[Edit to add: There’s supposed to be an excerpt of the OctoPie strip mentioned right below at the top of the page, but the image uploader fought with me, and once I finally got it to accept an image, it’s pulling this chop-off-in-the-middle crap. Problem occurring on multiple computers, so it’s on WordPress’s end. We’ll get that fixed as soon as we can.] Fixed. Thanks, Phillip.

When Meredith Gran posted the most recent Octopus Pie on Sunday, I’m guessing that she didn’t know she was neatly predicting how my work week would go. Interruptions, whether in the classroom or when you’re trying to get your swerve on, can either lead to an excess of politeness and dangerously narrow eyes or horrific violence¹. I’m trying to not be fired and Will’s trying to be a better person, so we breathe deep and solider on.

• Frequent readers of this page will know that I stand second to no man in my appreciation of :01 Books, who in addition to producing some of the finest graphic novels known to man also are in the webcomics biz as a sort-of publisher. It’s that latter role that I’d like to mention today, as :01 have announced the re-launch of TUNE by Derek Kirk Kim and Les McClaine (seen recently on art chores of the bonus story by Benito Cereno in the latest Dr McNinja collection). It’s an interdimensional romp full of accidental imprisonment and the eternal desire we all have to get back to our homes, plus a bit of trying to get laid. Added bonus: if you don’t like starting a new webcomic because there’s only a few updates? TUNE’s got 148 pages ready for you to read. Go get ’em.
• If you don’t like starting a webcomic that’s been around because there’s too much in the archive, Rebecca Clements (of Kinokofry, Secret Mystery Diary, BEC, and more) just launched Ruffle Hall ‘tother day, and while she’s dropping new pages like mad, it’s still in the wholly manageable dozen-or-so range. Nobody does whimsical quite like Clements; I’d go so far as to say that much like Kazu Kibuishi is channeling the spirit of Miyazaki², Clements is on occasion possessed by Dr Suess (with the disclaimer that I don’t think the good doctor was quite so much into the ladyparts, but you never know). So what happens to a pair of slightly odd characters who live in the boringest place in the entire world when they go off for adventures? Wonderful things, my friends, wonderful things.
• Continuing the Isn’t anybody dead? theme that was previously established, Pierre and Krep didn’t actually get roasted alive, and have been having a nice chat with the Mihrrgoot king and finding out that maybe the Oh, shit shoe that had to drop isn’t just that the Eebs aren’t as helpless as we thought. It may be that Our Heroes may not be as on the right side of their struggle as we thought. Facing unfathomable horrific potentialities, indeed.
• My Blam: Come up with a Googlewhack³, hours later there are at least 9 hits that result purely from the cartoon I casually mentioned it in. I call it, “Being Randall Munroe”.

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¹ For added verisimilitude, just add Wilhelm.

² Doubly impressive because Miyazaki isn’t dead and is still using his spirit.

³ “Canadian surrealist porn”

How do you feel about words? Particularly words put together to entertain, inform and/or delight? I have some to share with you today.

• First up, Chris Sims (of Comics Alliance, the Invincible Super-Blog, Awesome Hospital, and Batmanology fame) has dropped one of his excellent thinky pieces — not that I don’t love the funny stuff, like his justly-famous evisceration of Tarot #53 [as NSFW as you possibly can be], but when he’s serious, he’s as good a writer on comics as we have.

  He’s looking at the question of why comic book publishers aren’t doing webcomics to drive interest in their characters (really focusing on Marvel and DC, since one could argue that Dark Horse has had a setup similar to what he’s described via their Myspace Dark Horse Presents, despite the clunky interface), and while the issue has been discussed many places in the past (including this page), Sims has a knack for cutting through the crap.

  What he’s saying makes sense … it makes all the sense in the world, and there are executive types in executive-type offices that need to be giving his arguments serious consideration. Had Zuda [RIP] follow Sims’s model, it would still be with us and DC wouldn’t be trying the Hail Mary pass of rebooting-but-not-really their entire line.

