About now as I’m writing this, the last — hopefully not too frantic — polishes are being put on two corners of webcomics, each of which will lead to new and hopefully wonderful things. A third corner is polishing up something different, but we won’t be able to tell how shiny it gets for a while.

• Firstly, this:
  

  Hi everyone. I quit my job today. I will be working on Gunnerkrigg full time now. There will be a proper announcement on Monday.

  Tom Siddell has made the leap into full time comickin’, and I believe all right-thinking folk will agree that he’s going to do very, very well. If absolutely nothing else comes of it (and much will), he won’t have to hold himself to doing three strips on the weekend before allowing himself to relax any longer. Best of luck, Tom, your comics are great and you should feel great.

• Wondercon 2012 opens in a couple of hours, and anybody making the annual trip to San Francisco should first realize they’re in the wrong place, on account of it’s in Anaheim this year. Um, sorry ’bout that. Webcomicky people are to be found there in the small press and main floor area, including (but mostly likely not limited to:

  Small Press

  Table 11 Jimbo Hillin and the Wire-Heads crüe.
  Table 48 Evan “Overside” Dahm and Kel “Sorcery 101and also some fairy tales” McDonald.
  Table 49 Kory Bing, who does many things, as does Sfé Monster, along with Dave Shabet who mostly does Dead Winter.
  Table 51 Party Tymez with Ananth and Yuko and Becky and Frank and maybe you.
  Table 53 Ben Costa, Dean of Iron Crotch studies at Iron Crotch University¹.

  Main Floor

  Booth 452 More keen-ness than you can handle with Keenspot.
  Booth 504 The closest thing to functional adults in our community, Professors Foglio.
  Booth 615 A man haunted by a house move which is still in progress², Dave Kellett.
  Booth 617 Did somebody call for handsome men? Kris Straub and David Malki ! heed your cry.
  Booth 716 The poster children for Kids, Don’t Do That, Danielle Corsetto and Randy Milholland; give ’em both a big ol’ kiss for me.

• Are you the sort that wonders where you can spend your hard-earned entertainment dollar in a month or so? Simple! You should give it to Jorge Cham, who in return will send you The PhD Movie either via stream or DVD! The countdown timer on the movie page is, even as we speak, ticking forward at a rate of one second per second, towards that golden day (15 April) when you can enact this transaction. Yay!

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¹ Since the Shi Long Pang books are published by Iron Crotch University Press, it follows that there would have to be an Iron Crotch University, right? I just want to know what their sports mascot is. I bet its nickname is “Rusty”.

² Prediction: if you ask him how the house move is going, he will likely be his answering with Buuuuhhhh.

After yesterday’s Big Think on Kickstarter, I decided to let somebody else do the big thinkin’ today. Fortunately, that somebody is the very capable Jesse Thorn, who I believe — misadventures with Gabe & Tycho aside — embodies the webcomics ideal pretty well. Sure, his medium is radio rather than pixels, but it’s a give-it-away, charge-for-stuff calling, he uses TopatoCo for his merch, has interviewed webcomickers¹ for his radio and blogio audiences, and answers stuff sent to his public email address.

And, like webcomickers, Thorn is sharing his secrets. A print version of a speech/presentation/manifesto² that he’s been delivering to audiences around the world started making the rounds yesterday via Transom.org; entitled Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success, Thorn lays out examples of creators that embody elements of the path he followed to his present position of being as successful as one could hope for without being beholden to somebody else.

There’s a lot of very smart ideas in MYT, and that’s before you consider that he’s one sharp-dressed mutherscratcher who may well be responsible for young adult males getting the idea into their collective heads that a decent wardrobe is an asset in their lives. Even if you create nothing more meaningful than hack webcomics pseudojournalism³, read through what Thorn’s got to say. It’s damn good stuff.

• Hey, you know where Things are getting Made tonight? The East Village, where Kate Beaton and Michael Kupperman continue their regular series of entertainments, Crimestopper’s Club. As with previous entries in the comedy & comics show, Beaton and Kupperman have invited some of their buddies along to amuse you, and this month’s iteration includes Aaron “The Latin Art-Throb” Diaz and Chris “Doctor” Hastings.

