There are several projects that I feel you should pay attention to, in no particular order.

• First of all, recent Atlanta-to-Stumptown transplant Jennie “It’s Not Satanic Porn” Breeden¹ has returned to the Kickstarter well to finish off her doll line; about this time last year she made plush versions of two of the three voices in her head: the Devil Girl and Angel Girl as a stretch goal. The campaign fell just shy of creating the Pretty Princess as a final stretch goal, but people have apparently been hounding her mercilessly, for lo the Pretty Princess Plush now springs fully from Breeden’s skull (like unto Athena from the brow of Zeus), sitting about a third of the way to success with four weeks to go. Completists, take note.
• One may have noticed that I didn’t make a prediction about where the Pretty Princess KS will end up; I’ve come to the conclusion that the Fleen Funding Formula really doesn’t work well with fewer than a couple hundred backers, and the PPKS is in the 130s as we speak. While I think it’s very likely that Breeden’s fanbase (which is loyal in a brutally efficient manner) will not let the campaign falter I cannot predict where the final tally will go. Heck, my ballpark estimate for the Stand Still, Stay Silent book 1 campaign was some US$50K short (in this case, that was about a 40% underestimation), although in my defense it was on Indiegogo and thus didn’t show up on Kicktraq, the basis of the FFF. What I am saying here is congratulations, Minna Sundberg, and I can’t wait to get my copy.
• I can predict where the next campaign will end up, though: very, very high. Gigi DG has also gone to the crowdfunding platform to make a third thing; in this case, a third print collection of the wholly delightful Cucumber Quest. With a launch less than 24 hours ago and more than 500 backers driving the total to nearly 200% of goal with more than a month to go, Ms DG’s US$20K target is likely to hit a 5x to 6x overfunding. Call it US$150K +/- US$25K; given that the last two Kickstarters for CQ books have achieved, respectively, 645% and 627% of goal, I’d say she’s got a pretty good likelihood of her previous readers sticking around.
• For going on two years, Comic Chameleon has been bringing webcomics to the mobile masses with the full support of creators; coincidentally, we’ve seen far fewer scrapers since CC’s beta was announced at the end of 2012 and formally launched (of iOs devices) in May of 2013. At the time, I noted that I’m an Android guy and thus don’t get to share in the phone-based goodness, a situation that economics did not off an easy remedy for.

  Until tomorrow. From Comic Chameleon principal (and erstwhile Alien Loves Predator photochronicler) Bernie Hou:

  The time has come to make Comic Chameleon available for your phone! [O]ur Kickstarter campaign to fund the Android version of our app [is] launching this Thursday

  The sharp-eyed among you may notice some elided content in that quote, which was necessary to chop it into a grammatically sound form because I took out some stuff I wanted to address here. Namely, that Hou (knowing as he did that I’m an Android guy) has sent along an alpha version of the app for me to play with and report back on. Work has kept me from doing so yet today, but I will be doing so at the first opportunity, and given the generally happy reviews of the CC userbase on the iDevice platform(s), I expect it (once the inevitable early bugs are identified and squashed) to make the Googleheads as happy as the Jobsters. Keep your eyes on Kickstrater tomorrow, and let’s get that sumbitch funded.

El spam del día:

Me gusta el artículo, la mente es muy clara, yo también hago eso, gracias.

No es nada.

______________
¹ Plain ol’ non-Satanic porn by Ms Breeden is another thing altogether (that link is relatively safe for work).

Photo by unknown; sourced under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0) from AntWeb

The religious fervor that any fragment of the population assigns to their particular hobby has always puzzled me. I define myself as a lot of things: husband, engineer, EMT, moustache-haver, Subaru driver. The fact that I’ve been playing videogames since before the original Atari home console has never compelled me to define myself as a “gamer”, but whatever.