• In other corners of the internet, Ryan North is talking with Smithsonian magazine’s online arm about … dinosaurs! Yeah, okay, not much of a surprise, topic-wise, but given that Smithsonian is probably the best general-interest magazine being produced in the US today, and given that I’m likely on the low end of the age cohort for their subscriber base, it’s a big deal. Ryan says some words about his creative process, about how his readers teach him about dinosaurs, and some very nice things about Anthony Clark’s Nedroid.
• Speaking of Nedroid, did you see the very calm (far calmer than I would have been) tweet that Clark dropped earlier today regarding a blatant act of theivery?
  

  Reminder: There is no official “Nedroid App,” and if you buy one you are getting ripped off.

  Near as I can tell (Clark, rightly, isn’t giving the perp any links and neither will I), this is in reference to an app at an unofficial iOS market that promises Nedroid Comics for the low-low price of only US$1.99, which would be awesome if it were the developer’s legal right to sell them. While we’ve has the discussion on this page in the past about what constitutes fair vs unfair development of webcomics apps, this one is way over the line.

  It’s not an RSS aggregator. It’s not a fancy skin on the browser that directs you to Clark’s site. Near as I can tell (I don’t have an iDevice, nor would I give the developer any money to test my theory), it’s an entire damn archive of Nedroid comics delivered in one big bolus to your phone. I come to this conclusion because the size of the app is helpfully listed as 136.4 MB, and there’s no damn way a non-thieving app could ever require that much space.

  A DMCA takedown request has been sent, which is good. Better would be finding out it had been honored promptly, the developer suitably chastised, and monies recovered on Clark’s behalf. But if I find that app still exists in public form in, say, 48 hours, I will gladly offer to bankroll whatever further legal measures that need to be taken to put a stop to this nonsense.

• Let’s finish with some happy news. There are words from mad genius toymaker¹ Andy Bell regarding his newest, somewhat fishy, creation. And there’s a sample panel from Chris Eliopolous of his contribution (with Mike Maihack) to a comics adaptation of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller.

  The Storyteller is a particular favorite of his very large body of work (as with a lot of Henson’s late period, it’s animatronic heavy and appealed to a young engineering geek), and the dark nature of original fairy tales (before the Brothers Grimm cleaned them up, way the hell before Disney made them safe) has always appealed to me², so I’m waiting for this one with bated breath. Urge to kill … fading³.

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¹ Or “nightmare maker”, I can never remember which.

² More thoughts on fairy tales vis-à-vis webcomics may be found here; had I been thinking when writing that piece, I would have linked the performance fleece line to this comic.

³ Except for the urge to kill some tasty fish. Mmmmm … sashimi.

Long night on the ambulance, not very awake. One piece of news: Chris Yates finished constructing Baffler! #1500, the most difficult puzzle of his career (it took the master maker/assembler a full eight days to put it together). Key stats:

• 804 pieces
• 9.92/10.0 difficulty, which Yates once told me was a logarithmic scale
• over 6 kg
• eight levels
• $1750 + shipping/handling

Yes, that’s nearly two thousand American dollars; it’s not merely a puzzle, it’s practically a piece of furniture. The Staircase is available for purchase by one lucky person starting at 4:00pm MDT (GMT-6) today; first to complete the purchase wins, everybody else is a chump.

No theme today. Sorry.

• Reminder: Anya’s Ghost, Astronaut Academy, and Level Up all release today. Reiteration: Anya’s Ghost remains the best comics I’ve read all year.
• Scott Kurtz continues to mend (and occasionally trip all the balls) from his busted rib, leading to a searing pain in his drawing arm and an impromptu guest week-or-two. It’s pretty cool, actually, because today’s guest strip pointed me back to a webcomic I discovered earlier this year, then promptly lost the link for — Frankenstein Superstar, by John Hazard. It’s still a bit too new to do a comprehensive review on, but I was upset with myself for not being able to follow its progress, and now I can. So I guess that’s a win for everybody except Scott’s ribs? Feel better soon, Scott.
• Jon Rosenberg is getting back on the webcomicking horse, combined with the caring for infant twin sons horse, and is probably pretty darned glad to have taken the visiting the infant twin sons in the PICU horse out to pasture and let it run free, never to return¹. To celebrate, he’s got a new print and t-shirt sale goin’ on (not to mention a considerable number of expenses, cf: infant twin sons).
• Words of Wisdom² from John Allison’s blog today, on the topic of how you present yourself; this one is important enough to quote at length:
  

  On more occasions than I care to count, someone has come up to me at a comic show, pressed their little photocopied effort into my hand, and said “it’s not very good”. And 49 times out of 50, I manage to stop myself saying “then why on earth should I read it”.