  I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to talk with Hastings briefly over the weekend (while we were on a pizza-retrieval mission; very exciting stuff, featuring a near-fatal encounter with one of Brooklyn’s oversized and potentially-rabid urban raccoons), and while he was still finishing up his material for tonight, I am convinced it will be most chuckle-worthy. I didn’t have a chance to talk to Diaz, but if takes requests, just get him started on the topic of Ian McKellen as Magneto; trust me on this one.

• Sometimes Making Your Thing involves re-evaluating your Thing’s message. For a peek inside that aspect of the creative process, I commend to you Jeph Jacques’s thoughts on how today’s QC was originally going to go, and why he changed it. I know that a lot of people might think that Jacques was too afraid of a reader backlash that might never have developed, or that by framing in argument in terms of concern over how readers might be offended, that he was caving into reader entitlement.

  I prefer to look at it as, although you can’t control the interpretation of your work, you’d be stupid not to admit to yourself that others might not follow your intent to your interpretation. Having consideration for those points of view isn’t just courteous, it can make you consider your work in ways that you might not otherwise, and make your work stronger as a result. For what it’s worth, I think his original idea would have been fine, but the revised strip is better. Well done, sir.

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¹ David Malki ! has also been involved in the Gathering of the Thornalos known as MaxFunCon.

² Not his first manifesto, either.

³ And quite frankly, it would be tough for you to create something less meaningful than that.

Rich Stevens is actually doing it:

Someone actually pledged $666 to dare me to break vegetarian and eat a pound of bacon. Daniel Valentine, you amazing dark wizard of death. I am going to survive this and evolve new mutant powers in the process! Perhaps this will be the radioactive spider that eventually teaches me about responsibility.

Speaking of Valentines, Daniel and otherwise …

• You know who is every lady’s dream valentine? Brad Guigar, but that’s too bad because he’s only got eyes for his wife, sons, and cartooning¹. Today he celebrates twelve years of juggling those competing demands on his time in a manner so deft that he cartooning gets stronger, the wisdom he shares gets wiser, and the husband-and-father routine becomes more natural and rewarding².
• Know what else is associated with Valentine’s Day besides Brad Guigar? Yes, yes, we know, “horny werewolves”, thank you Internet Jesus. I was just gonna say “sexy times”, and use that to point out that the long-awaited Smut Peddler collection (with a submission period of more than a year, recently closed) is nearly completion. Posted today: the cover, by the too-talented-to-be-believed Emily Carroll. Prepare to read this with somebody you love (or at least really, really like).
• For your consideration: not quite a tip jar, not quite an obligation, more an expression of appreciation for those that don’t like to buy stuff. John Allison has introduced a subscription model for Bad Machinëry that is entirely optional, and for which you, the subscriber receive nothing in particular above and beyond the sense of satisfaction you get for supporting an artist. I was recently asked what the proper way to read a webcomic was (the original intent was RSS or go to the page), but my reply was:
  

  Mentally track how many pages you read, buy $1 of merch for every 10 pages.

  If you don’t like stuff cluttering your home, here’s your alternative; by my calculation, Mr Allison gives you about 250 pages per year, making the Silver level of subscription about right.

• One should note that asking for money for doing a comic (whether in the form of donations, a tip jar, fund drives, and the like) attracts a range of opinions, from support to criticism. Also found in the world of comics and no consensus opinion: motion comics. For those of us of a certain age, motion comics (no matter how well done, and often they aren’t well done) will always invoke the super-cheap Marvel animated show of the ’60s, where panels were slid on the screen with entirely static characters and a voice track overlaid (seriously; they made the animated Star Trek look like a Pixar production).

  That being said, I freely admit my own youthful experiences color my impressions of motion comics. Done well, it might add something to the original that I never realized was lacking. And if anybody is going to do it well, it’s probably Rob Balder, who is launching a project to motion comic-ize Book One of Erfworld. I have affection for Erfworld, in a way that I didn’t for Iron Man or Hulk when I was three or four years old. Technology has progressed by leaps and bounds, as has the judgment of what constitutes proficient voice acting. Hell, the US$24,000 that Balder has set as his goal may well exceed the budget that Marvel was working with back in ’66. So despite my misgivings (again, born entirely of my past experiences), I’m very curious to see how this could turn out.

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¹ A lesser man would have a mistress, but Brad’s not lesser in any sense of the word. Ladies.

