So much exciting news today, you guys. So very, very much.

• The Race Is On! The first four Scott C paintings (cf: here) have been released into the wild, and residents of Monterey, New York, somewhere in London I guess, and Toronto have been scrambling to find the treasure.

  Follow C’s twitterfeed to learn which ones have been claimed (there was a person that missed the Ghostbusters painting by seven minutes, but got to meet Mr C as a bonus), and keep an eye on Slashfilm and Great Showdowns for the rest of the week to learn about the remaining 21 paintings up for grabs.

• The Reviews Are In! Jorge Cham’s second tie-in movie — titled The PhD Movie 2, appropriately enough — has garnered its first major-media review in the pages of the New York Times. Okay, it’s the Education section, not the film section, and it’s less a review, more of an abstract, but when was the last time something you wrote got quoted in the Times, Mr or Ms Smartypants? For the record, I’m not a postdoc and I sound Statistically speaking, you’re three times more likely to get cancer than you are to get a grant funded by the NIH to cure cancer to be pretty damn amusing.
• The Wait Is Killing Me! Nick Trujillo made an impression in his too-short time in competition on Strip Search; he romped all over the immunity challenges for the first couple of days before being double-eliminated with Mackenzie Schubert on Day 4 and, uh, spoilers for a web series that ran more than two years ago.

  Nick’s getting ready to launch a brand new comic sometime today, but first he’s busy letting us all know he’s got to do work stuff and leaving us hanging for the time being which is building up the anticipation and attention. Well played, Trujillo, congratulations for getting us to fall into your little trap.

• Aaaaahhhhh! Fat Pony plushes are now available for purchase. I repeat, a niece who loved the crap out of The Princess and the Pony at her birthday is going to really enjoy Christmas. She’s a bit young to worry about things like what day of the week it is, but if you need a calendar for 2016, Beaton and the Pony have you covered there, too.

Spam of the day:

Looking for the ultimate way to experience GIANTS Software’s blockbuster Farming Simulator 2015 Gold Edition?

You guys, this is amazing. It’s less spam and more press release, but some company thinks that farm equipment driving simulation games are going to be so massively popular that they have produced a specialized controller bundle that goes for US$299. They want to send me a review unit.

Must be the incipient Halloween, when the dead walk, but we’ve got some revivals to mention today.

Let us note that a new A Softer World may be found today, on the topic of Halloween. Second, the Cartoon Art Museum (which, as we noted recently, is not so much gone as couch-surfing until it finds its own place again) announced that it will be at a new Disney fan event, Mouse-Con, on 15 November in Concord, CA.

But the big news is twofold.

Firstly, the long-hiatused Achewood sees a return of sorts today. Specifically, the Achewood in-character blogs, which have been on hiatus more than two years¹, see a new post from Peter “Nice Pete” Cropes². It is a meditation on life, death, the passage of time, Meyer lemon curd, and gluten-free pastry. It is the best thing that you could possibly read today, unless you scrolled down through Nice Pete’s archives to rediscover his thoughts on the topic of Rachael Ray.

And secondly, that Homestar Runner’s annual Halloween cartoon is out and — as usual — the costumes are excellent as well as being deep cuts. I’d say my favorite is probably Homestar himself as [spoiler — see below the cut], The Cheat as [spoiler], or The Poopsmith as [spoiler].

Happy Halloween (early), don’t forget to turn your clocks back this weekend (USA only) and remember to change the batteries in your smoke detectors. See you all on Monday.

Spam of the day:

Dear Sir/Ma, September 2015 Invoice is yet to be paid and we are sending you a reminder. Attached is September Invoice #7446-483 kindly review and have this settled.

That’s odd, I don’t remember doing business with an anonymous company in Lithuania. Let me just click on this completely innocuous document link so I can clear this up!

_______________
¹ Last strip update: 7 April 2014. Last blog updates: Emeril, 12 May 2006; Lil’ Nephew and Lyle, 4 May 2008; Molly, 29 July 2008; Ray, 12 December 2008; Cornelius Bear, 4 April 2009; Pat, 6 April 2009; Téodor, 16 July 2012; Roast Beef, 25 October 2013.