Define yourself however you like, but understand you’re going to be lumped in with the actions of everybody else that claims your particular tribe. That includes everything from low-grade defensiveness to the stunted, sociopathic fraction of the gaming tribe that has an inquisitorial zeal to stamp out the “heresy” they perceive in the “threat” to their identity in that a) somewhere, somebody might like games that are different; and b) women are having sex. This has lead directly to:

[T]he unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives. — 28 CFR Section 0.85

You get a gold star if you can figure out what word that definition applies to.

If you think that the word gamergate can be salvaged to refer to anything other than reflexive misogyny (sorry, ants, you need another word) suffused throughout with a piquant But we’re the real victims here, do me a favor — stop reading this page. The world is changing in ways not entirely catering towards you, and the way to deal with that is not with doxxing, rape threats, death threats, school shooting threats¹, and voluntarily associating with a spastic movement to “punish” anybody that doesn’t agree with you². I’ll be on the other side of history with the non-garbage people.

Back to webcomics tomorrow. In the meantime, please enjoy these quality laugh-chuckles that I picked entirely at random from the internet.

_______________
¹ Honestly, it’s like you’re trying to prove that Jack Thompson was right. You have no idea how hard it was to type those words in that order. I once got into a face-to-face argument with that guy but right now there are people providing empirical evidence for Thompson’s thesis that videogames turn young males into violent, remorseless criminals. Good job, geniuses!

² But I’m not like that and you’re a big meanie Gary! Sorry, you picked a label that’s being used for those purposes, the entire world knows it, and the only outcome here is that your carefully-adopted identity goes from pretty goddamned mainstream to denigrated and despised fringe group. Which, given the amount of whining I’ve seen, is pretty much where you think you are already. I think that you’ll find actual pariah status to be far less comfortable than you’ve imagined it to be.

We at Fleen have spoken more than once about (and in this interview, with the key person behind) Make That Thing, the crowdfunding production-and-fulfillment arm of The Topato Corporation. The first part of that descriptor, production-and, is probably the most important, as MTT isn’t just a post-Kickstarter merch-shipping service. To quote MTT Supreme Honcho Holly Rowland on staying in a relatively narrow range of projects¹:

We do what we do, and we do it well. We want to stay “on message”, so to speak, and not fuck around with video games or whatever because we don’t do video games and someone’s massively successful Kickstarter doesn’t seem like a proper testing ground.

But it appears that after a series of print- and plush-oriented campaigns (including some of the very largest in the publishing/comics category), MTT has branched out a bit. After all, Rowland followed up her previous assertion with:

That is not to say that we won’t open ourselves up to it in the future.

Their foray into recorded media started with the Deathmöle album, and now they’re partnering on a documentary film that will be chronicling the effort of building the biggest thing ever:

12 men have set foot on the moon, and getting them there cost $25.4 billion dollars. The last moonwalk ended more than 40 years ago. Two men, Michael and David, are dedicating their lives to creating the next great leap for humanity, and they think they can give us permanent access to the moon for less than a billion dollars.

This is what I love about the Topato family of creators — there’s always something there that will surprise me. And while watching the process of STRIPPED’s production makes me doubt that Shoot The Moon will be finished by Fall 2015³, I would be thrilled to be wrong. Here’s hoping they raise the necessary US$37,000 in the coming month and we can all find out together.

As long as we’re mentioning crowdfunding, check it out: Stand Still, Stay Silent book 1 has already raised US$34,452 of its anticipated US$25K, with a mere 27 days left to go. Since it’s on IndieGoGo and not Kickstarter, I don’t have the data to apply the Fleen Funding Formula, but I’d anticipate it finishing in the US$75K (plus or minus) range. Well done, Minna Sundberg, can’t wait to read the book next summer (she has to finish drawing chapter 4 for inclusion, then printing, then shipping).

Spam of the day: Hello gary! I am looking for a man, i’m 21 y.o. let’s talk? My name is Svetlana, I’m from Ukraine.

Hello Svetlana, what is it like in the bridebasket of Europe?

