It all comes back to comics:

Sometimes I stop and think about the fact that Homestuck is the 4th longest work in the English language and just kinda nod. — George Rohac

• Know who’s been making himself damn near indispensable to comics as a whole, constructing what may well be the definitive filmic history of the art form? Freddave Kellett-Schroeder, the hive mind that’s been toiling for pert-near four years to bring STRIPPED to a big screen near you. Last night, Fred and Dave released the first five minutes of the film to backers of their Kickstarters, and my friends — it was glorious. Somewhat less than 5300 people have had the opportunity to see that tease, and with any luck the entire world will be able to see the entire thing soon. It’s gonna be great.
• Know who’s been making himself damn near indispensable to an entire community of webcomickers? Brad Guigar, editor and everything-in-chief of Webcomics Dot Com. And in case five years back is fading from your recollection, Guigar was one of the authors of How To Make Webcomics, which tells you exactly what it says on the cover. The thing is, as good as HTMW is, it covers a medium that changes rapidly, and five years is a near-eternity in internet terms.

  There have been many requests for a sequel over the past half-decade, and Guigar has leveraged his writing for WDC to make that sequel, The Webcomics Handbook, now available for pre-order on Kickstarter. This one’s a no-brainer, folks, especially considering that all backer tiers come with — quoting here — Guigar’s “undying friendship”. Remember, the sooner you pledge, the sooner you can book a weekend for him to help you move.

• Strip Search — let’s face it, season one of Strip Search — wrapped up its finale last night which means you’ve had 16 hours (as of this writing) to have seen it, and if you don’t want to be spoiled on it, look away. I was conflicted watching Katie Rice get named the winner: zero surprise, as she’d utterly dominated the back half of the game; elation because her work was so very, very good; crushed because Abby Howard and Maki Naro didn’t win¹.

  In the end, it came down to what comics almost always comes down to — personal preference. Jerry and Mike had to decide what they personally most wanted to see:

  • A longform, horror-based, immersive-world graphic novel² from Abby, and one where they liked her off-the-cuff work better than her planned work
  • An almost anthropological personality study from Maki, not so dependent on your traditional-type punchlines
  • A loose-continuity, every-strip-has-a-punchline story that was the most comic-strippy of the finalists from Katie, and one where as strong as her final competition entries were, her pitch material was even better, giving confidence about how strong a work with plenty of time could be

  From the beginning, they showed a clear preference for work in the vein of what Katie presented, and you know what? That’s okay. Their show, their judgment, and it’s not like giving the nod to Camp Weedonwantcha means that The Last Halloween or Sufficiently Remarkable are erased from our collective memories. I will be reading (and more importantly, buying) all three of those projects because they all hit different pleasure centers in my comics brain³.

  Everybody associated with Strip Search is bound up into a web of professional and personal connections that will last and pay off for decades (Maki had some really gracious thoughts along the same lines today). As was determined back in January:

  Khoo stressed the responsibility that PA had towards the winner. We will do them right. People put their necks out there and trusted us; we didn’t tell them shit. They didn’t know what the show would be like or how we would make them look. For taking that risk, Khoo is determined that the reward is as good as he can make it.

  It’s pretty clear that the doing-right is extending to all the Artists; consider that Alex, who we didn’t get a chance to know, Alex has moved to Seattle, as has Amy, and also Monica (I half expect to hear that Ty and Nick are scoping out the U-Hauls). Add in the proximity of Mac and Erika, and it’s clear that whatever benefits accrue to Katie being in-office will spread fairly immediately to the others in the PNW, and only slightly later to those still scattered across the country. Being part of Strip Search surely helped the crowdfunding that Monica and Lexxy undertook to success, and Erika’s new comic, and the soon-to-be-announced Kickstarts from Maki and Abby. Also, is it a coincidence that since he was on the show, Tavis and his wife had a kid? Okay, yeah, probably, but you never know.

  Whatever else Strip Search achieved (and from everything that Khoo, Jerry Holkins, and Mike Krahulik have said, it wasn’t intended to achieve much beyond being entertaining), they’ve created a resonance cascade of skilled creators who are going to make each other better. Somewhere out there are people that either didn’t make the cut or want to be on a future iteration and are stepping up their own comics games; almost none of them will make it onto the show (whenever a new season might occur), but a nonzero number of them will share their comics with the world.

  Penny Arcade Industries has given us all far more than US$15,000 of comics that we will get to enjoy. Oh, and it’s entirely possible that they’ve created a competitor that will eventually challenge them for their position on the top of the webcomics heap, so it’s a good thing that they’ve still got Khoo on their side … for now.

