Did you see this last night? From the twitterfeed of Eisner-award winning webcomicker (he does some other stuff, too) Cameron “Not Kristen Stewart’s brother, dammit”, Stewart:

New new new Sin Titulo!! http://www.sintitulocomic.com/2011/08/02/page-109/

Sin Titulo, of course, the moody, creepy, noir-ish creator-owned webomic that earned Stewart the Eisner last year; it’s been back-burnered for a while now as Stewart worked on various Batman titles, a Suicide Girls miniseries [NSFW, obviously] (once prompting famed Batmanologist Chris Sims to declare The only thing I want to see Cameron Stewart draw more than a naked hipster girl is a fully clothed Batman.) and his Assassins Creed project with studiomate (and current Eisner laureate) Karl Kerschl. But those other projects are either done or not breathing down his neck, and we get to see what a creator at the peak of his game can make when he’s creating for himself instead of drawing somebody else’s IP. Best of all:

[F]inishing Sin Titulo is now a main priority so that it may be published as a print book next year! There are still a few things here and there that might pop up so I’m not quite ready to go full-on 5 days a week just yet, but I will try to manage 3 or 4 updates a week until this whole crazy thing is finished.

HELL. YES.

• Irregular reminder that talented people are making recipe-providing comics over at Saveur magazine. Since we last mentioned the Recipe Comix series some three weeks back, Carly Mondardo has shown you how to hard-cook eggs without overcooking, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson have sunk their Tiny Kitten Teeth into oyakodon, and Ryan North¹ delivers both a chili recipe and a philosophical meditation on the value placed by our society on flexing² within the usual six-panel confines.
• For those of you that were wondering (like me), New England Webcomics Weekend will return in NEWW3, when all is fresh and growth pervades the air:
  

  Webcomics Weekend 3 is on the horizon, but not in 2011. It will take place in early spring next year, just like the first NEWW.

  We organizers are feeling the crunch in ’11, so we’ll need the post-Christmas season to prepare. Sorry to delay things! NEWW3 will be great!

  In matters of NEWW, Meredith Gran equates to “word of God”, so there’s the answer. Much as I want NEWW3 to happen in a couple of months/next week/yesterday, already, I’d rather wait another couple months and have the show retain its laid-back magic feel than have it rushed and be a hassle for the organizers³. Block it out on your calendars, and see you there.

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¹ See also: Toronto Man-Mountain, The.

² Where “our society” really means “a society of sentient dinosaurs and tiny women”. For more on flexing, please consult the internet.

³ Especially if “hassle for the organizers” means that Gran wouldn’t have time to put together Octopus Pie updates like the one that dropped this week. Those panicked eyes hidden under the blanket are perfect.

Is The Untouchables the right visual reference, do you think? Might it be better to go with The Right Stuff? In any event, Messers Green, Hussie, Rowland, Jacques, and Stevens look like a band, and the article that the photo is attached to is better than average¹ for a newspaper story on webcomics. Nice job on the title of the piece — The New Webcomic Entrepreneurs — as that’s really the important thing about our community.

It’s not the fact that comics end up on the web, it’s that the people that put them up are in charge of the business aspects of what they do (or, as Randy Milholland mentioned in an unrelated tweet yesterday, I am a small business). The only thing I noticed that was kinda weird — the author of the article talked to five creators and mentioned two others by name, but none of them were ladies? Like I said — weird.²

• Speaking of entrepreneurship, got an email from Darren “Dern” Gendron, regarding a Kickstarting of a product niche I can’t say I’ve noticed before in webcomickry: board games. Sure, there’s some card games out there (most recently with respect to the Axe Cop³ supplement to Munchkin), but I don’t recall any board games. Scury Dogs: Pirates and Privateers looks to fill that gap, assuming that the rather more complex production issues of a board game (compared to a card game) can be overcome with the rather larger necessary budget.

