offer from that site — even including a deceptive trademark identifier (®) after the site’s URL at the bottom left-hand corner of the ad.

When the user tries to close the ad, another pop-up appears, with one of those “do you really want to leave this site — Yes or No” messages that make you wonder what you’re really answering “Yes or No” to if you click it.

In the end, most users force-quit their browsers and write the site an angry e-mail (and rightly so).

Here are a few tips on making sure your readers aren’t being inundated with annoying ads.

Log-in to read the entire post.

Brad kindly comped me a WDC account, so I’ve read the entire post, but I’m not going to share it here since it is intended for his subscribers. However, I can tell you that he’s done a pretty complete step-by-step of how he dealt with his ad services, and though he was pretty sure that the malicious code came from one of them, he contacted each of them to cover his bases. Just as well, as it appeared that the source of this particular nasty was also found on another ad service, it just hadn’t been causing any problems yet.

Guigar’s most useful bit of advice was probably from yesterday’s appeal, and something that everybody — creator and audience — should keep in mind:

[I]f this happens to you … please alert me as soon as possible. If you can, please include:

A screengrab of your browser window

A page script (fiddler / firebug) of the ad appearing

Any logistical information (time the ad appeared, browser type, page URL, etc).

That information will be useful in helping the ad service track down and nuke the offenders. It’s a delicate balance, trying to ensure that your site isn’t spewing crap through a channel that operates on a certain amount of trust¹ while at the same time not blocking so severely that you don’t make any money. I want to thank Brad for sharing his (unpleasant) experience with the rest of us, and if you were wondering about subscribing to WDC, I’d say this particular tutorial might well be worth the $30 annual fee by itself.

Let’s look at something cheerier, shall we? Kate Beaton drew a couple of comics for Amazon’s book blog, and they’re great. I’m not going to copy the images here (since they’re meant for that site), but I am going to point you to lessons in family dynamics, Plantagenet Style.

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¹ To say nothing of scrubbing comments of linkspam, and dealing with actual attempts to hack boxes, which has hit everybody from the Abominable to the Weiner in the past.

The young lady marrying into our family has both a quote from Ender’s Game¹ tattooed on her calf and the Triforce on the back of her neck, and she and I were wondering if how many of the grandparents in attendance would faint over dead if MC Frontalot’s I ♥ Fags got played at some point during the dance portion of the evening. All in all, a lovely time was had, but I’m a bit behind on my readings. Mea culpa, and let’s see what I did manage to catch up on.

• Aaron Diaz² has been doing some thinking about costume/character design over at his art blog, Indistinguishable From Magic. Part one: costume redesigns that work; part two: costume redesigns that don’t work; part three: costume and character redesigns for characters that desperately needed it; and part four: what a Justice League reboot could (should?) mean (note the Diaz’s version is neither supermajority male nor supermajority white). I like that one element Diaz kept from recent DC history is Power Girl’s look of You Have To Be Kidding Me, done so very well by Amanda Conner³
• I usually end up talking about Sinfest when Tatsuya Ishida does something particularly good in the ongoing love story of Criminy and Miss Fuchsia, and that was my original impulse after seeing yesterday’s strip. Then I realized that the real story beat wasn’t Fyoosh’s worry about being caught out by her boss (the proverbial Big D himself), it was the uncharacteristic concern for the well-being of another that Fyoosh’s fellow Devil Girl, Baby Blue, showed. Even before Crim helped Fyoosh find her good side, Blue was always the more vicious of the pair, and here she’s helping her compatriot instead of ratting her out (although clearly Fyoosh is afraid of the possibility).

  But more than that — in the prior weeks, Ishida’s been colliding some of his other storylines. The feral Devil Girl (fresh from an encounter with Monique and her shoes) has encountered evil fanboy Lil’ E, who’s in the midst of some serious confusion about who/what he is. He’s not expecting an expression of genuine, innocent friendship from the wild girl, and doesn’t know that she’s kept Big D from screwing with his head further … for the moment, at least.

