For several reasons, actually. At the moment, the most significant reason is that I’m presently dealing with the first cold of winter and I’m far less likely to have these vicious headache/sore throat combos in April than December. Rest assured, however, that there are other reasons.

• Such as, sometime in the Spring is when we can most likely expect to see Stripped. Although half of Freddave Kellett-Schoeder was beat down by days of continuous travel and interviewing, the other half joined me for dinner last night, leading to an extensive conversation about the film, its direction, and the logistics of getting a rental car full of moviemaking equipment from Central New Jersey to the least accessible corner of Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan, and on toward Connecticut during prime commute hours. Vaya con Dios, plucky documentary makers.

  On this swing (the last of the filming schedule, although they may squeeze in a couple final interviews back home in LA), Freddave Kellett-Schroeder have managed to rack up another half-dozen interviews, talking with vets of the webcomics scene, the print scene, and super-vets of the glory days of newspaper comics; there were also tidbits and details regarding the film that can’t be revealed just yet, but once they are, will cause at least one of your heads to explode.

  If you don’t want it to be your head that explodes, start acclimating yourself to small doses of incredibly cool, unexpected news now (huh, the A Girl And Her Fed books are shipping¹) to progressively larger doses (huh, the NY International Children’s Film Festival is showing all 15 Ghibli films); by the time Stripped comes out, you’ll be ready to deal with the news I have in mind.

  But because you’ve been so good and patient, I am prepared to exclusively share one piece of exclusive information that I confirmed exclusively with Dave Kellett last night: his daughter is freakin’ adorable. What do you mean, Everybody that’s ever met her knows that? It’s an exclusive!

  In all seriousness, Stripped is impressing ever more, as I learn all that Schroeder and Kellett accomplished so far, and learn about the plans they have for it. There will be days worth of visuals and interviews that serious students of cartooning will want to pour through for decades to come. I can’t help but think that it’s going to form a definitive record of the state of cartooning at this point in time and in 20 or 30 years, some future historians or documentarians will be asking to use clips in future projects².

• Also coming around in the Spring, the comic convention circuit will be kicking into full swing. I got an email pointing out that space for C2E2 ’12 is now available, but what most caught my eye about an otherwise-routine announcement was a section on changed union work rules, which should make exhibiting far more practicable. From the email:
  

  Recent rulings and legislation have improved work rules throughout McCormick Place. Exhibitors can bring in outside food, use power tools to build their own booths with full time staff and benefit from decreased crew sizes. Click the button below for additional information directly from McCormick Place.

  The referenced button leads you to this PDF from the exhibition space, which details reduced work crew sizes, reduced double-time rates, and the ability to use personal vehicles at loading docks. Hopefully Reed Exhibitions and other showrunners will be able to promote similar changes at other convention sites; with comics increasingly the province of independent creators, having realistic overhead costs will be critical to keeping comics shows from becoming the exclusive province of movie and videogame companies.

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¹ I love AGAHF and creator “Otter” Spangler, but would it kill her to have permalinks to individual newsposts on her site? No permalink to the books-are-in story, so here’s a picture for proof.

² I have a suspicion that Kellett and Schroeder might be a bit more willing to share clips of their work for future projects than they have found present licensors to be.

At this point, if there’s some kind of award or “Best Of” list that could conceivably be stretched to include humor, literature, cartoons, or Canadians, assume that Kate Beaton is on it. In the latest iteration, Hark! A Vagrant comes in as #7 on the Time magazine Top Ten Fiction Books of 2011 list. In the words of presenter (noted author and general webcomics appreciator) Lev Grossman:

It’s tough to say what list this book belongs on, but it’s the debut of a smart, funny, wholly unique voice, and it ought to be somewhere, so let’s put it here…. Whatever else it might be, Hark! A Vagrant is the wittiest book of the year.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

And within the past half-hour the one-fourth of the Cyanide & Happiness crüe known as Rob¹ tweeted a link² that informs us that Comedy Central has a C&H project in development:

From the creators of the Cyanide and Happiness web comics and shorts comes a half-hour animated show featuring the twisted humor of a world populated by glorified stick figures. Executive produced and created by Kristipher Matthew Wilson, Robert Andrew DenBleyker, David McElfatrick and Matthew Melvin.