² I don’t have empirical, observed evidence for that like for the other two things but come on — dude’s obviously got love for his family seeping from every pore. Every moment he’s cartooning, he’s champing³ at the bit to get back to his family.

³ You’re welcome, Brad.

So, Rich Burlew crossed the threshold for the #5 all-time Kickstarter fundraising total sometime overnight. Then somewhere around 9:30am (GMT-5) today, he lost it again, because coming out of nowhere is the campaign for Double Fine‘s next videogame, which set the record for 24 hours of fundraising and highest number of backers and is, as of this writing, literally adding backers and dollars faster than I can refresh the project page.

If you have to fall behind on a landmark achievement, at least there’s no shame when these guys are in the game; at present rates of growth, somewhat less than 48 hours will be necessary for Double Fine to become the all-time highest fundraising total on Kickstarter, and it keeps picking up steam⁰. As I write this sentence, they’re over US$868,000¹, having added at a rate of more than US$60,000 per hour since I started paying close attention a couple hours ago.

And, since as we all know Double Fine are slightly associated with Scott C, it’s all in the webcomics family.

Did I mention that Burlew’s campaign is (again, as I write this) over 1000% funding? Or that Rich Stevens had cleared 400% of goal in 24 hours? These are exciting times for creator-owned (in the case of Burlew and Stevens) and boutique/creator-driven (in the case of Double Fine) works; in case you were unconvinced on that point, allow me to direct your attention to this story.

Short form:

You can make all the arguments you want about Well, he didn’t have to sign a work-for-hire contract and Nobody forced him. Fine. Out of your system? Explain to me what benefit Marvel receives from enjoining Friedrich from stating a true fact. Explain to me how the Marvel/Disney corporate legal team could have possibly spent less than US$17K, and how spending more money than you receive can serve any purpose other than to punish Freidrich for having the temerity to say Hey, this deal is pretty lopsided, out of simple human decency and a sense of fairness would you re-negotiate?.

Where would Friedrich be if he owned Ghost Rider? What kind of hellish poverty will Burlew, Stevens, and the entire crew of Double Fine be much more likely to avoid simply because they’re not beholden to a publisher³ that demanded complete ownership of the things in their heads? How entirely malevolent does an entire segment of the publishing industry have to be that Rich Stevens has a brighter future by giving away⁴ something he owns than Friedrich and countless others have had by cashing checks for things they should have, but didn’t?

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⁰ So to speak.

¹ Probably hit US$900,000 by the time I’m ready to post.

² Money he doesn’t have; cf: destitute.

³ Can publishers be useful? Absolutely — take a look at TopatoCo, which does not demand total ownership of properties it publishes, because Jeff and Holly realize that is entirely out of proportion to the risk they assume in capital and effort to bring things to print. This is because they are decent human beings.

⁴ From the second update to his Kickstarter:

I am definitely going to be able to do my collections and offer them as DRM-free, payment-optional downloads.

So Rich Stevens turned 35 a few weeks back and celebrated by sharing gifts with you, the members of the world that are not Rich Stevens. These included special pricing on merch and free shipping, but also an ebook for free download containing a whole mess¹ of his comics.

Then earlier this week, he shifted tactics, making a second ebook of comics, this time specifically for the iPad, utilizing the brand-new iBooks Author app, again for free. Free turned out to be a critical distinction, as charging for it would open up the can o’ worms that is Apple’s iBooks Author EULA which would require a large cut of revenue to Apple as well as their permission to distribute it through their store. He may well be the first person out of the gate with a release produced via iBooks Author; certainly anybody that got their hands on the tool day-of-release is still waiting for Apple’s approval to sell content.

Rich Stevens don’t got time to screw around waiting for corporate approvals — guy gets an idea Monday, experiment launches Tuesday, Thursday he writes up his impressions.

Some 10,000+ downloads later, his most important conclusion may be that a significant number of readers out there would love to have a delivered-in-chunks, read-at-once model for their webcomics. Sifting through RSS feeds, remembering to hit sites, making time to read one of each of X number of strips per day², relying on bandwidth or signal at the time — for a large number of people (and probably growing as tablet use spikes upward) will find a bursty delivery, followed by the opportunity to read ten or fifteen minutes worth on the train, waiting for an appointment, or over lunch (wherever you happen to bef … I think the iPad part of this is key) to be an optimal experience.