² Nice Pete last updated on 6 October 2013.

(more…)

For those with lesser tolerances for the spooky stuff, things become less scarifying as you read down.

• Kris Straub is, as I write this, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, headed towards Melbourne and the about-to-occur PAX iteration therein. He’s also just left behind what I an assume is the leading edge of entirely deserved praise for the best contribution to the spirit of the spooky season I’ve seen this year, in the form of a few wobbly images, a couple dozen lines of text, and some deeply unsettling ambient sounds.

  The overnight crew at Channel 58 is not having a good night; something odd is going on, it may well be affecting the entire world and we see only the most local interpretation of events that may be beyond rational comprehension. The … the changes happen in front of us, as two entirely distinct interpretations of what it means to be safe and whole compete for the attention of a vanishingly small audience; those who are asleep are either safe or beyond help, and none of us knows which.

  Straub’s a master of showing no more than is absolutely necessary to get across his message, and this particular nightmare says/shows far less than it could, to terrific — I use that word in its most precise sense — effect. The questions that flood us over the course of a few minutes are more frightening than anything we could have been told/shown; Straub’s made our own imaginations an active co-conspirator in the scares.

  Local58.info — both address and, presumably, title — is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in the past three years not drawn by Emily Carroll, and a perfect tonal match for her work. It’s exactly what this Halloween season — what every Halloween season — needs to achieve maximum creepitude. Bravo.

• For those not yet sufficiently creeped out, may I point you towards a new project? Adam Tierney (words) and Matthieu Cousin (pictures) have a Kickstarter up for a clever book that you can share with young ‘uns that enjoy the spine-shiver of a good, safe scare. Specifically, they’re putting together an A-to-Z book of 26 one-page illustrations and 26 one-page stories dealing with 26 phobias.

  Afraid of Everything calls to mind an old Peanuts punchline , and you can get a good feel for just how wide-ranging those fears can be by checking out a free 10 page/5 fear preview. The phobic panopticon has cleared a bit more than 50% in its first five days, and is well on track to clear its (exceedingly modest) US$6000 goal in the four weeks remaining. Check ‘er out.

• Ryan Estrada’s Broken Telephone has been mentioned on this page previously, and as the six-interwoven-stories-with-eighteen-creative-teams epic approaches the 2/3s point of its yearlong run, it’s been catching more attention. Today, for instance, it’s the lead comic in The AV Club’s weekly comic roundup, in the company of the likes of the latest :01 Books entry and Usagi freakin’ Yojimbo. If you haven’t been reading Broken Telephone, you should be, and now it’s not just me that’s telling you that.

Spam of the day:

Hey! New message, please read.
El software de antivirus Avast ha analizado este correo electrónico en busca de virus.

Oh! Well, if you tell me that an antivirus program has scanned your spam email and the link you’re sending is http://[redacted].com/safe, then of course it must be fine for me to click through!

A story making the rounds about possibly finding evidence of constructed objects around a distant star has already prompted a thousand SF story hooks, but only one of them is in the hands of a man not afraid to get a .horse domain. I welcome you all to: dord.horse, long may the conversation run.

In other news:

• It’s been about a year since the crowdfunding for an Android version of Comic Chameleon, the mobile webcomic integrator that a) doesn’t suck and b) isn’t a scraper because c) it’s done with the permission of the creators and thus d) pays them. I got to play with a beta version a while back (it was a different phone on a very old release of Android and had some quirks, but was basically solid), and now you can play with the official thing, because Comic Chameleon for Android drops in the Google Play store today.

  I’m really looking forward to digging in with an up to date phone and seeing how it does. Should make getting out of bed in the morning much easier. Thanks to Bernie Hou (of Alien Loves Predator, topic of one of my favorite pieces I’ve written here at Fleen) and his team for all the hard work.

• The National Book Award finalists were announced on NPR’s Morning Edition today, and I was particularly thrilled to hear one shortlist nominee in particular: Nimona not only got mentioned, but was one of the few books that came in for a full discussion from an impromptu panel.

