Spring when all is good and well again and we may venture outside and breathe deep of the outdoors and almost get murdered by a psycho in a van. Best wishes to John Arthur Kelly, aka the three meter tall grumpy guy from Johnny Wander¹. So maybe stay indoors where you won’t get splattered by a sociopath and if you live in New York and need some work done, you can ask the HVAC company that owned the vehicle in question if they’ve identified their employee that tried to kill John, and too bad, guess you won’t use their company after all since they’re harboring a threat and/or menace.

• Some 14 hours after closing (long enough to be confident that all last-minute adjustments were complete), the Machine of Death card game Kickstarter stands complete at US$556,596 and 10,666 backers and holy crap you guys.

  What may be most impressive to me is the number of people willing to back the project at levels that were clearly some kind of Dadaesque statement (show your copy of the game to a goat before shipping: five people paid more than a US$100 premium over a tier where they could get the same stuff without the goats) or merely to screw with creator David Malki ! (one person pledged nearly US$500 to make Malki ! hand-write all the card, which come to more than 900 separate items).

  There’s a word for actions that have little direct bearing on the mechanics of our lives but which create their own emotion (in this case: amusement and schadenfreude, respectively), and that word is Art. It maybe disguised as a card game, but Malki ! used it as a vehicle for something more, I think.².

• In a month and a half, it might be safe to go back outside again, particularly if you rush back inside and the famed Toronto Reference Library for the equally-famed TCAF, which announced some new featured guests yesterday. The one that caught my eye is French [web]comicker Boulet (en Français ici; in English here), who will apparently be making a third appearance on this side of the Atlantic, where he may still have copies of the extremely limited print version of Darkness that will be available at Stumptown³ and MoCCA in the weeks prior.
• We spoke about Howard Tayler (my evil twin), his nearly-concluded Kickstarter campaign, and the value of reining in the stretch goals a few weeks ago, and Tayler is now chiming in on the same topic in what is likely his last update prior to the close of campaign:
  

  Enough With The Stretching

  It looks like you’re going to unlock at least three if not four ship coins.

  Once that happens, I am done designing coins for this project. Why? Because the designs take about a week to hammer on and get right. Four coins right at the end is already a bit of a stretch (ahem) and I want to make sure that I actually ship all of these coins out in April, like I promised to.

  Think about that for a moment. A successful project should ship ON TIME. A wildly successful project should ALSO ship on time, right? I’m reining it in as best I can, and agonizing over every potential slip of schedule. [emphasis and large text original]

  Drop in the obligatory noting that a wise man knows his limitations and gratitude towards whoever taught the youthful Evil Version of Gary From A Parallel Reality the values of both time management and fanatical devotion to promised goals.

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¹ Most of that sentence is a lie; I’ve met John and while he may look enormous next to Yuko, he’s not three meters by any stretch. He is also a delightful person and even the dreaded Punishment Shirt turned out to be not so bad as I’m told Cricket falls asleep in there now. We are very glad to hear that he wasn’t badly injured, and hope that there’s some form of justice for his destroyed bike.

² Also — look at that chart of backers and dollars by day; that’s just amazing to look at. Malki ! broke nearly every single rule on this campaign and when Kickstarter Theory is taught in the MBA programs of the future, this will be Case Study #1.

³ The annual awards of which, by the way, now include a Best Webcomic. Nominations [PDF] accepted until 30 March.

First thing that doesn’t happen very often: It looks like Holly Rowland was wrong when she said:

Sorry, @malki – I was pretty convinced you were going to hit $500K until the Veronica Mars project dropped. ;)

in reference to the Machine of Death game Kickstarter because dang, y’all, it’s up more than US$45,000 since yesterday and (as of the time of this writing) within spitting distance of a cool half-mil¹. It’s also exceeded the initial Kicktraq projection, whereas Gary’s First Law of Kicktraq Projections is they overestimate the final total by a factor of three to six².

