It’s the little things that catch your attention, sometimes. Case in point, a tweet of three words and one link from Kate Beaton t’other day:

First book announcement

That book would be Ducks, an expansion of sketch comics in longish installments over the years, and long planned to be a book. Book plans get put to the side for good reasons¹ and tragic², but there was never a question that Ducks would see the light of day.

I am looking forward to this book as I always look forward to Kate’s work, because my favorite of her work is always the next. I’m also dreading this book a little, because it tells the story of a time and a place that’s uniquely toxic — toxic to the land, toxic to the souls of the men working there, and particularly toxic for the women who are just trying to do a job surrounded by men with toxicity in their souls.

There are bits of the original five-part story that put chills down my spine and not in a good way. There’s pain tied up in the oil sands for just about everybody that passed through there, I’ll warrant — and for those without that pain, I would steer well away because I fear they’re broken in a dangerous way. Ducks is at the top of my reading list for fall 2022, because it will be by turns wonderful, painful, and searingly honest.

That’s what Kate does, and we owe it to her to read the story she brings us and not look away when the painful comes to the fore. Parts of that story are going to hurt; Ducks is asking us to bear witness, and to resolve to make a world where the hurt is less in the future.

Ducks is due from Drawn & Quarterly in Fall 2022. I’m putting it on your must-buy list now.

Spam of the day:
Spammers don’t get to share the day with Kate.

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¹ A wedding, a baby, a second baby. Some joyous occasions for Kate Beaton since 2014.

² We love you still, Becky, because our friend loved you so. Rest peacefully and know you will not be forgotten.

Some bad DNS took the site down at the end of the week. We’re back, though, and thank you as always for joining us.

• Remote SPX took place over the weekend, and that means that the Ignatz Awards were handed out on Saturday night. The coveted bricks are surely winging their way towards the winners, who include Lee Lai for Stone Fruit (Outstanding Artist, Outstanding Graphic Novel), Glaeolia 2 (Best Anthology), Abby Howard for The Crossroads At Midnight (Outstanding Collection), Ashanti Fortson for Leaf Lace (Outstanding Comic),

  [inhale]

  Casey Nowak for Bodyseed (Outstanding Minicomic), Michael Deforge for Birds Of Maine (Outstanding Online Comic), Ex.Mag (Outstanding Series), Freddy Carasco for Personal Companion in Ex.Mag #1 (Outstanding Story), and Pa-Luis (Promising New Talent). Fleen congratulates all the winners, and we sincerely hope that they find a way to send the chocolate fountain on tour to all of you.

• Jorge Cham has been busy with TV work for a good while now, but every once in a while he drops some new PhD Comics on us, and that’s why RSS will never die. I get to see the new strips and you probably didn’t know they were even coming out! The latest is a really great explainer of how the SARS-CoV-2 virus works. Cham’s always great when he talks to people that are really, really deep into a thing and want to share everything they know.

  Thus, discussion about spike proteins, about maybe why the delta variant is so much more infectious, about the importance of basic research — by the time you figure out what the very important crisis topic is, it’s too late because you needed a body of experts with 20 years experience and you can’t spin that up overnight¹ — and the importance of truthful information getting out ahead of the bullshit. Cham’s always been a skilled public communicator of science and technology, and he’s doing good service here.

  Oh, and he has a book coming out, too. Frequently Asked Questions About The Universe will be, well, a discussion of questions on the cosmic scale, and a new team-up with Daniel Whiteson, his collaborator on We Have No Idea. Remember what I said about Cham being great at sci-com? Order FAQATU before it drops on 2 November.

Spam of the day:

I have dirt on you.
Now I know everything.
The price of my silence is 0.21 BTC,
transfer them to me by August 26 to this bitcoin wallet
bc1qw220sye4cxya05ahpuw9lwfu7acwql660h73tq
otherwise I’ll tell everyone.
And then you will feel very bad.