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¹ Unlike virtually every reality competition ever, I was fully invested in all the finalists; there was no villain or obvious weak link there, meaning that it was guaranteed I would be happy and sad when it was all over.

² AKA, “filthy continuity”.

³ Although to be completely candid, of the three I think Sufficiently Remarkable spoke to me the most and I’m not sure if I can articulate why. In my perfect world, Sufficiently Remarkable has both “daily” and “Sunday” type strips, with the latter having the same feel as the first strip in Maki’s submission packet with Riti and her father.

A pretty deep swath of webcomics had their traffic interrupted yesterday because of malware warnings; the thing of it is, there was never any malware to begin with. Somebody, bored presumably, decided to toss some code into an ad frame whose sole purpose was to trigger Google’s malware detectors, leading to automated warnings and who knows how many reluctant readers. Known to be affected were comics associated with Hiveworks, Questionable Content, and The Devil’s Panties — none of which, it should be stressed again, are believed to have been an actual risk.

I’d almost be able to understand this behavior better if there had been some kind of reward in it; if there were some kind of equities market for webcomics and driving down readership for some high-traffic sites meant that somebody could make some money by shorting those comics, that I could understand (it would still be reprehensible and sociopathic, but at least there would be a motivation). This, though? Pointless.¹

• In entirely better news, the Digger Omnibus Kickstart is well over goal with three weeks still to go, and The AV Club has thrown a little love towards creator Ursula Vernon. Not that Vernon has necessarily noticed, what with being on her honeymoon in Alaska and contemplating interesting purchases which with the success of the Omnibus is probably surprisingly affordable.
• Today’s mandatory² viewing: Ryan North on what to do to optimize human history should you ever come into possession of a time machine: bone down on hotties invent the most crucial and challenging technology of all.

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¹ Congratulations, Expert Hacker, you annoyed a bunch of people that you will never meet, caused work for people that had other things to do, and it didn’t benefit you at all beyond the fact that you proved to yourself that you could. We all agree now: you exist, you matter, you’re just as important as you always suspected you were and you are so cool. No, really.

² You have to watch something while waiting for the Strip Search finale to air in … just under eight hours.

Every so often I get reminded of that time, when Randy Milholland got sick of people who bitched that the free entertainment he offered wasn’t on a regular enough schedule to suit them, and challenged them to put their money where their mouths were. I suspect that said schedule-bitchers never ponied up a dime, but enough people that did want to support Milholland did, which led Milholland to quit the day job and make free comics for our entertainment for a living.

I’m reminded of it this time because tomorrow marks nine years since Uncle Randy walked away from a crappy job and into that free, no-pants paradise that is modern webcomickry¹. Happy Nineiversary, Randy, and thanks for not murdering any of the schedule-bitchers² because incarceration would really mess up your update schedule.

• Today’s really awesome Kickstarter launch is by Evan Dahm, who is funding the first book of his third Overside saga, Vattu: The Name and The Mark. Clocking in at 270 pages, V:TNaTM forms a nicely self-contained story while still forming just the beginning of a much larger story (I’d estimate that by the time it’s done, Vattu will run 1500 – 2000 pages in all, so maybe six to eight collections this size?). In the five hours since launch (as this is being written), Dahm’s at some 97% of goal, which means he’s going to hit the only stretch goal announced so far:
  

  If it makes goal within the first day (by 10 am EST Tuesday), I will include a Kickstarter-exclusive small print with all physical rewards.

  Evan? You might want to think up some more stretch goals, on account of you’ve still got … 20 days and 19 hours, more or less, and I think you might go just a bit over goal.

• Are you a fan of awesome things? One would hope so, as that’s pretty much the focus we at Fleen have. Hope Larson, in addition to creating some of the finest [web]comics of the past decade or so, has over the past year dipped her toes into film-making, and her first efforts are now available for you to sample. Bitter Orange, Larson’s screenwriting and directorial debut, is now streaming, and it comes with an endorsement from no less than the finest writer on movies presently working in the English language.

  I speak, naturally, of Film Crit Hulk, whose observations on film are always a delight, and who gets Larson’s work like few others. Seriously, every time I write about one of Larson’s new books, I know that I won’t be a fraction as insightful or erudite as Hulk.³ But honestly? The best part of Bitter Orange comes at the very end of the credits; no easter eggs here, just a line that says:

  COPYRIGHT © MMXIII HOPE LARSON

  She thought up a story, she found a way to make it in her medium of choice, and now she owns it. In the wake of a damn-near internet-wide fight about whether or not large corporations can farm out their IP to movie-makers that may or may not understand what makes characters special, having a creator in charge of their vision is always worth celebrating.

