Yep, slow network. How slow? The hotel’s wifi and wired internet remind me what life was like before that newfangled “DSL” got run to my condo in 1998.

• It’s been a couple of weeks since I pointed out that Saveur magazine continues to run recipes from talented indy/webcomics creators, but no time like the present. Also, I’ve got some pretty good indications that the Recipe Comix series — once thought to be running for a dozen or so installments — can now be reliably described as “ongoing”, so we should have these for a good while yet.
• Countdown to return: Erfworld is hiatusing to allow the artist, Xin Ye, to deal with some fairly awful things in her personal life right now:
  

  That’s the bad news. The consolation prize here is that Book 0 will begin on Halloween.

  I’ve always intended to write an illustrated prequel novel for Erfworld, dealing mostly with the fall of King Banhammer’s Faq. So why not now? NaNoWriMo is coming, right? Let’s pound that sucker out.

  So I will be posting updates of the new novel, “Inner Peace Through Superior Firepower,” three times a week on a M-W-F schedule, starting Monday October 31. It will be a rough draft, meaning that what goes up on the site may be subject to revision, editing, and retconjuration even as the story unfolds. It will be like getting 60 or so text updates in a row.

  Additionally, Erfworld creator/scripter Rob Balder reports that they’re adding an inker and colorist, to allow Ye to work up pencils as she’s able, meaning:

  Once the novel has finished running, we will have a buffer and a new process worked out, so that in the future, Erfworld can run on a much smoother update schedule.

  Erfworld remains one of the long-form webcomics that really works well, so anything that allows Balder and Ye to produce it more efficiently sounds like a good idea to me. I can fill the pictures in my head on my own for a while if that’s what it takes to get past this rought patch.

• Speaking of Halloween, everybody been following the creeptacular watercolors that Randy Millholland‘s been doing? Start here and click forward; originals for sale soon.
• Speaking of for sale, you can now safely channel the thought process of Joey Comeau and/or Ryan North in the comfort and convenience of your own home, most likely in your kitchen. It is claimed that these magnets will allow one to spell out Batmanology, although it’s probably safe to say that one webcomics-related gentleman would prefer to know if you can spell Batmanlogist.
• Speaking of … oh, hell, just go check out MS Paint Adventures for the end of Act Five of Homestuck; it’s the culmination of more than a year’s worth of weirdness, and due to the sheer size of the the thing you’ll have to wait in the download queue¹ because that many people want it and when you see a line that long, you get in it.

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¹ Due to the state of the network where I am, I will likely not be able to complete the download until this weekend when I return to the land of plentiful bandwidth.

Yes. Yes, I will. So tired.

• Hurricane Erika got to live the dream last week and go back to her alma mater as a speaker; I’ve done the go-back-to-campus-for-a-reason¹ thing and I have to tell you — it rules. Professors that you always wanted to make proud are, those that you disliked with the fury of a thousand exploding suns can’t stand that you’ve achieved success², and everybody from the administration is really nice to you.

  In Moen’s case it was as an invited speaker on gender identity and “probably some dick jokes too”, which meant talking about the sorts of things that always came up in DAR! when it ran. Since I couldn’t make the talk (and Moen’s never not a funny, engaging speaker), it’s fortunate for all of us that she posted the video online. Be sure to stick around for th Q&A at the end.

• Speaking of multiple media, have you see the Kickstarter for A Nerd of Advice? ANoA is to be a podcast on that most unusual of things in the modern internet age, etiquette. It’s the brainchild of Sara “The Girl” McHenry and TopatoCo secret weapon/Vice President of Being Mom to the Whole Damn Internet Holly Post.

  In my experience, Post and McHenry are charming people, quick with their thoughts, and sure to elevate you from a person of Bad Habits and Circumstances to somebody nearly fit to be part of a polite society. People, the dominant reward from Kickstarter donations is a set of thank you notes. Help stop the gradual slouching of our nerd culture towards complete ruination — pledge.

