We are on Day Two of at least three days of 91F (33C) weather, the air conditioning is out, and the afternoon sun is just starting to crank up the joules. Somebody kill me, or at least send me a bucket full of cold I can pour on me and my dog. That’s right, I want a bucket of pure, uncut, essence-of-cold. And yes, I’m well aware there’s no such thing as cold, only heat and less heat. What you’re overlooking is the fact that I don’t care so kindly rework the laws of physics and get me some cold, please.

• You know who is, right about now, absolutely horrified by that whole bucket of cold thing? Dante Shepherd, professor of Chemical Engineering, thermodynamicist-at-large, educational innovator, and itinerant webcomicker. Today marks five years of Shepherd’s dailyish Surviving The World¹, and on top of that he’s got some exciting announcements:
  

  Many of you have asked for a collection of STW comics for a while now, so in response, with the help of Topatoco and Make That Thing, sometime next week will see the launch of a Kickstarter campaign to help make STW page-a-day calendars! … [H]ere’s a potential example of the final product.

  Just as many of you have asked for an app for STW for years, so I’m also happy to announce that starting Monday, STW will be available through the Comic Chameleon app!

  What? You want yet one more announcement? OK, OK – based on requests, I’ll bring back recitations² sometime soon, too.

  We at Fleen congratulate Shepherd on his achievements, his future plans, and hopes sincerely he doesn’t apply that mallet to our heads for the whole bucket of cold thing. We at Fleen are very, very sorry.

• In our discussion of Shaenon Garrity’s imminent wrap-up of Narbonic reruns yesterday, we inexcusably neglected to mention that Garrity will still be doing two actively-updating webcomics for the forseeable future. Skin Horse (co-written with Jeffrey Wells) just gets weirder and more loopy as it careens from classic children’s literature reference to classic children’s literature reference³ with no sign of end in sight.

  And although it will be, by design, a limited affair, Garrity’s Monster of the Week has, over the past not-quite-year, brilliantly deconstructed most of the first two seasons of The X-Files, which means two very important things:

  1. Garrity’s got three episodes to the end of season 2 (plus one season-ending recap), and four weeks to her one year anniversary, so let’s call it two seasons per year. At this rate, we’ll get another three and a half years of what is this crap Scully and sexy, sexy Skinner. Also, mites and annoyed Shaenon.
  2. On 19 July, the Friday of SDCC week, we will be Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose and on 8 November we will get Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, the two greatest episodes of The X-Files ever and I’ll fight any man-jack that says different.
• The latest episode of Strip Search put the four remaining Artists through contract hell and — spolier alert! — Robert Khoo enjoyed himself entirely too much, cranking the charm, the smarm, and the hostility up to eleven while trying to fast-talk the Artists into thinking that his very sticky contract is a good thing for them because they’re friends. No kidding, I would watch an entire season of Robert doling out the passive aggression.

  But even above its entertainment value, episode #27 is valuable because it emphasized the importance of not letting yourself get screwed, which even veterans can have problems with⁴.

  By coincidence, today also marked the release of the latest posting at Work Made For Hire, which presented a brilliant technique for directing a negotiation on contractual points that everybody who freelances needs to read right now. Key point:

  The difference between what Dylan [Meconis] and I asked Lo was that when Dylan talked to him, he was given the power to make a very specific choice, and both options were something Dylan wanted him to do.

  Guys, I’m not a freelancer and I intend to use “The Babysitting Question” in my life every chance I get from now on. It’s brilliant.

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¹ To be precise, today is StL #1773 and in the past five years there have been 1826 days what with the leap year and all, meaning that Shepherd comes up 53 strips short of “daily”, or just over one missing day every five weeks. I think we can count this as “daily”.

² The recitations, of which there have been 100, are answers to specific questions sent to Shepherd. Since there have been 100 of them, that means he’s really done 1873 updates in 1826 days, or an average of one extra strip every five weeks. So really we can call StL daily-plus.

³ I’m still holding out for some Purple Crayon.

⁴ It may have just been the editing, but in the episode as streamed, only two of the Artists brought up the idea of having a lawyer review the contract, and only one did so right at the beginning to put Robert on notice; I was hoping it would be all four.