I’m smelling back-to-back programming with South Park. Oh, and I hope whoever it was at ICE that initially decided that C&H co-creator Dave McElfatrick didn’t need to be admitted to the US has finally come to learn the error of his or her³ ways. Dave, Kris, Matt, and Rob may have a long road ahead of them before things actually make it to air, but since they have a habit of knuckling down, doing their work, and bringing the funny on a daily basis, I’d say the odds are in their favor.

Congrats to everybody at Explosm Amalgamated Laugh-Chuckles, and note that the time until the Family Research Council [no link ’cause screw those guys] issues its first my-stars-and-garters we’re shocked, shocked I say! press release decrying the C&H show as causing the the utter downfall of Western Civilization begins now.

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¹ Mr DenBleyker if you’re nasty.

² Also, one should note that DenBleyker got scooped on his own announcement, as comics reporting supastar Heidi MacDonald tweeted the news a full half-hour earlier and had a news posting up even before then. I don’t know how she does it, but some day I have to learn her secret powers.

³ Fine, fine … thon ways. Happy now, Ryan North?

Soooo … Gareb Shamus, who led the ever-contracting Megan Fox Tits Wolverine¹ empire, did two notable things last week:

1. He abruptly quit, effective immediately, on 1 December
2. On his way out the door, or possibly before leaving, or maybe after (the timing isn’t clear), he tried to get a webcomicker fired from his day job

Let’s examine that second item a little more closely, shall we? From today’s update of The Gutters, written by Ryan Sohmer and drawn by a rotating cast of artists:

Should you find yourself the subject matter of a Gutters page, and take offense to it, don’t go after my artists. Should you be so offended that you attempt to get someone fired from their day job, don’t be a coward.

Come after me.

My e-mail is Sohmer@blindferret.com, I will gladly provide you with my contact information, as well as that of our legal department.

I take sole responsibility for every comic and news post on this site.

Don’t you dare go after one of my artists.

Now let’s look at The Gutters #222 from last Monday, as drawn by Sohmer’s partner-in-crime² Lar DeSouza; the topic of this particular update is, by a peculiar coincidence, one Mister Gareb Shamus. Thing is, last Monday, #222 had originally been posted with art by another creator (since Sohmer implies strongly that said art was pulled at the artist’s request, I’ll forbear naming him at this time).

Boy, you sure showed Sohmer and an artist just trying to pick up a little work for hire, Mr Shamus! If your reputation was so very, very poor in the comics industry as to be made fun of previously, how much better it must be now. It’s a good thing we live a in a world where Google doesn’t exist, the original art for #222 can never be found again, you can simply bully DeSouza into being fired by his day job boss³, and the words Streisand Effect don’t have any particular meaning.

On to things with infinitely less jerky behavior.

• Per the Twitter account of Stripped, news that the end is in sight:
  

  This week: Final interviews with Guisewite, McDonnell, Feiffer, Munroe, Walker, Beaton ‘n Gran … then it’s full focus on post-production!

  The “Walker” referenced is ambiguous, but I’d guess probably represent cartooning stalwart Mort Walker. One might also note that Kate Beaton and Meredith Gran were already interviewed by Schroeder and Kellett at NEWW last year; of course, these past twelve months have been the Year of Beaton in the comics world, and Gran is doing the best work of her career, so it makes sense to go back for followups.

  Given that one of the challenges of any documentary (at least, one that doesn’t follow a single subject) is how to come up with a storyline to unite all the disparate elements, using one or two creators as representative of the growth and development of webcomics makes perfect sense. Put another way, the future of comics is going to be a lot more creator-owned, niche-topic-oriented, and female-created than it is right now, and Beaton/Gran look an awful lot like that future.

• Speaking of repeat visits, Saveur Magazine’s Recipe Comix have been revisiting some of their early contributors. Two weeks back, Dorothy Gambrell showed us all how to deal with Thanksgiving Alone (hint: bourbon), and today Carly Monardo brings us her grandmother’s lasagna recipe. My friends, if anybody knows what an amazing lasagna should taste like, I’m gonna guess it’s a lady named Monardo from Staten Island, who named her internet-based art collective after the dish. Dig in.

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¹ Also known as Wizard magazine and Wizard World; cf: here.

² Or possibly “hetero life-partner”, I can never keep it straight.

³ Ryan Sohmer.