• Speaking of common courtesy, Marvel comics did us all a solid by engaging in some unusual behavior. One may recall that Kate Beaton made some hilarious contributions to Marvel’s Strange Tales I & II anthologies³. One may also recall that Beaton’s presently in the midst of an extensive book tour in support of her latest tome, which has left her with little time to do new comics. So Marvel gave her the okay to share some of her work for them, which is typically not something that they would do. Behold: Kraven the Hunter at the Prom, with a bonus in the form of Beaton’s contribution to Nursery Rhyme Comics from :01 Books.
• Thank you to Matthew I, who sent a correction to the URL for The Water Clock in the comments of yesterday’s post. We regret the error, and the appropriate link has been fixed.

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¹ Recruiting.

² Their tears are delicious.

³ Including some in collaboration with Nick Gurewitch.

The Rules:

1. Consider keyboards to have a definite lifespan and discard them without question at the end of that period
2. If you disregard item 1, never, ever wonder why the spacebar on your twelve year old keyboard has suddenly failed; discard the keyboard without question
3. If you disregard items 1 and 2, never, ever pry up the spacebar to see if it’s something you can fix; what lurks beneath your view is a horror that should never be unleashed, yea, like unto a nightmare that eldritch horrors from outside time have when they can’t sleep¹

So, new keyboard, nice action, bunch of time wasted today so I’m behind². Thus, let me direct you to people from Webcomicdom that are off bein’ smart:

• From the far reaches of the SMBC Media Empire, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith³ have got themselves a podcast wherein they Do Science To It. All manners of science, all manners of it, they wanna have a conversation and make you more clever in the process. The Weekly Weinersmith episode 1 launched yesterday, and I believe we’ll see them on iTunes and Stitcher in the immediate future — possibly in time for episode 2.
• From the far reaches of time, Jennifer Babcock (cf here, do yourself a favor and ignore the comment thread) has made a fortunate habit of working far ahead on C’est La Vie, because she’s gonna spend the next couple of month in Egypt digging up stuff [o permalink, but the announcement is currently on her main page]. Babcock’s perhaps the only person that occupies the middle bit of the Venn diagram that overlaps “Webcomics Creators” and “Egyptologists”.

  I’ve read some of her research and it’s really cool how she’s found things that are essentially comics-as-popular-art from ancient Egyptian times (and no, we’re not talking tomb and temple hieroglyphics). The closest description of them is they’re ceramic plaques that function like McCloud’s Five Card Nancy deck. Comics! Plus, I was able to have a really cool discussion over lunch with her once about ancient Greek ostraka and I knew what those were because of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe. There’s nothing comics can’t do.

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¹ Seriously, it was gross.

² Also, I am possible never eating again. Ick.

³ Heh, heh, they said weiner.

Quick programming note: both Webcomicscon and APE are this weekend, on opposite coasts (Norwalk, Connecticut and San Francisco, respectively), with plenty of webcomicky types at each. I’ll be at my niece’s wedding, and considering that for her college graduation we got her a complete set of Roast Beef’s ‘zines and a bottle of Ray’s Rad Chilies sauce, I think I’ll have somebody to talk webcomics with. Just a hunch.

Sometimes, the funniest material comes from working without a net. Grab the microphone, lay down some audio, minimal edits, just go with it. We’ve seen the results from Kris and Scott (Scott and Kris) with their Blamimation — free-associating on a premise into an audio track, then limited animations to provide a visual component are added. But what if the words and pictures could be recorded simultaneously?

Enter Wondermark Kinetic. Air Marshall Malki ! and his cohort, Zachary Sigelko (seen on the right, talkin’ ’bout bears), have bashed together some mouth-articulated puppets and static backgrounds (all looking very Victorian-engraved) and tell their funny straight to the camera. Eight puppet shows uploaded in the course of six hours — the only recorded instance of short, funny films being produced more quickly was when the Old Spice Guy was kicking out responses to tweets every 20 minutes or so.