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¹ To quote the MTT website on project scope:

We don’t know how to make USB toasters or solar-powered flashlights², so we simply won’t take on Hardware, Design, Video Game, or Fashion projects. Other people are better at that than we are. However, the rewards for your project are heavily weighed toward the following:

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

Then we might be a good fit. (You can take a look at the things we sell at TopatoCo.com for an example of the things we make day in and day out).

² The first time I saw that I read it as solar-powered fleshlights and thought Oh man, Erika Moen’s got to get her logo on those.

³ The target date as described on the KS page; to quote their Risks and Challenges:

We’ve been around the video production block many times, but this is the first feature-length production we’ve done. It’s possible we may face delays when perfecting special effects, the score and editing, but we think any extra time spent will make for a better film. Plus, once we’ve got the movie done, sending it out digitally will be a breeze. [emphasis mine]

Utterly no disrespect to the STM team, but a year seems a very short time to tackle the project and I hope they don’t kill themselves in the making.

Even though I’ve got excellent, real-time backups, there’s still a moment of uncertainty as my finger hovers over the button that says Update Now.

• Speaking of fingers, mine is doing much better, thanks for asking; if you looked at it today you’d figure I’d had a particularly nasty papercut combined with an overly-aggressive session with the nail clippers. It’s still kinda painful if I get overly exciting while typing, but nothing too terrible. I bring this up because we are approaching open enrollment time for health insurance, and if you’re new to having insurance (thank you, ACA), you may not have had experience with renewing insurance.

  Long story short, there will be a fixed period of time that your insurer will notify you of, and that’s when you have to decide what kind of plan you want for next year. Guys, you want a plan. How much do you want a plan? Consider this — I got my insurance benefit statement for my little trip to the Emergency Department two weeks ago, and if not for that insurance my momentary bout of kitchen stupidity would have cost me nearly two thousand damn dollars.

  So consider this my semi-regular plea that you self-employed folks take the time to investigate this very carefully, because guess what? A cheapo high-deductible plan that’s meant to cover only catastrophes wouldn’t help in a situation like this; until we get this entirely bitched-up system of healthcare delivery properly fixed, you’ve got to have insurance if you don’t want something small to put you into potentially crippling debt.

• So what should I do with all the money I saved on EMERGENCY SERVICES and STERILE SUPPLIES and DRUGS/OTHER¹? How about buying a metric crap-load² of cartoonist interviews? Hivemind filmmaker Freddave Kellett-Schroeder have a limited-time sale going on for all the extras associated with STRIPPED:
  

  STRIPPED SUPER AWESOME DELUXE EDITION

  ON SALE UNTIL FRIDAY! SAVE 39%!
  Get over 26 HOURS of additional content!
  WHAAAAAAT

  Compare to other editions:

  • Basic film: US$14.99 (10 DCPWH)
  • Deluxe Edition (film plus director’s commentary, 30 minutes of various interviews, full Jim Davis interview): US$19.99 (5.7 DCPWH)
  • Bonus Material 1 (Deluxe Edition plus 14 more interviews adding up to 16 hours): US$34.99 (2 DCPWH)
  • Bonus Material 2 (seven more interviews, including a nearly three hour extravaganza with Kurtz, Straub & Guigar, almost 12 hours inall): US$16 (1.3 DCPWH)

  Those numbers in parentheses after the prices are the dollar cost per watchable hours ratios; At US$40 and equal to the content of both Bonus Material packages, the SADE features almost 29 hours of video for less than 75 cents per hour. The only reason to hold off on this is if — like me — you hold out hope for a full release of all 300 hours of footage, in an Ultra Super Awesome Deluxe 75 disc boxed set.

