Or, “Ow, my back”. Let’s distract ourselves a bit, why don’t we.

• Christopher Baldwin is coming up on the end of Part 2 (of 3) of Spacetrawler, and is looking to hit the ground running on book production. He’s about 12 hours into a Kickstarter campaign that’s about 25% funded, which is good. Baldwin’s pretty aggressive about the campaign, with an unusually large number of donor levels/prize combo platters for such a modest goal (US$7000), and that extends to his campaign’s duration: a mere 21 days.

  Be sure to watch his video all the way through, as he’s got some pretty original thank-you gifts (including a series of postcards from around the galaxy, sent to you each month, written by one of his characters¹). He also pronounces some of those verging-on-unpronouncable-by-humans alien locations² with lots of spitty noises, and that’s always fun.

• It’s been a couple of weeks, so it’s time for me to remind you again about Saveur and their ongoing project of having comics artists provide recipes in comic form. This week’s contribution comes from Gordon McAlpin of Multiplex fame, and it sounds delicious.
• Just a heads-up: Chris Yates has stepped up his game, making his latest multi-layer Bafflers all curvy and organic and water-fally. Very cool.
• Finally, time for my occasional reminder that while it’s not always to the forefront of Sinfest, Tatsuya Ishida’s Criminy and Miss Fuchsia storyline is possibly the most heartfelt thing I read in my daily feeds, and he surpassed all previous Awwwww! moments with yesterday’s update.

  I can’t help but wonder if Baby Blue, the Sisterhood, or Big D is going to bollocks up the moment of simple contentment they’re enjoying right now³ (out of misplaced concern, misunderstanding or bad intent, respectively), but for the moment they’re happy in a way that anybody who’s felt that first flush of love will remember. Hopefully, their Valentine’s Day will be just as happy for them.

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¹ Can’t wait to see what Krep has to say to you.

² Like the Hotel Kppfing.

³ Possibly by hounding the poor escaped soul who remembers story time; I don’t think either Crim or Fyoosh have it in them to be cruel to himm, even accidentally.

I don’t have any introductory remarks today; sorry.

• I started out by thinking to myself, No way did Randall Munroe draw 1000 little stick figures for today’s strip, but a very basic eyeballing (counting the stick figures in a small section, and assuming a relatively uniform density) indicates that if he didn’t, he’s within the bounds of experimental error. Then I said to myself, Well at least he didn’t draw references to all of his major recurring characters and most well-known strips, on account of Cory Doctorow’s cape would show up in red. Then I looked closer and saw Cory, in black and white, around the 9:30 position on the first “0”. Haven’t spotted any velociraptors yet, though.
• The thing is, when it comes to who I want to get all squishy with, I am of the same mind as Gerda and have interest only in the ladies¹. So why did Jess Fink’s G+ announcement that she was collaborating on a new artblog full of sexy, sexy dudes [NSFYWP]² for lustful gazing catch my attention? Maybe because I dig on Jess’s art, even when it’s Boners Ahoy!? Maybe because the ladies deserve a place for female gazing? In any event, there’s never a bad time to point out tastefully smutrotica and dammit, Jess always makes the sexy equal parts hot and fun. Can’t wait to see what her Smut Peddler (whose contributions just closed, and so we should see it complete soon) story looks like.
• From the helping out colleagues department: Ms K Brooke “Otter” Spangler has finally gotten her plush production completed, after more than two years of effort and many trying setbacks. The big pile of Mr Speedy clones at Otter’s house much surely be the fuzziest, wuzziest, cutest impromptu sleeping spot on the eastern seaboard, but the important part comes from her summary writeup of the process, which is quoted here at length due to no permalinks:
  

  [H]ere’s the super-brief version: the Speedy plush has been in pre-production for almost 28 months. Most of that was raising capital to fund production. Early last year he almost went to production with a different company. I paid a fairly huge chunk of change to get a prototype made, but poor quality, combined with some rather off-putting communications with this company, made me pull out at the last minute.³

  I began working with a new company back in late September, and cannot recommend them strongly enough.* They have fantastic customer service and they busted their rumps getting him to me in under 3 months. He was supposed to be here for the holidays but there was a lengthy snag getting him across the Canadian border.