So you’ve got Post-Thankful Fatigue Syndrome? Welling up with all the rage that only a holiday-season trip to the vicinity of The Mall can instill? Just be glad that you’ve got it easier that Arthur, King of Time and Space creator Paul Gadzikowski, who had cause to tweet in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving Day:

In the hospital with a heart attack. Not gonna die. More later.

Gadzikowski was able to provide more information about ten hours later, and as these things go, it turned out about as well as could be hoped for:

Had a heart attack Wednesday night. Caught it fast so effects are minimal, but it’s still a lifechanger.

Looks like I’m getting sprung from here today [Friday 25 Nov]. Not going back to work till December 5 at the earliest.

Being a webcomicker, Gadzikowski had his eye on the important priorities:

One thing this spate of adversity has taught me: keep your webcomic on a buffer.

The uncharitable might note that AKOTAS has been on a sketch-based story hiatus since the vicinity of the summer solstice, but look at that archive: updates every damn day, up to and after the infarction. I call that dedication and we at Fleen salute Gadzikowski and wish him a speedy return to normal life.

Let’s consider some things that would melt the icy displeasure of even the most PTFS-afflicated among us:

• Rosemary Mosco, who put a lot of her comicking on hold while she went to grad school, got married, little things like that, has put together an awesome print of birdsong mnemonics; hang next to her love letter to turkey vultures and her paleological/alphabetical primer. And, because today is Cyber Monday, don’t forget the TopatoCo secret cybercode.
• Continuing their trend of being supportive with cold, hard cash, the SMBC Theater Superpals have cleared the pre-order hurdle for SMBC DVD 2¹ in two days. As these are the same fans that utterly obliterated the Kickstarter goal for the new space-themed webseries, it shouldn’t be surprising that they collectively came up with two grand in a couple of days, but this was during the Thanksgiving Day craziness, with the family, and the traveling, and the pie-induced coma. So, well done, Superpals.
• Speaking of Kickstarterings launched over the Thanksgiving weekend (when nobody’s paying attention, so perhaps this slipped by you): Audra Ann Furuichi and Scott Yoshinaga did so to launch their latest nemu*nemu collection in perfect-bound full color. This one has gotten off to a slow start, which can only be explained by the general away-from-the-internet tendencies of the long weekend. Think of this book as not only entertainment, but a vaccination against dangerously infective cuteness.

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¹ Electric Jamesaloo.

Following up from yesterday — you can see the full Q interview with Kate Beaton at the CBC’s website. It’s really good.

• I was wondering why xkcd was late in posting yesterday — Randall Munroe was off on one of his enormous ass-images, this one explaining money. Seriously, almost everything you wanted to know about money, debt, taxes, expenditures is in one zoomable image¹. To make it easier to consider, said ass-image is in the xkcd store as a poster — or even better, as four posters that can be tiled together.

  This might be the most useful and informative image that Monroe’s ever done, even moreso than the radiation dose chart. Go spend an hour staring into the strange world of money, spend another two hours learning about The Giant Pool of Money, and you’ll be better informed than almost everybody you know².

• At the far opposite end of the spectrum from the Enormous Ass-Piles of Money, you have individual creators making things out of their brains and — to varying degrees — with their own hands. From David Malki ! (taking a rare moment of respite from all of his Machine of Death project-noodling) comes the latest iteration of the Wondermark calendar.

  It’s screenprinted by hand on lovely, thick paper and really reminds you what the product of limited-run, artisinal effort is like. I almost missed out on last year’s offering, but Malki ! emailed me personally to let me know he’d hold one against my order in case I’d overlooked it (which I had). NO such danger this year — my order’s already in.

• Not quite so done-directly-by-the-artist, but just as authentic an expression of individual vision: Evan Dahm is Kickstartering the one-volume edition of Order of Tales; he’s more than 35% along in his 30 day campaign since yesterday, so it’s a pretty sure thing that he’s going to make goal (with massive over-goal achievement meaning that many more copies of a really big book underfoot at Dahm’s apartment until they can get mailed out).

  The only variable is how many people will indicate that they definitely want the hardcover super-duper edition of OoT as opposed to the softcover merely-duper edition. My guess is that both editions will feature the promised foreword by living comics legend (and guy who knows about one-volume editions) Jeff Smith.

