For anybody that’s ever wanted to talk about a creator’s newest work and and put a career in perspective at the same time, there’s adequate writing and there’s sublime¹ writing. A stellar example of the latter dropped yesterday from the highly capable FILM CRIT HULK², talking about Hope Larson, by way of discussing A Wrinkle In Time. If you’ve ever wanted to feel humble about a public hobby as an opinion-slinger, consider that you’ll never be as good as a fictional radioactive ragebeast³, not that I would know anything about that.

• WE’RE DOWN TO THE whoops sorry. We’re down to the last five days of Operation: Let’s Build A Goddamn Tesla Museum, and O:LBAGTM frontman Matthew Inman decided to sweeten the rewards structure a little. As of this writing, twelve of the miniature Tesla Coils are still available, and remain one of the coolest, most mischief-potentialled tchotchkes ever offered up in a crowdfunding endeavour. Oh, and it should also be noted that said offer coincided with Inman’s 30th birthday, so Happy Birthday to him a day late, and also to Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik today; Christmas in September, indeed.
• Perennial blog favorite Scott C had a big to-do in LA last week for the upcoming Great Showdowns book, and it went well. In and around his west coast time, Mr C hung out with the author of the foreword of said book, a moderately well-known magician and professional society officer by the name of Harris at his day job. While this particular workplace has a history of being kind to webcomickers, this particular visit went a bit above and beyond as Mr C found himself pitching in on the job. When “day job” equals “starring on a primetime sitcom”, these sorts of things just happen, I guess.
• Speaking of primetime sitcoms, it’s probably about the only medium that Steve Troop hasn’t tried to conquer (yet) in his quest to bring Melonpool to all people, everywhere. The comics end of things are a means to an end, with puppets being where it’s at through all those permutations. Troop’s been pointing those puppets in the direction of movie-making for more than a year of development now, and is moving onto the next stages:
  

  For the last two years, the creator of one of the first webcomics has put down his pens in favor of bringing his sci-fi puppets to the big screen. In the last few weeks, a successful Kickstarter campaign has made this dream a reality.

  Melonpool: The Motion Picture is slated to start filming in February 2013. The feature-length film tells the story of Mayberry Melonpool, the sci-fi addicted captain of a spaceship full of misfits who must pull together to save the universe from a seemingly unstoppable foe — if they don’t kill one another first.

  Best of luck to Troop, and don’t turn your back on those puppets — they look like troublemakers.

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¹ If somewhat shouty.

² The boldface is mandatory, I feel.

³ Seriously, the finest piece of film writing I’ve ever seen was FILM CRIT HULK’s 7000 word dissection of Eat, Pray, Love. Me, I would have just repeated EAT PRAY LOVE MAKE HULK WANT SMASH 1000 times.

Too many things I talked about on busy days all at once, instead of pacing myself; ah, well — it’s just a couple of days until every pert-near webcomicker east of the Continental Divide makes their way to Bethesda for SPX. So while you’re waiting for that, please enjoy the following:

• PONY COP, the most adorable buddy-cop story of all time, gets the fandub treatment and it is glorious. All we need now are the pulse-pounding third and heartbreaking fourth installments in the PONY COP saga and all will be well in the world.
• Math meets snacks.
• She’s got your number, cat.
• Just guessing here, but I think that the Stretchladder of the Homestuck Kickstarter will be seeing an update on the “new perk” and “???” entries soon. We’re almost certainly going to hit the US$1.25 million level by end of the day, meaning that the game will be available on a physical Homestuck-branded medium¹. If Andrew Hussie is smart (and all available evidence is that he is, very much so), a carefully-revealed tease could pump up the response and drive people to ever-higher monetary support in exchange for exactly the right reward.

  Again, just guessing, but I’m thinking that a response equivalent to that for the SNOUTPACK² (and higher tiers) with the Senator Lemonsout and Pyralspite plushies, could be achieved with the right merch. Imps? Plush cuddle-cthulhu? Bec? Highly disturbing puppets? It’s like a totem lathe card for the making of money.

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¹ And if there’s one thing that Rich Stevens has taught us, it’s that custom USB drives will motivate the heck out of your reader base.