• Speaking of Brad Guigar (and honestly, why wouldn’t we speak of Brad Guigar?), if you’re like me you miss regular Guigar-heavy podcasts. Well, this is your lucky day, because the only thing better than a Guigar podcast is a multi-Guigar podcast:
  

  It’s official. The boys and I are podcasters. Subscribe to “Hey Comics — Kids!” on iTunes: http://ow.ly/BCMLv

  Everybody that always thought those other guys were holding Brad back during Webcomics Weekly, now’s your chance to swim in pure, uncut Guigar: Brad’s teamed up with his sons, Alex and Max, to talk about comics (or honestly, whatever pops into their heads … they are Guigars, after all) and they now have the imprimatur of Apple. Just listen carefully: science has hypothesized that if three or more Guigars end up in simultaneous laugh loops (click here, skip forward to the seven and a half minute mark, and glob have mercy), insanity may be the result.

Spam of the day:

Inspiring story there. What occurred after? Thanks!

nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd.

I’m sorry, what was the question?

________________
¹ The DRUGS/OTHER category featured a charge of one (1) dollar, and hell if I can figure out what it was for. I didn’t get any drugs. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the billing category that equates to you showed up in the ER and sat on a bed was the largest charge; the one that represented the PA fixed your damn-fool finger was a couple hundo less.

² Or 2.54 imperial crap-loads, if you prefer.

Okay, there’s still a day left to cost me and Dave Kellett some money. If it wouldn’t be unethical as hell, I’d bid the damn thing up to somewhere in the US$500+ range. In fact, let’s make this game a little more interesting: I pledged to match the purchase price of this piece up to US$500. If this is what it takes to spur some of you to get in the spirit of things (only full cast of Drive watercolor in existence, people!), I’m going to change the terms of my pledge:

I, Gary Tyrrell, will match the selling price of Dave’s piece as a donation to Team Cul de Sac up to US$1000, and with a minimum of US$500 in any case

You can’t afford to bid on a piece that might cost you multiple hundreds of dollars? Pledge a donation — however small — in the comments. You’ll get a reward beyond measure: official mensch¹ status, as declared by Richard Thompson himself.

• One of the things that I’ve observed with interest over the past few years is the (slow, but growing) adoption of writer’s rooms in webcomics. You could say that there’s an element of it at Cyanide & Happiness where it’s easy to imagine one of the lads bouncing an idea off another of them, but I think primarily it’s individual efforts. Anyplace you get a writer/artist partnership, there’s certainly give-and-take there.

  But I think you could probably trace proper writer’s rooms to the Pacific Northwest where (as often happens) you find Scott Kurtz at the center of experiments in webcomics. The Trenches started as an explicit writerly collaboration between Kurtz and the established duo of Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins; along with the artist changes, the writer’s room reduced to a singular voice: that of Strip Searchmonaut Ty Halley. While he may have withdrawn from one writer’s room, Kurtz was busy building up another as Dylan Meconis² joined him on writing duties on PvP.

  Crucially, I think the fact that Meconis creates comics so very different from Kurtz is a strength of this particular partnership. While Kurtz, Krahulik, and Holkins undoubtedly work well together they have similar strip approaches (gag-oriented, videogame and pop culture focii) and that limits the number of additional viewpoints that can be brought to bear on the final product. One might wish to compare with the writer’s room that was put together for the now-shuttered NAMCO High, featuring a bunch of creators of different ages and backgrounds (although there was a tendency for them to presently live in Brookklyn).

  I’m bringing this up because for anybody that’s considering a writer’s room, finding that balance of different experiences is probably one of the most crucial elements for success, but historically it’s something that’s been elusive. The traditional venue for writer’s rooms has been TV comedy, and much has been written in the past about how those rooms tend to be dominated by white dudes, often from Ivy League colleges, and viciously under-representative of women and minorities.

  And all of that is by way of pointing out a discussion that anybody considering a writing partnership (whether in a room or not) will probably want to listen to: as I write this sentence, WNYC midday host Leonard Lopate is introducing the author of a new book on comedy writing to discuss writer’s rooms at places like SNL, Letterman, and The Onion. You can listen to the interview here, and we can discover together what makes a good writer’s room (or perhaps the discussion follows some other track, but it’ll probably still be enlightening).