Firstly, congrats on coming up with a spam what slightly reminds me of plums and iceboxes, good job.

Secondly, looks like I blew your deadline by like three and a half weeks so I guess everybody knows my deal by now.

Thirdly, it would be a shame if people started to mess with that crypto wallet. Real shame.

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¹ Of all the myriad ways that Donald Trump fucked up the response to the pandemic, thinking that he could just hire a bunch of MD/PhDs and virologists and they’d be on the job next Monday was possibly the most egregiously stupid. This is your reminder that my thoughts on the coronavirus remain in effect.

One of my favorite KB Spangler¹ novels — and heck, it’s got a prequel so it’s really a series — is a galaxy-wide sweeping epic about the most important thing in the universe as humans expand and change both worlds and themselves as they see fit:

Supply chains.

Don’t laugh. The best scifi recognizes that all the stuff that makes the fictional worlds come alive has to come from somewhere; hell, one of the greatest cyberpunk novels of all time makes it all the way to page two before talking about making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel because that’s the only way the rest of the story can make sense.

Supply chains are why you have everything you have except maybe some of the sadder looking produce at the local farmer’s market and even that’s tied up in something cheap from Bulgaria like as not. The people who understand supply chains are to the modern economy what computer experts were from about 1972 to maybe 1988 — unseen, underappreciated, and absolutely vital². And it’s the topic of a particularly trenchant Twitterthread that was brought to me by graphic novelist and comics editor extraordinaire Ali Wilgus t’other day:

This is a fantastic thread about delays we’re currently dealing with in publishing, why they’re happening, and why they’re likely to get worse before they improve.

If you don’t have the time to read the thread — and it is very worth your time — Wilgus cuts to the chase:

A major takeaway: if you want to support your favorite authors and imprints, preorders are especially vital right now

The thread itself is the social media about of New Orleans indie bookstore Tubby & Coo’s, and it hits all the reasons that books — and that includes all forms of comics — are so damn hard to get hold of these days, where these days has for me been since roughly an hour into the pandemic as my preorders get repeatedly shit on by Diamond not that I have an axe to grind, nope not me.

Where was I? Oh yes, supply chains. T&C breaks it down into the highlights (each link jumps to a breakpoint in the thread that you can follow for several tweets on the topic): paper (there’s massive shortages of all forms of woodstock), printing (already a problem for smaller publishers/self-publishing as printers delayed small orders for big ones), warehouses (in which we should all resolve to never use the phrase unskilled labor again, as the lack of skilled warehouse workers is leading to both delays and fires), and shipping (everything from lack of dockworkers — skilled labor again — to lack of shipping containers).

Add it all up and there’s only one conclusion:

As you can see, literally every piece of the supply chain is disrupted in some way. This means major delays in getting books printed & shipped at both ends of the process, which affects pretty much any order.

If a store doesn’t have a book in stock/sells out, it could be 6-8 weeks before we can get more. If we have a book in stock that we can immediately ship out, delays will be less, but there will likely still be shipping delays, especially as we get closer to the holidays.

All this to say: PLEASE ORDER NOW for the holidays. And PLEASE do not get angry at or blame bookstores (especially indies) or bookstore workers. This is in no way our fault, and we are doing our absolute best. These delays are happening in ALL retail. Don’t be a dick.

And for anybody producing comics that wants to sell them? I would conservatively double the time you think that printing and shipping will take for the next while. It’ll be at least the end of the pandemic³ plus nine to twelve months before things get back to normal, whatever normal may have been. It’s been a while since any of us experienced normal.

So: order early, encourage others to do likewise, and be patient. It’s going to be frustrating for a good while yet, and there’s no point to making somebody else’s life more difficult than it already is.

Spam of the day:

I am Mrs. Dara, 70 years old, Dumb, and a widow.

Whoa there Sparky Spammer, there’s self-deprecation but that’s verging on clinical depression. Get yourself some help, maybe find a line of work that doesn’t make you so miserable?