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¹ Okay, fine, he doesn’t go into the technical definitions of types of money like M1 and M2, but unless you’re my sophomore-year mandatory economics class, you probably don’t care.

² You’ll probably also change at least one of your cherished opinions along the way.

Our Canadian friends (aka the Politest Conquerors) took care of Thanksgiving six weeks ago, on a Monday, and then got back to work. We from Down South will eat ourselves into a coma and take off Friday. What difference could one day’s productivity make?

• Answer #1: You could get to meet Mister The Frog, like Kate Beaton did. All those who are blind envious may now raise their hands or flippers or whatever. Me, I’m not, because me ‘n’ Kermit, we hang out all the time. In fact, here he is just chillin’ with my dog. Yep, totally not incredibly envious after watching the full-length interview (presumably, a full interview with Beaton will be posted soon).
• Answer #2: You could get to write the comic book adaptation of Adventure Time as Ryan North is apparently doing now. Again, not blind envious that North chose to share the news first with Comics Alliance on account of the fact that I am, to date, the sole comics-related sort-of journalist who’s been given the full scoop on the secret code embedded into his Dinosaur Comics books. Yep, no problems here.

  Additionally, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that one of the artists on the Adventure Time comic will be Braden Lamb, artist of the unfortunately-hiatused Kitty Hawk, which I hell of enjoyed back when it was still updating. I think Finn and Jake (and dare I hope, Fionna and Cake?) are in good hands.

• Anniversary time! As far as I know, Randy Milholland is not Canadian¹ despite his thorough documentation of Canada’s most dangerous wildlife. He has, on the other hand, been at this webcomics game for a long time, having passed the ten year mark and who knows how many comics²this past weekend.

  It’s been a long time since he lobbed an abortion joke in his very first strip, but nobody can say that Milholland wasn’t in it for the long haul. Per the blogposting on today’s update, as early as the first appearance of Choo-Choo Bear, scarcely a month into Something*Positive’s run, he was planning out what to do with the pudding cat in Year Five.

  Also, nobody can dispute that Milholland is the master of finding ways to let characters (even the most unlikeable) be complete people, none of them entirely perfect (ha!) or despicable, and allowing them to mature and change in organic, realistic ways. For all the grumptacular facade he puts up, he, more than any other webcomics creator³, understands the possibilities of redemption and wanting to grow as a person, no matter how hard it is at times (or how easy it is to put up barriers and walls).

  Even given all the bluster and dickery and awfulness that Milholland’s cast unleashes on each other, they all aspire on some level to be better. The name of the strip may have been intended as awful and cynical and ironic, but it’s become something that one can read and find legitimately optimistic. Bravo, and happy stripaversary, beardy-man.

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¹ One could argue that, being a Texan, Milholland is genetically predisposed towards the opposite of Canadianess. However, I can state from personal experience that he doesn’t fit the stereotypical mold of Texaness either, so perhaps he’s got some recessive Canadian genes.

² I could count the number of updates on his various archive pages, but aside from the question as to whether or not to count his side projects like New Gold Dream or Midnight Macabre, there’s a hell of a lot of them and thus I’m not going to. Deal.

³ Possible exception: Tatsuya Ishida.

Holy cats, the network is slow today. Granted, I’ve been in various locales for work for the past couple of weeks that had unusually fast network speeds, but this is just painful. I’ll just assume it’s to make up for the fact that it’s a gorgeous, unseasonably warm day for November in New York City, which presumably means the End Times are just around the corner because everybody knows that November is supposed to be pretty dank and miserable. Interesting times, my friends.

• Hopefully, when Ragnarök hits, we’ll all at least have a good idea what the most polite way to steal dwindling foodstocks from our neighbors might be, as Holly Post and Sara McHenry’s new podcast will be able to tell us. With less than a day to go, A Nerd Of Advice slipped over the line and reached its fundraising goal yesterday, ensuring that I’ll be able to leave tasteful thank-you cards on the graves of my enemies in the depths of the fimbulvetr. Well done, Sara and Holly!
• Speaking of Kickstarting, there’s another project to commend to you that launched over the weekend. Kel McDonald is putting together a comics anthology devoted to fairy tales, and if you’ve ever read this page before, you know I loves me some fairy tales. If nothing else, look at that lineup of talent that McDonald’s got arranged, revel in the fact that the chief purpose of this anthology’s fundraising is to pay the contributors, and consider that most of the creators are already putting finishing touches on their efforts. This is not gonna be a project that finishes far off in limbo, and it’s going to be pretty.
• Eventually I’m going to get to the point where the Sunday annotation of David Morgan-Mar¹ has been recommended to you so many times that you just click over there without me telling you it’s worth your time. Monday will come, you’ll be reading Fleen, and like Pavlov’s dog you will automatically click over to Irregular Webcomic².