  Unlike NPR’s Glen Weldon, I had no qualms about how it would translate from web to print, but like him and NPR’s Barrie Hardymon, I’m thrilled by its inclusion, and by the depth of Nimona’s story re: how girls get treated. Here’s hoping that Noelle Stevenson gets to give a little speech in a few weeks, and here’s hoping even more she closes with I’M A SHARK AAAAHH.

• Delilah Dirk is making her return, and she’s starting in webcomic form. In the run-up to next year’s print release, the first 90 pages will be serialized online, starting from chapter one, oh, today-ish.

  Four pages a week from Delilah Dirk and the King’s Shilling will go up until March, then we get to read the rest of the story in a glorious single chunk when we all go buy it. We’re all going to go buy it, right? Damn right we are. Tony Cliff’s lost none of his storytelling chops since the release of Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant, and now we all get to enjoy them together.

• Apropos of nothing: that time Emperor Palpatine and Sauron met to bitch about their enemies and deaths. It’s hilarious.

Spam of the day:

You’re so cute.

Damn right I am. I’m friggin’ adorable.

Where to start, where to start?

• How about with the elephant¹ in the Bethsda Marriott hotel ballroom, where it was noticed that the famed bricks that represent the Ignatz Awards all went to women. Before any arrested man-children start bawling their delicious, delicious tears that this is everything wrong with feminazis ruing comics and making things nobody wants to read, they would do well to remember:
  1. The Ignatzen are voted on by everybody attending SPX, which attracts a sizable and diverse crowd.
  2. The nominees range from low-circulation minicomics to critically- popularly-acclaimed works that have large print runs and are obtainable in any bookstore in the country.
  3. Nothing about this prevents you from continuing to read your masturbatory power fantasies, so quit acting like this is a zero-sum game².

  Looking back at the nominations, for instance, I failed to notice that of the five of the nominees in the Outstanding Online Comic, none identify explicitly as male³. A quick scan of the other categories show that women made up pretty much 50% of all the nominations (40% here, 60% there, some teams and group efforts make attempts at calculation necessarily inexact; I’ll note that Promising New Talent was 80% ladies).

  Still, there’s a long way to go from a hell of a gender-balanced slate of nominees to it’s Ladies Night in Comictown, and the simplest explanation is that this year, the work that spoke most to the audience happened to be made by women in each case. So congratulations to Emily Carroll, Eleanor Davis, Sophie Goldstein (×2), Jillian Tamaki, Sophia Foster-Dimino (×3), and Lilli Carré.

• It’s pretty much inarguable that one of the most important tools in the business plan of a web/indy-comics creator (or creator of any sort) is crowdfunding, and that the dominant platform in that space is Kickstarter. So it’s pretty damn encouraging to see that the people that run Kickstarter are in no hurry to run up the valuation, float an IPO, cash out with a dumptruck full of money, and watch from the sidelines as the need to make tech-bubble levels of profit screws over the user base.

  In fact, they’ve just made that worst-case outcome pretty much impossible, and they’ve got the legal structure to enforce it:

  Kickstarter Inc is no more. We’re now Kickstarter PBC — a Public Benefit Corporation. We’re thrilled to share this news, and we’d love to take a minute to tell you exactly what it means.

  Until recently, the idea of a for-profit company pursuing social good at the expense of shareholder value had no clear protection under U.S. corporate law, and certainly no mandate. Companies that believe there are more important goals than maximizing shareholder value have been at odds with the expectation that for-profit companies must exist ultimately for profit above all.

  Benefit Corporations are different. Benefit Corporations are for-profit companies that are obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders. Radically, positive impact on society becomes part of a Benefit Corporation’s legally defined goals. [empahsis mine]

  That’s from an email that you probably received if you’ve ever dealt with Kickstarter, or you could read the story at the New York Times if you prefer. If you want to see how Kickstarter is interpreting their positive social impact, you can read their PBC charter here.