  As of this writing, about $3600 of the necessary 20 grand have been raised, with just over a month to go. If you like boardgames but find that you’re getting bored with Catan⁴, take a look at the gameplay description that Gendron has at the Kickstarter page and maybe kick in some booty fer the cause.

• Newly noticed: The Chairs’ Hiatus by Matthew Bogart; it’s the story of a band, or what used to be a band. It kind of fell apart, and the members drifted away and have been living in various states of quietude and isolation. Now they’re meeting again face to face and remembering what they had, what they missed, why they got so angry, and what could possibly be forgiven. It updates somewhat irregularly, a half-dozen or so screensworth at a time, in tall, continuous-reading chapters (30 or more screens to the chapter, we’re a good way through the third chapter now).

  There’s not the “punch” you get on every page, but since multiple pages go up in each update, and the story is explicitly designed to be read in longform, that’s not really a shortcoming. The art is nicely composed, and the faces are simple enough to make reader identification with the characters extremely simple. I like this one, and I’ll be checking it irregularly, because I want to read big chunks of story, just like it was meant to be read.

• Did I mention that Digger volume 6 was available for purchase? Because it totally is, and given that the strip wrapped back in March, this is the last time I’ll get to tell you “New Digger volume available in exchange for money, you guys!” More to the point, two waves of signed copies will be put up for sale on 6 August, half of them at 6:00am and half at 6:00pm (GMT-5). Since none of my Digger copies is signed I’m not going to fight you for one; someday though, I will be in the same place as Ursula Vernon, and all six of my books will be there, and I will get signatures and or sketches, yes! Yes, I will!⁵

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¹ Although the dismissive parenthetical that “the name says it all” in reference to MS Paint Adventures? Very, very lazy.

² One possible explanation — all of the creators in the article live in Massachusetts except Randy Milholland, and he has a history of having lived there, so maybe that’s it?

³ Speaking of Axe Cop, let this serve as a reminder that tomorrow Axe Cop co-creator (elder half) Ethan Nicolle launches his second webcomic, BEARMAGEDDON. Not sure entirely what it’s about (bears, I’m guessing), but I have a feeling that somebody should alert Stephen Colbert.

⁴ Oh god that pun was completely unintentional, I’m so sorry. It’s all Brad Guigar’s fault.

⁵ For added effect, read that last bit in the voice of the deranged and highly-amusing Marlon Fraggle.

If the aircon in my building would ever kick in today, that would be great. Just saying.

• I didn’t get a chance to post earlier that the latest toys from Andrew Bell would be going on sale this morning (also 12 hours later tonight), and this morning’s tranche is sold out. Of course, if I had been able to tell you in time, you would have merely joined the crush of hopeful purchasers (a crush that makes the San Diego hotel scramble look leisurely by comparison) and still not have gotten any toys. Which is a shame, really, because the sashimi and Android toys look really cool, but at least content yourself knowing that between work schedule (this morning) and EMT volunteer schedule, I didn’t/won’t get any either. If you want to try your chances, the second wave hits the commerce engine at 11pm (GMT-4).
• New webcomic, and boy is it a) purty; and b) possessed of one hell of an intriguing premise. Power Nap comes from Maritza Campos and Bachan and posits the question, What happens when humanity doesn’t need to sleep anymore, and therefore doesn’t? Everybody’s completely blasé and nonplussed at anything that goes on around them, a little dead inside, a lot pacified as a population.

  Even more importantly, What happens if you’re the one guy that can’t take the drug that lets everybody else never sleep? If you can only stay awake enough to work a 10-hour day, you’re barely above the poverty line and barely awake enough to function; everybody puts in 16 hours a day (dwarfing your income) and still gets 8 hours of leisure time (with your commute, you can manage 4 – 5 hours sleep and that’s it — no R&R for you, buddy).