There are two occasions on which I got really, really angry with my parents for inadvertently withholding from me knowledge of people they knew that I would have desperately wanted to know myself. While studying electrical engineering I happened to mention to my father something I’d read in Robert Lucky’s column in IEEE Spectrum. Oh, how’s Bob doing? my father inquired. “Bob?” Bob Lucky. We were in the fraternity together. Still sends us Christmas cards.

I looked at him carefully and said, Robert Lucky, head of communications research at Bell Labs¹, inventor of the adaptive equalizer, future Nobel laureate, the foremost communications engineer of the past thirty years, the man that practically defines the very specific field of study that I concentrate in, the very best possible mentor I could have had for the past three years of school is your fraternity brother and you never mentioned it? Dad shrugged a huh-how-about-that shrug.

It was maybe a year later that that my mother brought up her hidden connection; I’d been sitting in the kitchen when she said, Oh I meant to tell you, because you like cartoons, right? Tish from Garden Club, her son Tom won a Daytime Emmy. “That’s nice, what was it for?” Something called Little Toons, I think. “Little … Little? Wait, you mean Tiny Toons? Tish Ruegger’s son is Tom Ruegger, head of Warner’s animation? That Tom Ruegger?” That’s right, I babysat him back when I was in high school.

I didn’t have an irritated how-could-you-keep-that-from-me reply because I hadn’t ever told my mom that something I had always wanted to do in the back of my mind, but never knew how you could go about it, was voice acting. My time in college radio, writing and performing in radio sketch comedy, had shown that I had some talent for voice work, but how the heck do you even start down that path whether from New Jersey (home) or Indiana (college) without knowing somebody on the inside?

Which brings me (at considerable length) to my point: no such inside-track is needed these days. Want to do voices for animation? Go do that, slap it up on the internet, and if it’s good enough you’ll get noticed by somebody, or you’ll make a fan of somebody who just happens to be making something cool. Which is exactly what happened with Scott Kurtz, as he told us yesterday:

When Doug TenNapel told me he was going to make a “Neverhood style” claymation adventure game and that he wanted me to provide a voice for one of the characters I was very excited. It wasn’t until later that he bothered to mention that I would have to contribute “voice acting” alongside Mike J. Nelson (MST3K/Riff Trax), Rob (Animaniacs) Paulson, Veronica Belmont, and Jon (Napoleon Dynamite) Heder. Now I’m terrified.

I’m no voice actor. I don’t do voices. But Doug assures me that I’m the right guy for this job, and I already said yes. So I’m going to put on a brave face and fake my way through this thing. *gulp*

I’m going to respectfully disagree with Kurtz on one point — he may say that he’s no voice actor, that he doesn’t do voices, but I think that he’s wrong. Bear with me a moment (as if you haven’t been all along); the way I see it, voice acting falls into roughly three categories:

• The stunt voice actor, commonly seen on big-budget animated films, where it’s clear that the purpose is to get the famous name rather than the right voice for the character. The less said about them, the better.
• The professional voice actors, the ones with a stable of voices that they do, adapting on project after project, honing their craft, whose names are mostly unknown to us. The good ones can hide themselves behind many roles and appear in so many different projects for decades; it’s why the actor that has been in the most movies with the greatest cumulative box office is Frank Welker². I have much respect for the professionals, and from his close work with Dino Andrade on the PvP animated series, I imagine that this is the sort of voice actor that Kurtz is unfavorably comparing himself to.
• The person chosen to do one particular voice because there’s nobody in the world that will do it better; sometimes it’s a famous actor, sometimes it’s somebody who’s not necessarily a household name, sometimes it’s nobody you’ve heard of but who is absolutely perfect for the role in question.

  Pixar has a great track record in this regard (cf: Brad Bird as Edna Mode or Sarah Vowell as Violet Incredible), but the best examples come from a woman you’ve probably never heard of: voice casting director Andrea Romano. She’s why every voice on Warner’s various Batman/Superman/Justice League series was absolutely perfect (cf: Ed Asner as Granny Goodness). I think the reason that Doug TenNapel wants Kurtz on Armikrog is because he falls into this category.

We, however, will only get to hear what character Kurtz is perfect for if Armikrog raises its US$900,000; at more than US$189,000 raised since the project launched yesterday, it seems pretty certain that the goal will be met in the remaining 28 days, but there’s only one way to be sure. Forget the fact that Doug TenNapel is a great comics artist and game designer, forget that Neverhood was a great game. Do it because it’s never a bad thing for creative types to stretch themselves into other avenues of creation³. And do it for all the actors, pros and perfect one-shots alike, who’ve given voice to the characters that you’ve loved.

