(Skipping a bunch of links — you’ll thank me later)

So WOWIO went and bought itself Drunk Duck a few days ago; formerly purchased by Platinum (which also previously owned Drunk Duck), WOWIO was apparently spun off some time ago, although it appears to still be owned by the same people that own Platinum. From my perspective, it appears that Platinum sold off a portion of itself to a portion of itself that it previously sold to itself? Insert obligatory incest reference here.

If you want to actually understand less of the deal than I do, you can watch to WOWIO/Platinum (remember — they’re different companies now) honcho Brian Altounian talk with MoneyTV on the acquisitions (thanks to Rob Tracy for pointing me to the video). But first, a disclaimer about MoneyTV …

Self-described as The longest running business television program of its kind, MoneyTV interviews CEOs of companies, having first agreed on the parameters of the interview:

We will research your company and create the questions to be asked during the 11-minute interview, providing them to you in advance for your review and approval. [emphasis mine]

This puff piece hard-hitting news investigation of your company can be yours for the low, low cost of $11,500. Presumably if you throw them enough money, they’ll get the Slap Chop guy to talk about how awesome your company is.

There are some great partnerships in creative life, and sometimes a great one gives way to a greater one. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were an unstoppable combo platter in the world of musical entertainment that would never be topped — until Rodgers partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II re-invented entertainment in their first collaboration and kept surpassing themselves for almost twenty years.

What I’m trying to say is, just as Rodgers & Hart led to Rodgers & Hammerstein, Straub & Malki ! have inevitably given way to Straub & Malki, the latter being David Malki !‘s mom, who filled in for her absent son on episode 47 of Tweet Me Harder and demonstrated a fundamental truth about parents: they shape who we are by teaching us what we know, but they don’t necessarily teach us everything they know. In this case, Mrs Malki knows about the Dewey Decimal System, ninjas, cats, ninja cats, and stinging insects. Maybe if she’s not available for some future podblast, Kris can have David back as a sub.

• Out today: How I Made It To Eighteen. My thoughts on the book are here. My question to you: Do you have a better use for seventeen bucks? Food, rent, stuff like that, you get a pass. Otherwise, this is your next purchase.
• Or maybe The Blood Cloud should be your next purchase, featuring KC Green’s own brand of special thoughts and guest strippers galore. Pre-orders up now.
• He was talking about making radio, but Ira Glass’s thoughts on wrongness are worthy of your consideration:
  

  Totally. One of the reasons I was interested in doing this interview is because I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it. We spend a lot of money and time on stuff that goes nowhere. It’s not unusual for us to go through 25 or 30 ideas and then go into production on eight or 10 and then kill everything but three or four. In my experience, most stuff that you start is mediocre for a really long time before it actually gets good. And you can’t tell if it’s going to be good until you’re really late in the process. So the only thing you can do is have faith that if you do enough stuff, something will turn out great and really surprise you.

Most days, the stories, news, and emails suggest a sort of commonality, but it’s not working too well at the moment. Let’s see if something pops up as we go along.

• Winning the Best Title of 2010 award in the prestigious “Fleenies”, Vepo Studios presents Whazamo! State of the Art: Webcomics, a profile of webcomickers at this year’s TCAF. Ramón Pérez, Hurricane Erika, and The Toronto Man-Mountain are featured in the five-minute mini-edudrama.
• The Best Creator’s Pitch Fleenie goes to Chris Eliopolous for the best possible reason to read Misery Loves Sherman:
  

  Just go read my damn strip already. It don’t come any cheaper.

Nope, haven’t got any more of those, and we all know you need at least three things to make a theme. But we do have some comings and goings to note:

• Dirk Tiede’s Paradigm Shift is due to return from hiatus on Tuesday, 1 June, as Part 4 kicks off the start of Act II. Considering that Act I took more than ten years (including the self-publishing of three books) to complete, a half-year hiatus ain’t so bad.
• Over at Hello With Cheese, it appears that co-creator and artist-half Bryan Prindiville has moved on; thanks to the extensive buffer, Prindiville actually stopped drawing two weeks ago, but the new artist doesn’t start for a few weeks yet. Prindiville will bow out on Almost A Big Round Number strip #250, on 4 June.
• Having wrapped up Act I of Operation: 3-Ring Bound, the mysterious creators of the spy-themed webcomic Eben07 (of whom no photographs are known to exist, and who are believed to sport modified finger- and iris-prints) will be on break for a month or so.