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¹ AKA my buddy Otter. She’s rad.

² Since then the computer geeks have become no less vital but they will make sure they’re never unseen or underappreciated again if it kills them or preferably us.

³ Everywhere in the world, not just here, wherever here may be for you.

It used to be a truism that webcomics slacked off (either updates, or readership numbers, or both) over the summer and ticked up again in early September, a token of how much net access was tied to academic institutions. Take a look at any of the old long runners, and there’s a better than even chance they started updating in the first two weeks of September, as many strips were outgrowths of college papers.

The ur-example is the Walkyverse by David Willis, which launched Roomies on 10 September 1997 (uh, happy 24th strippaversary last Friday, David), and which saw reboots keep the date: Bring Back Roomies five years later, and the current Dumbing Of Age (reboot? alternate reality?) in 2010 (uh, happy 11th strippaversary last Friday, David).

Willis’s old Blank Label¹ running buddy Paul Taylor, f’rinstance, started Wapsi Square at midnight Sunday night/Monday morning, 9/10 September 2001. Which means that strip #2 went up on a bad day and nobody was reading anything funny. Them’s the breaks sometimes.

But the most significant autumn launch is possibly not an autumn launch at all.

1 October 2001 was the day we met Téodor, Cornelius Bear, and found out Phillippe was standing on it, and Achewood burst into our eyeballs and … not a lot happened, actually. It was a webcomic, sure. But the later spark that showed us what webcomics could achieve, that less than five years later would lead to the greatest sustained burst of brilliance in any webcomic, ever — give me a moment to say some other stuff and I’ll justify that claim — wouldn’t really find its footing for a while.

Chris Onstad has said he doesn’t consider the strip to have started, not really, until three cats were introduced about four months later as The Dirtiest Dudes In Town. Ray was embryonic but recognizable and fell into his personality pretty damn quickly; Pat was … okay, not really Pat; by the time we learned Beef’s name his mode of interacting with the world was pretty much set, and Achewood was Achewood.

So as long as we’re coming up on 20 damn years of Achewood, a few things to share: there’s a nice video essay with entirely too few views on Achewood’s use of language, and I went and dug up both the teaser trailer and the test footage of the tragically never-completed Achewood cartoon series. Go back and find your favorite story arc and just wallow for a while. Come the first, we are all From Circumstances.

Oh, right, greatest sustained burst of brilliance in any webcomic, ever. January 2006 (five years and a day after we first met Ray, Beef, and Pat and man, screw Pat, he’s a jerk) started with The Great Outdoor Fight, which we are rightly still talking about fifteen years later; considering this was a time when Onstad famously did not plot story ahead and did each strip based on whim, it’s a remarkably tight, still riotously funny meditation on masculinity and finding your father.

After literally a one strip interlude, we launched into the story of Phillippe And The Transfer Station which, need I remind you, brought us Ebay Platinum Reserve, Airwolf, the preserved head of Keith Moon, and Ray’s Robert Smith impersonation.

Single strip breather again and we get Beef’s Magic Underpants, the tail-end strips of which feature some of the most perfect single panels in webcomics history. Look at the GENIUS! indeed; Look at his stand in his ROOM!

No intermezzo, the very next strip launched The Badass Games, after which a month of perfectly acceptable strips went by (including the introduction of sass gut and pimp skitters, two of the finest bits of Achewoodian language ever) before we got to one of the most bonkers ideas that Onstad’s ever come up with: Mexican Magical Realism, which would flit in and out of Achewood until Onstad launched perhaps his most trip-all-the-balls story.

By the time Ray walked home from Mexico it was nearly the end of October, and we still had to contend with Mister Band to finish the year and spill over into late January.

QED.