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¹ Requiscat in pace, Bell Labs. We will not see your like again.

² AKA the only guy that’s ever voiced Fred from Scooby Doo, and nearly 700 other credits.

³ Well, maybe not “never”. Dirk Diggler’s attempt to reinvent himself as a musician, that was pretty dire.

Dare we hope? And just in time for FunkyWatch May?

• I already knew I was going to tell you today about the launch of the Skin Horse Book 4 Kickstarter once I saw some late-night tweets on Friday about it going live over the weekend; as I believe this page has established, I likes me some Skin Horse. What I didn’t expect was to find myself quoted in the Kickstarter video. I gotta confess, even having been asked to provide quotes, blurbs, forwards, and the like a fair number of times, it’s a little thrill every time I see that somebody might actually care for my opinion-mongerings. Although, ahem.

  I shouldn’t get snarky, not when Jeffrey Wells and Shaenon Garrity¹ entertain me so wonderfully for free six days a week, when they offer up original art as a supporter reward², and when backers get the opportunity to attend a freakin’ TIKI PARTY at the tiki shack that Ms Garrity has had built in her backyard for the express purpose of gettin’ messed up on fruity drinks in mugs with faces on them. I’m pretty sure that no other webcomicker has ever allowed a prize of Come get drunk at my house which means you will know where I live, meaning that Ms Garrity is either slightly foolhardy, trusts absolutely in her fanbase, or has mysterious Funk Queen powers that protect her from all harm. I’m betting on that third one.

• Merch alert for those going to Phoenix Comicon this weekend: Andrew Hussie’s legion of devoted fans³ are about to discover the majesty that is the Chris Yates handmade puzzle line as a collection of GOD TIER BAFFLER!s is placed on sale and promptly sells out ten minutes later. If you make it past the Homestucks to the rest of the TopatoCo table, tell ’em I said hi.
• Speaking of TopatoCo, KC Green won’t be there, presumably because he’s busy scripting new Regular Show comics in the wake of the success of issue #1. Let’s put this in perspective: the highest-selling comic of April 2013 had something like 132,000 copies sold, and that was Batman. Green has put a new comic, aimed at kids, at fully half the sales of the marquee book of the most-recognized character in the country. That never happens. Everybody feel good for KC, or Mr Green if you’re nasty.

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¹ Funk Queen of Everything That Will Survive When All East Of The San Andreas Drops Into The Atlantic.

² Now at the entirely more-appropriate US$100 backer level; previous efforts by Ms Garrity have criminally undervalued her originals.

³ Or Elite Shock Troops of the Forthcoming Purification, take your pick.

There’s some really neat stuff for you today, kids. Let’s jump into it.

• More details on the Capture Creatures gallery show in June, which we teased two weeks back. First off, you may have noticed that said Creatures are appearing on the website at a furious pace, Becky Dreistadt having finished all 151 paintings some time ago; today’s installment is #121, meaning only 30 to go, meaning 17 creatures will still be unposted when the show/book pre-launch hits on 1 June:
  

  LA’s Gallery Nucleus will host the early book release and gallery show on June 1st at 7:00pm: all 151 creature paintings will be on display and available for purchase, along with a yet-to-be-announced resin ?gure, prints, and larger mystery pieces. Opening night features both Becky and Frank signing, as well as complementary drinks, snacks and secret musical guests; the show itself runs through June 23rd.

  That’s from a press release, so no link, but party details are at the Gallery Nucleus site. Unfortunately, the show was scheduled for a time when it was anticipated the book would be done but some delays hit and it’s not done. However, given the track record that Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson have on their books, not to mention the fact that it’s coming from the quality factory of Benign Kingdom¹, I’m not terribly concerned about anything other than the fact that I don’t already have the book in my hands right now.

  Also, Becky and Frank need to get one of their gallery shows to launch in New York already so I have a chance at purchasing paintings before they’re snapped up by other people; on the off chance that your favorite Creature isn’t snapped up by somebody else, chances are you can purchase it from Dreistadt’s artist page at Gallery Nucleus.