  Your work may not be of a professional standard, it may be loose, “sophomoric”, poorly lettered, imperfect — it may be flat out rotten — but you finished something, and if you finished one thing, you can finish another, and you will improve.

  Self-criticism is a valid exercise and a vital component of improvement. But it is not an attractive attribute to strangers.

  Out and about, on the scene, I want to see you beaming with pride that you made it out of that room with all your teeth and most of your sensibilities intact. [emphasis original]

Very little to add. If you’re the sort to judge your cartooning skills as inferior to John Allison’s, it’s not a leap to judge your social skills as being the same; you’d leap at the opportunity to follow his cartooning advice, so give his personal interaction advice a damn good listen.

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¹ Or possibly shooting that particular horse with high-yield atomic weaponry, you can never be sure, and it was a bastard of a horse anyway.

² The capital-w is warranted, as these words are very wise.

Ooof, late start today. How’s about some merch news?

• Not satisfied with merely one Book 4, Kris Straub releases two Books 4 (not to be confused with Book 8): Starslip Book 4 and Chainsawsuit Book 4 are available for your reading pleasure.
• Previously available: Gordon McAlpin (my sporting bet nemesis) has had Multiplex‘s first book, Enjoy Your Show out since September, but now it gets a bump in terms of availability. Diamond Comics (who are pretty much the sole distributor to comic shops) is listing the book in their June PREVIEWS catalog (with a “Movie Comics” theme), where it’s Staff Pick. If you’ve been meaning to grab it, mention it to your friendly local comic shop.
• From the Evil Twin, news that the $50 membership fee for WorldCon, which gets you the right to vote in the Hugo Awards, will also get you an e-copy of all the nominated works, which has a street value of $46. If you didn’t want to wait for a physical copy of the latest Schlock or Girl Genius storylines, and wanted to read about a million other words, this is the Bargain of the Century.
• Following up on yesterday’s Ryan Sohmer twitterfest: the Least I Could Do pilot project is live on Kickstarter, with a goal of US$75,000 in 60 days. Scott & Kris managed to get US$50,000 in about four days, so something tells me this is doable.
• Speaking of Canadian Ryans, Ryan North just broke the news that the Giant Squishable T-Rex is to be sold … let’s let him tell it:
  

  The NYC National History Museum will soon have these T-Rexes – http://tinyurl.com/yds6ne7 – in their store.

  I think he means the natural history museum, which would be the American Museum of Natural History, a place that I regularly frequent. Cool news. Even cooler if they can modify their penny squisher to make the T-Rex design say some thing from panel two¹.

• Finally: Steve Wolfhard. Cat Rackham book. Buy it.

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¹ Ryan, send me your address, I have something for you.

Busy evening. A t-shirt infringement was discovered, PvP went all ’50s on us, an entire Canadian election took place, and I opened my mail. Let’s take them one at a time, shall we?

• David Malki ! discovered a new low in design rip-offery, as an online storefront by the name of Tanga.com [no link for them!] not only appropriated two of his designs, they actually duplicated the descriptive ad copy word for word.

  Words fail me. You could almost argue independently coming up with the same gag concept, but that? That’s just lazy. Mr Malki ! recounted the sad affair via Tumblr, and went further to talk about what makes for a good implementation of ideas on shirts vs a bad implementation. I think it’s essential reading, as it gets pretty much to the core of what makes references to popular culture more or less worthy; key points:

  Why is this a big deal? Artists, myself included, make pop-culture references in our work all the time, and borrow ideas from other artists shamefully. Sometimes I do both at once — using artwork I didn’t draw to make jokes about a movie I didn’t create.

  Largely, it’s the difference between imitation and commentary.

  [one vendor’s] tees provoke a feeling of identification in the viewer, while [another’s] tees provoke a feeling of discovery.

  As a culture, we typically place a premium on creativity and integrity. That’s why it delights us when a creator makes something clever and new, but offends us when someone copies the work of another and profits unfairly from it.