² Which has increased by another 50 slots, to 700 backers, selling out as quickly as it’s expanded.

Ready for the weekend? I sure am hell of ready.

• Thing Number One: heard while still in a waking state on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, courtesy of science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce, the story of an attempt to build a museum devoted to Nikola Tesla, and how by the time the story aired, the Matthew Inman-led campaign had cleared a cool million dollars. In the eight hours since crossing the megamark (as of this writing) an additional US$50,244 has been raised. Assuming a constant rate (which won’t happen, but what the hell) we’re looking at the next 37 days raising an additional five and half million dollars. With that kind of money, I’m calling for do-it-yourself deathray kits in the gift shop.
• Thing Number Two: seen and heard this morning while somewhat more awake, David Malki ! goes sound-and-video for today’s Wondermark. It’s a little less … uplifting than the Tesla museum story, but it does follow the Malki! mystique pretty closely. That is, it makes me wonder exactly how much of it was repurposed from original material¹ as Malki ! is wont to do, and how much he created himself (he being a rather talented filmmaker). Applying methods which one has mastered in one medium to a completely different medium? That’s one of the hallmarks of genius, my friends.

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¹ I’m guessing 1950s era industrial hygiene films.

With the rough cut done and the fine cut approaching, Freddave Kellett-Schroeder are, in mere hours, conducting what I believe is the first test screening of Stripped in LA, at something called “The Marina”, which I presume means something to Angelenos. Guys, I can’t tell you how much work has gone into this film (the last post about the making-of aspects to run on this page was just about one year ago exactly, at which time they had put in more than two years of work), and how much of a splash it’s going to make in the world of [web]comics. Let’s all think good thoughts in the direction of SoCal, oh, let’s say an hour from now. If nothing else, the Dave half of Freddave has a new little one at home and I’m sure he hasn’t slept more than an hour a night since San Diego Comic Con six weeks ago.

• Thing to look forward to #1: We at Fleen have spoken with Magnolia Porter at numerous points since Bobwhite wrapped, and it appears that a collection is finally on its way. Don’t get us wrong — Monster Pulse Porter’s best work yet, and The Good Crook was full of charms¹, but Bobwhite was the first time she really made us sit up and take notice. For you lucky attendees of SPX in three weeks, Porter will have a limited run of Bobwhite: Year One while she completes work on the comprehensive single-volume collection.
• Thing to look forward to #2: In actual fact, I don’t usually discover stuff that I’m super-interested in Kickstarter’s emails with their featured projects², but every once in a while, there’s a damn good one. And as luck would have it, this one is five times over goal after four days (in a thirty day campaign), so it also comes under the heading of “sure thing” for those of you that don’t appreciate the “will they make goal or not?” aspect of KS. Specifically, there’s a customized notebook for comic-making, which combines a class moleskine-style sketchbook with a series of comic references and how-tos.

  I DRAW COMICS is proudly stamped on the cover, and boy, will you ever with one of these in hand. My only disclaimer is that from the (admittedly few) sample pages shown on the KS page, it appears to draw a focus on superhero-type comics, which is understandable given that one of the project coordinators is an artist at Marvel. To the extent that body proportions are solely skewed towards the capes crowd³, it may not help every aspiring comics creator, as so many interesting comics don’t follow the stylistic conventions of the DC/Marvel Wednesday pull-list.

  But I have a hard time believing that even a sketchbook entirely serving the aesthetics of superhero comics would be entirely worthless to non-superhero creators; heck, I may even grab one myself, and I can’t draw much more than stick figures — and not even good enough stick figures that Randall Munroe needs to worry about competition.

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¹ Not to mention the fact that you could see Porter develop as an artist and storyteller as it developed, and my goodness has it been nearly five years since it launched? Yes, it has.

² Which is not to say that projects I’m interested in don’t get featured — it’s just I know about them before the email shows up.

³ And I trust that they have the good sense to not include Strong Female Characters-type bodily examples.