  Ishida does this — he takes mindlessly dogmatic (or just mindless) characters and changes them. Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it’s rapid, but it never feels unearned. Funnily enough, few of these storylines that involve (for lack of a better word) redemption feature Jesus (of course Jesus is a character in the strip; so is God, and Buddha, and the Great Dragon), it’s mostly the characters trying to work things out for themselves and tending (sometimes oh so slightly) towards being better people. In a lot of ways, it’s the toughest thing in the world to write a redemption; despicable characters are easy, but a character that you dislike and then come to empathize with? Pretty much it’s just Ishida and Milholland that can pull off that particular trick. Must be a side-effect of their strips being dot-nets instead of dot-coms.

• It never pays to ignore Rich Stevens. New secret company: followed!
• Final question — is the RSS feed at Makeshift Miracle working for everybody else? Is it just my stubborn adherence to Opera that’s keeping me from setting up the feed properly?

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¹ The enemy’s gate is down, naturally.

² The Latin Art-Throb.

³ Shaenon Garrity (Nexus blah blah Webomics blah Geographic Area) described it as Conner always drawing Power Girl like she was just slightly drunk.

Quick programming note: both Webcomicscon and APE are this weekend, on opposite coasts (Norwalk, Connecticut and San Francisco, respectively), with plenty of webcomicky types at each. I’ll be at my niece’s wedding, and considering that for her college graduation we got her a complete set of Roast Beef’s ‘zines and a bottle of Ray’s Rad Chilies sauce, I think I’ll have somebody to talk webcomics with. Just a hunch.

Sometimes, the funniest material comes from working without a net. Grab the microphone, lay down some audio, minimal edits, just go with it. We’ve seen the results from Kris and Scott (Scott and Kris) with their Blamimation — free-associating on a premise into an audio track, then limited animations to provide a visual component are added. But what if the words and pictures could be recorded simultaneously?

Enter Wondermark Kinetic. Air Marshall Malki ! and his cohort, Zachary Sigelko (seen on the right, talkin’ ’bout bears), have bashed together some mouth-articulated puppets and static backgrounds (all looking very Victorian-engraved) and tell their funny straight to the camera. Eight puppet shows uploaded in the course of six hours — the only recorded instance of short, funny films being produced more quickly was when the Old Spice Guy was kicking out responses to tweets every 20 minutes or so.

It reminds me in a weird way of something NASA’s been doing for a number of years now. See, you could spend a couple billion dollars on a space probe, hope everything goes right for literally years while it travels to wherever it’s going, and it still might not work when it gets there due to circumstances beyond any rational measure of control. Alternately, you could bash together something quick and on the cheap (okay, $250 million isn’t “cheap” in the conventional sense, but stick with me) and even if some clown forgets to use metric and it smacks headlong into Mars, you’ve got eight or nine other devices working, some way beyond expectations. If the mission’s going to fail, let it fail quickly, and move onto something else.

I think of this because of a remark that Malki ! once made about having so many project ideas, so many things he wants to pursue, but to do any as fully as it could be done would mean not doing something else. But these animations make me think that he’s come around to the NASA model — try it, and if it turns out to not be as interesting or as fun as initially thought, ditch it and move onto something else.

Could the backdrops for these puppet shows (or for that matter, the cardboard-constructed Machine of Death he brought to MoCCA this year) look more polished? Sure, and if it warrants it in the future, I’m sure that polish will be added to the revised version. In the meantime, we get intense bursts of creativity, each of which stretches and strengthens the creativity muscle¹ of an already significantly creative individual.

Malki ! might decide after a burst of activity that Wondermark Kinetic wasn’t all he hoped it would be, but the things he learned will make the next 37 projects he drops on us all the better/funnier/more polished. Right now, the pace of building is fast, cheap, maybe even a little out of control — but now is just warmup time.

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¹ Difficult to find on most anatomical diagrams, it’s usually underdeveloped and wedges behind the spleen.