  *Webcomic people looking to make their own plush, email me and I’ll talk your ears off (eyeballs out?) about them. [asterisk footnote original, numberic one mine]

  That footnote is what I wanted to draw your attention to; I’ve known a buttload of webcomickers (some of them from Canada, making their unit of measure metric buttloads instead of Imperial) that have tried — some successfully, some not — to get various 3D representations of their characters made, and it’s almost always been a huge headache for them. The fact that one has now found a company that can turn around a design from sketch to prototype to delivery in three months (during the run-up to Alliday, no less), and is willing to share that information? You’ve earned yourself a place in Webcomics Heaven⁴, Otter.

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¹ Hey, ladies.

² Not Safe For Your Work, Probably.

³ Insert your own joke here.

⁴ Which is itself found in the First Circle of Hell, wedged into a somewhat unassuming corner, with a nice garden and decent DSL. There no other place to put them and it’s been ages since they got any fresh Roman orators, so there’s plenty of room.

I am slowly expanding the list of Officially Suspect sites, which now includes The Onion¹ but not The AV Club. Also, Twitter is not blocked, but any attempt to click through to a particular tweet or image results in a “that page doesn’t exist” error. In the meantime, I am working around the filters by various means because I am crafty. Okay, mostly it means surfing the Officially Suspect sites from the hotel and being behind the times, but whatever works.

• SMBC Thee-ah-tuh finished up the funding for their second DVD massively over goal, which means they’ll have to make good on their promise to do weekly sketches (instead of the monthly schedule in preparation for their web series in which they destroy James Ashby² in space). Comparing to their earlier effort, it now seems like a given that SMBC projects will hit 500% of goal funding in everything they do. Wow.
• Santa plus Dinosaurs in comics form from the mind of Ryan North over at Comics Alliance on Mondays and Wednesdays until Christmas, complete with all the vocal rhythms³ you’ve come to expect from The Toronto Man-Mountain. Speaking of Ryan North, there is now a form of plush T-Rex that looks large even next to a Ryan-sized man, which appears to be both the highest-priced item ever procured via TopatoCo, and limited (as of this writing) to only 37 more examples. If I had space in my living room for one of this things, it would freak my dog the heck out. Also unwary visitors.
• An instructive tale regarding a blatant piece of design theft, via David Malki ! popped up yesterday. Background: Malki ! endeared himself to my professional tribe with a piece of pithy wisdom that became a shirt featuring explosions. A catalog nominally associated with public broadcasting appropriated the idea (which, given the laws regarding slogans and short phrases, is permissible, if lazy) and implemented a hideously ugly design of their own for a dollar more than Malki !’s version; we’ll let him pick up the story from there:
  

  I wrote them an email. The reason I’m sharing this story — when I usually don’t bother to bring up situations like this, and give attention to entities that deserve to die in obscurity — is because I thought my approach might be instructive.

  The knee-jerk response is “Cease and desist! Sue! Call a lawyer!” This implies that (a) the issue cannot be solved through more amicable means, and (b) I have a lot of time and money to throw at this kind of problem. The latter is not true, and I like to at least allow for the chance that the former isn’t either. There’s a lot of double negatives in that sequence, so I’ll restate: Being aggressive puts people on the defensive. Being friendly gets people to help you.

  Also, always give the party in the wrong the ability to back off gracefully.

  Learning this is one of the biggest things that has helped me in life: avoid putting people on the defensive. Sometimes it is necessary to be firm, or to express dissatisfaction, or to press for remedy of a situation. But I have never found yelling and shouting to be the easiest way to that end — at least, not as an opener. [emphasis original]

  The email that Malki ! sent is a marvel of firm, yet utterly courteous, assertion of one’s rights; you should go read the excerpt that he posted right now. The practical upshot is that Signals will be carrying Malki !’s version of the shirt from Spring (at a horrible royalty rate, but one which is greater than the Nothing he was making before, and whoever ripped his design will no longer get that horrible rate), with the bonus that the incredibly ugly, lazy design (seriously, that rounded, noodly-looking typeface is as far from anything that evokes “engineering” or “explosions” or even “loud” as anything I’ve ever seen) will fall back into the obscurity it so richly deserves.

  It might not be an optimal win (that would be one where Signals apologized and gave all their ill-gotten gains to Malki !, along with the heart of the “designer” who shat out such a weak interpretation of the slogan), but the net result was a decrease in Total Ugliness instead of a screaming match that would have increased it. Now in addition to his varied skills in film production, podcasting, improv, rapping, design, printmaking, metal fabrication, editing, publishing, heavier-than-air piloting, and freelance firearms special services, we should recognize Malki ! as webcomics’ premiere corporate communications liaison and kick-ass demand letter drafter.