It reminds me in a weird way of something NASA’s been doing for a number of years now. See, you could spend a couple billion dollars on a space probe, hope everything goes right for literally years while it travels to wherever it’s going, and it still might not work when it gets there due to circumstances beyond any rational measure of control. Alternately, you could bash together something quick and on the cheap (okay, $250 million isn’t “cheap” in the conventional sense, but stick with me) and even if some clown forgets to use metric and it smacks headlong into Mars, you’ve got eight or nine other devices working, some way beyond expectations. If the mission’s going to fail, let it fail quickly, and move onto something else.

I think of this because of a remark that Malki ! once made about having so many project ideas, so many things he wants to pursue, but to do any as fully as it could be done would mean not doing something else. But these animations make me think that he’s come around to the NASA model — try it, and if it turns out to not be as interesting or as fun as initially thought, ditch it and move onto something else.

Could the backdrops for these puppet shows (or for that matter, the cardboard-constructed Machine of Death he brought to MoCCA this year) look more polished? Sure, and if it warrants it in the future, I’m sure that polish will be added to the revised version. In the meantime, we get intense bursts of creativity, each of which stretches and strengthens the creativity muscle¹ of an already significantly creative individual.

Malki ! might decide after a burst of activity that Wondermark Kinetic wasn’t all he hoped it would be, but the things he learned will make the next 37 projects he drops on us all the better/funnier/more polished. Right now, the pace of building is fast, cheap, maybe even a little out of control — but now is just warmup time.

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¹ Difficult to find on most anatomical diagrams, it’s usually underdeveloped and wedges behind the spleen.

Grey, dreary day. High humidity, just cool enough to make all the moisture hang in the air. A melancholy climate, and well-suited to some indoor entertainments. I know, let’s read some comics on the internet!

• Not that I begrudge Randall Munroe’s use of Bitches way back in comic #54, but Darryl Cunningham is attempting to be a bit more … conciliatory, perhaps? And he’s got more than 100 panels to deal with the topic of the validity of the scientific method and why science denialism is stupid, to Munroe’s one; it’s a slow build as opposed to a single knockout punch — it simply wouldn’t have worked in this context¹. Unsurprisingly, Cunningham has done as good a job as he has on his earlier comics, despite the inherent handicap of having a much broader, less sharply-defined topic (“science”) than in his previous investigative comical endeavours (examining things like the nonscientific denials of vaccine safety, evolution, or climate change).

  Speaking of, the journal comics of Tyler Page and his story of ADHD are pretty similar in tone and character to Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales, and he’s just posted chapter two. Go get it.

• Know what’s great? Achewood². Know what’s also great? People interpreting Achewood in their own styles. Case in point: Magnolia Porter (of the entirely-wonderful, recently concluded Bobwhite, and the even more wonderful and ongoing Monster Pulse) has decided to take some inspiration from Achewood characters, and set herself the challenge of drawing one a day for fifty days.

  In case her launch (yesterday) with Teodor made you suspect she would be limiting herself to series regulars, please note that today’s winner is Todd’s friend Little Freddie, who has not been seen for lo these many years. Me, I’m waiting to see when we get Rod Huggins, Sidney Yamahata, Sound and Motion, Cartilage Head, and especially Rameses Luther.

• Stripped: funded at 188% of goal, and just barely shy of the level that Freddave Kellett-Shroeder declared would let them add Dolby sound, mucho animations (from indie animators, naturally), closed-captioning, and more interviews. I’m guessing that somehow, they’ll find a way to make those extended goals happen, maybe with “mucho animations minus one animation”. Many congrats to Dave, Fred, and the 2600 people besides myself who pitched in, and will now assuredly get the documentary they were dreaming of.

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¹ For more on using “bitches” as a bit of lexical color, consider the case of newly-minted MacArthur Genius Jad Abumrad and his mom .

² Which I suspect, but I do not have hard evidence for this suspicion, will be dropping some new content on us in or around the imminent 10th anniversary of Philippe standing on it.

Gaaahhhh. Busy.