It occurs to me that it’s been a while since I had occasion to mention The Abominable Charles Christopher; after a certain point, noting that Karl Kerschl did a drop-dead gorgeous strip again this week just becomes a bit repetitive. But sometimes KK and/or CC make you pay attention, as happened with yesterday’s update.

I believe that I’ve mentioned before that one of the great things about Charles Christopher is the multiplicity of side stories that run in parallel to the main storyline of our favorite big-hearted ape-man. Considering that you’ve got the Story of Vivol and Moon Bear, the owl and the owlet and the crazy owl uncle, the bird that just wants to be a good father and husband, the cockroach therapist and/or analyst¹, and various love stories involving various smaller critters, you’ve got more intersecting storylines than anybody this side of David Morgan-Mar².

Then we have Sissi Skunk; she’s been in the background since the very beginning (within the second month of the strip, in fact), and as we’ve seen for quite a while, she’s into perhaps some very bad things³.

Every once in a while, Kerschl comes back to Sissi’s interactions (or more precisely, the interactions of her business interests) with the denizens of the forest; increasingly, those interactions have been noted by Luga. Luga’s the James Gordon of Cedar Forest, the honest cop who knows that something’s up and is going to get to the bottom of it. But he’s hampered by corruption and has reached the point of betryal by his comrades. Blood will be spilled, and if Luga comes through it, he’ll have even bigger problems.

It’s the depth of these incidental characters and their stories that make Charles Christopher’s world feel so richly realized; even with the protagonist away since the beginning of the strip, life in the Cedar goes on and the wicked and the weary continue their lives and narratives in his absence. And Luga, who just wants there to be justice in Cedar Forest, deserved to have his narrative noted now that it’s maybe come to an end.

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¹ I call him “Tobias”.

² PhD, LEGO®™©^etc.

³ Although, to be fair, she also brings you Squirrel-Chew.

Nonzero bandwidth for other purposes: restored.
Time: way late.
Conclusion: short update, regarding books.

• Book the First: Scott C launches his latest, Amazing Everything, tomorrow in conjunction with APE this weekend. He’s celebrating with a party at 111 Minna Gallery (located conveniently at 111 Minna Street) in San Francisco from 7pm to 10pm tomorrow. If you’re in the mood for more Scott (and who wouldn’t be?), he’ll also be speaking tomorrow afternoon at the Academy of Art (540 Powell Street) from 3:30 to 4:30.
• Book the Second: Production continues apace on the first print collection of everybody’s favorite online comical erotica smut, Oglaf¹. Need proof? Peep the twitternouncment of TopatoCo maximum leader Jeffrey Rowland, or the picture attached thereunto. Even on the cover of a book wherein he’s arguably the most commonly-depicted character, poor Ivan is still the buttmonkey²

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¹ Need we point out that if any link to Oglaf is safe for your work, you work someplace awesome?

² Or the rubbish tiger, as the case may be.

One may recall that I was unable to attend SPX this year due to work. What one may not know is that my fellow Goats forum refugee, occasional colleague on this page (and even more occasional drinking buddy) Jeff Lowrey offered to make some purchases on my behalf in Bethesda. And so he has, and at some point the USPS will deliver these to my home. You, on the other hand, don’t have to wait to obtain a copy of Hark! A Vagrant from your nearest bookshop, comic book store, or the fine folks at Topatoco¹.

You know how sometimes you hear a description of somebody as a “writer’s writer” or an “artist’s artist”, or you geta movie that just kills with the cinephile crowd but the broader public doesn’t like? There’s often a divide between creators that impress the general audience and creators that fellow creators recognize as doing something not obvious, something that makes them really special. You very rarely get a creator that remains accessible and stretching the bounds of the artform simultaneously.