If you were lucky enough to hang around the Dumbrella booth at San Diego Comic Con last month, scrollsaw-wielding madman Chris Yates might have shown you something very interesting indeed — a prerelease version of the new Baffler! for iPad app, which released today. Developer Twenty Sided Planet’s been at work for a year on this, and having played with it some, I can say it was time well spent. The grab-a-piece-and-spin-it-around functionality is crisp and smooth, and the timer counting up how long it takes you to solve a puzzle is maddening in its insistence at ticking along at a rate of one second per second.

Best of all, consider what you get — fifteen Chris Yates original puzzles, the digital versions scanned from actual physical puzzles, the prices of which would range from the dozens of American Cash Dollars to multiple hundreds. To obtain fifteen Baffler! originals would be out of the reach of all but the most devoted (and wealthy) collector, but Yates and Twenty Sided Planet are letting you have this for a measly three bucks (with future expansion packs undoubtedly at a similar pricepoint). Take a look at the launch video (there’s some nice quick shots of multi-level Baffler!s around the 1:10 mark) and then we can all sit here and wait to see how long it takes Apple to make The Baffler! for iPad an official demo app in their stores. ‘Cause man, this thing is addictive.

• With the country going all excited for Bobak Ferdowsi¹, would this be a good time to point out that Jorge Cham’s new video series, Ph.Detours, talked to him last week? Yes, yes it would. Ferdowsi’s about halfway through the video (with mohawk but without coloration), but the real stars of the show are JPL program engineer Chaz Morantz and the full-size Curiosity test model.

  As long as we’re talking PhD Comics, we should also mention that their Two Minute Thesis Contest is up to the voting stage — grad students give a brief pitch about what they’re working on, you can listen in and get smarter in your spare time, and the thesis with the most votes will be the first to be illustrated for a new web series, along with other fabulous prizes.

  Me, I’m leaning towards Rescue Times Need[ed] By Fire Services At The Critical Structure Fire by Thomas Lindemann, Rescue Engineering, Cologne University of Applied Sciences because come on — how many other candidates have to do their research inside burning buildings?

• Called it: Khoo putting together Strip Search entry guidelines based on Penny Arcade hiring practice.
• Okay, we all knew that B9.5 was going to crush its goal, we just didn’t know the final number. As it turns out, the final number was slightly over US$140,000, meaning that the Benign Kingdom project as a whole has taken in just over 200 grand. On behalf of everybody that pledged early and kept seeing new stuff added to our rewards packages, I’d like to thank the incredible upsurge in backers that brought in more than US$50K in the last six days of the campaign. Seriously, you just don’t see the curve of the projected total go up all that often on Kickstarts. Now the only question is what the Benign Ones do to top this.

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¹ I’ve mentioned previously that despite my childhood daydreams, I know I never could make it as an astronaut, but if I had been born 20 or 25 years earlier, I would have fought like hell to earn a chair in NASA mission control, so indulge me as I take a moment to recognize that not only has Bobak Ferdowsi got great hair and style out the wazoo, he’s a Flight Director.

Less than ten years out of college, and he’s calling the shots for all the flight controllers in that mission control center. That’s how it works when you’ve got the headsets on — a year or two out of school you’re saving an Apollo mission from an unnecessary abort, and if you stick with it by the time you’re 30 you’re very possibly sitting in Gene Kranz’s chair.

Think I exaggerate? John Aaron (EECOM) and Steve Bales (GUIDO) were twenty four years old when they called (respectively) “SCE to Aux”, and “We’re Go on that program alarm”. Every single person that’s ever plugged into a flight controller’s loop and called, “Go, Flight” is a goddamn hero and if you don’t know their names and stories, shame on you.

Who says that service outages are always a bad thing?

So I’ve been thinking about the possibilities for the Penny Arcade Strip Search Reality TV Series Thing since before I knew it was A Thing. Robert and Brian teased the crap out of it to me, never quite getting around to exactly what you might call details (and now that I reflect, it was probably one of the shoes waiting to drop that were left hanging back in Las Vegas). Since discovering it was A Thing (and Robert getting to see the look on my face, as he said he wanted to), I’ve been wondering where it could go.