• J Grant, one half of the creator pair behind Two Lumps, has written a story that nobody wanted to publish so he’s all Screw it, up on the web and pay what you like [PDF]. I’ve liked very much the things that Grant has written and I have read; perhaps this will occupy me on the long, late flight home from Vegas tomorrow.
• Brad, Dave, and Kris, in addition to being three quarters of the hottest boy band ever the Halfpixel webcomicking posse, used to do a reasonably regular podcast. Busy schedules (seriously Guigar was away on vacation for like 75% of the summer, I thought he’d been elected to Congress), a head cold (Scott Kurtz), and frustrating audio woes tried their best to delay any new releases of Webcomics Weekly, but have failed. Maybe I’ll be able to listen to this one [MP3] on the long, late flight home from Vegas tomorrow.
• Oh man does this look pretty. It won’t be out in time for my long, late flight home from Vegas tomorrow, but oh well — I would wait any amount of time for The Anime Club.

Okay, about 30 seconds until have to go sit in meetings all day. Perhaps for breakfast I’ll have some delicious, nutrifying bacon. Or is that horrifying? I always mix those two up.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say “Seminars, Bloody Seminars”, or “Presentations, Bloody Presentations”¹, but those wouldn’t let me invoke John Cleese, now would they? So busy today.

• Per the comments, Box Brown pointed out correctly that he was not the only repeat winner in this year’s Ignatz Awards — Joe Lambert won for both Outstanding Anthology or Collection and Outstanding Artist. Fleen regrets the oversight.
• Stripped keeps doing notable things, and there’s still a week left in the Kickstarter campaign (as of this writing: 140% funded). Today it’s an open call for creative types to participate:
  

  We’re extending a worldwide “open call” to independent, freelance, or small-team animators, to produce very short segments for the feature-length documentary, STRIPPED.

  Over 50 animators have already submitted samples, before we even asked for work. …It kinda blew us away, frankly! But we’d like to formalize that process, to better review everyone’s work, and compare apples to apples.

  There’s instructions how to submit on the Kickstarter page, with submission requirement #3 being particularly interesting:

  Your requested rate for 10-, 30-, or 45-seconds of animation

  Wait, rate? Let’s check the FAQ:

  Q: Is this a paid job?
  A: Yes.

  Well, that’s pretty unambiguously (especially considering how much, much larger and funded entities keep trying to get creative types to work for free exposure), and ties in nicely with Meredith Gran’s rule for promoting the careers of women²:

  Pay them. No, seriously. Pay them with money.

  The movie just got a whole bunch more interesting (and it looks like this development was driven by creators wanting to participate, sending in their offers to work before there was a call for them), as I don’t think this direction was part of Freddave Kellett-Schroeder’s original plan. Can’t wait to see what the animators of the world come up with.

Okay. Time for eight hours of presentations with no cell coverage in the basement level of a casino meeting facility. Joy.

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¹ Sadly, no chance of “Symposia, Bloody Symposia”, given that the original definition of “symposium” was “drinking party”.

² Equally applicable to any under-represented group — especially those just starting out in their fields.

I’m not going to say that somebody literally snuck poo bugs into my food, but I’m not saying that they didn’t, either. It’s been that kind of day. Quickly, then:

• Not specifically webcomics, but worth your attention: Jessica Hische (creator of the justly-famed Should I Work For Free? flowchart) has a thought-provoking essay on pricing your work. It’s written from the standpoint of a designer, but you can easily translate most of what it says to any independent creator-driven environment.
• On the horizon: Webcomicscon, first weekend of October (I’ll be at my niece’s wedding), in Norwalk, CT. First thing I noticed on their homepage is something you don’t normally see on con sites: a Code of Conduct, which looks pretty good. But might I make a suggestion that some variation of Wheaton’s Law be included as a numbered item, and a declaration that creepy, stalkery, unwanted-touchy people are not to be tolerated? I’ve seen people with no sense of personal boundaries at enough cons that, sadly, such an explicit statement of what should be minimally decent human conduct is necessary.
• Speaking of cons, webcomics überfan Michael Kinyon pointed me (and thus I point you) towards DigiCon, the virtual convention for those that can’t travel to cons. Interesting idea, curious to see how it works out, although scheduling it against SPX was probably not the best date they could come up with.