  In the meantime, Gibson was kind enough to share with Fleen readers an as-yet unseen Creature, Bechder, who may be spied at the top of the page. He’s all badgery, so I’m guessing he’s an Earth type, but with that smoke/steam coming from his mouth there might also be some Fire in his makeup. Am I doing this right? I never got into Pokémon so I’m new to all this lingo.

• Speaking of B9, it’s well known that lurking just behind the scenes is a tactical genius named George Rohac. As it happens, George² and I happened to be talking about ten days back under social circumstances; nothing formal, no notes taken, and we were having some excellent drinks, which is why I didn’t share with you the news he shared with me that night.

  However, Heidi Mac is all over the story today so you probably ought to know that George has left Oni Press (where he got a passel of webcomickers to do projects) for What Pumpkin Studios, aka Homestuck Intergalatic Headquarters. Just in case you were wondering how Andrew Hussie could conquer the internet even more than he already had, there’s your answer. Between WP and B9 and all the side advice that he hands out, George is practically synonymous with webcomic-related Kickstarts, with an estimated 30+ campaigns under his belt and (by my rough accounting) somewhere north of US$4.0 million in total funds raised.

• Two pieces of merch to point you towards, one real and one hypothetical. Firstly, let me point you towards the LympheDIVAs, which markets specialty clothing for survivors of breast cancer — a side effect of treatment can lead to swelling and chronic inflammation in the arms. There’s no treatment for lymphedema, but compression sleeves can help control the condition and help prevent it from progressing.

  Like a lot of medical clothing, compression sleeves tended to be uncomfortable and ugly, and there’s no reason to put up with that nonsense. Comfortable, fashionable sleeves and gauntlets are what LympheDIVAs set out to make, and the designs are visually stunning.

  They’ve just launched a new product family designs by mad pixelmancer R Stevens, with the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network³ getting a portion of each sale of 8-Bit Owl, Pixel Hearts, Pixel Skulls, and Red Robot. It’s not easy to make a stretchy garment retain a blocky, pixel look when it can be pulled in various directions, but it appears that Stevens and LympheDIVAs have done so (not that I should have doubted — my Red Robot socks look great, even on my weirdly asymmetric feet). Here’s where I’d send you all to a store and tell you to buy, but I sincerely hope that you never need to.

  On the theoretical end of things, I think that Hurricane Erika simply must — must — make the smiley-face panties shown halfway down the latest entry⁴ at Oh Joy, Sex Toy [probably NSFW]. For those not willing to click the link, here’s a clip of the relevant panel [almost certainly SFW]. Just get the little Yay! speech balloon on the front and your sexytimes will get 37% sexier.

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¹ Unofficial motto: Makers of fine qualities since 2011.

² While the Fleen Manual of Style dictates that on second and subsequent references, individuals should be predominantly referred to by their family names, there are exceptions to every rule and George is one of them. It just doesn’t work to call him Rohac, or Mr Rohac, or even Éogeorge of the Riders of Rohac. He’s just George.

³ Pancreatic may be the most miserable, evil bastard in the cancer family, if I may be allowed a moment of unwarranted anthopomorphization. It has poor treatment options, fast progression, aggressive metastasizive tendencies, and it kills in amounts that even Red Robot #C-63 would find excessive. It’s not particularly linked to lymphedema, but if Stevens wants to take a chunk out of pancreatic cancer, I say more power to him; I hope he gives it a good curbstomping.

⁴ So to speak.

Warning: today’s post contains references to the most evil creatures alive.

• Nothing to do with webcomics, but interesting nonetheless — a short-duration Kickstart (14 days) with a high goal ($US50,000) and a single reward tier priced at the very popularest dollar figure (US$25). The NPR/This American Life team-up known as Planet Money¹ have decided to Kickstart a t-shirt that contains all the information that describes where the shirt came from and how it was created and shipped to you, the recipient:
  

  We will take you on that odyssey and document the route our t-shirt took to your back. We’ll meet the people who grow the cotton, spin the yarn, and cut and sew the fabric. We’ll ride on the cargo ships that bring our t-shirt from factories in Bangladesh and Colombia to ports in the US. And we’ll examine the crazy tangle of international regulations which govern the t-shirt trade the whole way.