  I know the word gets overused, and I’m not exempt from that charge, but Power Nap is gorgeous. It’s like the visual stepchild of Euro-style indy comics (cf: Herval or Rodolphe Guenoden), Kyle Baker‘s graphic novels, and the Nightmare sequence of Robot Carnival. The facial expressions on Our Hero (Drew Spencer by name) are rubbery, evocative, and hilarious — they remind me more than a little of Vera Brosgol, actually.

  We’re about six weeks and 15 updates in, so now is the perfect time to get caught up; in case you forget, you can find Power Nap on the blogroll over there to the right.

• Finally, it’s been eight years since Questionable Content debuted, and although I’d estimate only a year or two of story time has elapsed over most of a decade of reality-time, that still represents ten or twenty times the pace of Megatokyo (and despite a preponderance of indie/emo characters, approximately 4000% less mopery). Actually, forget today’s time anniversary and come back on the 24th when (by my calculations) QC will cross into the vaunted 2000 updates club.

Why would we we talking about Tim Gunn on an ostensibly webcomics-themed blog? Maybe because last night’s Project Runway season premiere featured Paul Southworth’s famed Threadless tee, The Morning After¹. The challenge was to incorporate one’s own pajamas into a piece of fashion, and one of the contestants happened to be sleeping in said shirt; here’s what the dress looked like, with a nice closeup on Mister Happy.

Heidi Klum was not entirely sure what to make of it, but you can watch for yourself [starting around 25:20 for the initial discussion of the clown, and again at 44:00 for the runway] and decide whether or not the clown got the necessary respect.

• In case you didn’t see the announcement, damn early this morning, Greg Dean posted a notice on Google+ that Harper Elizabeth Dean was born at 12:24am (GMT-7), and posted a picture of the little cutie giving a big yawn. Mother and father are undoubtedly really tired after more than 24 hours of actively havin’ a baby², but I’d bet they’d appreciate your good wishes.
• Speaking of well wishes: Today’s xkcd, with context from last autumn, and relevant touches here, here, and here. If you’ll excuse me, I have a check to write.

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¹ Or, as I’ve always thought of it, “Taste the Rainbow”.

² No permalink, but Dean posted 10:25pm (GMT-7) on the 27th that they were already in the labor & delivery, and Harper didn’t show until the wee hours of the 29th.

I received some books from some creators for review in the past couple of days, and here is what I think of them.

• First up, Runtime Error, the first Not Invented Here collection from Paul Southworth & Bill Barnes; this one caught me by surprise. Oh, not that the book was out, or the content — I read NIH four times a week as it comes out — but by how what I had been reading as four gags per week leads to mini story arc, no real interconnectedness strip actually turned out to be an overall arc linking everything strip. Desmond and Owen sprang onto page one, strip one fairly fully formed (yea, like unto Athena emerging from the brow of Zeus), but the entire rest of the strip evolved around them in a way that was much more planned than I originally noticed.

  Reading through 18 months of strips in one go, what I originally took for callbacks now seem more deliberately planned story beats, just waiting for the right time to reveal themselves. The characters and situations Barnes has pulled from his own experiences in the IT trenches will seem familiar (and somehow less annoying than their real-life counterparts) to anybody that’s spent time in the tech industry. Southworth’s clean, assured, cartoony designs tell you everything you need to know about the characters even when they’re silent. Damn good work from creators for whom good work is second nature.

• Secondly, we have Bacon’s Not A Food, It’s A Lifestyle, the second collection of Calamities of Nature by Tony Piro. Despite doing regular browse-by reads of CoN, I somehow never realized that Piro is a physicist by training, although it does make many of his strips make more sense. These are older CoNtributions, from 2008 and 2009, which leads to a few dated references, but as Aaron, Alp, Harold, and Ferd (joined halfway through by Raymond) mostly exist in a timeless space, these are pretty few and far between.

  Judging from a quick scan of the site, Piro’s more likely to put topical/technical strips into the hands of generic non-cast members or diagrams (and those that he leaves with the core cast aren’t quite so time-and-space specific), so that’s not so likely to be an issue when volume 3 comes out. IN the meantime, CoN features a strong, consistent visual style, with a sharp, character POV-driven humor, and occasional forays into impenetrable truths that are the funniest CoNtents¹.