  Interestingly, the Kickstarter board is going extra-strong on the public benefit and transparency. The PBC structure requires them to report every other year on how they meet their charter’s goals, but they’ve also defined themselves as a B Corporation; that’s a voluntary designation that requires annual reports on their social goals, as well as some fairly rigorous environmental standards. What it all amounts to is that the people in charge of Kickstarter not only recognize what made it a success, they want to preserve it rather than abandoning it to unchecked capitalist exploitation. Good for them, and good for all of us.

• And for those of you that like geeky things and leave the house occasionally, Jorge Cham has some news for you:
  

  It’s #ThePHDMovie2 premiere week! Pass it on! >20 screenings this week including @CERN @DukeU and more: http://phdcomics.com/movie/#screenings

  Doesn’t look like any of those screenings will be at TopatoCon, but given that it appears that Cham will be conducting a Q&A and signing at CERN in that time frame, I suppose we can forgive him. Just one request for everybody working the LHC, though: if you want to show off for Jorge, please don’t do so by pressing the Big Red Button that says Generate Black Hole, Suck Earth In. Thanks.

Spam of the day:

Hello pecker 8-) i need s3x right now i’m not picky!!

“[N]ot picky”? Are … are you negging me? Am I getting the same approach that MRA dipshits think works on women?

______________
¹ Fun fact: elephant society is matriarchal in nature; the females that have lived the breadth of life’s experiences are what holds the culture together. I’m sure this has absolutely nothing to do with anything we’re talking about today.

² One might address a parallel thought towards those that are bitching about Viola Davis’s speech at the Emmys last last night.

³ One, Ariel Ries of Witchy, uses the pronoun they; the others describe themselves in bios using explicitly female pronouns or depict themselves in their comics as women.

Three things that I want to bring to your attention today. Honestly, no one of them is any less important than another, so let’s just dive in.

• The Cartoon Art Museum may be closing the doors of its present location in a couple of weeks, but they’re not closing for good. Furthermore, they’re going to engage in their mission of making the cartoon arts available to the widest possible audience until the very last minute. To that end, please note that they have named their cartoonist-in-residence for the (abbreviated) month, and it’s Ben Collison. He’ll be presenting on Thursday, 3 September, from 2:00pm to 5:30pm at CAM on his techniques for making comics with ink and coffee (attention: R Stevens). And now to 12 September, CAM is having a moving sale, with nearly everything in their store’s stock going for 20% – 40% off sticker price. Anybody in San Francisco should drop by 655 Mission Street and browse, or just give them your best regards.
• This page keeps a weather eye on the New York Times Best Seller List for graphic novels, and notes with approval that the latest iteration of same is still 50% occupied by Raina Telgemeier, but also notes a surprise in the #10 slot. Debuting on the NYTBSL is Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, which readers of this page may remember was reviewed by Fleen when it debuted nine years ago. It’s unexpected, but that I got to thinking — just as MAUS and Persepolis make reappearances on the list about this time of year every year as school resumes and they become part of the curriculum, it appears that American Born Chinese is becoming part of the canon and being studied.

  Yang’s no stranger to the NYTBSL, but I imagine it’s a great feeling to see his first, most autobiographical work finally recognized. Also, there’s the whole bit where the Times didn’t have a Best Seller List for graphic novels when American Born Chinese was released, as it undoubtedly would have sat on the list for a good long while otherwise. In any event, congrats to Yang for what’s got to be a heartwarming return to the school year, and watch this space for the inevitable news that Secret Coders (due for release in four weeks) has been added to the NYTBSL.

• This page also keeps an eye on Kickstarter campaigns and the management thereof. I’m pleased to note that on Saturday, the very best writeup of how to plan the financial end of a campaign — the so-called Kickstarter Math — that I’ve ever seen was released to the world. And it’s not for a webcomic, or a comic-comic. Marian Call, singer, songwriter, adventurer, bon vivante, and life partner of the repeatedly-mentioned-on-this-blog Pat Race, has a Kickstart going on right now to release her next album, which is down to the last two days. She’s well over goal and into stretch territory, and a big part of that is the planning that she put into the crowdfunding effort. Go read her post right now if you’ve ever thought about Kickstarting anything, particular the bit about modeling multiple levels of success and running a full set of numbers for each.