  We may not really care that the shirt saying “I like turtles” isn’t fundamentally saying anything except “I’ve seen an internet video.” And the designer of the shirt isn’t making any creative statement beyond “Have you seen an internet video? Buy this shirt, then.”

  Do I think it’s fair to take Futurama clips and recut them into a shot-by-shot remake of The Godfather? Yes, I do. I think it’s interesting and it’s creative and it advances the culture. Do I think you should be able to sell a DVD of that? I think that decision should be left to the Futurama rights holder, who may feel that it damages the commercial prospects for their own original work — but if they don’t feel that way, or (in a perfect world) if it wouldn’t at all affect the commercial prospects for the original work, I say go for it.

  What I do find distasteful is a disregard of the rights of others for a purely profit motive. That, I think, should be stamped out when it occurs for the benefit of a creative culture generally. Artists need to feel that they can be free to create and put their work out there without fear of being ripped off. If ripoff artists are rewarded, or even just ignored, then artists suffer.

  I’m glad that our knee-jerk reaction to seeing a ripoff is to call it out and shame it. I think we’re right to feel proud of someone coming up with a new idea, or creating a new combination of old ideas, but bored or sickened by the same old lazy references being regurgitated for profit. Don’t tolerate it! Having high standards pushes the culture forward faster.

  As I am writing this, Malki ! is reporting that Tanga removed his ad copy (how nice of them) and have purged critical comments on the matter from their site. At this time, he is actively receiving communications from them, and if any new information comes to light prior to publication, we’ll go back to it.

• Scott Kurtz continues with his exploration of the golden age of strip cartooning by doing this week’s LOLBAT strips in 1950s Raymond/Toth/Drake style, which makes me glad that I plunk down a couple of bucks every other month to buy Dave Sim’s Glamourpuss. In between the plentiful shots of crazypants rambling, Sim explores the technical aspects of art from that era of cartooning, and it’s been an education to learn both how those master artists worked, and how hard it is to draw in that idiom successfully. Kurtz is never better than when he’s stretching himself, and this is a heck of a stretch. I’m loving it.
• So yeah — most every Canadian I know is via the world of [web]comicking, and they seem to be pretty unanimously gutted about Harper getting his majority back. It’s completely lamesauce, and I hope that those of you going to TCAF from these southerly climes will buy one of your hosts (in the sense that all of Canada is your host) a stiff drink so that they can medicate away the pain. You know that some of the TCAF programming is actually in a bar, right? Your gesture of solidarity could hardly be more easily accomplished.
• About three weeks back, I had the occasion to remark via twitter on one of Paul Taylor’s original art auctions — specifically, the auction of the art for a strip a month earlier that had featured in a recent write-up of how he handled some particularly dark material in Wapsi Square. I didn’t get it, but hey — that’s life.

  Except that I did. Right after the auction closed, a reader (coincidentally also named Paul) emailed to say that he had both won the auction and noted my interest in the piece, and wanted to send it to me. Five-plus years into this opinion-mongering experiment, I’m still taken aback when people I haven’t met tell me that they find my blogging to be informative and/or entertaining.

  To actually receive a gift from a reader in this fashion (as I did yesterday) leaves me utterly gobsmacked — especially since the gift-giver isn’t promoting anything or seeking attention for his own creative efforts. It’s enough to make my low and suspicious heart grow three sizes today. So thanks to Paul, and to everybody that’s ever told me they like what I do here; it’s appreciated more than I could ever adequately express.

Many things today:

• The Hugo Award nominations are out and as expected, Schlock Mercenary (by Howard Tayler, aka my evil twin) and Girl Genius (by Phil and Kaja Foglio aka the most charming people in the world) both have print collections up for Best Graphic Story. It’s worth noting that Tayler is also nominated in the Best Related Work catgory for Writing Excuses, a podcast that he produces with Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells.

  Rounding out the webcomics-related activity, Randall Munroe has been nominated as Best Fan Artist, which seems an odd fit, but it’s apparently been a category with a history of odd fits so that’s all right. Those with memberships (excepting the “Child” category) to the World Science Fiction Convention (this year in the form of Renovation in Reno Nevada) are entitled to vote on the winners, to be presented in August. Fleen congratulates the webcomicky nominees.