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¹ For violence, not sexual content [link NSFW].

² History’s greatest monster.

³ We get it, Ryan, you like the compound plural. iPads 2, jeezum crow.

Regular readers of this page (both of you — hi, Rick; hi, Helen) know that I don’t let Javascript load on my browser without a damn good reason, but when Jess Fink tweets about awesome comics that can only be done online, and they require it? That’s a damn good reason.

Hobo Lobo of Hamelin is a take on the old Pied Piper story, but one that achieves a depth (both visually and storywise) that’s almost unique. The art is laid out in different planes, at varying distances from the viewer, and which move at different rates as you scroll from left to right. It would look like a storybook without the Javascript effects, but with it, you become an observer — but not quite a participant — in something that’s not animated in the usual sense of the word, but in the original sense: the scene has been brought to life.

Hobo Lobo is made by Stevan Živadinović, and you can see the progress of the story on his About page; he’s powered through a nominal three pages since 26 Jan 2011, but considering that a “page” consists of as many as 17th multi-field “panels” (which run continuously together, not like the panels you’re used to), the updates every couple days are a pretty impressive feat. Best of all, Živadinović is open to sharing his code which makes this parallax-as-comics possible, so we may see more sites that merit the inclusion of Javascript for actual reasons in the future.

Speaking of Neat Things:

• Shopping for the various end-of-year holidays continues apace, and webcomickers (many of whom derive from these end-of-year sales intangibles like rent) want you to remember to buy stuff from them. But because they’re a collegial bunch, all over the place you’ll find creators that a pointing their readers towards colleagues with neat stuff. You got your neatly-formatted, easy-to-browse version from Mr Willis, your full-of-pictures version from Mr Guigar, your enthusiastic version from Ms Corsetto … basically, start at any of those pages (or from your favorite webcomicker’s front page), follow a link to an esteemed colleague, and you’ll likely find more recommendations to follow. Happy Propping Up of a Tottering Economy with Consumer Spending Holidays!
• The third chapter of Tyler Page’s Raised on Ritalin has released, and hoo boy, it’s a good ‘un. Moving away from the personal history portion of the story for a bit, Page engages in a Larry Gonick-like exploration of brain function, the history of amphetamines, and how Ritalin in particular came to be used for ADD and similar disorders in children (despite the fact that we’re not quite sure how it works). Fascinating stuff, and just the breather necessary before we dive back into Page’s personal story.
• Webcomics readers may recall that Help Desk creator Christopher Wright has, on occasion, been slightly erratic with his timetable. From a starting point in 1996, he’s sometimes gone months or even most of a year between updates. But (and this is a big but), he’s always come back. And when his life permits him to get into the proverbial groove, he knocks down updates like nobody’s business.

  Which is pretty much what he’s been doing since the end of October, cranking out the Monday-to-Friday releases like they were going out of style. As a result, he dropped the 1997th episode of Help Desk today, putting him on track to hit the Big Round Number of 2000 on Friday. As we all know, 2000 updates is the number that separates the adults from the children, and if there are a few more comics to have hit that threshold than back in 2008, it’s still pretty damn impressive.

Having mentioned this year’s iteration of the Wondermark Calendar last week, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a new twist that David Malki ! is introducing for 2012. Namely, custom holidays.

“Custom” might actually be too strong a word; it’s not like every purchaser is going to get their own combination of unique holidays on the calendar cards. But he is soliciting for suggestions of new holidays to be enshrined for the next twelvemonth:

[Suggested holidays] should:

• Be short
• Be funny
• Include a brief explanation that I’ll archive here on the site for people to consult throughout the year.

EXAMPLE:

January 5, Poop-on-Cats-Day. This is when everybody gets back at their cats by holding them down and pooping on them. Traditionally followed by January 6, Wash-Your-Cats-Day, and January 7, Hospital Day.

Suggestions from the field include, as of this writing,

July 20: The Feast of St. Owens. In honour of Richard Owens, coiner of the term ‘Dinosaur’, every young child is encouraged to carry a small replica of a Dinosaur with them at all times. The feast is concluded in the traditional manner of Owens himself –- scooping out your enemy’s spine and keeping it in a jar in your office.