Kate Beaton is one of those very few, as good as everybody says she is; she is a painstaking crafter of pure, distilled moments, capturing the key essence of a story scene, a moment in history, a relationship and reducing it to the absolute minimum necessary to convey exactly the emotion and message she wants it to convey. There’s no excess lines, no word or caption that gets in the way or takes away your part in the reading half of the equation. The little stories (and they are all stories, whether there’s a gag there or not) Beaton tells tickle both the smartened part of your brain — which appreciates the games she plays with pop culture, history, literature, and language — and the part that just knows very little is better than an honest, unexpected laugh².

A lot of people are writing a lot about Hark! A Vagrant today, not because we got our marching orders from the secret conspiracy that runs everything³, but because a lot of people came independently to the same conclusion: Kate Beaton is an incredible, once-in-a-century talent, the kind that makes you want to grab people by the lapels and shout Read this right now.

And because she might forget to do so to one or two people over the upcoming book tour, Kate took some time out to pre-emptively thank everybody for picking up the book. She’s polite that way.

Earlier today, Box Brown offered up his take on the book release:

Guys [Kate Beaton] is going to for real break into the mainstream. I predict a [Conan O’Brien] appearance in 2012.

I think he’s right. I think that Kate Beaton will be the next (possibly the last) cartoonist to be known in the general culture, like we haven’t seen since Schulz (or since she’s not a strip cartoonist, maybe the better comparison would be to Feiffer, Addams, or Hirschfeld).

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But can you think of anything less than the release of a Kate Beaton book (and the attention she’s been getting from the mediasphere up to and including Time freaking magazine) that would knock the news of a new Perry Bible Fellowship strip way the hell down here? I didn’t think so.

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¹ Where, I understand, due to an absence of some of the complexities of bookstore distribution, Kate Beaton will make somewhat more money per copy than other channels, and where you can also pick up her first book, Never Learn Anything From History.

² Maybe sitting around a campfire at the end of the day. Marshmallows optional.

³ The secret conspiracy is busy this week, making sure the weather-control machines keep my home at 87% humidity until doors and drawers can no longer be opened.

See that picture up there? That’s the first story page of Jim Zubkavich’s The Makeshift Miracle, which ran online in 2001 – 03, as photographed in my copy of the 2006 print collection.

This is page one of The Makeshift Miracle¹, running online from today. In case anybody was wondering what a decade’s experience and networking in the comics industry gets you, it’s the opportunity to get redone art from the likes of Shun Hong Chan. If perchance you’ve never read The Makeshift Miracle, you now officially have no excuse — two pages a week, with a new print of the book coming from Zub’s studio, UDON next year, which will sit proudly on my shelf next to the original.

• From one page (so far), let’s jump up to three: Hurricane Erika posted one of her older comics works late last week, Orienteering, which was written by Sara Ryan and originally ran in the anthology Snow Stories.

  But Gary, I hear you cry, surely you can’t call a three page comic a longform story, or even long-ishform!² To which I say, go read it, and tell me there isn’t a hell of a lot of story that just didn’t make it into those three pages. He that left her in the snow, they have a history. And she and the skier have a future set of stories all their own — you just got a little snippet in what’s clearly a very long story, so quit whining and get to reading.

• Know what’s been missing for far too long? Family Man. When last we saw the redoubtable Luther Levy (so don’t think you can ever doubt him just once — you need to doubt, then re-doubt or it doesn’t stick), things were happening, including sexytimes with naked people! Then Dylan Meconis took a summer break.

  Boooo.

  But she came back with a 23 page complete story, not involving Luther or any of his, but perfectly in character with the fairy tale that she’s telling³. Outfoxed has lessons for those that are brave (or foolish) enough to dig for them, just like all the best fairy tales.