• On Friday I speculated as to whether or not the Strip Search finalists knew who had won yet. Today, I noticed a tweet from Abby Howard in advance of tomorrow night’s finale screening/streaming:
  

  This is going to be my first non-stressful flight to Seattle! There’s no mystery or fear or uncertainty awaiting ONLY FRIENDSHIP #FRIENDSHIP

  Interpret how you will, and be ready to watch the whole thing come to a crescendo at 7:30pm PDT tomorrow, 18 June 2013.

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¹ Note to casual readers: no part of comicking is entirely paradisiacal, but the no-pants thing is frequently true.

² That we know of, and if you were tried by a jury of your actual, no-pants peers, not only would they not convict, they’d send you home with a medal.

³ To say nothing of my pathetic, puny smashing skills.

David Malki ! of Wondermark¹ has provided a button underneath his strip that says This comic in a blog-friendly format which, when clicked, reformats his strip as 2×2 panels in a pop-up. Heck, if he’s gonna provide it, I’m gonna click it. Neat.

• If you haven’t seen the first part of the Strip Search season one finale, what the crap-hell are you waiting for? Katie, Abby, and Maki each brought a fully-fleshed pitch for Mike and Jerry to pore over, and regardless of who wins I want to see all three of these as a part of my regular rotation. Be sure to look over their submissions after watching the episode, because there’s some marvelous work in there².

  Spoiler #1: It’s a three-way showdown for the top prize, as the Artists are given four hours to produce three strips that fit into their new comic concepts.
  Spoiler #2: Holy crap with less than two and a half hours left Katie asks to abandon her Cintiq and start over on paper. Credits roll just as she starts to put pencil to paper, so we all have to wait until 7:30pm PDT (GMT-7) on Tuesday, 18 June to see how it turns out.

  Spoilery speculation: It’s been months since the three-way showdown, which means one of two things is true: either our finalists have been waiting all this time to find out who wins (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not knowing), or they know and haven’t been allowed to say for all this time (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not talking). Here’s to Tuesday when we can all find out what the hell is going on.

• Intriguing Kickstarter of the Day: Darren Gendron has launched a campaign behind a fantasy (specifically, faerie) themed card deck, and recruited some of the best in webcomics artists to do designs. Gendron’s pretty noted for projects with relatively low goals, fast turnarounds, and low cost of basic (physical) rewards as well as pushing into spaces where webcomics don’t usually go (board books, board games, etc.). In this case, if you’re a fan of Obsidian Abnormal, Evan Dahm, Lar deSouza, Yan Gagné and Mary Garren, K Lynn Smith, LJ Lockhart, Sarah Ellerton, or Jamie Noguchi, you could do worse than popping eight or nine bucks to get a small representation of their artwork on a deck of cards that can also be used to fleece your friends at poker.

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¹ And Machine of Death and TopatoCo and a lot more besides.

² Particularly Katie’s, whose children-in-peril story has a Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends vibe that’s making me feel joy in my black, cynical heart.

I’d like to start off today with a correction, or a clarification, or whatever’s appropriate when you specualte out loud and it turns out you were totally off base, but since it involves spoilery information I’ma stick it down at the bottom of the page and we can start with something else.

Books! New books! Second volumes, in fact, the both of them!

• There may be no single [web]comics character of the past few years that is as disturbing as Cornelius Snarlington, Business Deer (although whatever the hell that is menacing Wadsworth Zane in today’s Broodhollow is rapidly heading for the top spot). In case his mayhem-related office activities (or office-related mayhem activities) aren’t enough to piece your very soul, he also stares at you dead-eyed, menacingly, from the cover of the new collection of Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse, Business Animals, which has just gone up for pre-order.

  Usual disclaimer: Jon got me started in this blog-based opinion-having racket and also he owns my soul. But none of that changes the fact that regardless of whatever bias I might be injecting into this discussion, PZ Frickin’ Myers wrote the foreword, and you can’t do much better than that.