• Thirdly, from across the ocean-sea², Good Ideas and Bad Decisions the second collection of Beardfluff by Rembrand Le Compte. I’ll confess that I hadn’t been aware of Beardfluff before Le Compte emailed to ask if he could send me a book, an oversight that I should be ashamed of. This is a journal comic (which has about as much in common with Le Compte’s actual life as Overcompensating has to Jeffrey Rowland’s) that has, as a major recurring character, a sentient floating beard with a sweet moustache. Clearly, this is a strip that was made for me.

  Weirdness and facial hair aside, Le Compte has a style that’s part ligne claire, part Perry Bible Fellowship, and part the result of Belgium’s most beloved industry. These comics are from May 2010 to May 2011, making these the fourth and fifth years of Beardfluff — time enough for Le Compte to grow from a decent cartoonist to one with a much more assured and darker sense of humor, as well as a refined visual aesthetic³.

  Quick note: a production error apparently caused one strip to go missing — it’s in author’s notes in the back of the book, but doesn’t actually appear. Relatively speaking, it’s not one of the stronger strips, so if suicidal pigeons not being included means we get beardy Batman or Edwin the Furry Gnome, that’s a tradeoff I can live with. I’m going to keep Beardfluff in my regular trawl list, and thank Le Compte for sending his book; it’s really enjoyable.

• Lastly, not a review, but a quick note that Gordon McAlpin’s (my ex-nemesis) first Multiplex collection, Enjoy Your Show, has made it into the local comic shop channel. At least, there were copies on the shelf at Midtown yesterday, and it’s a handsome, heavy-in-the=hand, richly-colored book. Pick one up for yourself or a loved one today.

Edit to add: Oh man you guys, I can’t believe I forgot to include this fact — the envelope that Rembrand Le Compte sent his book to me in was covered (as you might expect) with Belgian postage stamps. One stamp managed to picture both the Atomium and the Manneken-Pis. All that needs to be added to that stamp to completely embody Brussels is the Blake et Mortimer mural. I came across that beauty completely by accident when visiting Brussels, and it put me in a good mood for the rest of the day.

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¹ I can never think of Eleanor Roosevelt the same way again.

² Specifically, Ghent, Belgium, home to one of the most badass castles I’ve ever seen; from across the water, it seems entirely designed to look as sinister and oppressive as possible, reminding the locales exactly which foreign princes were in charge and don’t you forget it. Then again, my mind was still kind of blown from staring at the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb for a couple hours, so maybe I was just projecting the menace a little. Still, great town.

³ Also in those four years? Sweet beard.

Okay, gotta confess that I haven’t really been concerning myself with DC Comics and their apparent kerfuffle¹ regarding their line-wide reboot and almost complete out-shutting of female talent. This is mostly because I don’t read any of their comics.

But apparently the institutional DC response to this situation has been “Well it’s not like we know of any women that we could hire.” This has led to not one, but two distinct bits of complete and utter truth-to-power today:

1. An online petition² addressed to DC contains (as of the time of this writing) eighty-nine names of supremely talented creators; have fun at home and pick out all the webcomickers!
2. Aaron Diaz³ pointed out why many of these eighty-nine women, if approached by DC, might turn them down:
   

   If you’re a budding female artist with fresh ideas, why enter the industry doing the 15th reboot of an 80 year old property you don’t own?

My own reading of Diaz’s position places the most emphasis on the last three words: you don’t own. Let’s say that DC called everybody’s bluff and gave, say, Jess Fink the art gig on, say, Wonder Woman (a book which, incidentally, I would buy the crap out of, if only to hunt down every single hidden boner than snuck into the final artwork). And let’s say that Wondy became the biggest thing that DC’s seen in the past 30 years, books flying off the shelves, movie deals getting signed every which way, big blockbuster success all around.