  Obligatory note that they’ve cleared their goal by more than US$10,000 as of this writing, and the entire project fascinates me more than anything the PM team have done since they went out and bought a toxic asset just to see what that was like. Alas, “Toxie” is no more, but this shirt should prove to be a better investment and I would have pledged for it already if not for one thing.

  Squirrels.

  One of the attic-invading, cable-chewing, fluff-tailed little bastards² is prominently featured on the shirt so screw that noise. No offense, David Kestenbaum, Jacob Goldstein, Marianne McCune, Zoe Chace, Caitlin Kenney, Chana Joffe-Walt, Matt Levine, Lam Thuy Vo, Jess Jiang, Robert Smith, Adam Davidson, Cory Turner, and all the other Planet Money contributors; I love your work and give money to my public radio station, but I ain’t puttin’ no damn squirrel on my body.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, Holly Rowland’s sneak preview of what’s coming to Make That Thing this springtime is now becoming less “preview” and more “up and running”. Tyson Hesse’s Boxer Hockey is essentially about people in their underwear whacking the crap out of a frog (and each other) as a competitive sport; since the beginning, Boxer Hockey fans have been wanting their own frogs and now Hesse and Make That Thing have finally produced a prototype with just the right expression, floppiness, and ability to stand up to blunt instruments.

  The Make-a-Frog Project kicks off just as Boxer Hockey (the strip) is approaching a crucial story point as the main characters meet their female counterparts in a Boxer Hockey (the sport) match that is sure to be unrivaled in terms of grudges, hilariously cheap shots, and frog-whacking. Get your own Make-a-Frog in time for the showdown so you can recreate the mayhem at home!

• Speaking of not exactly webcomics, I came across an essay that originally dealt with creative blocks in programmers, but I think it’s probably applicable more widely than that. The McDonald’s Theory is mandatory reading for anybody that doubts the utility of Just start, it’ll absolutely get better once you’ve discarded the initial crap as an operating philosophy.

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¹ Unofficial motto, in the sense that I just made it up: Cutting through the crap since before the financial meltdown.

² I’m convinced that it was squirrels that took down the Charles Christopher site last year, meaning that I can’t link you to the Squirrel Chew comic as the archives are incomplete. Yeah, well, screw you, squirrels, I have the book and I’m sharing your perfidy with the world.

Nine years is a long time in webcomics, and it would not be a slight accomplishment to turn out more than 400 (sometimes huge) photocomics with extensive costuming and props. But to turn out more than 400 (sometimes huge) photocomics with extensive costuming and props and 2222 wooden jigsaw puzzles? That’s the work of a creative madman, possibly with a frantic body posture and overly-excited facial expression.

So happy Baffler!versary to Chris Yates, Assistant Dragon Emily, Previous Assistant Dan, Captain Felix, Mensa the Menacer, Box-Head, the POOP sign, and all the other denizens of the Greater Boulder Puzzle Metropolis, and may your sanding fingers never shrivel up and fall off. PS: special 30% off Baffler! sale this week in celebration

• Apparently, MoCCA Fest 2013 isn’t over until the Society of Illustrators says it’s over, and sister, they ain’t said so yet. How else to explain the fact that talks and events associated with this year’s MoCCA are still going on? Case in point: 25 April (that would be ten days from now) at 6:30pm, Boulet (Fr ici, Eng here, and I don’t know how to say “here” in Korean) will teaming up with Gabrielle Bell to talk with the comics-loving public for a few hours, thanks in part to a cultural program organized by the French Embassy.

  An Evening with Bell and Boulet will be held at the Society of Illustrators, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and will run you between US$7 and US$15 depending on whether or not you’re a student, a member of the SoI, or a non-member; tickets and more information here.

• Science cartooning, heck yeah! Rosemary Mosco is one of those people that I can talk to forever about pterosaurs (and oh my goodness, it appears that Witton has a book coming in June, hooray) and bunches of other things as well, but man do I love talkin’ pterosaurs with her. She’s one of them actual scientist-type scientists (such as make we poor engineers look like unrigorous experimentalists), and as part of the Cambridge Science Festival in Cambridge, MA, she’ll be talking on the topic of science cartooning along with Jay Hosler and EJ Barnes.

  Science & Comics will take place at Cambridge’s Main library, from 2:00pm – 4:00pm on Saturday, 20 April, in the lecture hall. Like the vast majority of the CSF events (going on now until Sunday), it’s totally free.