• Can’t read it yet (at least not in the form that we’re talking about right now), but if you’re looking for a longform story that’s just sheer fun (and features the best tagline of any comic ever), you can’t go wrong with Dave Roman & John Green’s Teen Boat! For those of you that have never experienced the angst of being a teen or the thrill of being a boat, TB! will be published next year, has a newly-revealed cover, and even a few review copies up for grabs.
• Finally, for those of you that haven’t read enough yet, how about what may be the most comprehensive list of webcomickers that I’ve ever found? You may be familiar with the work of webcomics überfan Michael Kinyon; by day he is a mild-mannered professor of mathematics, by night and a goodly chunk of the next day, he reads more webcomics than me by about an order and a half of magnitude. Pert-near every Friday you can find his list of webcomickers (and webcomics characters) getting #FF’ed in his twitterstream, and now he’s engaged with a similar list on the Google Plus. Even more lucky for reference nuts (like myself), he built on the works of an earlier list. Attend:
  

  The most common complaint heard about Google+ is the difficulty some have in finding people to follow. Now it is a bit easier to find webcomickers on Google+ and thus to find new webcomics too. Your readers might be interested to know that there are two comprehensive lists of webcomics people with Google+ accounts, both hosted at Ralf Rottmann’s Google+ Counter.

  The first list is Cartoonists (Webcomics/Web Cartoonists) and is managed by Bearman, the creator of Bearman Cartoons. His is a list of “cartoonists with a webcomic or who regularly post non-freelance work on the web”.

  Since I already manage six lists of great webcomics pals and fine webcomics folks over at Twitter, I was inspired by Bearman’s example (and his gracious endorsement) to create my own list, entitled simply Webcomics. Mine is “a list of webcomic creators (current and lapsed) and other people associated with webcomics (bloggers, podcasters, etc.)”

  The two lists overlap considerably, of course, but the point is that each of us hopes that people will find them to be a useful resource. Any cartoonist who meets Bearman’s criteria and would like to be on his list can contact him at Google+ or by his website’s contact page.

  Similarly, any webcomicker who wants to be on one of my lists can contact me at either G+ or Twitter.

  Warning: extensive lists at those links. Perhaps you might try to set up an Archive Binge feed and take it in manageable chunks.

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¹ Damn, that’s pretty.

² Don’t call me Shirley.

³ Which is to say, a real-damn-fairy-tale, the kind that we used to get before successive generations of redactors and censors and happy-makers, the sort where you are not guaranteed a happy ending. A very good example of the form was recently written by Ursula Vernon (of the concluded but always-in-my-heart Digger) at her LiveJournal, starting here and concluding here. Warning: no pictures, and so good it will make you squirm.

Unrelated to anything else, this update of Gunnerkrigg Court is officially Today’s Best Thing.

First noticed via Kris Straub’s twitterfeed:

assetbar closes its doors january 1, 2012. check out their blog. s.assetbar.com/index

That link leads to a blogposting that ain’t much more verbose than Straub’s summary:

Assetbar is closing its doors January 1, 2012
We built Fanflows so creators and artists could have an easy way to pursue their craft and make a premium connection with their fans.
It didn’t work

So, as of January 1, 2012, Assetbar and all Fanflows will be gone.
How this is going to go down

1. Effectively immediately we will no longer be accepting new funds deposits.
2. Other than adding new funds, you may continue to use Assetbar for the rest of the year, but…
3. On December 30, 2011 at 11:59PM PST, we pull the plug on the servers.

Actions you can take

• Withdraw your remaining funds
• Donate the remainder of your balance to Chris Onstad
• Continue to browse your Premium Content until January 1, 2012
• Follow Achewood on Twitter

Thanks!

It has been fun. Mostly.

Peace out,
The Assetbar Team

Rewind: in April of ’07, Chris Onstad introduced a new tool to control content availability to his subscribers; he referred to the for-pay area as the Fanflow, and it was powered by a toolset called AssetBar, cooked up by friends of his. By January of ’09 Straub’s Starslip and Scott Kurtz’s PvP added the AssetBar technology, followed by Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie, described by these adopters as essentially a testbed¹. I recall one or two other webcomics did likewise, but they all sort of drifted away over the course of a year or so.

AssetBar never really took off and achieved that magical level of Must! Have! for a large enough swath of the webcomics audience (and to my knowledge didn’t really attract users outside that community at all) to be self-sustaining. Part micropayments, part content management system, it did a couple of things pretty well, but ultimately required a compelling case on the part of creators to get enough users².