• Skin Horse, by Shaenon Garrity and C Jeffrey Wells, is in an odd semi-hiatus right now. Those of you paying attention may have noted that Garrity is (as of this writing), hugely pregnant and not intending to do a daily strip whilst dealing with the immediate aftermath of presenting a small human child to the world³.

  Having wrapped up a storyline on Saturday, she announced that she was done drawing comics for a while on Sunday, and the next storyline (a catch-up-with-peripheral-characters melange, to feature a variety of guest artists) started on Monday. And if my eye does not fool me, Garrity even provided the art for the first vignette herself (or somebody out there has her style down cold), easing us into a summer of random fun, with Wells undoubtedly shifting plot and pacing to best match the fill-in artists.

  And in one of those weird coincidences, today’s strip features an offhand reference to an obscure cryptid known as The Hodag, which by a peculiar corincidence just happens to be one of the critters mentioned in an endnote of Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell, to wit:

  In 1893, the Rhinelander Daily News reported the discovery of the corpse of a hideous creature with huge claws and a spiked tail. It’s discoverer, local land surveyor Eugene Shpher, called it the hodag, then claimed to have caught a live one in 1896. Shortly after, he displayed it at the First Oneida County Fair. He stood by the veracity of his claims until the Smithsonian Institution announced it would travel to Wisconsin to inspect the evidence, after which he promptly recanted. This ridiculous hoax is now the official symbol Rhinelander, Wisconsin, which is pretty great.

  The more you know!

• The last time David Malki ! thought up a game, it turned into a half million dollar Kickstarter and a year-plus process of production and fulfillment. This time, he’s just decided to put the damn thing up in a post and let you play without going down the path that leads to things like livestock and international shipping incidents.

Spam of the day:

Today, I went to the beachfront with my kids. I found a sea shell and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She placed the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab inside and it pinched her ear. She never wants to go back!

Yeah, that’ll happen. My suggestion is that to avoid future trauma to unsuspecting and blameless hermit crabs, you seal your daughter in a barrel, with a small opening to pass in food and water.

_________________
¹ For those of you that didn’t grow up someplace where you got off from school for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, being a mensch is a good thing.

² About whom it is literally impossible to say too many good things.

³ With, it should be noted, the assistance of husband and Cartoon Art Museum curator Andrew Farago.

Today just seems to be chock-full of further references to things we spoke about earlier in the week. Weird how that happens sometimes.

• I hate to keep flogging the :01 Books is awesome horse¹, but they keep cropping up in my daily life. Today it’s because the mail brought a review copy of Farel Dalrymple’s forthcoming graphic novel, The Wrenchies². Look for a review a little closer to the September release.
• Scott C persists in his scruffy, charming ways — so much so that the jaded, flinty-eyed tastemakers at The AV Club noticed, lavishing some well-deserved praise on The Great Showdowns.
• Thanks to the Spam of the day, this week also saw mention of Angela Melick and her prodigious skill in both engineering and autobio comics. Word is today is her birthday, which should be marked on my calendar of significant births in engineering history. Oh, you doubt I have a calendar that features the birthdays of famous engineers³? Check it — annotated version for your viewing pleasure.

  As long as we’re on the topic of birthdays, it is also the birthday of Lore Sjöberg, whose website presence is less these days than it has been sometimes. Nevertheless, there’s still a significant amount of his old Brunching Shuttlecocks work available, including Lore Brand Comics and the greatest use of Flash animation in history. I am pretty secure in my atheism, but every day I thank the possibility of God that I was born into a world featuring the phrase depleted uranium Beholder statue.

Weekend now. Enjoy the crap out of it, and I’ll see you on Monday.

Spam of the day:

After a three month long research project, I’ve been able to conclude that how to change your minecraft name doesn’t negatively effect the environment at all.

That is exactly what I’d expect a shill for Big Change Your Minecraft Name to say. Don’t believe the “official” story! Stand up against those who would despoil our natural world by changing Minecraft names!

_______________
¹ Not true; I’ll tell you that :01 Books is awesome every day and twice on Sundays.

² Book design by Colleen AF Venable, natch.