Spam of the day:

Attention: Beneficiary,

We sincerely apologize for sending you this sensitive information via e-mail instead of a certified mail, post-mail, phone, or face to face conversation, it’s due to the urgency and importance of the security information of our citizens, I am deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Paul M. Abbate, We intercepted and seized a sealed envelope at the John F Kennedy International Airport, New York, NY 11430 coming from a foreign, we scanned the sealed envelope’s content and found it contained a part payment of $410,000 United States Dollar value certified payment bond. Also, the sealed envelope had documents with your name on them as the receiver of the package. After questioning the diplomat who accompanied the sealed envelope into the United States, we learned that he was supposed to deliver this sealed envelope to your residence as an inheritance / winning prize payment due / owed to you.

Quoted at length so I could say Dude, pick one damn scam and stick with it. You’re trying to jam in like seven different things here.

_______________
¹ Remember the days of comics collectives? When a bunch of creators would band together into what Jon Rosenberg² referred to as a mutual non-aggression pact³ because why not? A bunch of people who’ve been at this forever came up through one or more of those old semi-communes, and are more than familiar with each other’s elbows, having sometimes put a dozen folks behind a single SDCC exhibit floor table, ow.

Oh, and that link is to the Wayback Machine; don’t type it in directly, it takes you to a completely unrelated site that must have snagged the domain after collectives were no longer a thing.

² Obligatory disclaimer: who supplies my hosting and browbeat into this blogging deal in the first place.

³ He also referred to his Dumbrella cohorts as a bunch of lowlife emo-candyraver drug-addled web-cartoonists which, fair. At least one of them is responsible for the spreadsheets that provide a living for dozens of creators now.

That Dumbrella link is good, although it hasn’t been updated in forever, because R Stevens would rather die than give up a domain name, as is only right and proper. I need to ask him sometime how damn many of the things he owns.

Hard to tell, though, with the ongoing disruptions to society that are so unevenly present. Time and the passing of the seasons is muted. We need something to look forward to, something we can hang some anticipation of delight on, and fortunately for you, I’ve got just the thing to point you towards.

Lagies and Jenglefenz, I give you the next keepsake game from Shing Yin Khor:

Do you remember your childhood friend August? You met when she rode her bike into a ditch, right in front of you. Now, she’s lost in time.

Kickstarter in September 2021, live game in February 2022.

Follow to be notified on launch: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shing/remember-august

I will likely not be promoting this much, it’s a small and experimental live game that will land a story told in letters(by me and you, as you’ll write back) in your mailbox over the course of Feb 2022. You can buy that nice pen now, in order to save your friend August.

Done, and done. I believe my last fountain pen purchase was in anticipation of this moment¹. There’s preview images of Save August, and a description that should be landing hard in your brain if you’re anything like me:

the basic outline of it:
– you have to remember your friend, an agent of the Bureau of Time Disruption, to anchor her in present day.
– 8+ letters/misc. ephemera mailed to the player over a month.
– the USPS as a third character, a game about the rhythm of waiting. [emphasis mine]

Khor always comes up with unique mechanics for their games, and a game that is about patience is something that I’m going to get a lot of good from.

The Kickstart isn’t up yet, but the reward tiers have been announced:

I’m going to keep tiers very affordable. The backer tiers will be:

$10 – Live email game and game .pdf.
$20 – Live email game AND mailed game archive booklet
$50-60 – Mailed letters and archive booklet.

Post live-game, digital files will be released for free/PWYW!

The reason I am releasing digital files for free is because I 100% encourage anyone to remount the live game for a friend, by printing/prepping/mailing the game letters to them.

You can get much fancier with this outline than I will be able to with my bulk mail limitations!

That’s Khor in a nutshell — whatever they come up with, however many of us pay them for it, they still want everybody to get the benefits of art and experience. The generosity of spirit is stunning and a big part of why I’m proud to call them a friend. Even when things like this happen.

Save August will be launching on Kickstarter soon; find a good pen and paper, gather some envelopes, decide what stamps you want to use, and practice your handwriting. Think I’ll give my new turquoise ink a go with this one. See you all at the mailbox come February.

