As noted last week, A Softer World launched a Kickstarter campaign and released their 999th update, leaving everybody (or at least me) wondering what Emily and Joey would cook up for strip #1000.

Wonder no more.

What initially appeared (to me, at least) as a double-size update has been growing over the past few hours:

We are updating the 1000th comic all day! It’s like a story! A whole big STORY! *passes out* PS KICKSTARTER

As of this writing, it’s eleven rows tall, and each time another strip is added the alt-text changes with it. I suspect that there may be meaning — even a parallel story — there, all those yellow pop-ups will be lost in time, like tears in rain.¹

• There’s been a foofaraw in the writerly corners of blogistan for a couple of days, as a posting credited to the VP of the Horror Writers Association (and on the HWA Los Angeles chapter blog) purported to divide the world into professional writers and — gasp! — hobbyists, and succeeded mostly in pissing off a great number of professional writers. As is often the case, I find the John Scalzi (who is not the only writer I follow that scored only 1/10 on the quiz, far below the 8/10 necessary for validation) may have put it best:
  

  Here’s the actual quiz for knowing whether you are a pro writer or not:

  1. Are you getting paid to write?

  If the answer here is “yes,” then congratulations, you’re a professional writer!

  Okay, that’s Scalzi in snippy mode; he made an even better point a bit further down:

  The problem with [HWA VP’s]² quiz is that it confuses process for end result. Her quiz is about process, and presumably her process — what she thinks is necessary for one to do in order to produce the work that create the end result of making money as a writer. But process isn’t end result, otherwise in this case I wouldn’t be a professional writer, which I clearly and obviously am.

  Confusing process and result here is not a good thing. It confuses writers who are hungry to know what “being professional” means. The things [HWA VP] describes can lead to being a pro writer, but it’s not the only path, or a guaranteed one, not by a long shot. In this respect this quiz defeats its own purpose — it offers no indication about whether one actually is a professional writer, only whether one has jumped through the process hoops that one single writer believes are important to become a pro. [emphasis original]

  This thought of process vs status has been on my mind a fair bit; I don’t think that I’m letting any cats out of any bags to say that Brad Guigar asked me to do a first read on The Webcomics Handbook³, and I find it suffused with a tone of Topic A: Okay, here’s how I do it, and this works for me; you may find a variation on this that works better, or a way that’s completely different and that’s cool. What matters is what you produce. and how few absolutes there are. Maybe Guigar should send a copy care of the HWA.

• Speaking of what you produce, readers may recall that international mystery man Eben Burgoon of Eben 07 launched a Kickstart for a side project called B-Squad back in December, one which didn’t fund very well, and was ultimately unsuccessful. Like others before him, Burgoon has opted to resubmit the B-Squad, a technique that is rarely successful.⁴

  Unlike those others before him, Burgoon is capable of learning from his mistakes: he’s redone his project scope (reducing a US$8000 goal to US$3000), tinkered with his stretch goals, and borrowed successful ideas from other projects (case in point: challenge coins). As a result, he’s much more likely to succeed the second time around.

  In a domain where success is too often assumed to be inevitable, it’s natural for Kickstart campaign owners to look towards successes as things to emulate. These might be your own previous projects (such as Bill Barnes, Paul Southworth, and Jeff Zugale funding the second Not Invented here collection), or they may rely on accumulated name recognition and goodwill (say, Tavis Maiden taking a boost from Strip Search to launch a new strip, much like his fellow Artists have done). It’s rare to see somebody adjust approaches after a stumble rather than just have a hissy fit⁵ about it. Here’s hoping that Burgoon is the start of a trend.

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¹ Rutger Hauer is the man.

² I’ve taken the name because it’s pretty obvious in the posting, and because I suspect that the VP in question is taking a fair amount of shit today for the pretty significant overreach in the original article. I just don’t feel like piling on right now, as I’m presuming that the mistake was one of execution and not intent. Should reports come about that no, the execution matched the intent that that’s actually the viewpoint being promulgated, I may reconsider this notion.

³ Spoiler alert: it’s very good.

⁴ No names, but seriously I’ve seen Kickstarts that failed to raise even ten bucks resubmitted with nothing changed expecting a different result.

⁵ Again, no names, but remember the guy whose project failed to fund and he changed the video into an obscenity-laden screed about how the world didn’t deserve his genius ideas? That was great.