  Or possible do that a little later, as it appears that her host is down at the moment, possibly due to the twin loads of people rushing to give her money (she runs a sponsorship program in addition to Kickstarts) and to absorb her wisdom. Oh, and listen to (and buy!) her music, because she’s got a hell of a voice, a great sense of what makes a good song, and can channel everybody from Bowie to the Brothers Chaps.

Spam of the day:

This Test Shows How You’re Going to Die

I already know how I’m going to die. TRUCK.

Tuesday as busy day? Very odd.

• We start, as we have done with increasing frequency over the past five months or so, with TopatoCon, on account of they keep announcing stuff. Today it’s fact that ticket sales are now live and the preliminary programing schedule is now up.

  There are some unfortunate conflicts in the schedule, such as Saturday afternoon when the Let’s Drink About It guys will be talking cocktails (oooh!) at the same time that Christopher Hastings will be leading a workshop on writing sketch comedy. This is tragic, because Hastings is a creative mixer of drinks and would greatly enjoy the LDAI session, but one can’t have everything (I’ll go there on your behalf, Chris, promise).

  It’s also ironic that on Sunday afternoon, there will be discussion with Wes Citti and Tony Wilson about how to Play Nice With Others at the same time that David Malki !, Spike, Kate Leth, and Randy Milholland will be talking about how Internet People are basically dicks who’ve forgotten how to Play Nice With Others.

• Speaking of small conventions heavy with indie-type creators, SPX have announced the Ignatz Award Nominations for 2015, and there are a couple of names that stand out. Specifically, Jillian Tamaki is all over the damn thing (and deservedly so), with nominations for Outstanding Artist, Outstanding Anthology or Collection (both for SuperMutant Magic Academy), and Outstanding Story (“Sex Coven”, from Frontier #7).

  Other webcomics types include Emily Carroll for Outstanding Artist (Through the Woods), Sophie Goldstein¹ for Outstanding Graphic Novel and Outstanding Comic (both for The Oven), and Box Brown for Outstanding Anthology or Collection (An Entity Observes All Things). The category of Outstanding Online Comic itself has nominees

  • Lilli Carre, The Bloody Footprint
  • Lauren Weinstein, Carriers
  • Rebecca Roher, Mom Body
  • Blue Delliquanti, O Human Star
  • Ariel Ries, Witchy

  Best of luck to all the nominees. The Ignatz Awards will be presented at SPX, 19 September, in Bethesda, Maryland.

• Speaking of longtime webcomickers who are looking to spend more time making webcomics and less time at the day job (okay, we weren’t, but work with me), David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) is about to join your ranks. Having spent more than a dozen years making more than a dozen comics with literally an infinite number of updates, Morgan-Mar has decided that the drudgery and unrewarding nature of the day job² is less fun that making comics and other creative things, and you can help make it possible:
  

  News: Hey folks, I have good news! I have talked with my manager and HR department at work, and confirmed that I can reduce my working hours to 9 days per fortnight. That means I could spend one full day every two weeks making more creative stuff!

  But I have a mortgage and bills to pay, and am very risk averse. So I have posted a goal of raising US$750 a month on Patreon to partly offset my resulting loss in income. If I can reach this goal, I will make this move and dedicate a day every fortnight to making more comics, books, podcasts, videos, and other cool stuff. This will include raising the number of new Irregular Webcomic! strips to 4 per week.

  And if I can get to the dream goal of $1500 a month, I can quit my day job one day per week, and Irregular Webcomic! will return to a full 7 new strips per week. Spread the word! And please consider supporting my Patreon. Thank you to all of you

  For reference, Morgan-Mar is presently at just under US$450/month, or 60% of the way to goal. And honestly, if there’s anybody that should be able to be a full-time creative, it’s Morgan-Mar. The dude’s got more ideas per cm³ than anybody else on the planet. I can’t wait to see what he can come up with when he can spend full days on his ideas instead of a stolen hour or two.