• In a neat bit of self-wanging, Zach Weinersmith managed to hose up his own site by crosslinking SMBC and the Kickstarter campaign for his newest original book, Trial of the Clone 2: Wrath of the Pacifist. Like the original Trial of the Clone, ToTC 2:WotP is a choosable-path comedic story, wherein your character from ToTC has failed upward to being in charge of the galaxy and now must rule; near the end of the first book’s Kickstarter campaign Weinersmith asked if the sequel should follow the protagonist on a Good path or an Evil one, and the consensus was Good.

  While Evil often looks to be more fun, you can’t deny that there’s nothing funnier than to watch somebody attempt to do Good and screw it up (and since the “hero” of ToTC is easily the most inept being in all of time and space, there should be plenty of room for up-screwing).

  In the hours since the book-kick launched, ToTC 2: WotP has cleared 75% of its US$20,000 goal, and reached the first four stretch goals (Weinersmith having pioneered the art of setting goals below the funding goal, building excitement while guaranteeing some outcomes). So far the stretches have all been related to getting more illustrations (by Weinersmith’s longtime collaborator, Chris Jones), but I imagine that there are some interesting goals in store once goal has been met in … oh, I’d say about two hours from now.

Okay, here’s that correction and remember: spoilers ahoy.

• Four days ago I laid out a timeline for the remainder of the season of Strip Search:
  

  Okay, looking at the calendar we’ve got the Maki/Lexxy elimination tomorrow, then four more episodes on 7, 11, 14, and 18 June. I had speculated early that there might be a final three approach (there’s ample precedent in the reality competition genre), but given the setup of the Strip Search Thunderdome, it make sense that all eliminations will be two Artists head-to-head, and this schedule reinforces that thought Consider: that gives us time for a social challenge among three competitors (7 June), a competitive challenge for immunity (11 June), an elimination to get us down to two (14 June), and the Big Ready-Set-Art on 18 June.

  So, yeah, my guess was wrong; as seen in today’s episode of Strip Search, none of that is happening. I should have stuck with my original speculations, since it turns out that by defeating Lexxy on Tuesday, Maki advanced to the Strip Search equivalent of Fashion Week: he and Abby and Katie face no more challenges in the house, are sent home to work up a final challenge for two months, then return to make their pitches.

  The original strips that they develop over eight weeks must include a name, three character bios, six sample strips¹ and a t-shirt design. Judging will be shown in a two-part finale, next Friday (14 June) and the following Tuesday (18 June), which per Robert Khoo will have some live component.

  There is at this point no way to tell which of the three finalists has the edge — each of the three could (and deserves) to win the prize, who wins almost doesn’t matter. While US$15,000 and a year’s embed in the Penny Arcade machine are nothing to sneeze at, the attention that the Artists have garnered, the audience that each of their new comics will have right from the beginning, and the support system that they’ve forged among themselves² means that they’re all winners³. Abby, Katie, Maki, it’s been a hell of a ride that you’ve given us and I just want to thank you for it.

Updated to add: Tickets for the Strip Search finale just went on sale. Tuesday, 18 June at 6:30pm PDT (GMT-7) at the Meydenbauer Center in Seattle. The final three episodes will be played in the theater, with the final episode released to the world at 7:30pm. Oh and on an unrelated note, kudos to the Meydenbauer for keeping ticketing fees to an entirely-reasonable US$1.52; I just bought tickets for Alton Brown’s Tour O’ Fun and I got socked for ten bucks a ticket. Screw you, Ticketmaster.

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¹ It’s gotta be the best six strips I’ve ever written — Abby.

² Everything that the nominal winner learns from their year in the PA offices will absolutely filter out to the other Artists. There’s a precedent for this kind of very fast, very thorough knowledge diffusion, and it’s within Mission Control during the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. As Gene Kranz observed, it wasn’t necessary for one flight controller group (or crew) to experience everything themselves, because they worked under the model of What any one of us learns, we all learn and build on.

³ There’s no lose in this. — Maki.

We are on Day Two of at least three days of 91F (33C) weather, the air conditioning is out, and the afternoon sun is just starting to crank up the joules. Somebody kill me, or at least send me a bucket full of cold I can pour on me and my dog. That’s right, I want a bucket of pure, uncut, essence-of-cold. And yes, I’m well aware there’s no such thing as cold, only heat and less heat. What you’re overlooking is the fact that I don’t care so kindly rework the laws of physics and get me some cold, please.