  Signals intelligence has them taking time to put their report of proceedings through review and classification before distribution to the appropriate departments. It is imperative that copies be obtained and decoded — you are authorized to sacrifice your own life (as well as those of your teammates and any friendly assets) if necessary to meet this objective. Do not fail, or the world may never recover from the consequences.

It’s just one of those days, you know? Pretty miscellaneous.

• The next Erfworld volume is up for pre-order, and a break of two weeks or so to regroup before diving into the next section of story. I’ll give Rob Balder this — when he says “this story will be about 25 pages” and delivers “more than 30 comic pages and an equal number of text updates”, it’s hard to get annoyed that he might need some downtime.

  Also on the pre-order block: the newest Schlock Mercenary book from Howard Tayler (which I managed to spell correctly this time). As is usual, both books will feature signatures (and Tayler’s will included sketches) in return for the upfronting of cash, saving you potentially thousands of dollars to travel to a show that features the creators to get the same degree of personalization. Now don’t they look like bargains?

• Back in the news as the movie approaches completion: Gene Yang on whitewashing in The Last Airbender, this time in comic form. Confession time: I never watched Avatar when it was on, and I generally dislike Shyamalan movies, so I’ve got no dog in this fight; but it surely does seem like Hollywood went out of their way to honor the Asian aspects of the original stories in every respect except the characters. Feel free to quibble over how this is true or not true in the comments.
• Wait — did they just fly through the drive ring (00:14) when leaving the Denny’s? SCAD student Dave Taubert takes designs from Dave Kellett’s Drive and makes a little rendered fly-by movie out of it. I found the second half (showing some of the construction effort) to be as interesting as the first half; Taubert’s notes may be found here.
• Emergency sale at Box Brown’s place! Okay, not an emergency, but very exciting nonetheless.
• Finally, I’ve seen some papercraft models of various webcomics characters — Wigu Tinkle, Hawk, Truck-Ra (can’t find the model right now — anybody know where it is?), but after seeing these anime papercraft models, I’m starting to wonder what might be possible. Dan McNinja on fire? Cartilage Head? Fuschia and Baby Blue? Model Erika? Squatting Matthew Henson? The mind boggles.

This is where that influence that the Penny Arcade guys have makes a difference in a lot of lives. The latest episode of PATV is live, and it’s not an easy thing. Messers Holkins and Krahulik talk about their histories of anxiety, depression, coping, and the effects drugs (illicit and licit) have had on them.

They’re sharing stuff that mostly doesn’t get talked about, and that alone could help a lot of people. This is a must-watch.

One of the webcomics-friendliest people out there is Josh Fruhlinger, which is odd because he’s mostly famous for writing seriously about tech issues or very snarkily about newspaper comics. And one of the webcomics-friendliest of the newspaper cartoonists (in that he maintains a long-running webcomic) is Ces Marculiano. They’re chatting together on Tall Tales Radio with host Tom Racine, and it’s always good when Josh gets going on Apartment 3G‘s oddly unsexy hijinks, Mark Trail‘s fisticuffs, and Mary Worth‘s eventual subjugation of all sentient beings to her indomitable will. Mary Worth is.

• Speaking of audio treats, there’s a terrific recording of the self-publishing panel from the recently-concluded Stumptown Comics Festival, starring Meredith Gran, Shaenon Garrity, and Lucy Knisley, with Hurricane Erika moderating. It’s a good ‘un.
• Speaking of Stumptown, recently seen carved into a stump in Portland: KB + KC = ♥. Those in the know believe that this may refer to the most awesome jam comic ever committed to pixels. Also, does anybody else have the problem that every time they go to type in the URL for KC Green’s Gunshow, they spell it Funshow instead? Or is that just my subconscious speaking?

For those of you that don’t wake up to Morning Edition, there was a story this morning on the Center for Plain Language, their awards for good & bad writing, and one of their judges. In other words, suck it, Big Paper! David Malki ! has your number:

[G]ood, clear business communications to be rewarded with shiny trophies at a fancy ceremony; and horrible, confusing, misleading and/or opaque business communications to be savagely mocked by yours truly in as ruthless a manner as possible.

PS: Malki !’s one-time weekly publisher likes his latest book.

• In other news, all sites utilizing ComicPress as their CMS should see what Phil “Frumph” Hofer has to say about the current state of the theme. Short version: the current implementation of ComicPress has one more release in it (2.9.2), then its underlying architecture is going to change a bit. Versions 1.0 through 2.92 will now be known as ComicPress Legacy, and versions 3.0+ as ComicPress Premium. Legacy will remain free, but new features will not be developed by the ComicPress team (although others out there are welcome to do so).