… and he’s pointing and casually declaring, Comics. Why is it I can’t see this sort of thing happening in America? We suck¹.

• About three months back, Jorge Cham released an initial set of screening dates for his cinematical entertainment, and I noted a screening tentatively set for my backyard. Yesterday, a far more precise screening schedule dropped, and it’s … I think that extensive is not sufficiently broad to describe what it is. More than one hundred showings are listed, with as many as a half dozen on the same day in far corners of the world. I note that Cham himself will be doing live Qs and As at some twenty of the showings, often accompanied by members of cast or crew.

  I’m particularly interested in this one in particular, as it’s very close to my home and thus I’ll be able to buy Jorge a drink by means of congratulations. Hope to see some of you out there, and a special message to all grad students past and present: it’s okay to laugh until you cry, since the alternative most likely available to you is to merely cry until you climb a tower with a rifle. Nameless bystanders, drop a word of thanks to Cham for giving all those potential spree killers a safe outlet for their grad-study insanities.

• Speaking of movies, Dave Kellett announced a bonus set of video clips from Stripped yesterday, featuring Kate Beaton, Ryan North², Richard Thompson³, and Greg Evans. Backers also have access to an extra clip of the man who might have done more to define comic stripping in the past few decades than anybody else: Jim Davis.
• Speaking of strips, Striptease wrapped up today, Chris Daily having been cranking out comics for damn near 11 years and more than 1000 updates. Fun fact #1: Daily was the first webcomicker I ever met, way the hell back at the first MoCCA Fest, probably around the time of the Inker Search storyline. Fun fact #2: just about every other webcomic referenced in those strips is no longer around, but Daily continues; look for book collections in the near future, and for the resumption of Punch an’ Pie from hiatus, and whatever pops into his head because there’s no stoppin’ the guy.
• Received last evening at my twitterfeed, via Patrick Race of Alaska Robotics, a short missive of great import:
  

  @fleenguy It might take a second but I think when you realize what this means you’ll be pretty excited. http://verabee.com/letter/testing.gif

  You guys. You guys. Almost the very first thing I ever wrote on this site was an appreciation of Vera Brosgol‘s Return to Sender, a webcomic so good it retains a spot in my bookmarks even though it’s seen no updates since 2004 and only one brief bloggening in 2007 (plus one crossover via a Scary Go Round guest strip nearly lost in the aether). But damn me if that link doesn’t look like Often and Colette, with perhaps a bit more of the crazy eyes that Brosgol used to such good effect in Anya’s Ghost. YOU GUYS, I AM MAYBE ABOUT TO BE THE HAPPIEST COMICS READER IN HISTORY.

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¹ If you’re going to get het up about that declaration of suckitude, it’s not a general comment on the country as a whole or its relative value or righteousness, just on our tragic underuse of Post-It Notes to create Pedobear on the office wall.

² Nexus of All Webcomics Realities, Northern Division.

³ Not the musician with the extra-nimble fingers.

Readers of this page may recall that I have mentioned in the past a work-in-progress that I consider to be really significant: a documentary film¹ on the state of cartooning, in these times of great change, by Dave Kellett and Fred Schroeder. Said documentary recently acquired a title (Stripped²) and a trailer, and reached the milestone where the real work left is post-production: editing, effects, sound mix, color timing, and other words that mean nothing to you and me because we don’t work in the film industry.

To get to this point has cost Kellett and Schroeder two years, countless trips to interview subjects³ (more than 60 of them, which means that NEWW2 must have been a godsend because they were able to talk to more than a dozen people in one weekend), and undoubtedly a serious chunk o’ personal cash. Keep in mind that documentaries don’t make a huge amount of money — this has been a labor of love, cost them each deep, and taken time that could have been spent on projects that paid them actual cash money for things like rent and food.