• You know who is, right about now, absolutely horrified by that whole bucket of cold thing? Dante Shepherd, professor of Chemical Engineering, thermodynamicist-at-large, educational innovator, and itinerant webcomicker. Today marks five years of Shepherd’s dailyish Surviving The World¹, and on top of that he’s got some exciting announcements:
  

  Many of you have asked for a collection of STW comics for a while now, so in response, with the help of Topatoco and Make That Thing, sometime next week will see the launch of a Kickstarter campaign to help make STW page-a-day calendars! … [H]ere’s a potential example of the final product.

  Just as many of you have asked for an app for STW for years, so I’m also happy to announce that starting Monday, STW will be available through the Comic Chameleon app!

  What? You want yet one more announcement? OK, OK – based on requests, I’ll bring back recitations² sometime soon, too.

  We at Fleen congratulate Shepherd on his achievements, his future plans, and hopes sincerely he doesn’t apply that mallet to our heads for the whole bucket of cold thing. We at Fleen are very, very sorry.

• In our discussion of Shaenon Garrity’s imminent wrap-up of Narbonic reruns yesterday, we inexcusably neglected to mention that Garrity will still be doing two actively-updating webcomics for the forseeable future. Skin Horse (co-written with Jeffrey Wells) just gets weirder and more loopy as it careens from classic children’s literature reference to classic children’s literature reference³ with no sign of end in sight.

  And although it will be, by design, a limited affair, Garrity’s Monster of the Week has, over the past not-quite-year, brilliantly deconstructed most of the first two seasons of The X-Files, which means two very important things:

  1. Garrity’s got three episodes to the end of season 2 (plus one season-ending recap), and four weeks to her one year anniversary, so let’s call it two seasons per year. At this rate, we’ll get another three and a half years of what is this crap Scully and sexy, sexy Skinner. Also, mites and annoyed Shaenon.
  2. On 19 July, the Friday of SDCC week, we will be Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose and on 8 November we will get Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, the two greatest episodes of The X-Files ever and I’ll fight any man-jack that says different.
• The latest episode of Strip Search put the four remaining Artists through contract hell and — spolier alert! — Robert Khoo enjoyed himself entirely too much, cranking the charm, the smarm, and the hostility up to eleven while trying to fast-talk the Artists into thinking that his very sticky contract is a good thing for them because they’re friends. No kidding, I would watch an entire season of Robert doling out the passive aggression.

  But even above its entertainment value, episode #27 is valuable because it emphasized the importance of not letting yourself get screwed, which even veterans can have problems with⁴.

  By coincidence, today also marked the release of the latest posting at Work Made For Hire, which presented a brilliant technique for directing a negotiation on contractual points that everybody who freelances needs to read right now. Key point:

  The difference between what Dylan [Meconis] and I asked Lo was that when Dylan talked to him, he was given the power to make a very specific choice, and both options were something Dylan wanted him to do.

  Guys, I’m not a freelancer and I intend to use “The Babysitting Question” in my life every chance I get from now on. It’s brilliant.

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¹ To be precise, today is StL #1773 and in the past five years there have been 1826 days what with the leap year and all, meaning that Shepherd comes up 53 strips short of “daily”, or just over one missing day every five weeks. I think we can count this as “daily”.

² The recitations, of which there have been 100, are answers to specific questions sent to Shepherd. Since there have been 100 of them, that means he’s really done 1873 updates in 1826 days, or an average of one extra strip every five weeks. So really we can call StL daily-plus.

³ I’m still holding out for some Purple Crayon.

⁴ It may have just been the editing, but in the episode as streamed, only two of the Artists brought up the idea of having a lawyer review the contract, and only one did so right at the beginning to put Robert on notice; I was hoping it would be all four.

There are two occasions on which I got really, really angry with my parents for inadvertently withholding from me knowledge of people they knew that I would have desperately wanted to know myself. While studying electrical engineering I happened to mention to my father something I’d read in Robert Lucky’s column in IEEE Spectrum. Oh, how’s Bob doing? my father inquired. “Bob?” Bob Lucky. We were in the fraternity together. Still sends us Christmas cards.

I looked at him carefully and said, Robert Lucky, head of communications research at Bell Labs¹, inventor of the adaptive equalizer, future Nobel laureate, the foremost communications engineer of the past thirty years, the man that practically defines the very specific field of study that I concentrate in, the very best possible mentor I could have had for the past three years of school is your fraternity brother and you never mentioned it? Dad shrugged a huh-how-about-that shrug.