• Blank Label gets a little larger today as Gordon McAlpin (aka my sporting bet nemesis) brings Multiplex into the fold. In terms of visual style, storytelling style, and update schedule, this seems like a nice, complementary fit for BLC’s current members, Kel McDonald, Spike, and David Willis. Welcome aboard, Gordon.
• I see on my regularly-consulted 2011 edition of the Wondermark calendar that today marks the 8th birthday of Wondermark. One wonders if such an odd confluence of inputs — Victorian era woodcut art, David Malki !’s persistently clever wordplay (with the occasional foray into sac ants for variety), and a sense of go-for-broke creativity — could have been predicted to persist for so long and to have birthed opportunities for so many side projects. Curiously, no mention of this milestone appears on the Wondermark site, presumably because Malki ! is too busy putting together the last elements of tomorrow’s Machine of Death Live Stage Spectacular.
• We’re down to less than three hours until the second set of Chris Yates original webcomics-series Baffler! puzzles go on sale. This week’s haul includes an adorable kitty by Becky Dreistadt, ninjas by Sam Logan, and entirely SFW Chester by Jess Fink, a leapin’ McPedro by Danielle Corsetto, a typically bulgy-eyed pug by Dave Kellett, a pixel T-Rex by Ryan North, and an all-business Sheriff Pony by Jeff Rowland, all of which may be seen here. My favorite part? The cactus-shaped piece (a Yates trademark) in the McPedro puzzle. They go on sale today at 4:00pm Mountain Time (UTC-6) at the Baffler! store.
• Pre-orders are up for Zach Weiner’s first SMBC collection, Save Yourself, Mammal!. Given more than 2000 strips in the SMBC archive and this being the first collection of said strips, it’s of necessity taking a best-of approach. Which means that you’ll find no eh, it was okay strips included just because they fell in the same week as a couple of real rib-ticklers (the non-continuity aspects of SMBC make this fairly easy to do).

  As previously noted, 100% of the profits from SY,M will go to Donors Choose to fund classrooms across the US and help support the development of the next generation of tech nerds; what I didn’t see mention of before is that the book is being released under a Creative Commons license (specifically, Noncommercial 3.0 Unported), and that given the books have to be ready for the launch party in just under two weeks, your pre-ordered copy should ship starting a mere two weeks from today. All hail Weiner and the mad geniuses behind breadpig, because they know how to get things done.

Logistical note: work will, for the next couple of days, take me to the premises of a large financial institution that shall remain nameless¹ and which will provide me no net access aside from what I eke out on my phone. Minimal, severely delayed, or entirely absent updates are anticipated, and we at Fleen thank you in advance for your patience.

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¹ But the name rhymes with scold man; snacks, which sounds like notes that could be expanded into a pretty interesting update in a story-oriented comic, possibly Skin Horse.

Meredith Gran, at the Pizza Island panel, in response to the question, “How will the studio defend itself in the zombie apocalypse?” — I’m gonna die.

I trust that puts all of the zombie nonsense to bed once and for all. What else can we learn from this year’s MoCCA Festival?

• It’s easy to spend a lot of money on good stuff. In the photo up there, one may find mini-comics by Box Brown (Everything Dies 4, 5, and 6), Sophie Goldstein (her work apart from Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell is simultaneously more moody and more lighthearted, with one mini dealing with the pitiful few survivors of a global holocaust, the other with a mildly disgruntled cat), Kel McDonald (partnering with Marie de France to do a take on a fairy tale of the sort that used to exist prior to Grimm and Disney prettying them up — secrets, betrayals most foul, and righteous vengeance involving a de-nosing) and the NERD Comics collective (on the theme of Darwin).

  One may also find books by Sylvan Migdal (Curvy 1 and 2), Collen AF Venable & Stephanie Yue (Guinea PI: Pet Shop Detective 3), and Evan Dahm (Order of Tales 3). One may additionally find prints from Kate Beaton, Meredith Gran, and Yuko Ota & Ananth Panagariya, along with a small piece of evidence that I am fated to die by TRUCK. That’s right, David Malki ! had an actual MACHINE OF DEATH into which I willingly placed my hand and received my fate.