To finish at this point will require more money than has been spent to date, so they need some help. If I were Kellett and/or Schroeder⁴, I’d be going crazy right about now. Crazy that the financials won’t work out and the film won’t get finished. Crazy that the financials do work out and Oh god I have to finish it and there will be a million little things that only I notice and why didn’t I fix that bit of sound and that was a dumb question and, and, and….

While we can’t do anything about that self-doubt that seems to affect all the great creative minds, we can at least help make sure that the financials not working out fears are put to rest. The requisite Kickstarter campaign (where you may view the trailer) is live, and in the (approximate, as of this writing) 24 hours since it launched, 512 backers have gotten Freddave Kellett-Schroeder 32% of the way to their US$58,000 goal.

People, we can do better than this. I particularly want to draw your attention to a FAQ at the bottom of the project page (past all the photos of eminent cartoonists, cartoon historians, and one hack webcomics pseudojournalist):

What will you do if you exceed your funding goal for STRIPPED?

If we exceed the goal by a *small* amount:
We’ve carefully budgeted for a set amount of special effects and animations … and it’s going to look gorgeous! BUT! With even a slightly larger budget, we’d be able to add significantly more effects and animations … upping the look of the whole film.
===========================
If we exceed the goal by a *large* amount:
We have a big-picture idea that gets us very excited. We’d like to edit and make available ALL 230 HOURS of the individual interviews. These cartoonists shared incredible stories, tips, tricks, and recollections with us, and we’d love them to be enjoyed and preserved for posterity.

As we’ve said elsewhere … the 13-year old versions of ourselves would’ve killed to watch all these interviews, so making them available to the world would be a real gift to all who love cartooning.

I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned this before — knowing so many talented cartoonists, getting to hang with them over beers, counting so many of them as friends is one of the high points of my life. No fooling, no hyperbole, the sheer talent oozing out of the people I get to see on a semiregular basis takes my breath away. The only downside is that when the sketching starts, I have nothing to contribute — I can’t draw worth a damn⁵.

This is something that I intend to remedy before I die; at whatever point in time I can free up the hours, I will take lessons in drawing, then start doodling the thousands of hours until I develop a repeatable cartooning style, and I will join in one of those sketch-fests (that always seem to degenerate into Bomers doing rude things) … possibly not until the funerals of the older and harder-living among the circle of friends⁶.

This is why you need to donate. Not just because it’s a worthy project. Not just because it may become the definitive documentation of an artform at a moment of key change (something I don’t believe has happened before, in any medium). Not just because Fred and Dave are the nicest guys you might ever meet.

You need to donate so that the goal is obliterated to Hades and back, so that I get those 230 hours of tips and tricks and my end-of-life shakydoodles are barely acceptable. Fail to do so, and you will be spitting on the final wishes of a dying man. And I think we all know how horrible that would be.

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¹ If you ever get Dave Kellett to do his Irish Guy voice, make sure you get him talking about the state of the “fillum” — it’s adorable.

² I’m still holding out for Hot Pen On Paper COMIXXX Action.

³ Their raw interview footage accounts for more than 200 hours at this point; if it were your full-time, 9-5 Monday-Friday job to watch that footage, it would take you more than five weeks to do so.

⁴ Interesting dilemma — which of those two would I be? Dave’s family is wonderful and he has a lemon tree in his yard. Fred’s a filmmaker in LA, which has to be good for meeting ladies. I simply can’t decide which of them I should assume the identity of for the purposes of this discussion.

⁵ Let me amend that statement — I can do circuit diagrams that are crisp, clean, balanced to the eye, and generally aesthetically pleasing, but these are geometric-symbol representations of abstract mathematics. I can’t draw things in the real world, no matter how cartoony or abstract, worth the aforementioned damn.

⁶ My money’s on Rosenberg to go first, from Spontaneous Whisky Immolation; eventually it will be just a coffee-infused Rich Stevens, a post-singularity Aaron Diaz, and me to document their discussion.