• Two of my favorite creators have been stepped back for a while (and will be for the forseeable future) from their main creator-owned project due to external commitments. One of those (a graphic novel from Oni) has been running in place of their main work and the other was revealed late last week: the reason that I’m not seeing “>Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya’s twice-weekly autobio adventures is, in part, due to them producing an Adventure Time miniseries about PepBut and Cinnamon Bun as noir detectives. Let’s see, midsummer last year was when Meredith Gran’s Marceline and the Scream Queens mini launched to great acclaim, so I have high hopes for this year’s midsummer launch of Adventure Time Candy Capers. Mostly because PepBut rules.

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No footnotes? I … I can’t explain this.

I’ve been wondering when the first really big Strip Search-related splash would be made and last night Lexxy Douglas launched a Kickstarter to get her webcomic started. In the order that they occur to me:

• Less than 90 minutes after launch (and about an hour after the first public tweet), Douglas had cleared her US$7500 goal.
• Reading the campaign pitch the money raised is to let Douglas turn down otherwise-paying work so she has the time to launch the comic; this stands in contrast to most [web]comics-related Kickstarters that are going to succeed, in that a request to make something that nobody’s seen yet generally doesn’t do as well as a request to merchandise something that already has an audience.
• Douglas, of course, has an audience (via social media) and is well integrated with webcomics creators, not to mention the fans she’s garnered in her time on Strip Search. Last night I thought she’d timed the launch of this KS campaign well, given that she was still seeing an uptick in attention from people that felt her elimination from the show was a travesty. #TeamLexxy will be all over this.
• This morning, I think that her timing is absolute fucking genius [A/V mixed with a liberal dose of holy crap!]; seriously Lexxy, that is some Khoo-level strategy you pulled right there. Bravo.
• As of this writing, Ms Douglas is on the cusp of just north of US$21,000 and the Gary’s First Law of Kicktraq Projections has her finishing in the US$50K – 100K range.
• Stretch goals are presently defined up to 50K; better think up a couple more and ones that don’t require physical production/shipping, on account of you’ve already got a couple hundred packages to mail.
• It appears that George helped Of course he did.

Speaking of Kickstarts, what may be the most logistically-challenging [web]comics Kickstart in history¹ is making progress, and dropped some references to a pledge-management system² called BackerKit, which you may as well get used to seeing, as I suspect it will be a standard part of Make That Thing campaigns.

I can’t give you a comparison with the previously-mentioned After The Crowd as I don’t have access yet, but the screencaps and video make it seem roughly equivalent. The one key differentiator that I noticed is that BackerKit appears to give you continuous access to manage your pledge/information, where After The Crowd gave you a time-limited, one-shot access (with the ability to request re-access later if needed).

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¹ Fulfillment will involve the wrangling of literal dozens of webcomickers, wood craftsmen, printers, translators, musicians, delicious adorable kittens, and more.

² It’s only a matter of time before the enterprise software industry reduces that to “PMS”.

Douglas Adams was right¹ — there’s something about Thursdays that’s just off, and Dentarthurdent is not unique in that assessment. Today is probably the Thursdayiest Thursday in some time, too. Let’s see if there might be some news out there that will break through the doldrums.

• I had the good fortune to catch up with both Kate Beaton and Scott C last weekend at MoCCA Fest, and I take it as a sign that both have lots of things going on that neither specifically mentioned that they have a series of events coming up next week in Juneau, Alaska that you can totally attend if you have access to either a boat or a plane. Juneau, y’see, isn’t exactly what you’d call accessible by road unless you’re already there.

  It is, however, breathtakingly beautiful, almost entirely deceptive in its sense of scale², and a surprisingly comics-friendly town. At least, that’s what Scott McCloud and family discovered during the Alaska loop of their year-long book tour which was — goodness! — just about six years ago.

  Anyways, Ms Beaton and Mr C will be guests of Alaska Robotics, with lectures, signings, and workshops from Thursday to Saturday next week. Juneau’s not that large³, so if you can find your way out there, I imagine somebody can point you in the right direction.