This first delivery dropped a month’s worth of strips, leading to an easy magazine metaphor; should Apple find some way to have a rolling approval for this kind of distribution (instead of requiring pre-approval for each “issue”), and likely if they can permit creators to keep more of the fruits of their labor (30% is somewhere between usury and science fiction), this could be the first iteration of that Next Big Thing that forward-looking webcomickers have their eyes on³.

There will be further experiments and refinements — Stevens knows that fast turnaround and incremental improvements reach a good final state much faster and cheaper than trying to get to 100% on the first go — which process requires input. One key question (from my perspective as a non-iPad owner) would be how to adapt this model away from a single platform; I don’t have an answer and wouldn’t expect Stevens to have one yet either, considering the entire thing is about three days old. But if you have thoughts on the matter, the discussion is taking place on Google+. I can’t wait to see how this one turns out.

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¹ One of the more obscure English measurements.

² For me, X ranges as high as 75 or 80 and as low as mid-30s, depending on the day.

³ In my opinion, one of the most useful things that Scott Kurtz has done via his occasional participation in print vs web shitfights is to very publicly never lose sight of the fact that webcomics as we now know there are a transitional mode of distribution. There will be a next thing, whether it’s some form of e-magazine, or the only slightly hyperbolic direct-to-brain HyperComics that get thrown around from time to time.

Not permitting webcomickers to fall into the trap of print comickers who don’t see a way to adapt is crucially helpful; just living with an understanding that business model and technological change are a given gives the current (and more likely, the next) generation of comics creators a better chance at not being left behind by those changes than some of their predecessors have proved to be.

In a land not quite so far from here sore lacking in etiquette, many did wander from poor behavior to poor behavior, wandering until they had worn out three pairs of iron-bound shoes, wandering until their eyes grew dim with none to instruct them in the ways of interpersonal interactions. In this land was a prophecy, hidden in a gem, the gem hidden in a duck, the duck locked away in a great wooden chest, a prophecy that contained all the secrets of Please and Thanks-You.

A pair of wise queens proposed to find the chest and in the chest the duck and in the duck the gem, and to share the knowledge with all the land, and the wise queens found among the people those willing to aid them in their quest, and they set out to let people know to Stop Doing That Were You Raised In A Barn Or Something¹. They cast their knowings to all who were smart enough to desire them, and that is how Nerddom became just a bit less rude and more considerate.

Okay, that’s harder than it looks. How about something a little less grandiloquent for the rest of today’s news?

• Appearing tomorrow, live and in person, the Ryan ‘n’ Joey Occasional Roadshow² hits Trinity College at UToronto from 7:00 to 10:00pm with fun and excitement and really wild things. Those of you in the GTA, do drop in.
• Jeff Zugale takes a break from both shouting Woo! in inappropriate circumstances and painting Wil Wheaton in awesome circumstances to draw some webcomics for Bill Barnes & Paul Southworth featuring Desmond in pantless circumstances. Smart move making this the first strip of Zugale’s stint on Not Invented Here, as poor Desmond is so freaked out by this memento mori that he doesn’t even notice that he looks different now.
• I recall a conversation with Robert Khoo wherein he denied that Penny Arcade was a webcomic endeavour at all; rather, it was a content-creating company focused on the videogame industry, with the webcomic just one part of it. Granted, the comic is the dominant part, but he didn’t commit to that always being true. Today, PA takes another step towards the comic being just another item in the content portfolio, as Ben Kuchera (formerly of Ars Technica) makes the jump to Penny Arcade with a publicly-described brief of:
  

  [W]riting about the gaming industry for Penny Arcade

  So that’s multiple comics, publishing, tie-in games, a charity, multiple internet TV series, a merch-design house, exposition services, custom branded content service, a scholarship, and now generalized editorial content. While we’ll never see PA challenging, say, Disney for pan-media dominance, I fully believe that’s only because Khoo wouldn’t be able to keep his hands in all aspects of such a broad enterprise. I also fully believe we’re within two years of PA going fully international, most likely with PAXEurope and/or PAXAsia, but I wouldn’t count out satellite offices creating original content in other languages for local consumption.

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¹ This was a somewhat unusual land for such tales, as it turned out that none of the people had, in fact, been raised in a barn and thus had no excuse.