Oh, and that “by the time I’m done eating lunch” call was obliterated; with nine hours to go, today is already the second-highest day for fundraising in the MoD game campaign, eclipsed only by yesterday. Upticks at the end aren’t unheard of, but only the true outliers exceed the totals of the first couple of days.

Second thing that doesn’t happen very often: a webcomic hits 3000 updates. In the four and a half years since I waxed rhapsodically about Irregular Webcomic hitting the 2000 mark, quite a few more webcomics have hit the multiple-thousands achievement, but it’s still pretty damn impressive. This time the new That’s A Lotta Damn Zeros Club inks another tickmark next to the name of Greg Dean, who hit 3000 strips of Real Life today, despite a toddler-driven irregular update schedule and a general eschewance of the convention circuit. Well done, Mr Dean; now get to work, you’ve got #3001 to do.

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¹ It is an absolute certainty it will be over five hundred thousand before I’m done eating lunch — and I’m a fast eater, you guys. I guess in all fairness, “Webcomic Kickstarter hitting a half-million dollars” is the thing that doesn’t happen very often, but I’m giving 50-50 odds on Aaron Diaz³ hitting the mark in the next week. So yeah, Holly being incorrect is the uncommon thing in this discussion.

² Case in point: the Schlock Mercenary challenge coin Kickstarter, which is on a nice gentle glide path towards 7400% of goal, plus or minus. Based on the first day’s backing totals, I predicted a finish between 5550% and 11,100% (respectively, 1/6th and 1/3rd of the initial estimate), and it looks like we’ll land square in the middle of that range.

³ Tolkien and dinosaur scholar par excellence.

It all seems to be about the green¹ today.

• The first of the Big Four Webcomics Kickstarters of February Aught-Thirteen has wrapped, with the Cyanide & Happiness guys netting just over US$770,000 with a slight upward tick at the end there. For reference, as of this writing the other three of the Big Four are sitting at:
  • Machine of Death: US$454,000
  • Schlock Mercenary: US$115,000
  • Dresden Codak: US$362,000

  For a grand total of 1.701 million dollars American cash money. Granted, there’s Kickstarter² fees and Amazon fees and taxes and all the rest, but the compelling story remains: more money, more value for your backer contribution.

• The ur-example of more value for your backer contribution remains the Choose Your Own Hamlet by the Reconstituted Toronto Man-Mountain, who is even as we speak laying out the book, overseeing the recording of the audiobook, prototyping lil’ plush Yorick skulls, and giving us a sneak peek at one gorgeous map of the choices that can be made, which is itself made too look like Yorick’s skull. Dang, y’all.
• In fact, the only part of the increasing coolness of the Choose Your Own Hamlet that the aforementioned RTM-M³ isn’t responsible for would be the live-action version of Choose Your Own Hamlet, which will have its premiere this weekend in Busan, South Korea, thanks to local director (and webcomickin’ madman) Ryan Estrada. The presentation of To Be or Not To Be (a live, choose-your-own-adventure play) will be this Saturday at 9:00 EDT (GMT-4, or check your local time here) over the internet.

  Sure, the live audience will have the thrill of watching the actors try to manage hundreds of possible story paths, but you at home can do the same thing, and you can vote on those choices that will affect the story. Just don’t make the choices that keep Ophelia in her original, put-upon, depressive, dishrag-type personality because if you do, the text of the book (and presumably the play) will say that you aren’t allowed to be Ophelia for a while.

  The details on To Be or Not To Be (a live, choose-your-own-adventure play) are at Google+ where you can choose to watch the streaming glory and participate. It is in all likelihood the first live play designed for such social media technology and you’ll want to be able to tell your grandkids where you there at the beginning.