Guys, all my free time has been spent getting caught up on work from my two weeks away from work, so I’ve only found a little bit of news to share with you. The mad geniuses at Make That Thing have teamed up with the madder geniuses at A Softer World to Kickstart the fourth ASW collection, Let’s Do Something Wrong. Said campaign went up yesterday just late enough to not include it in my Kickstarter musings, it’s halfway to goal, and somewhere a bird-decorated photographer and a chess-playing maniac sit confident in the knowledge that they’ll get to make this book.

Miscellaneous things I noticed in conjunction with this campaign:

• It is spare, almost spartan, in the reward structures, and the lack of announced stretch goals: you can get a PDF version of the new book, the new book in softcover or hardcover, in some combination of new plus prior books, and two tightly limited “experiential” rewards — Joey and Emily include you in the strip; Joey and Emily do a commentary track for your favorite movie. MTT knows how much it would suck to fall behind on delivering product, especially given recent high-attention KS flameouts, and so is limiting the campaign to what they can absolutely deliver on time. Bravo.
• Today’s ASW is strip #999, so this is a perfect time to announce a print collection.
• Going back to MTT for just a moment, I noticed that since their soft launch in/around the Machine of Death Game, this is the sixth project they’ve been involved with (the MoD Game, the Dresden Codak collection, the Surviving The World calendars) or directly owned as project creator (the Boxer Hockey frogs, the Sam & Fuzzy omnibus¹). Six projects in six months is pretty impressive, and with a total funding of nearly US$1.3 million, I can’t wait to see what they can do when they’re fully ramped up.

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¹ Technically, that one’s by Make That Thing of Vancouver, BC instead of Make That Thing of Easthampton, MA. It’s the same people. Also, I saw the blanks for the S&F omni at San Diego; Sam Logan was getting a bicep workout just lifting the damn things. They’re huge.

So there was a fairly big project implosion on Kickstarter last week, a guy that may have fundamentally misrepresented what the money would be used for, spent it all over about thirteen months and then told his backers they are outtalucko with respect to the rewards but that they will all get paid back, no really. This has led some to conclude that Kickstarter is fundamentally broken because people don’t exercise enough due diligence when backing projects. I both agree and disagree with this premise.

I don’t think that Kickstarter is fundamentally broken (at least not yet — its use as a second-order financial instrument is something I’m still wary of), and I think that people don’t exercise enough due diligence, at least in some communities of Kickstarter. I’ve written before about the reasonably dismal record of people campaigning to fund dead-tree comics who have no experience (writing, drawing, publishing) and figure that a promise that the story will be so awesome you guys is enough to magically produce thousands of dollars — and that comics people generally don’t buy it¹. Conversely, I’ve learned that the boardgame sector of Kickstarter is (anecdotally, at least) willing to take flyers on new, unproved talent, perhaps because importing Eurogames is so bloody expensive, getting burned for US$20 or US$25 every third or fourth campaign may still get you more product for your expenditure than you would see otherwise.

It’s possible for experienced creators with a history of making stuff to get bogged down making things and thus to see expected shipping dates slip in the face of massive production demands (especially when unexpected circumstances come into play). Frequent updates and progress reports can help soothe those situations, but I’ve heard that Mr Guy from the first ‘graf was making lots of updates that weren’t entirely truthful about the progress being made, so trust is a key factor. Creators with a history of not screwing up (or even better, limiting their projects to what they know they can deliver) and creators with relationships with proven fulfillment services ought to be just fine. Kickstarter’s only broken if its function was to facilitate doomed projects.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, one launched just yesterday for Ross Nover’s first collection of The System (with the obligatory less-than-24-hours funding success, helped by a modest US$3000 goal), and one is about to end as Maki Naro’s Sufficently Remarkable approaches its final two days. The traditional last-few-days bump is looking a little muted for Naro’s campaign, so now’s the time to get in on that if you were gonna. Me, I’m just glad that he cleared the US$30K threshold for the official Pineapple Maki Drink Contest which I am entering so hard. I made up a batch of falernum last night just to ensure I’d have enough for my drunkological experiments, and I stand ready to sacrifice pineapples to the cause. Viva!
• Hat tip to boing boing for noting that four months after he dropped some magic on us, Randall Munroe’s slow-playing comic, Time, has finally wrapped up with some 3000+ frames. You can view the whole thing in various speeds at Geekwagon. The word epic is frequently overused, but it seems appropriate in this case. Countdown to Monroe’s next uncredibly seriously large project starts … now.