Spam of the day:

The waterproof sandals that you will wear all summer long

You’re a bit late there, Champ. Try again in about six months?

_______________
¹ Note to self: get some decent stationery.

It’s been a busy 24 hours or so for me. Stay safe and godsdammit, when there are safety warnings, listen.

Year after year, the most unique slate of comics awards nominees, the ones that you wouldn’t have ever heard of otherwise, is found at SPX and the Ignatzen. Small Press Expo will be virtual again this year, but that won’t keep the festival and the jury from finding the best work of the past year for attendees to vote on and award the coveted bricks. And it appears that the creators of one of the most-nominated works of the year won’t be allowed to receive the brick(s) if they win.

There’s anthologies by prisoners, plural, in the Outstanding Anthology category: A Queer Prisoner’s Anthology IV (edited by Casper Cendre) and Confined Before Covid: A Pandemic Anthology By LGBTQ Prisoners. The former is also nominated for Outstanding Series.

Other nominations that caught my eye include Ashanti Fortson for Leaf Lace and Lee Lai for Stone Fruit in Outstanding Artist, Abby Howard’s superlative The Crossroads At Midnight for Outstanding Collection (seriously, go follow that link for my thoughts on the book, it’s great), Maddi Gonzale’s Rhapsodie for Outstanding Comic (along with Leaf Lace again), Sloane Leong’s A Map To The Sun for Outstanding Graphic Novel (along with Stone Fruit again), and Whit Taylor’s Montana Diary for Outstanding Minicomic.

What these nominations have in common, what the Ignatz nominations have in common every year, is that there’s not weak work. Some of it may not be to your taste or mine, but it’s all clearly the work of people who spend a hell of a lot of time and effort thinking about how to make the best comics possible.

Nowhere is that more true that in Outstanding Online Comic, where it’s hard to find two nominees that look anything like each other. There’s Leaf Lace again, along with Michael DeForge’s very stylistic Birds Of Maine, Susannah Lohr’s very moody and spooky Shadows Become You, Alex Robinson’s absurdist joke stretched to the breaking point which only makes it more brilliant Mr Boop, and Shing Yin Khor’s meditation on identity, I Do Not Want To Write Today. They are united only by the fact that they appear online first, and that’s great.

Speaking of great, Khor has another of their very thoughtful, extremely beautiful comics up at Catapult today: Why I Love Airports. It’s entirely of a piece with all their other Catapult contributions, which is to say you’ll learn something about Khor and yourself after you’ve finished reading it obsessively for the third or fourth time. Even money it’ll be a nominee in the 2022 Ignatz Awards.

Since the festival is virtual again this year and physical ballots cannot be handed to Saturday attendees, they will be emailed tomorrow to everybody on the SPX email list. If you aren’t a subscriber to the email list, you can request a ballot here. Voting runs until 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, 12 September, with the awards presented via streaming on Saturday, 18 September, at 8:00pm EDT. Good luck to all the nominees.

Spam of the day:

A new and Revolution bra helping improve posture and relieve back pain.

Y’all really don’t get me, do you?

Have I mentioned how very, very much I hate the fact that the comic book industry allows itself one (1) distributor, and they suck in every conceivable way there is to suck? Trick question, as I’ve been on about Diamond more times than I can count, and they continue to suck, particularly in holding onto books for weeks after they’re supposed to be out, which is why I’m only now getting around to The Dire Days Of Willowweep Manor by Shaenon Garrity (Narbonic, Skin Horse, etc) on words and Christopher Baldwin (Little Dee, Spacetrawler, etc) on pictures.

If you have read this page to any appreciable degree, you already know what I’m going to say just based on those two names. For everybody else, read on and spoilers ahoy.

Here’s what I love about Garrity (Tiki Queen of the Greater Bay Area and Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities): as good as she is drawing her own stuff or with a writer, I think she’s even better as a pure writer of comics. She has a knack of writing to the strengths of her collaborators, and with Baldwin on board, that means deliciously over the top facial expressions and physical overreactions.