It was maybe a year later that that my mother brought up her hidden connection; I’d been sitting in the kitchen when she said, Oh I meant to tell you, because you like cartoons, right? Tish from Garden Club, her son Tom won a Daytime Emmy. “That’s nice, what was it for?” Something called Little Toons, I think. “Little … Little? Wait, you mean Tiny Toons? Tish Ruegger’s son is Tom Ruegger, head of Warner’s animation? That Tom Ruegger?” That’s right, I babysat him back when I was in high school.

I didn’t have an irritated how-could-you-keep-that-from-me reply because I hadn’t ever told my mom that something I had always wanted to do in the back of my mind, but never knew how you could go about it, was voice acting. My time in college radio, writing and performing in radio sketch comedy, had shown that I had some talent for voice work, but how the heck do you even start down that path whether from New Jersey (home) or Indiana (college) without knowing somebody on the inside?

Which brings me (at considerable length) to my point: no such inside-track is needed these days. Want to do voices for animation? Go do that, slap it up on the internet, and if it’s good enough you’ll get noticed by somebody, or you’ll make a fan of somebody who just happens to be making something cool. Which is exactly what happened with Scott Kurtz, as he told us yesterday:

When Doug TenNapel told me he was going to make a “Neverhood style” claymation adventure game and that he wanted me to provide a voice for one of the characters I was very excited. It wasn’t until later that he bothered to mention that I would have to contribute “voice acting” alongside Mike J. Nelson (MST3K/Riff Trax), Rob (Animaniacs) Paulson, Veronica Belmont, and Jon (Napoleon Dynamite) Heder. Now I’m terrified.

I’m no voice actor. I don’t do voices. But Doug assures me that I’m the right guy for this job, and I already said yes. So I’m going to put on a brave face and fake my way through this thing. *gulp*

I’m going to respectfully disagree with Kurtz on one point — he may say that he’s no voice actor, that he doesn’t do voices, but I think that he’s wrong. Bear with me a moment (as if you haven’t been all along); the way I see it, voice acting falls into roughly three categories:

• The stunt voice actor, commonly seen on big-budget animated films, where it’s clear that the purpose is to get the famous name rather than the right voice for the character. The less said about them, the better.
• The professional voice actors, the ones with a stable of voices that they do, adapting on project after project, honing their craft, whose names are mostly unknown to us. The good ones can hide themselves behind many roles and appear in so many different projects for decades; it’s why the actor that has been in the most movies with the greatest cumulative box office is Frank Welker². I have much respect for the professionals, and from his close work with Dino Andrade on the PvP animated series, I imagine that this is the sort of voice actor that Kurtz is unfavorably comparing himself to.
• The person chosen to do one particular voice because there’s nobody in the world that will do it better; sometimes it’s a famous actor, sometimes it’s somebody who’s not necessarily a household name, sometimes it’s nobody you’ve heard of but who is absolutely perfect for the role in question.

  Pixar has a great track record in this regard (cf: Brad Bird as Edna Mode or Sarah Vowell as Violet Incredible), but the best examples come from a woman you’ve probably never heard of: voice casting director Andrea Romano. She’s why every voice on Warner’s various Batman/Superman/Justice League series was absolutely perfect (cf: Ed Asner as Granny Goodness). I think the reason that Doug TenNapel wants Kurtz on Armikrog is because he falls into this category.

We, however, will only get to hear what character Kurtz is perfect for if Armikrog raises its US$900,000; at more than US$189,000 raised since the project launched yesterday, it seems pretty certain that the goal will be met in the remaining 28 days, but there’s only one way to be sure. Forget the fact that Doug TenNapel is a great comics artist and game designer, forget that Neverhood was a great game. Do it because it’s never a bad thing for creative types to stretch themselves into other avenues of creation³. And do it for all the actors, pros and perfect one-shots alike, who’ve given voice to the characters that you’ve loved.

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¹ Requiscat in pace, Bell Labs. We will not see your like again.

² AKA the only guy that’s ever voiced Fred from Scooby Doo, and nearly 700 other credits.

³ Well, maybe not “never”. Dirk Diggler’s attempt to reinvent himself as a musician, that was pretty dire.

I swear by all that I hold dear, some day I will make it to Chris Butcher’s little slice of early-May comics-related heaven. In the meantime, just look for the reports of anybody that was there and once again it appears to have been a success beyond the usual superlatives. There aren’t many situations where I take pronouncements like Best show ever at face value, but in the case of TCAF I can’t ignore the overwhelming consensus. Welcome home everybody that was in the Tee-Oh for the weekend, now get back to entertaining me for free.