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¹ Seriously, I saw a pitch once for a guy that had never produced anything comicky in his life, wanted twelve grand, and you didn’t even get a print copy of the comic — a whole 20 pages worth! — until US$35 in pledge. I think he raised a total of seven bucks, on account of it was a screamingly obvious Bad Deal.

Or, I suppose I should say, front load waste container-emptying truck since This Is How You Die has taught me that Dumpster™ is a trademark of Dempster Brothers, Inc. Thanks, TIHYD! Speaking of which, my TIHYD autograph count now stands at 1, Meredith Gran, who illustrated ROCK AND ROLL. I should also note that the first copies of To Be Or Not To Be are available at the TopatoCo book and a lovely fellow brought one by to get Meredith (and Jon Rosenberg’s) autograph, and one of Meredith’s two illustrations is for the ending where (spoiler alert!) Ophelia just starts killing the crap out of everybody until half of Denmark has personally been murdered by her and it is hilarious.

• Speaking of Ms Gran, I asked about her Gender & Comic Books panel, later today at 1:00pm in room 28DE and it turns out she never agreed to be on this panel and is trying to figure out why the heck she’s listed as a participant. I’ll be double-checking with her to determine if she’s going to participate, but at this point I’d kind of doubt it.
• Still at the Dumbrella booth, Rich Stevens has two samples (one hardcover, one softcover) of his Oni Press reprint collection, I’m A Rocker, I Rock Out (the first of a series of themed collections — this one focuses on Indie Rock Pete[r Gaylord Wiener]), and they are beautiful to behold. It’s my understanding that Oni have a limited number of copies of the collection at their booth, in the 1800 aisle, underneath the giant hanging banner that features Red Robot.
• The endlessly cheerful Kazu Kibuishi looks good; this time last year he had a health crisis that came pretty close to killing him, but he’s bounced back. I’ve known people to have faced bad health situations and subsequently fall into a never-ending cycle of worry about what goes wrong next; Kibuishi has decided to be happy.

  He’s happy to be working, happy to see the positive reactions to the Harry Potter book covers¹ he’s done (the latest gets released today), happy that he got to do back-cover images for the books², happy to be working on Amulet again, happy to see his kids growing up healthy and safe. He hopes to finish Amulet 6 by December or so (print lead times meaning we may see it in a year or so) and is working out ideas for volume 7 and beyond. At this point, there’s no limit to the series and he is full of stories to share; after knowing that he is well again, that’s the best possible news.

• As mentioned earlier, Kibuishi is sharing booth space with Gallery Nucleus, Olly Moss, Scott C, various Flight contributors, and the entirely adorable Becky and Frank at the back of the 2700 aisle.
  Becky and Frank have a limited number of a new resin toy (see photo at top) at their booth (sharing with ) in multiple colorways, and the possibility of vinyl later. They’ve also got a gallery show (arranged by Nucleus) in Pasadena that is launching near the end of the month, a show that will see Becky’s work shelved alongside Dr Suess originals. Details aren’t released yet, so keep your eyes open on that one.
• Back in Webcomics Central, there’s a lot of people thrilled by their recent/ongoing Kickstarter successes: Sam Logan, Evan Dahm, Kris Straub, Aaron Diaz, David Malki ! (who has an actual Machine of Death, ready to predict your demise), Ryan North — taken together they’re responsible for something on the order of US$2.5 million of creative commerce.

  Speaking with Make That Thing Benevolent Dictator For Life Holly Rowland, we ballparked an estimate that MTT may hit US$1.5 – 1.6 million of project shepherding in 2013, their first year of operation. While we were having that bit of conversation over booth construction, the hardest working man in comics, Jim Zub wandered by and we were able to talk about Samurai Jack and Skullkickers.

• With respect to the former, it’s hopefully going to be an ongoing title, not just the five-issue limited that’s been announced. As Zub put it If they keep buying, we’ll keep making it. He’s excited about the storytelling and visual experimentation that Jack (which was experimental on both counts) will lend itself to, and noted a model for a five issues/one issue production pattern (much like Skullkickers, which consists of five issue story arcs, followed by one issue of guest short stories) that I’m not entirely certain I’m allowed to share right now, so let me just say that you want this 5/1 model to come to fruition. You don’t even know how much those 1s will rock.