• As part of my theme on money, I was going to point you to a situation where a billing mishap left The Adventures of Dr McNinja facing a shutdown later this week, with the possibility of creator Chris Hastings being sent to collections⁴. Fortunately, that all got resolved before I had a chance to say anything about it, so well done McNinja fans. As always, there’s a lesson here, which in this case unfortunately is of the variety that you have to police the people that are (supposed to be) taking your money because if they don’t do so successfully they may make your life miserable.

  I once had a cable company that received the checks I sent them and credited my bill as paid, but never actually cashed them. This went on for six months and only came to a head when I moved house and tried to get my cable disconnected. Then they tried to hit me with hundreds of dollars of “late fees” because I dunno, they lost my checks or something? The fact that I had statements showing that my bills were paid each month didn’t seem to matter until I mentioned involving utility regulators with the state of New Jersey, then they decided to write it off in the interests of keeping a satisfied customer. Then I moved and never used them again THE END.

  Where was I? Oh, yes — it seems stupid to have to follow up with people to make sure they’re actually taking your money (you’d think they were really interested in doing so on their own), but sadly it’s true. You have to be more business type than artist to make it as an independent artist, so take those steps towards due diligence and it will make your life easier in the long run.

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¹ Note for people not in the US: our paper currency is boring, kinda greenish on one side and mostly black on the other. We desperately need somebody from a country that knows how to make pretty cash convince the stick-up-their-asses types in Washington that bills don’t need to be drab.

² How ubiquitous is Kickstarter these days? My sister brought it up the other day, asking me to explain how her friend, a musician, managed to raise US$49,000 to master & press an album and what the crap-hell?

³ Known around the house as Ryan North

⁴ If you don’t happen to know Chris Hastings, you should be aware of two things:

• He is just the nicest guy, even nicer than he appears to be via the internet if you can imagine such a thing
• He is too pretty to be sent to collections, you guys

You can’t accuse Dave Kellett of burying the lede with respect to the new Kickstarter he’s launched to finish off STRIPPED; not ten seconds into the video the words appear on the screen:

Voice of Bill Watterson

Watterson, a man so reclusive¹ that last summer’s announcement that he’d agreed to provide written responses to Kellett’s questions for STRIPPED was rightly seen as a coup, has actually gone and recorded audio of his thoughts vis-à-vis comics for inclusion in the film. This is by far his most public appearance in the context of comics since wrapping Calvin and Hobbes more than seventeen years ago. Ignore everything else about STRIPPED², that right there is sufficient reason for this film to exist.

And to get things out of the way, yes, STRIPPED already had a Kickstarter that was very successful; as Kellett explains, this second campaign is being held not to finish the film, but to pay the fees (which are well into the five figures and could hit six) for the rights to include footage from other sources: brief clips of Peanuts specials and Johnny Carson interviewing Cathy Guisewite will cost nine grand, for example.

If you already contributed to the previous Kickstarter (and full disclosure: I did), you’ve already had a communications from Kellett and Schroeder that they are not asking prior backers to pony up again. They are specifically looking for people that missed the first campaign (or weren’t aware of Kickstarter at that time) to fund this push not to make the film, but to make it better. It’s a classy move, and I want to congratulate Kellett and Schroeder for not taking the easy route and hitting up people whose names they already have.

• Speaking of Kickstarter, Rob DenBleyker had some interesting news to share yesterday:
  

  The Cyanide & Happiness Show just became the most funded animation project on Kickstarter. Holy shit!

• Okay, so between the C&H show, the Machine of Death game, the Dresden Codak book, and the Schlock Mercenary challenge coins, the high-profile webcomics projects launched in February have collectively raised more than US$1,051,000. Yikes.
• It appears that Saveur magazine really needed submissions for their Recipe Comix again, as they sent Chicago artist Marnie Galloway to Marrakesh and she comicked the whole thing up but good. Galloway had a previous entry in the series, so I imagine that played a part in Saveur offering the trip.