• Nearly all of the above (as well as those without wares that I had not yet purchased) spoke of what’s coming up — Migdal’s new comic will feature a Victorian lady dealing with planet-destorying space opera; Malki ! spoke about the expected rush of audition tapes for the rapidly-approaching MoD live stage show; Dahm spoke about the scope and scale of his current storyline (Vattu will be larger than any Overside story yet seen), as did Latin Art-Throb Aaron Diaz (Dark Science will be longer than Hob, but not ridiculously so).

  Ota & Panagariya may be announcing a very interesting print in the future, so keep your eyes peeled for that. The newly-free Frank Gibson promised numerous amazing projects with Tiny Kitten Teeth (and life) partner Becky Dreistadt. Scott C is busily brainstorming new Showdowns every day, and Tracy White and I had nice talk about How I Made It To Eighteen.

• You meet the nicest people at these things; waiting in line for the Pizza Island panel, I met a charming young man named Zach who will shortly be launching a new webcomic that sounds intriguing, and may have a niche to itself. Think Bryant Paul Johnson’s now-wrapped Teaching Baby Paranoia, only actually true. Alternately, think documentary, but shorter and less investigatory than Darryl Cunningham‘s muckraking (and I use that word in the most complimentary sense).

All in all, quite a lot for one day. What else is going on in webcomics today?

• Long run: Achieved! Chris Daily’s Striptease (which bears the distinction of being the first webcomic whose creator I ever met, waaaay back at the first MoCCA Festival, speaking of closed circles) hit 1000 strips today. Ten and a half years (more or less), radically changed art styles, a cross-country move, a collaboration on a second strip (itself more than four years old at this point) and a marriage can’t keep the true-hearted webcomicker down. Well done, Chris.
• Return: Achieved! Karen Ellis’s long-hiatused Planet Karen (fewer than a half-dozen updates since November of 2009) popped back today, with the promise of maybe more strips in the future? PK had been one of my favorite autobio webcomics, and I do hope Ellis is able to find the time to keep up with it.
• Free Stuff: Achieved! Dave Kellett’s self-published Sheldon collection, Literature: Unsuccessfully Competing Against TV Since 1953 (which you may have heard got an Eisner nod last week), probably isn’t in as many hands as some of its competition for Best Humor Publication, so Kellett’s making it easy for Eisner voters to read. Got a data connection? Got 12 MB of free drive space? Voting in the Eisners? Then download a PDF of Literature here so that you can give it due consideration.

  I’m guessing that there’s no way for the download server to know who’s actually an Eisner voter and who isn’t, so Kellett’s essentially giving his book away for the next couple of weeks (there’s precedent, as when Ursula Vernon was nominated for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition back in 2006, Digger was subscription-unlocked to allow voters to examine her work). If you’re taking advantage of the freebie and like what you see, won’t you consider buying a copy? I’m sure Dave (and his young daughter, who likes things like food and shelter) would thank you.

Well, since Zach Weiner first tweeted the URL yesterday, I’ve been digging my way through the archvies of Les and May , which has a somewhat pokey design and takes a while to show the next strip. Les and May is the creation of Larry Lewis, has been updating Monday through Friday for most of the last year without fail, and is Lewis’s second major comic strip project. The first was called Campus Clatter and ran for about seven years, wrapping up in 1976 in the face of competition from Doonesbury.

Did I mention that Larry Lewis is 82 years old? That he started drawing cartoons twenty years before I was born? That after doing advertising, commercial art and editorial cartoons in various forms from the ’50s until 2002, he retired but never lost the itch?

I have two suggestions for future comical-type conventions:

1. Put Larry Lewis and Malachai Nicolle on a panel together.
2. Make him the Guest of Honor at the next iteration of Classoline Alley.

Lewis is a living conduit to how comics were, and he’s working on the internet for the same reason that so many other webcomickers started (and so many still do): because he loves drawing, and wants to share his work with an audience. I’ve got nothing to add other than Bravo.

• In other news, the extraordinarily popular Lookouts side project at Penny Arcade has grown into its next incarnation. Namely, board game/RPG hybrid. Cryptozoic Entertainment have done the design work, and with a release date of “early next year”, I’d be surprised if there were not a playable version at PAX Prime this summer. This one looks gorgeous.