• Looking a few weeks into the future, those of you (us) that backed the Schlock Mercenary challenge coin Kickstarter who might have been hoping to get your goods shipped in late April per the original estimates? You’ll be waiting a few weeks longer than originally planned as y’all swamped the foundry:
  

  Sadly, there will be a delay — we did, in fact, swamp the manufacturer. The full coin order will not arrive at Chez Tayler for another 40 days. From there it will take us at least a week to assemble bundles for shipping, and then, sometime in early June, we’ll have a shipping party in which 3,000 packages go out the door, and Sandra and I rack up $30,000 in expenses for postage.

  The delay means that your coins will ship in early June, not late April as previously promised.

  I’m thinking that on the grand spectrum reasons for Kickstarter delays, exhausting the manufacturing capacity of a specialized industry is waaaay over towards the Acceptable end, and I do hope that nobody will be bitching at Howard Tayler⁴ for blowing that particular deadline. We’re into you would only get it faster by violating the laws of physics territory here.

• Looking a little further out, we have a release date for the print collection of Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant, namely 27 August. The news prompted a remembrance of something long forgot and a happy discovery: there’s a Delilah Dirk short story in the fifth Flight collection which is substantially the same as Chapter 3 of Turkish Lieutenant. Those of you with both in your collection (or will have, come the end of summer) can do a side-by-side comparison for changes, not that I am for a moment suggesting that you (I) might be a detail-obsessed completionist. Not at all.
• Speaking of detail-obsessed completionists, I’ve been digging deeper into the reconstructed archives of Lore Sjöberg’s Bad Gods, and found another long-forgotten favorite — within the collection of POKE/PEEK mini-animations are five perfectly formed arguments proving the most important collorary to Tyrrell’s First Law Of The Internet⁵: Also, don’t engage with anybody who would read the comments. It’s odd how little some things change in — goodness! — seven years.

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¹ About far more than just Thursdays, in fact.

² Starting out from a park building on what we’d assumed would be a 15 minute or so hike to the Mendenhall Glacier which was right there, we found ourselves turning back after two hours on account of the damn thing was no closer than when we’d started. There was simply no visual cue as to the actual distance, which was weird.

³ Actually, that depends on how you define “large”. The actual urban portion of Juneau is pretty small (about 12 square miles and 17,000 people, and chunks of that are university/state capital land), but if you include all of the “city and borough” land, you’re looking at more than 3200 square miles/32,000 residents (or a bit smaller than Rhode Island and Delaware put together). By contrast, my town runs a relatively compact 2.8 sqare miles, but manages to fit 13,500 people into that space.

⁴ My evil twin.

⁵ Namely, Never read the comments.

A little behind the times on some things, pretty up to date on others.

• Just a reminder that Lucy Knisley’s Relish will be in stores next week, and that it got the Fleen Seal of Approval and you should totally pick it up. As an appetizer, why not check out Knisley’s collaboration with Erin Meister at Saveur’s Recipe Comix?
• Time for a periodic reminder that you New York area types can drag your silly comic-obsessed asses into adult sophistication with the help of a little wine education, courtesy of Kristen Siebecker¹ and her recurring Popping Your Cork series. The Spring PYC will be Wednesday, 10 April (for all you people maybe hanging around after MoCCA?) at Simple Studios in Midtown. Previous classes have sold out so hurry — and use the code FRIEND10 for a 10% discount.
• One of the hallmarks of Kickstarter is that you can’t solicit for charity, which makes sense — you don’t want to get into a dispute where you wonder if money raised under the pretenses of going (wholly or partially) to charity doesn’t. So Machine of Death impressario David Malki ! didn’t come close to mentioning that he wanted to devote some of the proceeds of the MoD game to the literacy and writing charity, 826LA. From the MoD project update page:
  

  MYSTERY STRETCH GOALS:
  Continue reading this post on the Machine of Death blog!

  And from there, the news that the MoD Squad planned to donate one dollar per game (both physical and PDF) ordered to 826LA, for a total of 10,938 games which rounds up nicely to US$11,000. This was enabled by clearing the US$382,600 level. And as a further act of being an stellar person, Malki ! announced that by clearing 8260 backers, MoD books and games will be donated to 826LA for sale in their shop to support their programs. As if that weren’t enough, there will be 826LA-exclusive MoD game content for purchases of MoD stuff via the 826LA online store starting in June.

  Given that the Machine of Death game is about creative and collaborative storytelling, I can’t think of a better place for their largesse to go — 826LA (and its affiliated programs around the country) may well be responsible for finding the next great storyteller, one that wouldn’t have been nurtured without 826’s help.