  I’m not saying that if you submit a recipe to Recipe Comix, Saveur will necessarily send you business class to a foreign destination for luxury and gourmet foods, but I can say that if you never submit a recipe to them, they won’t know who the hell you are and thus definitely will not send you on an adventure. Look, they pay for your comics, you might get a fabulous reward down the line, and most importantly, I get more Recipe Comix. That’s a win-win-win, people.

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¹ By extreme coincidence, Ryan Estrada had a couple of tweets yesterday talking about Watterson’s seclusion and Kickstarter. Hell, there’s an entire other movie that’s been produced and now showing on the festival circuit that’s entirely about how the filmmaker couldn’t even get in contact with Watterson.

² Particularly the inclusion of a hack webcomics pseudojournalist on the interview list, inexplicably not buried at the very bottom in tiny type. Given the amount of footage that Kellett and partner Fred Schroeder recorded, if I make the final cut for more than eight frames, something more important is definitely getting shortchanged.

Everybody is either in transit to Seattle for EmCity or making final preparations before leaving tomorrow. I could mention that Dresden Codak’s Kickstarter is being reported as the fastest-funding initial 24 hours of any comics project and is already the #8 most-funded Comics project after approximately 40 hours, or that the Machine of Death card game Kickstarter has just unlocked something called — rather ominously — FATE BLITZ, but we’ve heard enough about those two projects of late, so I won’t.

Instead, two brief items:

• One, for the next while, Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya will be running Lucky Penny in lieu of their regular diary strips. For those that didn’t catch the announcement last year, Lucky Penny is an original graphic novel by Panagariya and Ota for Oni Press, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to have a release date just yet. The shift to LP will let Ota work on just one thing for a while, hopefully speeding the day when we see a print collection, new Benign Kingdom projects, and more.
• Two, I have on past occasions mentioned Christopher Bird and Davinder Brar’s Al’Rashad: City of Myths, a weekly longform comic of politics, religion, intrigue, and characters that tell you what you need to know about them by how they dress¹ and hold themselves when they speak. It’s terrific stuff.

  But please note that I said “need to know”, as for a great deal of time I have wanted to know a great deal more about these characters and the world they inhabit; my guess is perhaps 10% of what Bird has world-built in his head will ever see the page. And wonder of wonders, Bird has answered my silent plea with a character page chock full of biographical and geopolitical nuggets that make my heart sing. I am so happy that I’m not even going to engage in the privilege of every comics reader and kvetch about the obvious contradiction between biography and previously established story and clearly Bird doesn’t care about continuity like true fans would and … [Editor’s note: At this point Gary was dragged away and had some manners slapped into him; we apologize for the fuss.]

  Ahem. As I was saying, please enjoy Al’Rashad, updates Mondays, and please overlook both my misplaced enthusiasm as well as my inexplicable omission of Al’Rashad from the recommended comics list over there to the right. Get to reading.

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¹ I particularly note that the Caliph of Al’Rashad dresses very plainly, which reveals great deal of his character.

The annual scramble for San Diego Comic Con hotel rooms started at 12:00 noon EST and by 12:02 I was done with a promise of an email with my assignment. Here’s hoping.

Oh, and since this is going to be a Kickstarter-heavy post,let’s get something non-Kickstarter out of the way up front — I have of late been enjoying the crap out of Help Us! Greatest Warrior, which appears at a Tumblr near you The title character is bean-like, more than a little dude-crazy and will utterly kick your ass if she can be bothered. Creator Madéleine Flores has been killing it, and you should hit the (very brief) archives right now.

• Is this new? I think this is new. David Malki ! posted in an update for the Machine of Death card game Kickstarter that he will use the powers of technology to add a special reward for backers that also back a different, unrelated game. This is, I believe, the first Kickstarter crossover:
  

  Story War is a little bit similar to Machine of Death in its broad strokes (“combine random elements to accomplish a wacky objective”), but varies in the particulars.