³ Okay, technically it’s a calendar with the birthdates of significant electrical engineers. With all the circuit-building and Arduino-wrangling that Melick does these days, I’m declaring her one of us in spirit.

Ian Jones-Quartey is an old friend of this page; we at Fleen have followed him since before there was a Fleen, even before mention of his first webcomic didn’t cause him to threaten to delay its return by a month. We have bar-crawled with him, attended weddings with him, discussed tacos with him, and been generally impressed to hell and back with him.

All that history just got reset; today is the first day of Anno Jones-Quartey, a new calendar marked by the time that Ian JQ dropped some serious wisdom:

[Tumblr question]: Being that you’re an industry expert, I was hoping if there were any tips or advice you can give to an aspiring Animation Series creator. Any lessons you’ve learned from working in the industry from so many years. What advice would you give yourself if you were starting out trying to get you’re animation picked up by a major network?

[Answer]:Yeah I have a big piece of advice! Stop “aspiring”!!!!! Your aspirations end now!!!!

YES YOU! DON’T WAIT! START NOW! [emphasis original]

Jones-Quartey goes on for some length, and every bit of it is worth reading and absorbing, whatever field of creative endeavour you may find yourself in. If you can read through the entire thing and not feel compelled to murder Aspiration in favor of Doing, then you weren’t ever going to Do anyway. Well done, Mr JQ; if nothing else you’ve prompted me to get off my ass about a particular project I’ve been kicking around for way too damn long.

• No note, no celebration, just another strip (the 5114th if my math is correct): 14 years of Schlock Mercenary from my evil twin, who has come a considerable way from Day One (or Day Minus 5114, BJ-Q). Thanks for all the laughs and mayhem, Howard.
• As many suspected might happen, STRIPPED will be showing at San Diego Comic Con on Friday night:
  

  Cool! @strippedfilm will be screening at the official San Diego Comic-Con Film Festival, Friday July 25th. Join us if you’re at SDCC!

  I’ve seen it a bunch of times now, but I think I want to see it on a large screen surrounded by people.

• Oh, nuthin’, just an awesome Bee & Puppycat by Becky Dreistadt, no big deal.

Advance warning: almost no chance of a posting tomorrow, as I have to get up stupid-early for a cross-continent flight that will occupy me pretty much all day. Enjoy the weekend.

Thanks, Top Men! Now, where to start, where to start?

• How about here? I should have pointed you towards a short (really short, like less than 1500 words short) story by Ursula Vernon from last November, because it’s excellent (as is pretty much all her writing) and also an excellent example of what her story-voice is like. I remember dragging my wife to the computer and making her read it, so there’s that.

  But now there’s a Disney-revisionist movie playing, and Lauren Davis at io9 remembered Vernon’s story, and then The AV Club noticed it, and what kind of Vernon superfan would I be if I didn’t signal boost a little? If you like The Sea Witch Sets The Record Straight, read Digger, and the Dragonbreath series, and everything else that she’s written, and thank me later.

• Speaking of people you should be reading under all circumstances: Hope Larson. I believe that the record is clear that I hold Larson as perhaps the best creator of graphic novels (original and adaptations) working in English today, but it’s been some time since she had a webcomic. The Secret Friend Society (once the home of Larson’s Salamander Dream, and Kean Soo’s Jellaby) has long since shuttered its doors, leaving no place for a between-books dose of Larson’s magic.

  Until now:

  I wrote the script for Solo last year. This story has been in my brain, in one incarnation or another, since mid-2012, and I’m ready for it to go out into the world. I’ll be drawing the pages and slapping them up online the moment the ink’s dry, raw and fresh and full of mistakes. And full of swear words—the subject matter is fairly tame, but it’s not a kids’ comic.

  I won’t be adhering to any sort of update schedule and I currently have no plans to publish Solo with a book or comics publisher, but I will put together a permanent website as soon as possible.

  Just bookmark it and check it regularly, yeah? It’ll be just about guaranteed the best thing you read any day that it updates.