• It’s never been the most reliable of updaters, Instant Classic, even going so far as to run an update with the helpful annotation Believe it or not, I have the next 4 or 5 comics drawn. Exciting times! and then not supplying the next strip for just about exactly a year. But irregular updates have never dissuaded me, and even those that are likely never coming back will cause me to peek in from time to time, just to make sure, if they’re good enough.

  And that’s the thing about Instant Classic — however much Brian Carroll may find life (or filmmaking) interrupting him, he’s always going to come back to the comic, because he’s still got story to share. Yesterday marked the first decade of telling that story, in fits, starts, always returning until it’s done. Here’s to as many stories as he has to tell, and however long they take to share.

• Readers of this page may be familiar with one MC Frontalot, official rapper of webcomics and all-around nerdcore badass. When he decided to make his latest official video, the question was what form it should take. Given that he’s commissioned half of webcomics to do art for his various albums, it was probably a no brainer to call upon the drawin’, comickin’, and animatin’ wonders, Carly Monardo (various art for Dr McNinja, coincidentally written and drawn by her husband) and Lauren Monardo Gramprey (BrainFood Comics, Perhapanauts, and coincidentally Carly’s twin sister).

  Said video went live last night, and you may now enjoy I’ll Form The Head [AV] (from 2011’s Solved) in all of its mid-’80s evoking glory. Seriously, if this doesn’t make you want to slip on some feetie pajamas and curl up in front of the TV with a big bowl of cereal, then I guess you weren’t born around 1978. Neither was I, but don’t judge me.

So I’ve been away for a bit, as mentioned last week. For those who were wondering, being married for twenty years and then getting to throw a party for your friends is sort of awesome. But I’m back now, and it seems not a moment too soon, as things are beginning to pile up around here.

• I’d planned on coming back to bloggening today, and even if I hadn’t I would have had to after seeing a blip in my twitterstream last night, the first in 18 months or so from Allie Brosh who is sublimely wonderful and had fallen entirely out of public view. It happens, and in her case, Ms Brosh has shared why it happened and done so in a way that’s honest and brave and makes me want to punch capital-D Depression right in the neck.

  I don’t know if her words+pictures today have helped more people with depression or without — being able to recognize when somebody you know is suffering and being able to help is not a skill that’s widely taught just yet, but damn if this comic isn’t a tremendous first stride. Read it, think about it, go be a shriveled piece of corn for somebody that needs it.

• Also dropping today is the latest Jim Zub project; while he was famously jerked around by DC Comics earlier this year, he was also classy as hell about the whole thing. I’m going to ascribe his newest news to that classy-as-hellness, because I’m not certain that anybody at DC has two functioning neurons to rub together, but they probably recognize kind behavior¹. In any event, Mr Zub is responsible for the writerly portion of a two-part Batman story in a digital-first anthology series, with Part One appearing on devices today and part two next Thursday, 16 May. My only quibble with Zub’s entirely understandable enthusiasm is when he says:
  

  My first published superhero story and first published DC Comics work, Legends of the Dark Knight #49, has been released on digital and mobile platforms and it’s only 99 cents!

  That’s because every time Zub shares his wisdom on making comics and making it in comics (start here, look to the sidebar that says “Tutorials” and don’t stop so long as there are still links to follow), he is himself a goddamn superhero to everybody that loves comics, and don’t you forget it, Zub.

Various new things were introduced while I was gone:

• Comic Chameleon, long awaited, has seen its official launch, meaning that you can download it to your iDevice now and start reading webcomics for free, and with the cooperation of their creators. Well done Bernie Hou and the entire Comic Chameleon team; once I get my Android version you’ll escalate all the way to “Attaboy” status.
• Dante Shepherd, this blog’s favorite Chemical Engineer², has launched a new undertaking and it’s not the second comic (provisionally dubbed PhD Unknown) that’s been hinted at for a few months now. That’s cool, we at Fleen would rather wait until it was done cooking to Shepherd (and art collaborator Joan Cooke)’s standards.

  No, what Shepherd announced was a new initiative to promote interest in and understanding of STEM topics by K-12 educators, who will presumably share their knowledge and enthusiasm with the various rugrats budding scholars who will form the technological basis of future generations. If you happen to know anybody that teaches K-12, do everybody a favor and point ’em towards Science The World so we can start building a smarter tomorrow.