² Occasional in the sense that they occasionally put on a show, not that they are occasionally Ryan and Joey, which they are pretty much all of the time.

R Stevens 3, of course. He’s following the tradition of hobbits and giving you presents today, the day of his birth. Also, he has now met the legal requirements to be President of the United States of America.

• Remember how I talked about all the stuff Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson were doing, and how not all of it had been revealed yet? Two more pieces have been, with a gorgeous, limited edition two-piece Adventure Time screen print coming out sometime tomorrow from Mondo Tees (watch their blog and/or twitterfeed for the exact on-sale time, and expect the 185 sets to go quickly). Mere hours later, the Adult Swim themed show at Gallery 1988 opens with a reception¹ from 7:00 to 10:00pm at the Melrose branch; Becky’s contribution pays homage to The Venture Bros².
• Welcome return, or cruel toying with our affections? Tweet Me Harder drops episode #76 nearly ten months after the purported series finale [MP3]. Dare we hope that this marks a return to TMH glory?³
• Eisner nominations are now open, with the criteria for Best Digital Comic not looking significantly different from prior years:
  

  The best digital comic category is open to any new, professionally produced long-form original comics work posted online in 2011. Webcomics must have a unique domain name or be part of a larger comics community to be considered. The work must be online-exclusive for a significant period prior to being collected in print form. The URL and any necessary access information should be emailed to Eisner Awards administrator Jackie Estrada: jackie@comic-con.org.

• Finally, the sad, sorry history of webcomics scrapers has hit a new low, as some bozo on Facebook is scraping content, redelivering without permission, and soliciting donations of cash which will totally be given back to the original creators, no really, promise it’s totally not a scam⁴. Randy Milholland has the details, and after a little preliminary digging at Facebook (I don’t have an account, so I could be wrong on this), it appears the category those getting hosed sideways can file a complaint under would be Intellectual Property Rights Infringement.

  Or it might be on grounds of Impersonation (since the app leaves the impression it’s associated with the comics in question) or Scams & Spam (since funds are being sought). Hopefully, Facebook doesn’t make each creator jump through these hoops and brings down the wrath of Zuckerberg quickly. In the meantime, I’m pretty sure the dipshit pulling this little game is thinking exactly like the person who recently plagued Jamie Smart so.

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¹ Read: booze and snacks.

² Unrelated, but last night in Providence, Rhode Island, while on my way to enjoy a quiet evening¹ with Fleen publisher (and Dumbrella Hosting impressario) Phillip Karlsson, I passed an industrial-looking building for rent with what looked exactly like the Venture Industries logo. I tried to get a picture, but it was too dark.

³ Probably not.

⁴ It’s a scam.

Long. Very long. Ouch-inducing long. Words not so good. Move on now.

• For the past week, Starslip has been setting up, subtly and first and with increasing speed and strength, the sort of conflict that Kris Straub has built so well before over the past not-quite-seven-years — reality is not what it should be, and that’s the sort of thing that leads to unravellings. These — disruptions is the best word to use, I suppose — felt more permanent than those that had gone before, if only because Straub had previously been careful about talking up the changes to come in Starslip, up-talkings that were absent this time. There were mentions he’d made about knowing how Starslip ends, but nothing definitive.

  Then it became official in his 2011 wrap-up/2012 look-forward:

  Starslip will end by the first week of April. [O]n the artistic side of the coin, once I had plotted out the strip’s last storyline, I had kind of resolved it in my mind. I had all the storytelling tools to end Starslip six months ago, but I didn’t. So I’ve been waiting for the right moment, but in doing so, it feels like I’ve been treading water. It’s not an easy goodbye for me, but I’m excited to move forward on more projects.

  For not-quite-seven-years, Starslip¹ has set the standard in Sci-Fi/comedy/adventure/but there’s something deeper there, and I am sad to see it go. That being said, I am happy that Straub has accomplished the story that he sought to tell and found a way to move beyond whatever limitations it was presenting to him. As Vanderbeam might say, Great Space Heavens! If you meet a Space-Buddha, on the Space-Road, target his go-parts and make explosions.