June 12: Death by Tentacles Day. In memoriam of all the intrepid sailors, airship captains, sailboats and Japanese anime girls viciously violated and slain by oversized octupi, mutant cuttlefish and alien cephalopod-like creatures.

Also, nice try person who suggested 30 July as Defenestration Day, but if you’re going to use it to commemorate the date of the First Defenestration of Prague¹, what about the Second Defenestration of Prague², which took place on 23 May? Or even the One-and-a-Halfth on 24 September³? I suggest a compromise, equidistant between the Spring and Autumn Defenestrations, which would be 24 July; this has the added bonus of likely falling during San Diego Comic Con most years, allowing a mechanism to thin the crowds a bit for at least one day.

• New Johnny Wander book! Volume 2 is now available for your ordering pleasure, although to make delivery before Christmas exponentially more likely, personalizations will not be offered at this time. Buy a copy and bring it to the Yuko half of Yuko-and-Ananth at a con! Or wait until January! In the interests of full disclosure, one must note that a certain hack webcomics pseudojournalist was asked to provide a back cover blurb and did so.
• Tangentially webcomics: anybody out there reading Drops of God? Is it just me, or does plucky heroine Miyabi Shinohara somewhat resemble an all-grown-up Kat Donlan? And is this just an excuse for me to mention that holy crap, Gunnerkrigg Court has been killing it this week? Yes, yes it is.
• Continuing through much of this morning, Jim Zubkavich has been relating the story on Twitter of a Russian comics pirate that emailed him to ask if it would be possible to get unlettered copies of the Skullkickers art, so that he (the pirate) could translate them into Russian and release them to sharing sites more easily.

  I’ll wait while you digest that.

  A back and forth with Cameron Stewart and Indigo Kelleigh ensued on the merits of cooperating with this situation. There’s no Russian-language version of Skullkickers, nor plans to make one; there’s no legal means for this guy to obtain the comics in Russian; they’re already torrented and that will continue regardless of what Zub decides.

  On the other hand, this may create an easement or set a precedent for bad situations down the line. Honestly, just go follow the whole thread because it’s fascinating, and a conversation that is likely to come up more frequently in the future. And then take a look at Chip Zdarsky’s proposed solution:

  @Zubkavich @cameronmstewart I would fly to Russia and shoot him a lot and say “permission granted.”

  And with that, have a good weekend.

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¹ 1419 CE, precipitating the Hussite Wars.

² 1618 CE, precipitating the Thirty Years’ War.

³ 1483 CE, not precipitating any particular war.

Today I am stuck at the mercy of people with no sense of “agreed upon starting time”. On the one hand, there is very little that’s more guaranteed to annoy me than wasting my precious few remaining heartbeats because you can’t be bothered to show up. On the other hand, I have network access and webcomics willing to entertain me. What wonders might quell my murderous rage?

• There’s an excellent appreciation of everybody’s favorite character-driven webcomic, Octopus Pie (by everybody’s favorite Brooklynian, Meredith Gran) over at Comics Alliance today; Lauren Davis (seen spreading comicky wisdoms in places both high and low) is closer to Gran’s age cohort than I am, and has some insights that have always escaped me in my readings of OctoPie. I love finding a completely new perspective on something I’ve followed for a long time; given that Gran’s been releasing Eve and Hanna’s stories for more than four and a half years, finding new nuances is a real thrill.
• Readers of this page know that if there’s one thing I adore with all my heart, it’s The Abominable Charles Christopher; Karl Kerschl has poured all of his considerable skill into his epic tale of a silent ape-man for four and a half years. With Chapter Two just finished, Kerschl’s busy deciding precisely which heart-strings to tug and funny bones to tickle among his audience, and he’s filling the time with guest strips. He could scarcely have gotten a better launch strip for Guest Times than yesterday’s marvel from Yuko-and-Ananth¹, taking us back to our favorite woodland shrink for a rousing game of Dungeons and Nonviolent Interpersonal Conflict Resolution.
• Visual sighting and pre- (pre-?) order announcement on the long-awaited Choo-Choo Bear plush from the mind of Randy Milholland and the business empire of the unsighted mustelid. It’ll probably be some time next week before the (pre-?) orders go live, but more than likely they will be somewhere in the vicinity of here². From Milholland’s Tumblennouncement of the plush’s imminence:
  

  I am really, really excited right now. I’ve wanted a Choo-Choo plush to exist for about four, five years.