  If you pledge to both games (physical versions), we’re gonna compare our backer lists and each send you an exclusive bonus card: a Machine of Death card that references Story War, and a Story War card that references Machine of Death! We’ll also send you a PDF with a set of suggested CROSSOVER RULES for combining both cards in HIGH STAKES INTERLEAGUE PLAY. [emphasis and SHOUTING original]

  I can’t wait to see what other cross-pollinations this might lead to. In this case, it’s a match of equals (both Story War and Machine of Death are well over their goals, so neither is trying to gain success by drafting off the other), but I could see especially successful projects being approached by struggling projects, trying to succeed via cross promotion that mostly goes one way. Secondary market, anyone?

• Speaking of secondary markets, about ten days back we mentioned a new service from TopatoCo called Make That Thing with some speculation about how MTT might be structured and a promise of more details soon. That was supposed to have been last weekend via an interview with TopatoCo VP Holly Rowland, but weather systems (and now EmCity) got in the way, so we’ll be talking with Holly next week.

  In the meantime, Make That Thing had a public unveiling last night, and we’re able to see some of how MTT is going to operate. In addition to shipping and fulfillment services, MTT will be offering promotional services, and will also be able to offer certain kinds of production:

  Because each campaign involves a high amount of personal attention and attention to detail, we only take on a handful of projects at a time, and only those that we think match up well with the kinds of things we know how to make – primarily comics, books, and games.

  We don’t know how to make USB toasters or solar-powered flashlights, so we simply won’t take on Hardware, Design, Video Game, or Fashion projects. Other people are better at that than we are. However, the rewards for your project are heavily weighed toward the following:

  • Printed materials (books, comics, posters)
  • Printed or embroidered apparel items (T-shirts, polos, neckties, aprons)
  • Novelties and baubles (stickers, patches, bookmarks, foam swords)
  • Other things that don’t involve inventing a new type of manufacturing apparatus

  Then we might be a good fit.

  They’re in closed beta right now, and as MTT finds its feet, I suspect they’ll be taking on projects primarily from the existing roster of TopatoCo clients. However, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if future clients found an MTT campaign as being similar to an audition for joining up with TopatoCo as an ongoing client. More when I get to chance to talk to Rowland, where I’ll be sure to ask who thought it was a good idea to leave a forklift with the TopatoCo Funployees.

• Speaking of Make That Thing, we knew that the Machine of Death card game was going to use MTT on account of that was sort of their soft launch. Now we know that their second client will be the Dresden Codak book which is well into holy shit territory with nearly US$120,000 raised in the first 15 hours. Aaron Diaz¹ has been hard at work since launch trying to come up with stretch goals that he hadn’t anticipated needing for a week or more. Even if you don’t read Dresden Codak, go check out the campaign just for video, then ask yourself honestly how fancy your pants are.

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¹ The Tolkien and Dinosaur Scholar Par Excellence. Oh my glob, Aaron, you need to draw the main players of The Silmarillion as maniraptors.

So Howard Tayler’s Kickstarter is running at some 3000% of goal and counting, and he’s got a really important update that you should read. Certainly, read it if you’re a backer, but also read it if you’ve ever considered running a Kickstarter yourself because he talks about how your plans can get completely pooched not just from failing at a Kickstarter, but from succeeding too well¹.

The original scope for this project was as follows:

• Fund the creation of up to five different coins, at volumes which allow me to sell them at conventions, and keep stock on hand.
• Fund at somewhere between $10k and $20k after thirty days.
• Ship all the coins in mid-April

For reference, Tayler is just shy of US$55,000 as of this writing. Between Tayler’s experience and other runaway successes we’ve seen where the delivery of rewards becomes a serious burden², I’m starting to wonder if creators should make much more liberal use of limited rewards. Expecting to see no more than X to Y and a proportional number of backers, and you’ve arranged your schedule for the next few months around those assumptions? Limit the rewards so if you get a blowout success in the opening hours, you aren’t obligated to do more than you’re capable of.