• Kickstarts have also been underway, with campaigns set for the second volume of The Bear (including a webcomicky presentation of Volume 1 at MyBear.net, as promised recently), the second volume of Dumbing of Age, the first volume of Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, and the revival of the Penny Arcade Downloadable Content podcast.
• That last one has been getting a bunch of (to my mind, ill-informed) pushback, on the grounds that podcasts don’t cost anything and therefore it’s a big scam. Au contraire, mon frère, podcasts do cost something; they cost time, which if Mike Krahulik, Jerry Holkins, and others at Penny Arcade Industries take, they won’t be spending on other things that will generate money.

  Could Jerry and Mike do the podcast without impacting their lavish, Russian mafia-like lifestyles? Probably, but they aren’t just supporting themselves — their efforts are what make payroll for more than a dozen people, and with that kind of responsibility comes Robert Khoo’s responsibility to say, We have to find a way to make it pay. Me, I’m just interested to see if they set the all-time record for highest percentage funding in Kickstarter history, which as of this writing is at an astonishing 570,000% of goal. Okay, granted, that was a ten dollar goal, but let’s not lose sight of the distractingly-large number.

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¹ Much in the way that my dog will be your very best friend if you offer her a treat, but shies away from small children that haven’t learned how to pet gently.

² In keeping with tribal custom, all specific engineering disciplines are capitalized here at Fleen, in acknowledgment of the skills, knowledge, and hard work of those who practice our peculiar intersection of design, intuition, math, science, the right-hand rule³, and blowin’ shit up. Respect.

³ AKA, The engineering gang sign.

Warning: today’s post contains references to the most evil creatures alive.

• Nothing to do with webcomics, but interesting nonetheless — a short-duration Kickstart (14 days) with a high goal ($US50,000) and a single reward tier priced at the very popularest dollar figure (US$25). The NPR/This American Life team-up known as Planet Money¹ have decided to Kickstart a t-shirt that contains all the information that describes where the shirt came from and how it was created and shipped to you, the recipient:
  

  We will take you on that odyssey and document the route our t-shirt took to your back. We’ll meet the people who grow the cotton, spin the yarn, and cut and sew the fabric. We’ll ride on the cargo ships that bring our t-shirt from factories in Bangladesh and Colombia to ports in the US. And we’ll examine the crazy tangle of international regulations which govern the t-shirt trade the whole way.

  Obligatory note that they’ve cleared their goal by more than US$10,000 as of this writing, and the entire project fascinates me more than anything the PM team have done since they went out and bought a toxic asset just to see what that was like. Alas, “Toxie” is no more, but this shirt should prove to be a better investment and I would have pledged for it already if not for one thing.

  Squirrels.

  One of the attic-invading, cable-chewing, fluff-tailed little bastards² is prominently featured on the shirt so screw that noise. No offense, David Kestenbaum, Jacob Goldstein, Marianne McCune, Zoe Chace, Caitlin Kenney, Chana Joffe-Walt, Matt Levine, Lam Thuy Vo, Jess Jiang, Robert Smith, Adam Davidson, Cory Turner, and all the other Planet Money contributors; I love your work and give money to my public radio station, but I ain’t puttin’ no damn squirrel on my body.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, Holly Rowland’s sneak preview of what’s coming to Make That Thing this springtime is now becoming less “preview” and more “up and running”. Tyson Hesse’s Boxer Hockey is essentially about people in their underwear whacking the crap out of a frog (and each other) as a competitive sport; since the beginning, Boxer Hockey fans have been wanting their own frogs and now Hesse and Make That Thing have finally produced a prototype with just the right expression, floppiness, and ability to stand up to blunt instruments.

  The Make-a-Frog Project kicks off just as Boxer Hockey (the strip) is approaching a crucial story point as the main characters meet their female counterparts in a Boxer Hockey (the sport) match that is sure to be unrivaled in terms of grudges, hilariously cheap shots, and frog-whacking. Get your own Make-a-Frog in time for the showdown so you can recreate the mayhem at home!

• Speaking of not exactly webcomics, I came across an essay that originally dealt with creative blocks in programmers, but I think it’s probably applicable more widely than that. The McDonald’s Theory is mandatory reading for anybody that doubts the utility of Just start, it’ll absolutely get better once you’ve discarded the initial crap as an operating philosophy.

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¹ Unofficial motto, in the sense that I just made it up: Cutting through the crap since before the financial meltdown.

² I’m convinced that it was squirrels that took down the Charles Christopher site last year, meaning that I can’t link you to the Squirrel Chew comic as the archives are incomplete. Yeah, well, screw you, squirrels, I have the book and I’m sharing your perfidy with the world.