  Huh. That’s about … four and a half years?

• Perhaps filled with great resolve after yesterday’s Boxing Day panorama of Brownness, Box Brown announced availability of the first collected volume of Everything Dies. Given that not all of the individual ED issues are still available, and that those that are will run you $5 for 32 — 48 pages of story, the $17 that The Great Disappointment will set you back for more than 200 pages may just qualify it as the bargain of the year. Heck, this collection of beginner’s eschatology³ might be the bargain of the past four and a half years.

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¹ Notionally two separate people, but many who have met “them” in person will swear that they are in fact one hive mind, so cleanly integrated are their artistic sensibilities.

² Countdown to the first person to do something rude with a Choo-Choo Bear plush and a McPedro plush starts … now.

³ Look it up.

Got invited to be part of something potentially very cool in the 2012 timeframe; can’t wait to see how it might come to fruition. In the meantime, we have a plethora of wondrous things to share today.

• Not webcomics, don’t care — you can now get a print of John Hodgman, Deranged Millionaire and occasional arbiter of disputes. I am bringing this to your attention because it lets me share the fun fact that I played a small part in Hodgman’s efforts to obtain the ferret skeleton in that video. The dead animal supply company I pointed him towards supplied the ferret skeleton in the Ferret Skeleton Room¹. This print is officially Today’s Coolest Thing.
• No, wait, this is: the new Ryan North-penned Adventure Time comic (referenced here) will have one of the covers for its premiere issue done by Becky Dreistadt of Tiny Kitten Teeth. It’s actually become a bit of a misnomer to describe Becky as “of Tiny Kitten Teeth”, as her schedule is increasingly filled with other projects. On the one hand, less TKT and Tigerbuttah; on the other hand, she’s becoming in-demand for her prodigious skills, and it’s just a matter of time before she’s snapped up by some channel or other and put in charge of a string of highly successful animation projects. As much as we in webcomicdom know and love her work, her career is just now starting and I couldn’t be more thrilled for all of her future fame and renown.
• No, wait, maybe this is: just about four weeks in, Child’s Play ’11 is up over the US$1 million mark, which puts the collective effort since 2003 at over $US10 million. And there’s still most of a month and the always massively productive charity dinner/auction to go. Those numbers boggle the mind and humble me; I’m proud to have been a tiny fraction of that effort each year.

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¹ Hooray for helping.

So you’ve got Post-Thankful Fatigue Syndrome? Welling up with all the rage that only a holiday-season trip to the vicinity of The Mall can instill? Just be glad that you’ve got it easier that Arthur, King of Time and Space creator Paul Gadzikowski, who had cause to tweet in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving Day:

In the hospital with a heart attack. Not gonna die. More later.

Gadzikowski was able to provide more information about ten hours later, and as these things go, it turned out about as well as could be hoped for:

Had a heart attack Wednesday night. Caught it fast so effects are minimal, but it’s still a lifechanger.

Looks like I’m getting sprung from here today [Friday 25 Nov]. Not going back to work till December 5 at the earliest.

Being a webcomicker, Gadzikowski had his eye on the important priorities:

One thing this spate of adversity has taught me: keep your webcomic on a buffer.

The uncharitable might note that AKOTAS has been on a sketch-based story hiatus since the vicinity of the summer solstice, but look at that archive: updates every damn day, up to and after the infarction. I call that dedication and we at Fleen salute Gadzikowski and wish him a speedy return to normal life.

Let’s consider some things that would melt the icy displeasure of even the most PTFS-afflicated among us:

• Rosemary Mosco, who put a lot of her comicking on hold while she went to grad school, got married, little things like that, has put together an awesome print of birdsong mnemonics; hang next to her love letter to turkey vultures and her paleological/alphabetical primer. And, because today is Cyber Monday, don’t forget the TopatoCo secret cybercode.
• Continuing their trend of being supportive with cold, hard cash, the SMBC Theater Superpals have cleared the pre-order hurdle for SMBC DVD 2¹ in two days. As these are the same fans that utterly obliterated the Kickstarter goal for the new space-themed webseries, it shouldn’t be surprising that they collectively came up with two grand in a couple of days, but this was during the Thanksgiving Day craziness, with the family, and the traveling, and the pie-induced coma. So, well done, Superpals.
• Speaking of Kickstarterings launched over the Thanksgiving weekend (when nobody’s paying attention, so perhaps this slipped by you): Audra Ann Furuichi and Scott Yoshinaga did so to launch their latest nemu*nemu collection in perfect-bound full color. This one has gotten off to a slow start, which can only be explained by the general away-from-the-internet tendencies of the long weekend. Think of this book as not only entertainment, but a vaccination against dangerously infective cuteness.