Here’s what I love about Baldwin: no matter how silly or serious the premise, he knows how to compose a panel for maximum effect. Need a moment’s pause to build up the joke? Or perhaps to make the incipient horror land three millimeters closer to the exact center of your brain? He’s there. Need a reaction panel or an environment-establishing shot that’s practically a splash page? Nobody better.

So take a topic that’s rich with visual possibility and which rewards over-the-top genre savvy like whoa, and you’ve got a winner. The genre, in this case, is Gothic Romance novels. Brooding manor lords, dank tarns, empty halls echoing footsteps and secrets, taciturn housekeepers, storms that steal your breath and stop your heart? Haley knows, loves, lives, and breathes them all. It’s all she wants, to be swept up into a grand narrative that involves both heights and wuthering.

She, uh forgot about the lack of indoor plumbing. And how the feckless youngest brother would, in real circumstances, get everybody killed.

All of that is furthest from her mind, though, when she happens to see what appears to be a stranger drowning in the river, and finds herself pulled through the crack between the worlds that she didn’t know to look for. Turns out our universes, plural, are kept apart by kludges and pert-near indentured labor, and these jury-rigged maintenance microworlds have themes. And our world is about to be crashed into and destroyed by a far worse one if she can’t get the gears of reality working again.

Gears which are found in a pocket dimension filled with every cliche, every trope, every element of Gothic Romance. She’d be having the time of her life if everything weren’t trying to kill her (and, by extension, everybody back here on Earth). Fortunately, she knows how to make the rules of gothic romance work for her (declaring at one point she’s not a maiden — a weak, helpless, an agencyless plot point — but a heroine). She knows the rules of how the stories work¹, and she’s going to save everybody at Willowweep Manor and multiple worlds with that knowledge.

She’s also going to watch a taciturn housekeeper punch a bear in the face because it’s Garrity writing. And it’s so rad for us to watch happen because it’s Baldwin drawing.

The story kicks into gear almost immediately, and careens swiftly from near-disaster to damn near-disaster with barely a pause. The threat is consistent within the rules of the story, the action scenes clean and easy to follow, and the gags land lightly on tip-toe, delivering their laugh-chuckles with precisely the right amount of gravity.

Get The Dire Days Of Willowweep Manor (available at book and comic stores everywhere, hopefully) for the teen-and-up in your life, but especially for those that have fallen into a Gothic Romance hole and needs to be reminded that stuffy, over-serious stories can be silly, too.

Spam of the day:

Animations In 3 Clicks With The World’s Easiest Full-Auto Video Animation Software!

See, I know animators, and what you’re describing is not something that will automatically create animation because those don’t exist. You’re describing something that produces limited motion like unto the old Under Construction motion images on early webpages, and you intend for them to drive marketing on this site.

For these and surely myriad other crimes, you are my nemesis.

_______________
¹ For example, the villain, in his moment of triumph, must ascend to the highest point available, the better to gloat on the precipice.

If you’ve spent even a minute on this page, you know that it’s the considered opinion of We at Fleen that the best work in [web]comics is being done by women. We’ve discussed this many times, and need not be rehashed here; if you’re looking for logic, start here and work your way through the next … gosh, I dunno, half a million words or so¹ and you’ll find plenty of my rationale. Let’s look at some of that work now.

• Hey, remember back in April when Meredith Gran did us a solid and gave us a coda² to Octopus Pie that we didn’t know that we needed and hoo boy did we need it? Good times. And remember when she offered up a limited edition print run of the story that made her store fall over? Also good times.

  I got my copy this week. It’s so good. The colors (cover by Sloane Leong, interiors by Valerie Halla) popI don’t know if Gran will ever do another print run, but you can read the black and white version here for, I’d imagine, the next forever. Octopus Pie remains one of the few works that just kept getting better, and you should read all of it, like, right now.