• Kickstarter news: less than 20 hours to go, and less than US$200 from adding yet another 8-page extension to Cuttings by Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya. For the record, if that stretch goal is made (it will be), that will make more than 50 extra pages of art in the book; if the usual last-day bump reaches the next stretch goal after (that’s another US$5000), it’ll be more than 60 extra pages added to what was original going to be a 72 page book. Added value for extra funding — that’s how you do it.
• Kickstarter news: Somewhere around the 24 hour mark, Zach Weinersmith’s campaign for Augie and the Green Knight crossed the US$100,000 mark, knocking down stretch goals faster than Weinersmith can update. At present, though, there will be an additional five art pieces in the book, which now has a ribbon bookmark, will be made available to libraries, and recorded as an audiobook.

  Oh, and if you’re in a support tier that gets art prints along with your book(s), you now are getting five of those instead of two. Per the FFF, AatGK is headed to a finish of US$400K +/- US$134K. So, plenty of room for more improvements to come. How many extra Boulet paintings can this book hold? I’m hoping for at least 25 in all.

• Kickstarter news: Speaking of US$100,000, that’s the goal line for Jorge Cham’s newest campaign. That’s a hell of a total, but considering that it’s intended to make a sequel to 2012’s The PhD Movie, that’s kind of a bargain. The first movie was funded by Cham and his cohorts, but since it’s apparent that there’s now an audience for the film (screenings have been held more than 500 universities and research centers, including Antarctica), why not spread around the costs? Better yet, the more money raised, the more of The PHD Movie 2: Still in Grad School you’ll get, as every dollar above goal will go into lengthening the film.

  It’s currently sitting at just under 15% of goal after about eight hours, so it appears the only question is how long the movie will actually be: raise enough and you could force Cham to make the Berlin Alexanderplatz of grad school narratives. In case you’re worried that might kill him, don’t — dude went through grad school, he’s used to never-ending, frustrating, wondering-if-it’s-all-worth-it undertakings that last for years.

Spam of the day:

With the site outage, not much got caught up in the filters. So sad! The spammers might be moving on to sites that have a higher uptime.

Just because the movie’s all done and released and all doesn’t mean that STRIPPED is no longer making news.

For instance, I received my copy of the Watterson poster ‘tother day¹, and by my reckoning that means that hive mind Freddave Kellett-Schroeder just have to whip up the book of the film to finish out their Kickstarter obligations. Kellett’s done what? A dozen books on his own plus How To Make Webcomics, so he can almost certainly get that put together by … I dunno, next Tuesday?

Okay, I kid, but it’s impressive to see how much of a massive undertaking Kellett & Schroeder have just about finished, which will naturally mean that it’s time for the next movie project². But on the off chance that they don’t feel like jumping straight back into a project that will take years and many, many dollars, they can at least keep the film-making habit satisfied by producing and releasing more full interviews from their 300 hour collection.

Case in point: in addition to the various bonus material found on the streamable and DVD editions, and the previously-released Bonus Material 1 (fifteen full-length interviews for more than sixteen hours of additional content), one may now obtain Bonus Material 2 (seven interviews, ten creators, nearly twelve hours of content). Or heck, go for the everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink edition with literally more than a day’s worth of discussion from more than twenty interviews³. Comics creators, there’s a lot of in-depth discussion and more than a few process demos, making this a must-have for your reference library.

And that’s not all! Their roadshow screenings continue apace, with the University of Oregon hosting a screening and Q&A tomorrow night, the Schulz Museum hosting a screening and Q&A on 21 June, Webster University (St Louis) hosting screenings on 11 and 13 July, and possibly a screening at SDCC. If Freddave aren’t careful, they’ll spend more time on the road with the finished film than they spent on gathering interviews.

Spam of the day, from our filters to you:

My parents would always share their own communion bread with us, even when we were too young to go up to the rail ourselves. It made us feel welcome as part of the church family and we learned through them what communion means and just how special and important it is. I would always serve children if their parents agreed. buy soundcloud likes

That’s just … that’s beautiful, man.