  Speaking of Skullkickers, the fourth story arc just wrapped, the fourth guest issue is on deck, and Zub is busy working on the fifth arc (we’ve seen the basic sword/sorcery arc, the urban intrigue arc, the pirate arc, and the jungle arc; this one will be the frozen north/viking/barbarian arc). He’s hoping to mostly get the two remaining arcs (the sixth will be … the kitchen sink, throw everything in there, find out what the hell has been going on …) done in 2014, which means that 2015 can be the wrap-up tour, comprehensive omnibus collections for everybody, and letting the next project (there’s always a next project with Zub) come to the fore.

  If the timing works out right, the online MWF reruns of Skullkickers will catch up and finish about the same time the last issue sees print. That’s not only a neat way to wrap up the project, it may be a necessity: Zub’s primary artistic partner, Edwin Huang, has been getting a lot of inquiries and requests on various projects, and may be very busy if Zub doesn’t get him on the remaining issues quickly. Dang, good work leading to attention and more work — doesn’t suck.

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¹ The request to do the covers came along at a time when after-effects of his illness made writing difficult, but drawing was still possible.

² He had an image that he really loved for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire but was perhaps too subtle for the cover; he offered to rework it as a back cover image, and it worked so well that he continued the experiment for the other six volumes.

The great thing about the people I follow, and have been privileged to know, is just how nerdy we can all be. Case in point: Dante Shepherd (PhD, Chemical Engineering) wanted to make a point about how silly it is to treat humanities and hard sciences as sitting in opposition to each other, and did so by appealing to the memory of a well-loved¹ cartoon from his youth.

• I hope by now you are all appreciating the gift that Tom McHenry has provided for you and are well on your way to becoming horsemasters. Join us at the pinnacle of society!
• Ryan Estrada wondered a few days ago if anybody was collecting the many, many instances online of thinking that artists should work for free because if they aren’t poor they aren’t really artists, or some such crap. Finding no better repository he’s launched the @forexposure_txt twitterfeed, which is already displaying a handsome collection of The Stupid and reminds us of Stevens Law: People die of exposure. So far, this is my favorite:
  

  I”m [sic] a working letterer for Marvel comics and I still would never expect to get paid for writing and/or art.

  That noise you heard was Chris Eliopoulos firing up the chipper-shredder; whoever tweeted that foolishness will not leave so much as a stain.

• Big Art Sale! Meredith Gran is selling original Marceline and the Scream Queens pages for amazing prices, and Octopus Pie pages at what can only be described as criminally low price point. Go dive in.
• Last thoughts for today — I’m running out of wall space but I just had to. Menquilin, meet Hapytzu.

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¹ If excessively preachy.

At 1:21pm EDT today, the longest day of the year (at least in the northerly climes), Abby Howard launched a Kickstart for The Last Halloween, seeking US$9000 to launch the once-weekly multi-page-updates spoooooky webcomic. At 1:39pm EDT — eighteen minutes later — 120 backers had cleared her funding goal as her totals began rolling over literally faster than I could refresh my browser.

Howard’s approaching this one smart: a lot of the rewards are non-physical, so she won’t spend months on fulfillment and shipping¹, she’s offered some high-price tiers that have attracted supporters². In this time it’s taken to write those two footnotes, she’s halfway to her first stretch goal (US$25,000) and there is no end in sight. As soon as I’m done with this sentence I’m backing this campaign (at a level sufficiently high to get a recipe for Sadness Brownies and a recording of Abby telling a scary story), and writing myself a note to be prepared to back the inevitable Kickstart for a print collection in a year or so.

I’m basically just killing time now, having worked out links and the title image and all, waiting to give you a number for the end of the first hour of funding, and here we go:

• Total Backers: 347
• Total Funding: US$18,387³

For reference, that’s nearly 25% more than the actual Strip Search cash prize, and the money keeps on a-comin’. Well done, Abby, and I can’t wait to see The Last Halloween.

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¹ Postal costs could be a killer, assuming she’s shipping from Montreal and many of her backers will be in the US.

² As of this writing, 22 minutes in, she has support for:

• $850 I will design you a custom-made monster, AND you get a death scene in the actual comic. (1 of 2 left)
• $1150 Abby will put you on her “D-List”, a page on her website with a list of names (or aliases) of all those on her D-List accompanied by a sketch of that person (from a picture supplied by you) (Please do not send me a picture of your D). She will also send you a picture of her making a sexy face. Each sexy face will be unique. (9 of 10 left)
• $3200 Abby will tell you her deepest, darkest secret. (9 of 10 left) NB: This reward is accompanied by a sketch of Abby saying Nobody pick this reward okay. You are not allowed.