• Following up on Monday’s survey of Becky and Frankness, Becky Dreistadt has posted a preview of her cover for the forthcoming Adventure Time comic, issue #2, and it’s purty. From Boom! Studios (publishers of said comic), http://boompen.tumblr.com/post/15265770760/do-you-love-adventure-time-do-you-love-emily, including Emily Carroll’s version. You know, I’ve always thought that variant covers for a single comic were basically a scam and I’d never buy into them, but dammit I think I’ll have to. Rounding out the fun, issue #3 will be featuring a cover by Sister Claire² creator Yamino. Adventure Time will in various ways contain the work of so many different creators from the web side of comics, I can only wonder who’ll they’ll get next. Answers, as always on a postcard.
• Final thoughts: This binder contains transcripts of the (literally) hundreds of hours of interviews for Stripped; some tiny portion of it contains about about five quick answers from me at the tail end of a really good interview with the guy who owns my soul³. Looking at the names on the tabs, I am humbled by the thought that I could have had anything worth contributing in such company. I can’t wait to see what they all have to say.

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¹ And/or Starshift, including or not various Crises.

² I don’t think I’ve ever been as succinct as when I described Sister Claire as relentlessly cute and just the right amount of blasphemous.

³ I got a dollar for it!

Then again, who’s to say? At least one person involved in each of these stories think they’re pretty important events, but you aren’t here for a philosophical discussion as to what constitutes “breaking news”.

• Steve Wolfhard is somebody that you can never talk about too much; his Cat Rackham comics are beautiful and revelatory and sometimes surprisingly intimate. In the latter category is the comic that went up yesterday, referring to the events of Monday, to which only one thing can be said — congratulations to Steven and Leslie, and big ups to MaxFunCon for the assist.
• God DAMN, Chris Onstad has gone from total Achewood stasis to the sort of weird, crazy-go-nuts stories he produces when at the top of his game in three strips. Ray In Rehab (tentative title) may only be updating every ten days or so, but it’s already showing the potential to be another New Kings of Sapphic Erotica/Lash of Thanatos or North Korean Magical Realism. Well done, mysterious sir.
• I’ve been waiting to mention the much-discussed experiment in downloadable comedy because I wanted to see raw data on how it all worked; yesterday Mr CK gave us that information. Short version: the disintermediation and lack of DRM surrounding the Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater is a success, and bears some instructive lessons for independent creators that seek to make their living by trusting their audience. I found this bit to be particularly telling:
  

  The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of [13 December], we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.

  I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked. If anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it. And so now we all get to know that about people and stuff. I’m really glad I put this out here this way and I’ll certainly do it again. If the trend continues with sales on this video, my goal is that i can reach the point where when I sell anything, be it videos, CDs or tickets to my tours, I’ll do it here and I’ll continue to follow the model of keeping my price as far down as possible, not overmarketing to you, keeping as few people between you and me as possible in the transaction.

  Much has been made in the many (sometimes quite loud) discussion about webcomics business models (and the viability of same) about whether or not any money can be made via variations of the 1000 True Fans model. It’s been loudly declared that only working with a publisher can possibly pay, or that transitioning from a major-media publisher model to an independent producer model couldn’t possibly scale.

  Truth be told, the dozens of webcomickers making their living aren’t a large enough sample to be statistically valid (not have they been at it long enough to draw conclusions from duration), and what was really lacking was any evidence as to how far the model could scale up.

  Louis CK would seem to indicate: pretty damn far. Again, one datum may be an outlier, but I’m pretty confident that Louis CK can turn another show into a similar-sized success — which could provide the impetus to scale further up into funding the production of a feature film:

  Keep in mind, however, that it’s not sales of Beacon that would fund the film: He says that if Beacon “really tears an asshole into the money monster who then shits dollars into my mouth,” he would then use those shit-dollars to “buy a home and get some security which I NEVER have had in my life and have certainly not gotten from my low-budget show.” However, if he sells enough downloaded copies of this one to justify trying the experiment again, then the proceeds from his second special will all go toward making a movie.

  Crowdsourcing a motion picture has been bandied about a couple of times (hello, Browncoats), but this is a little different. This isn’t asking a lot of people to donate/finance/invest for the costs of the movie, it’s following a traditional production model, using the proceeds of a success to bankroll the next, hopefully more successful, project. It’s the sort of thing that has, in the past, been pretty much the exclusive province of large corporations. It’s the sort of thing that every webcomicker that rolls the profits of a book into a run of shirts has been doing, on a smaller scale. It has the potential to change how lots of independent artists¹ do things for the forseeable future.