If there’s pent-up demand, you can always say, I’m gratified so many of you want in on this, I’ll whip up some new rewards tiers and let the rest of you give me money while making the appropriate shifts to your schedule. And hey, nothing drives up interest like initial scarcity. If you’ve got a relatively straightforward set of rewards with a predictable production schedule, reliable supply chain, and scalable delivery operations, feel free to leave everything unlimited. In all other cases, some hard-nosed realistic self-assessment will probably be what stands between you and madness.

• Speaking of Kickstarters, Zach Weinersmith wrapped up his this morning, raising US$341,667 towards his newest book. If my math is correct, the number of backers he’s gotten at the various tiers means he’ll be signing his name approximately 4194 times in the various books that get signatures. Although many of those signatures will come from earlier books, which means Weinersmith may already have them signed and his hand won’t fall off the week after the big pallets arrive at his house.
• Nobody does data–sharing like Dorothy Gambrell³, and it was gratifying to see that her latest way to envision information is blowing up all over the damn place in the last couple of days. You won’t find it on her website, though, as it was made for Psychology Today’ February 2013 issue. In case you don’t subscribe, the editors have made her infographic of where missed connections occur by state available. If you’re a Scientologist, it’s all over Tumblr without attribution, which totally sucks.
• More EmCity participant notifications have come in, meaning I’ll have to go back to my earlier post and update the lists and maps. In the meantime, please consider yourselves notified that John Troutman and Ryan Smith will be at table Q-19 in Artists Alley.

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¹ Paging Rich Burlew, who gets all the slack in the world for an unpredictable injury that forced him to stop work for months, but who also wound up in the situation of having to create 25 separate product categories and try to keep nearly 15,000 backers happy while being just one person. That’s the sort of situation that sends sensible, grounded people on benders that take Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas as a to-do list.

² Above and beyond the simple shipping aspect, regarding which I will have more to say next week; the real work is in the design and production of everything you promise.

³ Except maybe Randall Munroe. If Gambrell and Munroe ever collaborated, my brain would explode from sheer enjoyment.

First, a quick update on yesterday’s Webcomics Folks and Where to Find Them at EmCity posting: Kel McDonald was kind enough to let us know that her booth (number 1008, for those playing at home) will, in addition to herself, Kory Bing, and Magnolia Porter, also be hosting Meredith McClaren, David Willis, and Tyler Crook. Keep the updates coming, people.

Okay. To my knowledge, the greatest overfunding of a webcomic-related Kickstarter on a percentage basis is not Homestuck (which achieved a relatively modest 355% of goal), Smut Peddler (415%), Diesel Sweeties (2006%, now we’re talking), or even the vaunted Order of the Stick (2171%), but Darren Gendron’s Monster Alphabet board book, which scored a funding rate of 5015%. Granted, the goal was only US$500, but a fifty times overfunding is pretty damn impressive.

I mention all this because Howard Tayler¹ launched a Kickstarter for a collectible last night at 10:00pm EST and had funded less than four minutes later. As of this writing (just over 13 hours into a 30 day campaign), Tayler sits at just under US$40,000 on a US$1800 goal, putting him at 2214% of goal, putting him past Order of the Stick and coming up on halfway to Gendron’s achievement.

Again, low funding goals make overfunding percentages easy to hit², but take a look at the projection on Tayler’s project, which is on track for an unreal 34,286%. Yes, yes, I know — Kicktraq projections never come true, or Ryan North would have cleared US$1.7 million and Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck more ten times that. But! Look at the initial Kicktraq projected values vs actual funding and take them as a ratio and you’ll get a fairly narrow range³:

• Homestuck: 5.75
• Smut Peddler: 5.17
• Diesel Sweeties: insufficient data (only last four days shown)
• Monster Alphabet: insufficient data (dates don’t correlate with campaign)
• Hamlet: 2.92

Across a wide range of initial goals (US$500 to US$700,000) and a wide range of overfundings (355% to 5015%), the ratio of initial projection to final funding runs between about 3:1 to 6:1. If these are representative, Tayler can expect to take in somewhere in the range of US$100,000 to US$200,000 (as of today, since the projection has gone up since yesterday, probably because it launched so late in the day), with a percentage funding of somewhere between 5500% and 11,100%. Of course, my sample size is so small as to make predictions laughably inaccurate, thus the very wide ranges given.