• Kickstarts? Kickstarts! Alina Pete is doing a card game based on the concept of the tarot, sitting about 18.5% of goal as she comes into the back third of the campaign time. This one needs a big bump if it’s gonna get made. On the other end of the spectrum, Ryan Sohmer is looking to make three books of Least I Could Do and is about 35% of the way to goal since launching yesterday. The Fleen Funding Formula (mk II) doesn’t apply to either project due to the low backer counts, where predicted results and actual results diverge violently.
• I have serious problems with Lenovo these days due to their terrible, terrible decisions re: privacy-invading design decisions in their consumer line of laptops, so they are very lucky that Ryan North is a likable dude with an adorable dog and he’s willing to promote their ThinkPad line⁴. I am sorry to say that I don’t trust the company you are promoting, but we are still cool, Ryan.

Spam of the day:

Do you have any tips for rookie blog writers? I’d certainly appreciate it.

Footnotes, man. Readers dig footnotes.

_______________
¹ Goldstein is also listed as a member of the Jury, but please note two things about the Ignatz rules: the Jury is anonymous, even to the other members, during the nomination process, and while Jury members may not nominate their own work, there is no prohibition from one Juror’s work being nominated for an award by his or her fellow Jurors. I trust that Ms Goldstein recused herself from any decision that would have resulted in her own nominations.

² Working on image-processing for a corporate research arm and helping to set the ISO standards for image definitions. Such boring and unappreciated scut-work! Might as well work retail.

I almost said all of that with a straight face. Next time for sure!

³ That’s a “power of three”, or cubic centimeter, not a footnote.

⁴ Which line doesn’t seem to have been affected by Lenovo’s terrible, terrible decisions — which is actually even worse, because the ThinkPads are mostly aimed at corporate customers that are best able to detect and mitigate such terrible, terrible decisions. The consumer-grade laptops that Lenovo sold pre-compromised are hitting the demographic least able to defend themselves. Never buying another Lenovo product, but man, Chompsky’s cute.

There are a couple of offshoots of webcomickry in other realms of expression that caught my eye today, plus the list of SPX exhibitors is live. Let’s go down the list, shall we?

• I had never heard of the Rorschach Theatre before today; it’s in Washington DC, and since 1999 have been less of a place and more of an event. See, Rorschach turned its lack of its own space into a sort of mission statement and found ways to tailor productions to the various spaces that hosted them. They’ve got performance space these days, but still treat the innovative use of space as a sort of calling card.

  And if you’re innovative about space, you get to stage things that wouldn’t necessarily fit on a traditional stage, like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, or their next production: TRUTH & BEAUTY BOMBS: A Softer World. The recently-wrapped bit of surreality has been adapted to live performance (with previews starting 4 September and running until 4 October, reservations now open), and given that this is about as experimental as theatre can get, the costs of mounting the production need covering. Think about it: usually plays start from things like a script and characters¹, but they’ve got twelve years of webcomics to adapt.

  Which is where you come in; starting, oh, now-ish, you can help defray the costs of playwrights, actors, designers, directors, stage crew, technicians, fight choreographers (!), costumes, props, construction, insurance, etcetera, etcetera, via that most webcomickish of all mechanism: the Kickstarter. The play is going on regardless; the funding from the campaign will help to backfill the company coffers so that they can do innovative work like this in the future. Want tickets? You can get a pair at the US$50 tier (actually cheaper than directly buying the tickets). There’s t-shirts, meet-and-greets, and friggin’ walk-on roles up for grabs.

  If you ever wondered how Emily Horne & Joey Comeau’s work could somehow be made weirder, this is the answer, and now we all have the opportunity to show the creators that they aren’t making a huge mistake. I’m not going to be in DC anytime soon, but heck if this isn’t the sort of thing that makes me smile — I’m kicking in ten bucks, will you?