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¹ Who need to have drive, ambition, and damn good business instincts — maybe not the skills to do all the business things themselves, but the self-awareness to figure out what they can do versus what they need to farm out (without giving up ownership), and the bullshit detector to figure out who’s trying to screw them.

I am slowly expanding the list of Officially Suspect sites, which now includes The Onion¹ but not The AV Club. Also, Twitter is not blocked, but any attempt to click through to a particular tweet or image results in a “that page doesn’t exist” error. In the meantime, I am working around the filters by various means because I am crafty. Okay, mostly it means surfing the Officially Suspect sites from the hotel and being behind the times, but whatever works.

• SMBC Thee-ah-tuh finished up the funding for their second DVD massively over goal, which means they’ll have to make good on their promise to do weekly sketches (instead of the monthly schedule in preparation for their web series in which they destroy James Ashby² in space). Comparing to their earlier effort, it now seems like a given that SMBC projects will hit 500% of goal funding in everything they do. Wow.
• Santa plus Dinosaurs in comics form from the mind of Ryan North over at Comics Alliance on Mondays and Wednesdays until Christmas, complete with all the vocal rhythms³ you’ve come to expect from The Toronto Man-Mountain. Speaking of Ryan North, there is now a form of plush T-Rex that looks large even next to a Ryan-sized man, which appears to be both the highest-priced item ever procured via TopatoCo, and limited (as of this writing) to only 37 more examples. If I had space in my living room for one of this things, it would freak my dog the heck out. Also unwary visitors.
• An instructive tale regarding a blatant piece of design theft, via David Malki ! popped up yesterday. Background: Malki ! endeared himself to my professional tribe with a piece of pithy wisdom that became a shirt featuring explosions. A catalog nominally associated with public broadcasting appropriated the idea (which, given the laws regarding slogans and short phrases, is permissible, if lazy) and implemented a hideously ugly design of their own for a dollar more than Malki !’s version; we’ll let him pick up the story from there:
  

  I wrote them an email. The reason I’m sharing this story — when I usually don’t bother to bring up situations like this, and give attention to entities that deserve to die in obscurity — is because I thought my approach might be instructive.

  The knee-jerk response is “Cease and desist! Sue! Call a lawyer!” This implies that (a) the issue cannot be solved through more amicable means, and (b) I have a lot of time and money to throw at this kind of problem. The latter is not true, and I like to at least allow for the chance that the former isn’t either. There’s a lot of double negatives in that sequence, so I’ll restate: Being aggressive puts people on the defensive. Being friendly gets people to help you.

  Also, always give the party in the wrong the ability to back off gracefully.

  Learning this is one of the biggest things that has helped me in life: avoid putting people on the defensive. Sometimes it is necessary to be firm, or to express dissatisfaction, or to press for remedy of a situation. But I have never found yelling and shouting to be the easiest way to that end — at least, not as an opener. [emphasis original]

  The email that Malki ! sent is a marvel of firm, yet utterly courteous, assertion of one’s rights; you should go read the excerpt that he posted right now. The practical upshot is that Signals will be carrying Malki !’s version of the shirt from Spring (at a horrible royalty rate, but one which is greater than the Nothing he was making before, and whoever ripped his design will no longer get that horrible rate), with the bonus that the incredibly ugly, lazy design (seriously, that rounded, noodly-looking typeface is as far from anything that evokes “engineering” or “explosions” or even “loud” as anything I’ve ever seen) will fall back into the obscurity it so richly deserves.

  It might not be an optimal win (that would be one where Signals apologized and gave all their ill-gotten gains to Malki !, along with the heart of the “designer” who shat out such a weak interpretation of the slogan), but the net result was a decrease in Total Ugliness instead of a screaming match that would have increased it. Now in addition to his varied skills in film production, podcasting, improv, rapping, design, printmaking, metal fabrication, editing, publishing, heavier-than-air piloting, and freelance firearms special services, we should recognize Malki ! as webcomics’ premiere corporate communications liaison and kick-ass demand letter drafter.

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¹ For violence, not sexual content [link NSFW].

² History’s greatest monster.

³ We get it, Ryan, you like the compound plural. iPads 2, jeezum crow.