³ Also the US$850 tier is now sold out, but there’s still room on the D-List!

Two new webcomic-related Kickstarts, not nearly enough time to dig into them as deeply as is probably necessary¹; forgive any superficialities, please.

• On the one hand, Fred Gallagher has bounced back from his most recent health challenges and launched a Kickstart for a “visual novel” type game adaptation of Megatokyo², which has in approximately 45 hours cleared 375% of its US$20,000 goal, hit a bunch of stretch goals, ensured a sequel, and has another 28 days to go. If US$20K seems a low bar for funding a video game, it’s a game type that akin to a text adventure overlaid with art from the comic and a bit of audio — technologically, not something that requires oodles of money, a studio full of people, and a year or more of effort. The US$150,000 stretch goal to make Megatokyo The Visual Novel Game a three-game series seems a virtual certainty.
• On the other hand, Ryan Sohmer launched his third Kickstart of the year for a multiplayer RPG-type game adapted from Looking For Group³, which has in approximately 18 hours raised more than US$40,000, putting it slightly ahead of the Megatokyo effort in the backers-per-day and dollars-per-day departments. However, a multiplayer RPG with full animation and voice acting, with the possibility (via stretch goals) of multiple O/S platform support is something that requires oodles of money, a studio full of people, and a year or more of effort.

  The fact that the basic goal — US$600,000 — is more than the final pie-in-the-sky-no-way-we’ll-reach-it-maybe stretch goal for the Megatokyo project (US$500,000) should give you an idea of the difference in scopes and scales of these two projects. If LFG & The Fork of Truth succeeds, it will be the first high-goal videogame Kickstarts not proposed by an established studio that I can recall (but I don’t follow the videogame section of Kickstarter especially closely), and may prompt further projects of this type. We’ll know soon enough, one way or the other.

• Calling it: Achewood is now on indefinite hiatus, presumably because of the efforts around the proposed animated series. It is for situations like this that RSS (whose demise is greatly overstated) was invented.

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¹ In this case, it’s because I don’t regularly follow either of the webcomics in question.

² Itself inspired by Japanese visual novels, in a nice bit of circle-closing.

³ Itself inspired by MMORPGs, in a nice bit of cirle-closing.

David Malki ! of Wondermark¹ has provided a button underneath his strip that says This comic in a blog-friendly format which, when clicked, reformats his strip as 2×2 panels in a pop-up. Heck, if he’s gonna provide it, I’m gonna click it. Neat.

• If you haven’t seen the first part of the Strip Search season one finale, what the crap-hell are you waiting for? Katie, Abby, and Maki each brought a fully-fleshed pitch for Mike and Jerry to pore over, and regardless of who wins I want to see all three of these as a part of my regular rotation. Be sure to look over their submissions after watching the episode, because there’s some marvelous work in there².

  Spoiler #1: It’s a three-way showdown for the top prize, as the Artists are given four hours to produce three strips that fit into their new comic concepts.
  Spoiler #2: Holy crap with less than two and a half hours left Katie asks to abandon her Cintiq and start over on paper. Credits roll just as she starts to put pencil to paper, so we all have to wait until 7:30pm PDT (GMT-7) on Tuesday, 18 June to see how it turns out.

  Spoilery speculation: It’s been months since the three-way showdown, which means one of two things is true: either our finalists have been waiting all this time to find out who wins (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not knowing), or they know and haven’t been allowed to say for all this time (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not talking). Here’s to Tuesday when we can all find out what the hell is going on.

• Intriguing Kickstarter of the Day: Darren Gendron has launched a campaign behind a fantasy (specifically, faerie) themed card deck, and recruited some of the best in webcomics artists to do designs. Gendron’s pretty noted for projects with relatively low goals, fast turnarounds, and low cost of basic (physical) rewards as well as pushing into spaces where webcomics don’t usually go (board books, board games, etc.). In this case, if you’re a fan of Obsidian Abnormal, Evan Dahm, Lar deSouza, Yan Gagné and Mary Garren, K Lynn Smith, LJ Lockhart, Sarah Ellerton, or Jamie Noguchi, you could do worse than popping eight or nine bucks to get a small representation of their artwork on a deck of cards that can also be used to fleece your friends at poker.

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¹ And Machine of Death and TopatoCo and a lot more besides.