Jess Fink is not going to see any money of that hypothetical movie. Maybe the Warners Entertainment checks give her the time to come up with her next original story, but that’s the most that it would do. The fame and fortune that these creators get will, almost without exception, come from their own ideas, their own creations, their own stories — stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, not ongoing zombie properties.

DC wants to cut themselves off from some of the best creators, with the best ideas, making the best comics, out of a sense of faux ignorance? Awesome, they can knock themselves out. I’d love to be wrong about this. I’d love to see the amazing talents that DC claims not to know exist given free rein and paid not just with a rate, but with an ongoing stake in what they create. We all know it ain’t never gonna happen, and in the meantime, I can still buy a bunch of my comics directly from the creators⁴ and get to read things I haven’t seen a thousand times before.

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¹ I love that word.

² Those things never work, but are on occasion amusing to read.

³ The Latin Art-Throb.

⁴ Case in point: I just became the 300^th backer of the Narbonic Kickstarter campaign; a little late, I realize, but still two full days to go.

Do you like things? Do you plan to be around in the future? If so, you may enjoy these things which are Coming Soon!

• Coming so Soon that’s it’s actually already out, the Cloudscape Comics Society has been doing a series of really good anthologies and the latest one, 21 Journeys is now available at ecRATER. Vanessa Kelly at Cloudscape was kind enough to send me a PDF for review, and there’s some damn good work inside — what struck me most is that more than any anthology I’ve seen recently (with the possible exception of the final Flight volume), each story in 21 Journeys feels entirely in sync with the theme, but also distinct and reflective of the creator’s own unique voice. Outstanding work, well worth your time.
• Coming Soon to an RSS feed near you, Kris Straub will be following up the late, lamented Tweet Me Harder with a new podcast on the theory and practice of humor: The Humor Authority doesn’t have a launch date yet, but Mr Straub has never been one for delay when he sets his sights on a goal, so listen to the teaser¹ and be prepared for the forthcoming discussion.
• Coming as Soon as you like: your contribution to Buckonet, the crowdsourced site² helping the search for one Richard “Bucko” Richardson. You do know about Bucko, the dick-n-fart-joke murder mystery by Jeff Parker and Erika Moen? He’s run off in terror and the wiki is coordinating the search. If you see Mr Richardson, he is freaked out on absinthe and in fear of life, so report those sightings.
• Coming so Soon it’ll be here before you know it: not one, but two new Box Brown comics. On the one hand, you gots the new issue of Everything Dies, with an innovative “pay what you can afford” mechanism. On the other, Blank Slate Books will be releasing Brown’s newest original project, The Survivalist, in October. One of Brown’s strengths is to find people that he utterly disagrees with (cf: any of the modern stories from Everything Dies), research the hell out of their beliefs, and present them as fairly as he possibly can. Where he criticizes, it’s based on their words, logical, and not personal. I have to believe that this approach will carry through to his story of a paranoid conspiracy buff (who just happens to be right), and I’m looking forward to reading it.
• Coming … well, not that Soon, really, but worth putting on your calendar: the next graphic novel by Raina Telgemeier will be titled Drama, regarding middle school theater geeks, and be out in a bit more than a year. Countdown starts now.

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¹ Warning for those with delicate sensibilities: there is mild smack talk directed at EB White towards the end of this audio clip.

² I love these reader-driven projects, from the history of The Great Outdoor Fight (seemingly throwing some code errors right now) to the history of The Elemenstor Saga.

Everybody’s on the way back from San Diego, or back and recovering, trying to get their work out the door tomorrow. I’ll point out the mini update from the weekend, and few things I found today to be of interest:

• John Allison notes that today marks eight years of being his own boss. For those of you that require visual cues, that means that everything since Sipowicz showed up has been John working not for The Man, but for himself. Polite golf claps, everybody.
• A few words of wisdom from Evan Dahm on the state of webcomicdom:
  

  Comics as a whole are in the process now of gaining that legitimacy, and it’s because of the people doing good work in that medium, more than any other reason. Superficial aspects like deciding to call them “graphic novels” instead of “comics” don’t help. Good work helps.