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¹ I haven’t found anyplace where suckas who didn’t contribute to Kickstarts can avail themselves of this poster, which I hope that Freddave will remedy shortly because damn this thing is gorgeous.

² If I am found mysteriously murdered after suggesting he should spend another half-decade making another movie, remember that he may appear to be an easygoing guy, that Dave Kellett, but those are the ones that have secret murderous tendencies for maximum irony when the neighbors all appear on TV and can’t believe that he’d do such a thing.

³ “Over 26 hours”, to be precise; given the 300 hours of original interview footage, this means that Schroeder and Kellett have released less than a tenth of the total material they have on hand, and can continue to give you more and more and more for some time to come. Given that a DVD can typically hold up to about 4 hours of video, the inevitable 75-disc box set is going to take some considerable shelf space, which you should start clearing now. Alternately, wait for terabyte-scale thumb drives to get cheaper and save on shipping.

How’s everybody doing? I’m doing good, thanks for asking.

• STRIPPED comes to iTunes Canada tomorrow, and just like it made a run at #1 in Documentaries in the US last month, filmmakers Freddave Kellett-Schroeder are going to try to repeat the feat in the Great White North. If you live north of 49 and haven’t see the film yet, tomorrow’s a good day.
• Not to be confused with the Great White North, some time back a webcomicker by the name of Lars Brown did a two-volume story via Oni called North World and it was pretty great. I mention this because Brown has continued to make some not-your-typical sword-and-sorcery comics by the name of Penultimate Quest, and it’s time to get the second volume of PQ printed. Enter the requisite Kickstarter campaign, which has just under two weeks and just under 10% to go. Brown’s the real deal, making comics with heart, and realistic relationships, and frustrations at your lot in life, and swords. If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d like, please consider backing PQ2.
• Speaking of real deals that do swords and comics with heart, Jim Zub is launching a new creator-owned story (his first since Baldy and Shorty started kicking skulls in 2010; as Zub has stated, we’re on the next-to-last story arc of their adventures) in August, to be titled Wayward; if I may be permitted a moment of pure opinion, Zub’s stuff gets an automatic blind buy from me. Some of it may not turn out to be for me, but the man’s stellar hits-to-misses ratio means it’s worth plunking down four bucks to find out even if it doesn’t sound like my cup of tea.

  Wayward, for the record, sounds like the finest of green tea, whisked by a senior geisha in a formal ceremony:

  Rori Lane is an outsider by nature, but moving to Tokyo to live with her single Mom has only exacerbated her weirdness. She’s feeling out of sorts, worried about fitting in and, as if that wasn’t enough, strange things are beginning to happen. Glowing symbols and patterns are starting to appear before her eyes… and she’s the only one who seems to notice.

  “Wayward is a coming of age story filled with mystery and emotion. It’s also an ass-kicking joy ride with teenagers beating the hell out of Japanese mythological monsters,” said Zub. “Steve and I built this series from the ground up to play to both our strengths. I can’t wait for people to see what we have planned.”

  In WAYWARD a group of teens living in Tokyo find a common bond in manifesting strange, supernatural abilities. As they begin to unravel the mystery behind their powers and their common source they’re drawn into a war with the vestiges of Japan’s monstrous mythic past.

  Buffy meets Spirited Away, anybody? You can bet that I’ll be finding Zub at SDCC in July and dragging as much info out of him as I can.

• Speaking of Zub, even if I weren’t blind-buying all his work I’d still pick up the next Schlock Mercenary collection (featuring a short story by Zub), which is now up for pre-order. The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse story arc set up much of late-period Schlock’s story development, was nominated for a Hugo Award, and is available in standard (US$20) and sketch (US$30) editions. For that you’ll get 160 pages of full-color mayhem, the bonus Zub-penned story, and a deep sense of personal peace and tranquility¹.

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¹ They say that the grave is very tranquil.