And you know what’s weird? That’s not even the oddest thing about this campaign. The oddest thing (apart from the fact that Tayler, who’s self-funded all his rather pricey books, is Kickstarting at all, especially for such a low-total item) is that Tayler opted to make something that has such a tenuous connection to his core IP.

The challenge coin (or “coins”, thanks to stretch goals being obliterated almost immediately) has never appeared in Schlock Mercenary. He had to explain what challenge coins are in the opening paragraphs of his Kickstarter description, and yet he’s hit upon something that his readership simply cannot live without.

Furthermore, this I didn’t know about these things existed but it must be mine is priced above the usual impulse buy for an unknown quantity⁴. The challenge coins are related to Schlock Mercenary (two of them, at least; the stretch goal “Not my circus, not my monkey” coin is Howard trying to import a Polish aphorism) but not as directly as a book, and they’re an unfamiliar type of item.

That’s the key takeaway today — your fans may not know what they want and a sufficiently unique item (don’t bother with challenge coins, that’s been done now) may just take off into the stratosphere. If you’ve got an item that can be produced in a wide range of quantities at decent margins to yourself, Kickstarter means there’s no reason not to try.

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¹ My evil twin. Happy eleven-and-a-quarterth Birthday next week, Howard.

² As in so many things, Rich Burlew’s Kickstarter was an anomaly, being both massively overfunded on a percentage basis and having a very high initial goal of nearly US$58,000. To a lesser degree, Ryan North’s Choose Your Own Hamlet is also a trendbreaker, with a higher-than-normal goal of US$20,000 and an achievement of more than 2900%.

³ Again, Order of the Stick is an anomaly, as the initial projected total wound up less than the actual total, giving a ratio of 0.718 which just doesn’t ever happen in nature.

⁴ I’m basing that statement on Jon Rosenberg’ Quantum Theory of Money which states that fans at a show are willing to part with up to twenty bucks without too much hestiation.

However! From my many hours assisting at booths at various conventions, I can tell you that quantum unit holds for something that fans recognize, like a t-shirt. I know what a t-shirt is, and it features a design related to something I like is the situation that leads to that twenty changing hands.

Odder items are more likely to follow the rules for impulse purchases, whereby somebody that isn’t a fan is willing to drop money on something they don’t know, or actual fans are willing to drop on something that isn’t represented in whatever they’re a fan of.

Impulse buys max out at five bucks. Anything more and you can see the gears turning in their heads — I don’t know this thing, so I’m not willing to risk a great deal of money against the possibility that I may not derive as much utility or enjoyment from it in the future as I suspect I might at this very moment. I really have to stop listening to the Freakonomics podcast, it’s rubbing off on me.

Yesterday, Chris Yates put up images of the last Baffler!s in Webcomics Fortnight Deux, meaning since we last mentioned them there have been contributions from Evan Dahm, David Willis, Rebecca Clements (that one astonishes me; I simply can’t believe that Yates and Assistant Emily the Lion were able to translate such a complex image into wood and paint), Andy Bell, and Danielle Corsetto. Mr Yates has been busy posting the Baffler!s to eBay, where as of this writing 13 of the 16 puzzles are available for bidding.

Guys, they start at fifty bucks, which is criminally cheap¹. As much as I’d love to grab up the Fat Pony, Tigerbuttah, Beartato and Friends Pizza Party, and Year in Japan [no link yet] for a grand total of US$200, we all know that ain’t gonna happen, and nor should it.