  Webcomics are … in some ways becoming the new “indie” comics, and replacing the niche filled by minicomics and zines, bit by bit. Because it is effectively free and easy to put this stuff online, it will naturally have a lower signal-to-noise ratio than print comics, and a lower percentage of good stuff — and I hope it is always that way.

  If you are making or aspire to make a webcomic, take your work seriously, be engaged in it, and believe in it. Do good work, and be consistently critical of it so you will keep improving. You have your reasons for choosing this particular means of distribution, so own it: don’t think of it as a shortcut or an excuse to do anything less than the best you can. [emphasis mine]

  I’m intrigued by the bit in bold, because I can read it several ways:

  1. Dahm likes the free-wheeling, anything-goes nature of indie comics and hopes it’s never lost
  2. Dahm figures the lower quality work is a side-effect of a constant influx of new creators, forcing established talents to keep upping their game
  3. Dahm thinks it’s easier to compete for scarce dollars when the competition isn’t very good; there are others that believe in this interpretation

  Since Dahm’s conclusion is for there to be more good webcomics, I’m leaning towards interpretation #2 for the bolded bit, but still — they all have their appeal, and it’s hard to argue with any position that says I should have more high-quality comics to read for free. So everybody get on that making more good webcomics for me, ‘kay?

• Out of the violence that a terrorist¹ perpetrated in Oslo, one reader found comfort in a webcomic. No joke or snark here — well done, Mike and Jerry.

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¹ Per the definition used by the State Department I learned in my days studying national security: Premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. Feel free to also refer to the perpetrator as a psychotic, murdering goddamn disgrace to humanity, but I will not name him and provide the notoriety and platform that he apparently craves.

The AV Club hit the Webcomics Pavilion at San Diego Comic Con and eavesdropped on a Phil Foglio portfolio critique.

I’ve watched Foglio do these at close distances, and it’s pretty much as Todd VanDerWerff describes, with one minor edit: Foglio always asks the aspiring artist if they really want a critique, because he will give them good and bad, honestly, and are they sure? I’ve seen people accept his critiques with varying degrees of grace, but I haven’t ever seen anybody get offended thanks to that preamble.

Just don’t ask Brad Guigar to do portfolio review. Seriously, don’t.

Let’s get some announcements out there before all the air conditioning overloads the power grid, takes down power and communications, and eastern half of the country devolves into barbarism and anarchy. If I don’t survive until Monday, it’s been a blast, and thanks to all my readers.

• There’s emails that get immediate attention when they cross my virtual desk — and given all that he’s done for capital-w Webcomics with ComicPress, Tyler Martin is fairly high up the Pay Attention list. In addition to designing the dominant webcomics WordPress plug-in and his own webcomicking (sadly over, it seems), Martin has done design and infrastructure work for more webcomicky sites than you can shake the proverbial stick at, and he wanted to share some news about one of those:
  

  Skywriter Media and Entertainment Group, and Roddenberry Entertainment are joining forces to develop an animated kids’ comedy series, Gene’s Journal, based on the hilarious webcomic created by Trevor Roth and illustrated by cartoonist David Reddick. Gene’s Journal is the untold, true story behind the adolescent years of Gene Roddenberry. It was during these years that Gene was continuously abducted by aliens for the extraterrestrial purpose of studying human beings –- all of his experiences recorded faithfully in his boyhood journal.

  There’s a lot more there in the usual corporate-PR speak, but that’s the gist of it; many congrats to Roth and Reddick. Oddly enough, I’ve been thinking about Roddenberry quite a lot this week, probably because of the recent episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s podcast, where he spoke at length with Nichelle Nichols, which naturally meant that Roddenberry came up.