  This time, it’s advice for anybody that’s ever asked him how to make a webcomic, and it strikes me as significant that a pretty damn successful webcomicker who never had any intention of making money (to the point that there’s not even advertising to offset hosting costs at IW) has largely the same advice that you’d get from somebody who’s made the webcomic his job.

  Apart from the technical advice, Morgan-Mar produces three most-important ideas:

  1. Don’t start a webcomic expecting to make any money. Do it because you want to make comics and will do it even if it takes you time and effort for no reward whatsoever.
  2. More importantly, don’t expect everyone to love your work.
  3. [M]ost importantly of all, decide how often you are going to update your comic and stick to your advertised update schedule. [emphasis original]

  I can’t disagree with any of them.

• I also imagine some day Kate Beaton will stop being noticed by significant media; today’s noticer: The frickin’ Economist, newsweekly of record for the most important people in the world. Yikes.

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¹ PhD, LEGO®™©^etc.

² Or drooling; presumably the drool will cause a short in your keyboard that brings up the IW page.

Note to all the robocallers that have plagued me this election season: I have kept a mental running tally of how many times each of you has bothered me. Whoever has the fewest Annoyed Gary tickmarks gets my vote.

• Things to have: Zach Weinersmith and Howard “Evil Twin” Tayler both moved outside the usual print/t-shirt/book collection merch axis, with announcements of an iDevice app and a Kickstarting board game, respectively. Particularly impressive is the boardgame, which is sitting at just under 50% of goal around 14 hours into the campaign, despite what I would have pegged as an unusual and potentially hampering reward structure¹. I’ll have to rework my personal model of what works for Kickstarting².

  Since we’re talking about iStore iApps for iDevices, I mentioned back in May about a gent named Steven Mausch who was building a webcomics reading app in the iPad that didn’t scrape or steal content from creators. Mausch writes to let us know that the app, ComicsPanel, is now available for your consideration. Somebody with a fondleslab let us know how you like it.

• Places to go: Are you on a continent? Then you can see The PhD Movie without leaving that arbitrary geographical unit. Seven continents of screenings, kids, from Minnesota to McMurdo³ and all points between. If you’re specifically in North America, even more specifically in Toronto, the most dangerous man in webcomics is having a stealth reading of surprise material tomorrow night. Details available for those that have Facebook.
• Things to see: Magnolia Porter⁴, as previously noted, is drawing 50 Achewood characters in 50 days, and just dropped #s 48 and 49: Ramses Luther Smuckles and Cartilage Head. These have been really, really great, and it’s going to be a pleasure to see who the 50th will be, tinged with the sadness that we don’t get any more of these. If we all die tonight because of the close-shave chunk of rock heading for us, not knowing who #50 is might be the biggest disappointment of the fall of civilization.

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¹ Approximately 75% of pledgers have opted for the 2nd tier reward, which includes a copy of the finished game at the $55 level (the first tier gets you nothing but good feelings, for a minimum of $1, so we’re really talking about the first reward tier). The thing is, most of the higher tiers predominantly distinguish themselves from the $55 tier by adding in more copies of the boardgame.

² It’s based around on providing unique and progressively more desirable rewards for more money, but this one opted for a quantity approach (mostly — mixed in with the additional copies are additional game contents that would otherwise not be available or available much later to the general public, so it’s really about quantity and time).

³ Which seems to be the place in Antarctica for webcomickry.

⁴ She kicks mens asses, and she votes.

Just because Halloween is over (and the mythical sexy ____ costumes overrunning our once-proud streets fade into the background) for another year doesn’t mean that things can’t still be sexy around here. Let’s sex this place up with sexy sexiness.