Yates and Assistant Emily deserve as much money as possible for the hard work they’ve put in, and the individual creators who contributed designs likewise should be fairly compensated for coming up with such wonderful designs. The auctions run for five days each; go crazy, outbid me, and have fun reassembling them.

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¹ As of this writing, none of the bids have cracked US$65, plus shipping. And don’t go complaining about the shipping charges, Yates packs his stuff to the point that tactical nuclear weapons couldn’t damage it in transit, which is exactly what you want if you care about your puzzle arriving with all of its pieces present.

I realize that I’ve been looking at Kickstarter wrongly with respect to a fairly fundamental question: When does it reach steady state? When does it happen that the high-profile projects slow down, hit a nice, predictable rate, and my budget for supporting such things stops getting busted? Answer: It doesn’t.

Case in point: the promised Kickstarter campaign for the the Machine of Death game hit yesterday afternoon, achieved its US$23,000 goal in about twelve hours, and is plugging away for another month. The sheer creativity that this game will demand of its players¹ (not to mention the track records of the principals) virtually guarantees the that stretch goals (and there will be many, many stretch goals) are likewise sticky and attractive. I’m guessing somewhere between US$150-200K by the time it’s all done.

And yet, the most intriguing part has little to do with the game itself. About two thirds of the way down the project page is a paragraph that I can only call a soft launch announcement for what could be the most exciting Kickstarter-related thing of 2013:

I’ll also be working with TopatoCo’s new subsidiary, Make That Thing, which is a dedicated fulfillment agency specifically for campaigns like this. TopatoCo has a warehouse full of people who do nothing but receive pallets and ship packages all day long for over fifty of the internet’s top artists (including me, Kris, and Ryan). So they and I will be working together to ensure that all the products and rewards from this campaign will be produced and shipped to you as quickly and efficiently as possible. [emphasis original]

One of the perennial complaints about Kickstarter campaigns (and by no means is this limited to the [web]comics sphere) is the sometimes very long time it takes to fulfill pledge rewards, even once the project in question has been actually produced. A very successful project can overwhelm a creator with shipping and fulfillment for literally months, and now TopatoCo are stepping into that niche.

Nothing is known outside the walls of either current or future TopatoCo World Headquarters about Make That Thing, so I’ll be sitting down next weekend with TopatoCo VP of Asskicking Holly Rowland to ask her about it. TopatoCo has been extraordinarily careful about picking clients and not growing their business past the point that they can handle the work, but if Make That Thing is truly a subsidiary, with its own systems, procedures, and staff, and if they decide to make their services available to Kickstarter projects outside of the TopatoCo stable? Game changer. Now we know why they needed that whole damn building for themselves² — they’re on their way to become the Amazon of one-off projects.

And that was going to be all I wrote until the four jolly lads at Cyanide and Happiness took the only logical step after turning down TV money for a C&H show last month — they launched their Kickstarter about ten hours ago and are already past 25% of their base goal of US$250,000. I’m very curious how much money will be necessary to achieve their top stretch goal (it’s presently masked), which is:

The C&H guys will 4-way joust to the death

Presumably, the last survivor will get to keep the money. No bets on this one, I can think up completely plausible reasons why each of the four would be the winner of that particular deathmatch. I hope they stream it.

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¹ Machine of Death: The Game of Creative Assasination is going to reward those who are quick with their wits and able to jump from idea to idea with ease. The description of the project is going to act as a filter for those who will not be temperamentally inclined to excel at or enjoy this game, as it is full of dancing language, leaping from place to place in a dizzying fashion. In other words, I have to plunk down money on this sumbitch.

² And if they do become a fulfillment house for major Kickstarter projects, they’ll need to start looking for another, larger building pretty damn soon. Maybe just head back to Eastworks and take over the whole thing?