• Marian Call has been mentioned on this page previously, because when you put her musicality together with partner Pat Race, you get all kinds of cool nerdery. I’m still not over how awesome Space Weird Thing was, and now Call & Race are back with a new video that features Marian Call (in the role of Marzipan) and Marian Call (as Strong Bad) in a note-perfect cover version of Sensitive to Bees from Strong Bad Sings and other type hits, which I have an actual copy of. Whatever you are doing right now, stop doing it and go watch the magic. It’s magical.
• As mentioned above, the SPX exhibitor list is now up, and there are both a number of web-/indy-comics types, as well as people that will be bouncing from Bethesda up to Easthampton for TopatoCon the following week. In addition to special guests like Kate Beaton, Noelle Stevenson, Gemma Correll, Matt Bors, Scott McCloud, and Spike, SPX will include people such as Aatmaja Pandya, Amanda Scurti, onetime Fleen contributor Anne Thalheimer, Anthony Clark, Audrey (and presumably also Jamie), Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson,

  [inhale]

  Blue Delliquanti, Box Brown, Carey Pietsch, Carla Speed McNeil, Catie Donnelly, Chris Yates, Clay Yount, Colleen Venable, Danielle Corsetto, David McGuire, Dustin Harbin, Eric Colossal & Jess Fink, Evan Dahm, Isabelle Melançon & Megan Lavey-Heaton, Jeffrey Rowland, Jon Rosenberg, KC Green, Matt Boyd, Meredith Gran & Mike Holmes, Molly Ostertag, Penina Gal, Rachel Dukes, Dave Roman, Ross Nover, Sam Bosma, Sara McHenry & Tom McHenry, Tony Breed, and Yuko Ota & Ananth Hirsch. Check ’em out, tell ’em I said hi, and let me know who I left off the list.

Spam of the day:

In days gone by, should you stood a bankruptcy or even a foreclosure, getting approved with an car finance was like pulling teeth

Days gone by? Are we talking like the pre-lidocaine era?

________________
¹ Oh please, oh please, let ASW recurring character Ryan North be part of this play!

I mean, it’s SDCC week, people are already traveling to SoCal for the nerd prom, and a billion items have come up in the past couple days. Okay, these are each going to be brief because it’s like seven things.

• New SDCC offsite events In addition to all the programming mentioned last week, there are things happening outside the convention center. Singer-songwriter Marian Call (cohort of Alaska Roboticist Pat Race and famed portrayer of Top Space Man) will be part of a show called Space Time on 10 July (that’s Friday) at 7:00pm. Know who else will be there? Molly Lewis (aka Ground Control) and Bobak “We Are Go” Ferdowsi.

  Lewis will also be part of BAMF, the Bad Ass Music Festival, held 10-12 July in nearby Ruocco Park, alongside such luminaries as Kirby Krackle, Paul and Storm, and The Doubleclicks.

• Future plans for The Response Matt Bors follow up on earlier announcements of what’s going on with editorial cartooning at Medium via an announcement at The Response. Short version: It’s a finite project, through the end of July, and more conversations will occur between now and then.
• The AV Club loves webcomics Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor got cited as one of the best piece of media (not comics, all of media) for the first half of 2015, while John Allison, Noelle Stevenson, Ryan North & Erica Henderson, and Gemma Correll were cited as being part of the best of print for the same timeframe.
• Kickstarts Magnolia Porter wins the Most Adorable Kickstarter Video, Like, Ever award … oh, yeah, and it’s part of the launch for Monster Pulse’s second print collection, Phantom Limbs. It’s no secret that Monster Pulse is one of my favorite webcomics (just check out today’s update to see why — wow), so I’m urging everybody to back this one because I want my book, dammit.

  And if that weren’t enough, longtime editorial cartoonist Tom Tomorrow announced his Kickstart via Make That Thing, and it’s a doozy. Twenty five years of strips will be constructed into a 1000 page, two-volume hardcover collection, with an estimated mass of nearly 7 kg. Such a huge collection needs a huge goal, and with less than 24 hours elapsed, Mr Tomorrow has exceeded the US$87,000 needed and is closing in on US$100K. And can I say holy crap, somebody took him up on the US$10K reward tier? This one’s gonna be metaphorically and physically huge.

Spam of the day:

Dr.Oz bikini secret

Man, I can’t find even one picture of Dr Oz in a bikini. Laaaaaame.