  Complex guy, ol’ Gene, had some cheesy ideas and some incredibly important ones. It’s a good listen, as is the second half of the interview with Ms Nicholls about her years of effort as a booster of NASA and the space program. Coming in the same week that Atlantis touched down and brought our current manned spaceflight program to an end (without an immediate successor), it’s inspiring and a little depressing at the same time.

• Not only are their people whose emails are automatically a priority, there are people whose actions are. Maybe the absolute top of the list is Scott Kurtz, who I find to endlessly fascinating: willing to take risks, to experiment with his business model in public, to get into more online arguments than is probably good for him (but where he’s also often making the best points, at least when everybody’s willing to step back and let their emotional responses cool off a bit). I enormously respect that he’s not afraid to offer up his mea culpas in public, and that he’s made a concerted effort to grow beyond his hothead tendencies.

  So when he announced today that he’s breaking one of the major taboos of webcomics, I paid attention. Specifically, he’s taking sponsorship dollars for in-strip content. Not ads, not side-strips that aren’t part of the “real” PvP, but honest-to-Hawking paid product placement. This can be done, very carefully, without coming off as a giant shill (in his announcement, Kurtz mentioned Mad Men as the exemplar of this¹), in part because:

  The PvP gang has played Dungeons and Dragons, gone to see every Star Wars film, quote Trek non-stop and choose Coke over Pepsi. I’m already doing it, I’m just not getting paid for it.

  That’s the key part there — Kurtz has spent a dozen years establishing the — for lack of a better term — credibility of his fictional characters; the longtime and casual reader both can easily discern the products and services that the characters use because it comes from who they are. At least a third of Brent Sienna’s character development comes from his Apple cultishness.

  If Kurtz can find sponsors that aren’t afraid to let him play with their brand (including making fun of them if it serves the story arc), sponsors that would make sense for his characters to interact with, then I can see this working. In the hands of a creator more … mercenary is the word I keep coming back to … this could turn very bad, very quickly.

  Kurtz, on the other hand, has a certain reservoir of trust built up in his audience: trust that he cares about the characters and story, that making the strip as good as possible comes first and foremost, that if it doesn’t work out in a way that betters the strip he’ll abandon the experiment.

  The announcement came today as the story arc that’s been running this week finally mentioned the sponsor by name — had Kurtz not done so, my guess is that he’d easily be halfway through the quarter-long sponsorship before people started to suspect there was a financial interest. I think that this is going to make Kurtz’s ad guys work harder than they ever have before, and it’s not clear to me that every quarter will have sponsorships that meet Kurtz’s criteria² lined up as the previous one expires.

  We’re going to see people trying this that don’t do it well, and any success that Kurtz has may not be repeatable. But as always, the dude is interesting.

• For those of in San Diego this weekend, you can see Kurtz on two panels, as well as others of interest to webcomics types:

  On Saturday, Kaja & Phil Foglio talk steampunk (room 23ABC, 10am); Kurtz talks digital disruptions with Mark Waid (room 8, 2:30pm); the Halfpixel Gang record Webcomics Weekly live (room 25ABC, 5pm), and then Mike & Jerry have the PA Q&A in the same room (6pm).

  On Sunday, Los Bros Nicholle talk Axe Cop (room 6DE, 10am); Keenspot get Keen (room 4, 3pm).

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¹ Although I think a better example might be a Mexican telenovela that’s set at an ad agency, and as a major plot thread is developing an ad campaign for Ford. The punchline being, the in-show ad campaign is actually being used by Ford in Mexico (or, more precisely, the ad campaign used by Ford in Mexico has been back-fitted into the show to create the fiction that’s where it was created).

² From the announcement:

• The product would have to be something I believed in.
• The product had to be something I would comment on in PvP anyway.
• The client would have to be forward thinking, and geek savvy, and be able to poke fun at themselves.
• The client would have to understand that the inclusion of their company into the strip would have to serve the greater story or humor.