Long-time readers of this page may recall the name of Olaf Moriarty Solstrand, which ranks as possibly the best name to come up on this page — it’s just impossibly badass. In fact, if Solstrand and fellow Norwegian Øyvind Thorsby were to create a metal band, they would be halfway to success just on the basis of their names alone. But Solstrand has more to contribute than just a great name; you may recall his 100 Ideas in 100 Days initiative, his master’s thesis on the social dimensions of webcomics [Norwegian text], or his scripting of Disney’s Donald Duck comics. Today, he’s come back to us with data from an experiment on usability:

As part of the progress of coding a webcomic portal (not available anywhere in English yet), I decided to do some cheap usability testing on a couple of existing webcomic portals to figure out what conventions exist and how people use these websites. So I went to UserTesting.com (excellent website, by the way) and set up a user test where I asked the participants to go to DrunkDuck.com and ComicGenesis.com — which I assume are the two really big amateur webcomic portals out there — and do a couple of simple tasks (the most important one, “find a comic that looks interesting”).

Solstrand’s results are narrow (three testers took him up on the challenge, but consistent: three testers that don’t read webcomics at all found Drunk Duck easy to search and navigate, and Comic Genesis difficult. Certainly, a more directed task would be helpful (for example, how accurate are the filter categories on Drunk Duck?), but more in-depth investigation isn’t necessarily Solstrand’s priority (after all, they aren’t his websites). The videos make for must-see viewing (if you’re in charge of user experience for either of those portals), or at least an interesting curiosity (if you’re anybody else). As always, we at Fleen thank Solstrand for his research.

In other news, there are a number of talented creators that are looking for reader involvement of financial natures. Let’s run ’em down, shall we?

• By now, everybody in the world (and their dog) has undoubtedly heard about Evan Dahm‘s Kickstarter campaign to fund the second printing of Rice Boy. Not only is Rice Boy Dahm’s signature work, it’s one of the best graphic novels of the past decade; furthermore, if we help Dahm replace the rapidly-dwindling stocks, it will undoubtedly mean he’s got the financial wherewithal to keep with his comic making, just as Vattu has reached a critical point.

  Heck, while you’re at it, make sure to pick up the recently-released Order of Tales, book 3 while you’re at it (I’ll be getting mine at MoCCA or whichever show Dahm does next, as I like purchasing in person from him).

• Also on the world+dog list: praise for Daniel Lieske‘s Wormworld Saga, which you may recall debuted on Christmas Day and instantly captivated all who read it. Lieske dropped me an email with news of his own plans:
  

  You reported about the Wormworld Saga in the past so you might be inclined to help spread the news about the big leap I’m currently making by collecting funds for the creation of a Wormworld Saga App. I’m really trying to tackle this thing the independent way. It’s exciting times!

  Exciting times, indeed. Let me quote from the two most important bits of Lieske’s Kickstarter pitch:

  It took me the whole year 2010 to create the first chapter of the Wormworld Saga. I’m working on the project in the evenings besides my day job as a computer games artist. I time-tracked every single minute that went into the creation of the first chapter and I know for sure that I would be able to create 4 chapters a year if I could quit my job and work full time on the graphic novel.

  and

  The app is NOT meant to replace the free online version of the Wormworld Saga graphic novel. I firmly believe in “freeconomics” and the Wormworld Saga app is designed to be a premium content for true fans of the project.

  So go visit and decide if you can help or not; Lieske’s work is beautiful, and the prospect of four chapters a year (chapter 1 is 36 screenfulls, and each screenfull is about a page) would mean a hell of a lot of good comics get made.

• Lastly, no Kickstarter this time, just an appeal to help clear out some existing stock so that new stuff can be made. Chris Yates makes photocomics and the finest wooden jigsaw puzzles on the planet. Today, word came that the scrollsaw that he uses to make those puzzles gave up the ghost and will have to be replaced. We’ll make this simple: no scrollsaw, no new Bafflers!

  I can speak personally to the quality of Yates’s work (having commissioned three Bafflers, and been blown away each time), so if you think that him (and his able assistant, Dan, a stellar fellow in his own right) being idle is a criminal waste of talent, browse through his store and see if you like anything there. Every purchase brings us closer to the day his mind-bending flights of fancy can be made solid once more.