• From the sexy twitters of the very sexy Sylvan Migdal:
  

  Hey! This month, all proceeds from Curvy books go to Planned Parenthood. Sexy comics for reproductive rights & health! c.urvy.org

  Curvy, for those of you not in the know, is probably not safe for your work, unless you work on Oglaf or Chester 5000 for your day job, in which case you have won this game we call life. Much respect to Migdal for recognizing that sexy times have consequences, and being prepared for them makes everything sexier.

• Nothing is more sexy than the modern power grid¹, which makes so much else that is sexy possible — and word comes to us this morning that Eastworks, site of TopatoCo, Dumbrella & NEWW, is again part of the early-to-mid 20th century. Internet is still out in that part of Massachusetts, so merch orders are not going out just yet, but the crack staff of TopatoCo can at least stare lovingly at all that stuff that they know somebody wants. Maybe they’ll give it a hug! We also hear that various residents of that corner of Webcomikia are getting their electric back, leading to a 100% improvement in mood, core body temperature, and shower-assisted cleanliness. Hooray for Science!
• Speaking of Science — sexy Science — the new two-volume Narbonic omnibus edition is in Shaenon Garrity’s hands and shipping to those that helped Kickstart it into existence. There will be a book release party at Borderlands Books in San Francisco from 5:00pm to 7:00pm on Saturday, November 19; Garrity is on record as promising cupcakes and wine, presumably from a box.
• Finally, it appears that nobody spent their All Hallow’s Eve dressed as Sexy James Madison, but that’s okay — yesterday saw the release of the Kate Beaton interview at The Sound of Young America, and Jesse Thorn wasn’t about to let that conversation go by without a discussion of the Strong Female Characters². Remember — sexism is over, not sexiness! Different things.

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¹ The only exception to this is Rich Stevens, who is the Platonic Ideal of sexiness.

² Alas, the pure, unbridled sexiness of beach volleyball didn’t seem to come up. Maybe next time.

Another day, another … actually, today is remarkably similar to yesterday. Not much “another” anything going on. Weird.

• For those that missed the notice that Machine of Death 2¹ had a submission from Antarctica, some supporting details have been posted to the MoDblog. Not only did a story come from McMurdo Station, but the submitter had previously sent in a story from Afghanistan.

  Aside from frequenting sections of the planet that neatly demonstrate Tyson’s Antigaia Hypothesis², Erik Zimmerman is a firefighter. Apparently, going into innately hostile locales is not exciting enough for him as he then seeks to also be someplace innately hostile and on fire. I will bet you twenty dollars American cash money that Zimmerman’s own Machine of Death prediction card reads either ASLEEP AFTER A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE or EXPLODING BECAUSE THE WORLD CANNOT CONTAIN HIM, both of which beat mine⁴ hands down.

  Also at the MoDblog — news of a MoD-related 24 Hour Comic, and sample attribution text that MoD fanarters and other creative types may use to legally put their own spin on MoD stories. Go nuts.

• We at Fleen have mentioned the work of Michael Jonathan — minicomics with soundtracks; the entirely safe-for-work Eros, Inc — in the past, but he’s been running pretty low profile for a while. Today we found out why:
  

  I’ve been working as the showrunner’s assistant on this new show Good Vibes, which premieres on MTV this Thursday at 10:30pm (after new Beavis and Butthead). I even do a few voices in later episodes and I’m super proud of the show. I think it’s really great stuff, but if you don’t believe me you can watch the entire first episode online, mere days before it can be watched in real-time.

  Seems like there’s some good talent attached to Good Vibes even before you scroll down to Other Crew. Alas, the same crappy network speeds that are keeping me from catching up to the end of the latest chapter of Homestuck will keep me from this sneak preview. However, it’s possible that the hotel’s TV lineup includes MTV, which means I can catch it as it airs, following the finale of a frankly-disappointing season of Project Runway. It seems so long ago that Tim Gunn was commenting on Paul Southworth’s puking clown shirt design, doesn’t it?

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¹ Death Harder.

² In which Neil DeGrasse Tyson attempts to refute the notion that the Earth is a nurturing, life-promoting orb that we should all be in perfect harmony with, by noting that if he were to randomly drop you “bare-assed naked”³ at a random point on the globe, you would almost certainly be dead 15 minutes later because the Earth not only doesn’t care about nurturing you, most of it will actively try kill you.

³ His words.

⁴ TRUCK.