² Particularly Katie’s, whose children-in-peril story has a Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends vibe that’s making me feel joy in my black, cynical heart.

Thanks very much Ryan North¹ I will never sleep again thanks to today’s Dinosaur Comics. As a quick hint, nobody wants to consider an afterlife full of parasites except for Kelly Weinersmith. Ick.

• Something weird happened today: Cyanide and Happiness appeared in the comics section of more than 650 newspapers worldwide, an occurrence which all reasonable persons would have figured to be damn near impossible. Okay, it’s just one panel, and it’s a pastiche by Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis, and covered by censor bars, but still — just imagine all the people that read newspaper comic strips deciding to do a Google search on Cyanide & Happiness because they figure it can’t be as bad as all that. I can hear the heads exploding from here.
• Well, that was fast — a few weeks back I mentioned that Digger² would be Kickstarting an omnibus edition, which went live after our update yesterday. Surprising absolutely nobody (except possibly Digger creator Ursula Vernon), it completely funded at approximately the thirteen hour mark, and is well on its way to (per the Fleen Rule of Kickstarter Projections) the US$100,000 — US$200,000 range. Yeah, got it, webcomics with built-in audiences overfund their Kickstarts all the time, what’s the big deal?

  The deal is that the Digger campaign may have the most unusual reward ever offered — hand-forged, wombat-sized pickaxes at the $US1000 (!) backer level. Yesterday I was wondering what could be cooler than Dante Shepherd’s mallets and I guess I have my answer, if only because the pickaxes will involve a forge and anvil and metalcrafting. However, somebody really should point John Scalzi toward’s Shepherd’s campaign, as I bet he’d love an even larger Mallet of Loving Correction.

• It’s been a good two months since Saveur has run any recipe comics, which means I guess I should be prodding people more to produce some of them things. I can put you in touch with their digital editor, and it’s my understanding that the checks she cuts for accepted comics cash without problems. In any event, Christopher Bird of Mighty God King (and the writerly half of the stellar Al’Rashad, which improbably keeps getting better) teamed up with Shelli Hay to present a family recipe on his own damn site.

  We’ve never met, but Bird’s always struck me as a reasonable man as well as being chock-full of good comics ideas (although probably the most intriguing comic idea he ever presented was a collaboration), but I have no doubt in my mind that he means it when he says in panel number eight that he will cut you for making unauthorized substitutions. Let the home cook beware.

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¹ Your status as Toronto Man-Mountain and one of the Three Ineffable Avatars of Webcomics (along with Shaenon Garrity and George Rohac) remains unimpeachable, but dang bro you brought the creepy today.

² I loves me some Digger.

Who’s in the mood for brief items? I sure am!

• Anniversaries can be tricky things. For example, today’s SMBC bears the number 3000, which is an official Big Damn Round Number in the Fleen ordinal system of mathematics. However, Zach Weinersmith has actually done a good deal more than 3000 comics, if you consider his archive.

  For starters, today’s strip is the 2955th of the current series, but then there are 132 comics in the so-called “Classic” SMBC collection (black and white, strip-style comics with actual characters and things) and another five dozen or so that appeared sporadically during the modern age (some during a hiatus in 2003 and 2004, some alongside regular SMBC from 2005 to 2007).

  But what the hell, since at least 2005 it appears that the strip numbers have been going up monotonically, and that makes today as good a day as any to recognize Weinersmith for reaching 3000 strips so everybody feel good for Zach.

• Following up on Erika Moen’s win in the Magic: The Gathering challenge on Strip Search, there was a question at the time as to whether or not Wizards of the Coast would actually be producing said deck, and you may recall that Robert Khoo was unable to comment at the time. Well, wonder no more, as Hurricane Erika shared the news on twitter that the deck is being produced:
  

  We went back to the winner, Erika Moen, and had her finish out her design without the time pressure on the show and finalized an awesome design for a skateboard deck. Now we are excited to announce that attendees to the event can enter for a chance to win a skate deck featuring Erika’s final design by Hooligan!

  More precisely, four decks¹ are being made for the giveaway, and dang do they look sharp². Congrats again to Moen, and thanks to all involved for letting us know how things ultimately turned out.

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¹ I’m guessing at least one of them makes its way to Ebay.

² You can compare Moen’s original design against the final design; it’s pretty impressive how close the colors are given that the original was done with marker rather than computer color-matching against a Pantone standard.