Man, before we even get to the fact that it’s Canada Day and wish well to all our friends north of the border¹, there’s so many things to be happy about. I can’t even decide which would be most important, so I’m just going to hit these in chronological order.

• In the past few days (call it a month or so on the early end), I’ve received packages full of joy from three separate Kickstarts: Evan Dahm’s lovely illustrated edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (now available via TopatoCo), Jon Rosenberg’s long-delayed² Goats book four, and Zach Weinersmith and Boulet’s Augie and the Green Knight, all of which are more beautiful than could have been hoped. Thanks for those, guys!

  For those keeping track at home, this brings my Kickstarter backing record to 49 projects, of which 1 was designated “no reward”, 36 fulfilled, 5 are due for future delivery, 3 are late less than a month (it’s the first, after all), 3 are in the vicinity of a year late (two for what I consider to be good reasons, one I’m mentally writing off) and 1 partially fulfilled three years back for a project that’s gone tits-up. Call it 36/44 success rate, or 81%, which I expect to bump up by the end of the month, and again by end of summer.

• Meanwhile, yesterday David Willis started dropping hints of a new comic which hinted at the future erosion of his famous buffer. Then he dropped the proverbial other shoe:
  

  So on May 27, as I was trying to preregister for BotCon through my phone because our damned Time Warner wifi was having outages AGAIN, Maggie got back from the doctor, noted that there was, in fact, an Ultrasound due that visit despite our expectations, and then handed me this little printout, saying, “Here’s a picture of our baby.”

  And after pausing a bit, she pulled out another little printout and said, “And here’s a picture of our other baby.”

  It’s Twins! David and Maggie become at least the third webcomic couple to bring twins to bear³; previous twin-having webcomickers Jon Rosenberg and Ryan Sohmer were at press time reportedly pointing vaguely in Willis’s direction and laughing hysterically that at least they got to practice on single kids before having to learn how to be parents to twins before weeping uncontrollably. I think that means Welcome to our totally fun club!

  We at Fleen congratulate Willis on his impending great fortune, and are calling for predictions as to how far his buffer will slip. We’re taking 85 days in the pool.

• But the news that will resonate outside our community hit after things wrapped up on the east coast; reports were seen (first in Deadline, later in other corners) that both Kris Straub and Jeff Smith have new Hollywood deals. Straub’s case is perhaps further along, as it was announced that Max Landis will be producing a horror anthology for SyFy, the first season of which will be Candle Cove. Straub has struggled in the past to be recognized as the author of this particularly unsettling piece of fiction, with occasional claims that the short story was in fact true from people who are overly credulous, misremembering their own childhoods, or possibly both.

  Meanwhile, a production firm named a vet of AMC to head up their TV unit, and one of the first projects that’s being examined is an adaptation of Smith’s RASL. A story that mixes art thievery, dimension hopping, Nikola Tesla, and existential horror, RASL is about as different a followup to BONE as could be imagined. It would be a while before we see it hit the screen, but in tapping RASL and Candle Cove for adaptation, it appears that the entertainment complex is showing a willingness to explore wholly original ideas and has an idea of who might be a good source for them.

  Which got me to thinking what webcomics would make a good TV series. Achewood or Wonderella could absolutely rule on [Adult Swim], A Girl and Her Fed could do well on a basic cable channel with experience in showrunning (say, A&E or AMC), and I’m convinced that the Henson Workshop people could do something really good with Monster Pulse. I’m not sure how far we are from effects being able to do justice to any of Overside stories, but Skin Horse maybe could be made to work. Any other ideas? Leave ’em in the comments.

Spam of the day:

cheater detox

I know those words, but can’t figure out they mean together.

_______________
¹ AKA future ruthless overlords.

² The campaign for which coincided with, more or less, a high-risk pregnancy and birth of special-needs twins, who have defied every possible odd to be happy, healthy, distressingly clever young men. Well done, Team Babies!

³ It appears having a long-running webcomic must now be added to the contributing factors for having twins, such as being a twin yourself.