Certainly, this is the sort of winnowing process that Robert Khoo lives for; many have commented that the hiring process for Penny Arcade is convoluted and demanding, bordering on insane¹, but I think most people who criticize have likely not been involved in personnel matters before. I’ve just wrapped up a four year stint as the Membership Trustee for my volunteer EMS agency, and I can tell you that Khoo is precisely correct that what makes for a bad hire is not a lack of skills, it’s a lack of fit (personally, culturally) in both directions. It’s the sort of thing that can kill a small business (or volunteer organization) if it’s not handled with extreme care, and more so when those environments are characterized as high-energy, high-pressure, or high-performance. If unpaid volunteers would have willingly subjected themselves to the multi-stage process that Khoo designed, I would have adopted it in a heartbeat.²

Since it’s a competition that needs to be visually interesting, I trust that Khoo will also be up to his usual standard in devising challenges (I’m pretty sure that Robert likes planning things like bachelor parties and reality competitions so that he — like a photographer that hates to be photographed — doesn’t end up participating in them). The demand will certainly be there, and the rewards certainly won’t be just for the eventually winner; the audience that could be built up by being followed for a season of PATV (some 30 episodes, I’d presume) and making it to the final three or four could be enough to launch a career, even without the year-long in-house association with PA’s experts.

I think that the ultimate success or failure of this project will hinge on two items: the breadth of work that gets in and stays in for the duration, and how well the contestants are nurtured.

In the case of the first, Mike and Jerry are terrific about pointing their readers to creators whose work is marvelously divergent from their own; can you think of any webcomicker less like Penny Arcade than, say, Erika Moen? Having an Erika-type, or analogues to the breadth of topic & style found in your Beckys, Kates, Merediths, Toms, Evans, or Jams in the contest, people whose work is nothing like Penny Arcade will, I think, be a prime determinator of the quality of competition.

This isn’t entirely up to the producer end of the equation — I do think that Mike, Jerry, Robert, and the others are fair-minded enough to want to showcase the best work with the most potential (after all, they’re on the hook to give a sort of imprimatur and don’t want to sully their own brand), but if the contestants self-select and you don’t get applications from as wide a pool of creators with as wide a range of artistic styles (and personal experiences), the show won’t live up to its potential with respect to (as Anton Ego put it) the discovery and defense of the new.

The second item is more within the control of the showrunner. TV does reality/competition shows on a range from generally classy (cf: The Amazing Race or Iron Chef America) to trainwreck (cf: Housewives, Shores, anything centered around a job that isn’t Ace of Cakes ’cause dammit, those people like each other and have fun at work), and even the shows on the ability counts more than narcissistic personality disorder end of the spectrum can drop the ball badly (cf: Mondo was robbed, and where is the goddamn owl).³ Put bluntly, will Strip Search have a Tim Gunn to encourage, critique, mentor (and, when needed, lay the smack down)? Note that unless the Tim Gunn role is fulfilled by Khoo, the local substitute will not be as good a dresser as Tim Gunn. Heck, just see if Tim wants to come out to Seattle for a couple of months.

So that’s where my head’s at. The rest we’ll see when the final numbers on the Kickstarter are in (as of this writing, we’re about US$1500 away from Jerry having to cosplay something suitably humiliating at PAXes Prime and East), but the projection makes Strip Search a virtual certainty at this point. Contestant screening, format, challenges, guest judges⁴ are all to be seen. There remains an incredible amount of work to execute on all the potential, but if there’s one thing the Penny Arcade crew (all of them, even the ones whose names you don’t see in the credits) know how to do, it’s execute on potential.

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¹ Let’s make this clear: you or I could not get hired by Robert Khoo. We wouldn’t make it past the laundry question, much less to the phone interviews.

² Not that we ever had 5000 applicants for a single open EMT slot.

³ Confidential to Scott Kurtz: Project Runway has started again, so you might want to not pay attention to my tweets on Thursday nights for the next coupla’ months.

⁴ I could be available for a weekend, just sayin’.

Okay, look. It’s been a long day, a long week, and you got a mountain of text off of me yesterday morning, and you’ll get more on Tuesday. Monday evening, if Monday’s flight is particularly boring. Let’s do both of us a favor and keep this brief.