• Hope Larson, due to circumstance and timing, is somebody I’ve not seen in person in way too long, which is a shame as I love her work. It’s varied, it’s smart, it always finds something new to say, and we always have fun when we hang out. I’ve been especially taken with her comics work since she partnered up with Rebecca Mock³ for the Four Points series, Compass South and Knife’s Edge some years back.

  So it’s been with great interest that I’ve been following news of the project that’s taken up much of the past couple of years for them — a story of the heartland, with a look that’s equal parts Miyazaki and BONE, and a story that’s Wizard Of Oz if all the magic stayed in Kansas. Pandemic pushed everything back, but now we’ve got the announcement of Salt Magic:

  Hey y’all! Salt Magic by me and @rebeccamock is available for preorder!!!!!!! Out October 2021. https://indiebound.org/book/9780823450503

  Salt Magic releases on 12 October, and will be available at bookstores everywhere. I’m giving this a must-buy recommendation sight unseen; Larson and Mock are each individually that good, but together they’re even better.

Spam of the day:

Bin card creation software to create a Canva Pro account 1 month

I was going to say that I know what those words mean but not in that combination, and you know what? I’m not sure I know what all those words are supposed to mean individually.

_______________
¹ Or approximately one third of a Homestuck.

² And unlike that famous monstrosity of an epilogue (Marigold knew the score), this one was true to the characters and story and the author hasn’t turned into a big ol’ TERF.

³ With whom I bunked during my first year of Comics Camp, and to whom I owe a life debt.

Sometimes, what you want to talk about just drops in your lap. Hooray for late-summer Kickstarts.

• Say what you will about Zach and Kelly Weinersmith, but they get it. They get their audience and know exactly what they are like¹ and are more than ready to dish it up to them. The academia-themed boardgame, Every Else Thinks This Game Is Awesome, has blown through its Kickstarter funding goal in a about four and a half hours (presently it’s sitting at 180% of goal), and will likely be hitting the stratospheric levels associated with a Weinersmith joint, including globs of stretch goals that make the final product awesomer.

  Me, I decided to back as soon as I saw the grad students were represented by interchangeable pawns with no control over their own destiny. All of the rewards where you got to influence or appear in the game are gone, but 943 people (as of this writing) can grab the reward level where a special card signed by the Weinersmiths² is included in the game. This one looks fun, it’s already funded, it’s basically zero risk given prior Weinersmith Kickstarts, so give it a look, yeah? Oh, and check out the video on the campaign page, it features a great variation on the soundtrack record scratch.

• Also up for Kicks and Starts, the 30th — you read that right, three-zero — campaign from Iron Circus, the latest iteration of their ongoing fairy tales from around the world series, Cautionary Fables and Fairy Tales: North America. Notably, the stories are told by Indigenous creators, which really should be a given but isn’t yet, so good on Spike and everybody at IC. Then again, Alina Pete has been part of the IC family forever, and is herself a member of the Cree nation, so keeping the stories in the hands of the people they originated with was probably more of a given than at any other publisher.

  Usual Iron Circus deal is in effect: every US$5000 over goal raised results in a US$5/page increase in pay to the creators; as of this writing (a day into the 18 day funding period), creators are making an extra US$40/page, and about to hit US$45. According to the FFF mk2, we’re headed for US$155K +/- 30K in funding; hitting the low end of that range would result in a US$105/page bonus, in an industry where mid-major publishers may pay less than that total per page. We’re more than a full day away from being able to calculate the McDonald Ratio, but it would come to at least US$185K, based on what’s been raised in the first two days³.

Spam of the day:

Tool to read messages from friends on FACEBOOK

That would be FACEBOOK. The purpose of Facebook is to read messages from friends on Facebook.

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¹ Damn you, Sports & Leisure category, damn you to hell!

² And featuring facts about both weiners and smiths.

³ Remember, Kel McDonald’s rule of thumb is the money raised in the first three days of the campaign is approximately one third of the eventual total.