  Malki ! also did a vlog interview with Matthew Lesko². I suspect that although the interview was very well managed by Malki ! and conveyed his philosophy of Kickstarting very well, the wrong message may be taken by a percentage of the people that watch it. Lesko’s spent so much time hawking the idea that there is free money out there for the having, and here this guy wound up with half a million dollars, that the people most receptive to Lesko’s message will only hear that number and apply it to the message he’s so well known for.

  This is not an unknown situation in crowdfunding, and while those that watch the video because they know Malki !, or MoD, or Kickstarter in general will likely be more resistant to the siren call of Free! Money!, I sincerely hope that he (Malki !) has put in place good filters on his email, as he’s most likely going to be getting a substantial number of people wanting to know how they can get half a million dollars, too³.

• Oh, and one more thing: new Nicholas Gurewitch cartoon at Boing Boing! Great gag, terrific visual, and Mass Casualty Incident classes will be using that last panel to illustrate what a cluster MCIs can become.

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¹ Sommelier, wife of a comics guy of some note, and original showrunner of MoCCA Fest, the latest iteration of which is approaching rapidly.

² Full disclaimer: I have encountered Lesko twice in person at random — once on the streets of Bethesda, MD and once in New York’s Penn Station. He looked really annoyed at life both times and kinda elbowed me in the ribs semi-accidentally on his way through a tight slalom of people.

³ We at Fleen haven’t done a comprehensive survey, but this is most likely the new contender for the longest, most convoluted sentence in the blog’s history. Yay?

Not webcomics, but I first noticed it because of the Twitterfeed of Cameron Stewart: a new collaborative project to wrangle 468 artists to each reinterpret five pages from the six volumes of Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira in the style of The Simpsons. Bartkira, as it’s been dubbed, now has over 300 artists participating and a character assignment map that is brilliant in how appropriate some of the choices are. Part of Stewart’s contribution (with Ralph Wiggum in the title role) is shown above.

All together now:

BAAAAAAART!
MIIIILLLLLHOOOOOUUUUUUSE!
<mutations, lasers, sattelites ‘splode stuff>

• Howard Tayler¹ sent me a very nice (automated) email over the weekend, regarding his recently-concluded Kickstarter campaign and pointing me towards something I hadn’t encountered before.

  After The Crowd is a pledge-management solution that imports the data that a creator (Tayler in this case) receives from Kickstarter, and allows the mapping of pledges to specific rewards (Tayler had several tiers that amounted to choose any x out of these y options) and add-on purchases.

  Unfortunately, I can’t show you the very nice interface that I was presented with (access to that part of ATC is via individually-tailored² links that are good for one use), but trust me, it was spiffy: pictures of all the possible rewards, an accounting of what I’d already pledged, what I’d already be receiving, and an easy way to tinker with my desired order. Then the money got added up and if I owed more for add-ons (I didn’t), a link to PayPal.

  Per Tayler, the add-ons that were so very easy (and tempting) to add pushed his funding total as of yesterday from 8571% of goal to over 9000 [A/V]. For anybody that’s running a Kickstarter³ with a wide variety of pledge rewards (or a mix-and-match approach to rewards), I’d strong urge you to check out After The Crowd or one of the similar solutions that will inevitably be developed in the very near future.

• Also, a little bit after that, Tayler wrote up the most recent of his received wisdoms re: crowdfunding where he opines that the worst risk of a Kickstarter isn’t failing to fund — it’s a mixture of failing to deliver or to learn. Or maybe it’s just the risk of finding out that the world disappointed you deeply [NSFW?]. Bad world, bad, bad world!
• In case you hadn’t seen it yet, Randall Munroe is playing out a story very, very slowly in today’s xkcd — from my casual observation it’s running about one frame per hour. Undoubtedly, once it’s complete it will be collected many places around for you to take in the full experience at a faster pace, but for the moment it’s utterly captivating, melancholy, and on the verge of existentialist dread. It could be telling us either a gentle, hopeful story or one full of loss. There needs to be an adjective to describe that midpoint between anticipation and dread.

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¹ Evil twin, opposites in all ways, etc.

² Or perhaps “Taylered”, in this case.

³ And isn’t able to get Make That Thing to handle all the logistics.