• Saturday we heard that Dave Kellett and Dylan Meconis both lost out in their respective Eisner categories, booo.
• Saturday I spent a fair bit of time talking with the always-smart Vijaya Iyer about the business of media in general and Kickstarter in particular. More on that later.
• Saturday I happened to run into Raina Telgemeier at random on the floor, and she was kind enough to give me an advanced review copy of her latest graphic novel, the hotly-anticipated DRAMA. Understand, I’m primed and ready to read DRAMA, given how much I’ve loved Raina’s previous work, but each time I’ve talked with Scott McCloud, he’s let me know how this book is, quote, A game-changer. I suspect that as soon as I read it, I am going to be getting downright evangelical about DRAMA.
• Saturday Scott & Kris announced their new Blamimation-style treatment of Mappy¹ for ShiftyLook. Rich Stevens announced that he’ll be running print versions of Diesel Sweeties material via Oni Press, as well as other projects as a writer.

Saturday purchases: RASL volume 4, given an ARC of DRAMA.

In the panel rooms today: Keenspot at 2:00, Axe Cop at 3:00.

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¹ The mouse police.

One is never really prepared for the truly weird moments at SDCC; case in point: being introduced to the very nice lady that bought a Chris Yates original Baffler!, and recognizing the signature on the credit card receipt: Lynn Johnston. Weirder: having her tell me that she bought her son (presumably the one that “Michael” is based on) one of Yates’s POOP signs last year. Weirder still: she did her best to convince other people in line to purchase POOP signs (or, from another angle, dOOd). She was lovely and it was a delight.

Also odd: the Penny-Arcade booth staff all had those brainwave-reading catgirl ears that respond to emotions. At his panel later, Robert Khoo would don a pair and react to Scott Kurtz’s mad experiments¹.

That panel (and additional details on the Dave Kellett/Stripped panel are extensive and appear below the cut.

Friday purchases: Kris Straub’s Starslip Companion².

In the panel rooms today: Penny Arcade at 2:30, the Kickstarter panel most worth going to because Vijaya Iyer is on this one.

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¹ Sample: Okay, I’m going to put an image of me in your head and we’re going to watch the ears. Me pooping. It’s a hard poop. The ears indicated interest, then deflated in existential horror.

² A book so white and understated/tasteful in its presentation, when photographed against a white background, it threatens to merge into the fabric of reality itself.

(more…)

That big Stripped announcement?

Bill. Watterson.

Okay, let’s be clear, Watterson is not breaking his decades-long habit of no interviews, but he has provided an extensive, thoughtful set of answers to questions via email, making his most public pronouncement on comics in forever.

I got other stuff for you today.

• Scoop! Fleen can reveal exclusively exactly what it is that Ryan Estrada (and a passel of co-conspirators) have been working on. Launching Monday, 2 July, all of the projects that he’s teased (and more!) will be available as a digital comics equivalent of the famed Humble Indie Bundle.

  The Whole Story will feature as many as seven full e-books, a combo platter of new and established creators, combining both new and previously-seen work. Three books await you for free, with the remaining four available at various purchase tiers, adding up to a total of nearly 500 MB of comics. We’ll give the launch address on Monday, and remember: you’ll only have about three weeks to grab what you can. They’re in Retina resolution, and in case you were wondering — Estrada’s dropping hints that this will be an ongoing publication channel, so look for more bundles in the future.

• Next up: updates to where to find everybody at SDCC; Zach Weinersmith will be hanging with Unshelved (booth 2300), Bill Holbrook and John Lotshaw will be with Moonbase Press (table L-02); Weregeek and Little Vampires are tabling together (booth 1831), and Keenspot are indeed double-boothing.
• Next, if you’re in Philadelphia this weekend, you can watch webcomics own Brad Guigar¹ perform stand-up on Saturday night. Fun starts at 3:30pm.
• Shaenon Garrity² has launched a new webcomic where she recaps one X-Files episode per week and the first one is magic. I shouldn’t be surprised, since Shaenon + recap = comedy gold, but there is a very deep downside to this new endeavour: if she keeps to a one-a-week schedule and does them in order, it will be early July 2013 before she gets to Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose and September of the same year before she reaches Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space”. This is tragic.

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¹ He’s dreamy.

² Tiki Queen of the Greater Bay Area and Nexus of All Webcomics Realities, non-Ryan North Division.