The users, on the other hand, needed to have lots of their favorite creators hooked into AssetBar to be certain of having enough places to spend their deposited funds; while a few superfans of just one site might pay a buck or two a month for sneak peeks at behind the scenes content (something that Kurtz, for example, gives away for free daily now), it seems that most wanted to spend a bit here, a bit there, and there just wasn’t a broad enough marketplace willing to accept the virtual scrip.

Not enough sites means not enough users means other sites not seeing the point in adopting means still more users not signing up — vicious circle stasis was achieved fairly early, and yesterday’s plug-pull announcement seems more an afterthought than anything (for example, the AssetBar blog seems not to have updated since December of ’09, a sure sign of a non-priority project).

Props to Israel L’Heureux and the rest of the AssetBar team for winding down with plenty of advance notice and a chance to reclaim funds; too often enterprises like this just disappear one day and any customers that have outstanding credit are outtalucko. Given that a previous project of the team got sold to Juniper Networks for a not-insignificant sum, I don’t think they’re hurting for cash, but still — it’s sadly more than you expect these days, to see startups try to go out with a modicum of class.

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¹ Kurtz in particular is pretty flexible about messing around with his business model: trying things, keeping those that work while they work, ditching those that don’t, and thinking about what to try next on an ongoing basis. That experimental, never-think-you’re-safe approach makes me think he’d be a damn good IT admin in charge of disaster preparedness — dude’s always got a backup plan. Respect.

² Onstad probably came closest.

Grey, dreary day. High humidity, just cool enough to make all the moisture hang in the air. A melancholy climate, and well-suited to some indoor entertainments. I know, let’s read some comics on the internet!

• Not that I begrudge Randall Munroe’s use of Bitches way back in comic #54, but Darryl Cunningham is attempting to be a bit more … conciliatory, perhaps? And he’s got more than 100 panels to deal with the topic of the validity of the scientific method and why science denialism is stupid, to Munroe’s one; it’s a slow build as opposed to a single knockout punch — it simply wouldn’t have worked in this context¹. Unsurprisingly, Cunningham has done as good a job as he has on his earlier comics, despite the inherent handicap of having a much broader, less sharply-defined topic (“science”) than in his previous investigative comical endeavours (examining things like the nonscientific denials of vaccine safety, evolution, or climate change).

  Speaking of, the journal comics of Tyler Page and his story of ADHD are pretty similar in tone and character to Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales, and he’s just posted chapter two. Go get it.

• Know what’s great? Achewood². Know what’s also great? People interpreting Achewood in their own styles. Case in point: Magnolia Porter (of the entirely-wonderful, recently concluded Bobwhite, and the even more wonderful and ongoing Monster Pulse) has decided to take some inspiration from Achewood characters, and set herself the challenge of drawing one a day for fifty days.

  In case her launch (yesterday) with Teodor made you suspect she would be limiting herself to series regulars, please note that today’s winner is Todd’s friend Little Freddie, who has not been seen for lo these many years. Me, I’m waiting to see when we get Rod Huggins, Sidney Yamahata, Sound and Motion, Cartilage Head, and especially Rameses Luther.

• Stripped: funded at 188% of goal, and just barely shy of the level that Freddave Kellett-Shroeder declared would let them add Dolby sound, mucho animations (from indie animators, naturally), closed-captioning, and more interviews. I’m guessing that somehow, they’ll find a way to make those extended goals happen, maybe with “mucho animations minus one animation”. Many congrats to Dave, Fred, and the 2600 people besides myself who pitched in, and will now assuredly get the documentary they were dreaming of.

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¹ For more on using “bitches” as a bit of lexical color, consider the case of newly-minted MacArthur Genius Jad Abumrad and his mom .

² Which I suspect, but I do not have hard evidence for this suspicion, will be dropping some new content on us in or around the imminent 10th anniversary of Philippe standing on it.