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¹ Electric Jamesaloo.

Following up from yesterday — you can see the full Q interview with Kate Beaton at the CBC’s website. It’s really good.

• I was wondering why xkcd was late in posting yesterday — Randall Munroe was off on one of his enormous ass-images, this one explaining money. Seriously, almost everything you wanted to know about money, debt, taxes, expenditures is in one zoomable image¹. To make it easier to consider, said ass-image is in the xkcd store as a poster — or even better, as four posters that can be tiled together.

  This might be the most useful and informative image that Monroe’s ever done, even moreso than the radiation dose chart. Go spend an hour staring into the strange world of money, spend another two hours learning about The Giant Pool of Money, and you’ll be better informed than almost everybody you know².

• At the far opposite end of the spectrum from the Enormous Ass-Piles of Money, you have individual creators making things out of their brains and — to varying degrees — with their own hands. From David Malki ! (taking a rare moment of respite from all of his Machine of Death project-noodling) comes the latest iteration of the Wondermark calendar.

  It’s screenprinted by hand on lovely, thick paper and really reminds you what the product of limited-run, artisinal effort is like. I almost missed out on last year’s offering, but Malki ! emailed me personally to let me know he’d hold one against my order in case I’d overlooked it (which I had). NO such danger this year — my order’s already in.

• Not quite so done-directly-by-the-artist, but just as authentic an expression of individual vision: Evan Dahm is Kickstartering the one-volume edition of Order of Tales; he’s more than 35% along in his 30 day campaign since yesterday, so it’s a pretty sure thing that he’s going to make goal (with massive over-goal achievement meaning that many more copies of a really big book underfoot at Dahm’s apartment until they can get mailed out).

  The only variable is how many people will indicate that they definitely want the hardcover super-duper edition of OoT as opposed to the softcover merely-duper edition. My guess is that both editions will feature the promised foreword by living comics legend (and guy who knows about one-volume editions) Jeff Smith.

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¹ Okay, fine, he doesn’t go into the technical definitions of types of money like M1 and M2, but unless you’re my sophomore-year mandatory economics class, you probably don’t care.

² You’ll probably also change at least one of your cherished opinions along the way.

I kid, but Mr Snark was pretty well known for his dislike of infinite canvas — perhaps for the very reason that yesterday’s Octopus Pie update is so likely to not provoke his ire. It’s hard to do infinite canvas well, but when it is, when it’s necessary to get across the idea (as it is here), there’s nothing to match it. Meredith Gran remains at the top of her game, and among the very best comics artists in any channel at expressing the emotional state of her characters. I got chills reading it.

• From the Business of Comics Desk: those creators looking to hop on the Square bandwagon may have a bit of a wait to do so. The mobile-device card-processing solution went and got itself featured on Marketplace last night, which is going to broaden awareness and possibly demand for the phone-dangling card-reading dongles and the cheap merchant services that come with it. While the appeal of Square has been obvious for those that want credit-processing ability outside of traditional storefronts — show vendors and suchlike — I wouldn’t be surprised to see small businesses and restaurants doing some back-of-the-envelope figures to decide if Square wasn’t better than their current merchant account. Hopefully, any scale-up in demand won’t be accompanied by growing pains.
• Everybody remember Neil Cohn? Guy that does research into the perceptual experience of reading comics? It’s time for the latest round of surveys, so head on over The Monkey and let him know what you think. You might win stuff.
• Mysterious tweets indicate that the long-rumored next project from Brad Guigar¹, apparently with the connivance and cooperation of Chris Giarrusso. Here’s what’s obvious: the project will launch tomorrow, on the website of Emerald City Comic Con and both creators have a history of capes-related, all-ages comics. Guess we’ll all find out tomorrow.
• Last thought: proof of how TopatoCo is simultaneously subsidizing mail service in the Pioneer Valley, and also requiring extra manpower on their pickup route. A literal megabuck of postage expenditures in just over four years, and Christmas is still to come.

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¹ Sorry ladies, he’s taken.