  Other shoe (and you knew it would fall one day): Premium will not be free, and the ComicPress developer that you purchase it from will be responsible for supporting it. Frumph himself (who has been a tireless resource to the ComicPress user base, volunteering much time and effort) is stepping down as lead developer, just as ComicPress starts to roll in the bucks. He’ll continue to provide custom site designs and contract support, but the demands of his life require that he spend less unpaid time on ComicPress. But for all that he’s contributed so far, send him your thanks; he deserves it

I have some webcomics to point y’all towards today; I’ve been following each for a while, but wanted to let ’em build up a bit more (archive size, or chunks of plot, or something) before I talked about ’em. Consider each worth your time.

• Rich Barrett’s Nathan Sorry is (or perhaps was) an investment analyst who should have died in the World Trade Center; instead, he’s got a new identity and $20 million dollars that isn’t his which he didn’t mean to steal, not really (not that that will save him from the wrath of those it belongs to, I’d wager). He might think two months a small southern town are enough distance to complete his escape, but we know better, don’t we? Eventually, this one will be a graphic novel, about 250 pages or so.
• Paul Dwyer goes absurdist and amps up the mental conflict between art and story in I Shot Roy!, which is built on images from comic books of the 1940s (don’t worry, it’s all in the public domain). In terms of surreality, I’m gonna put this one up next to God™¹.
• Katarina Emgård adds to the profile of Swedish webcomickry with a sci-fi, hero-ish story called Kisenja. It’s got a Flash interface, so it may be a bit slow to read depending on your network and computer; it’s pretty, though, especially the design of the homepage. Six episodes so far, each with six to eight pages and new updates monthly (although Episode 1 is a comparative monster, with 26 pages).
• Also Flash-interfaced (more on that in a minute) is Red Light Properties from Dan Goldman (you may remember him from ACT-I-VATE); SF publisher TOR is actually providing hosting until the story is complete. Every Tuesday brings you eight more pages on a Miami realty firm that specializes in haunted homes.

  Now, about that Flash interface: this one is a bit heavyweight on the loading, but you have some options.You can either load the comic by adding one panel (or sometime, one word balloon) at a time, or a whole page; while the incremental approach is quick, I found it somewhat distracting — or maybe it reduced me as a reader to too passive of a role. Instead of finding my way around the page, I was being led. Loading one page at a time, on the other hand, was distractingly slow on my computer, and (I can’t help but think) isn’t quite how Goldman wants it to read. Either choice detracts only slightly from a weird, wonderful work.

• The precise opposite of Red Light Properties would have to be Don MacDonald’s Machiavelli; ol’ Niccolò’s name has become so famous that we mostly think we know his deal, but there’s a lot to that particular history that most people don’t know. Kate Beaton might try to get to the core of Machiavelli in six to ten panels, but MacDonald is in for the long haul, ustilizing a pen and ink to a beautiful, washed effect.
• Finally, I thought I’d already written about Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell, but it turns out I hadn’t. D’oh. Through a convoluted set of circumstances that were utterly not his fault, the title character has a karmic debt that has doomed him to eternal torment, unless he can be the nicest, best, most giving guy in the history of, uh, history. Given that he lives in a hipster-rich section of Brooklyn, works in financial aid counseling, and has some stoner angels crashing on his couch, the odds aren’t looking too good. Very funny.

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¹ Full title: Or, more fully, God™ © 2XX8 *** ***** ****** ******* Incorporated. All rights reserved. God and all related characters, titles, names and documents are trademarks of *** ***** ****** ******* Incorporated. No similarity between any of the names, characters, persons and/or institutions in this deity with those of any living or dead person or institutions is intended and any such similarity which may exist is purely coincidental.

For those of you in the Portland area, Comics Month (as declared by Mayor Hunky) is in full swing, and that means it’s nearly time for the Stumptown Comics Fest to get under way. The exhibitor list may now be cross referenced against a map, and there’s only a few zillion webcomickers gonna be there.

• Among the attendees (“Guest”, if you wanna be pedantic, presumably “of Honor”) will be Hope Larson, whom some of you may be able to see at the West Coast iteration of Drink and Draw Like a Lady (with props to Dylan Meconis for local organization and Hurricane Erika for the poster — if you see Erika, ask her to do a shot in honor of me pre-ordering her book).
• While there, you might want to congratulate Larson for her latest news. As surely all have heard by now, she’ll be adapting Madeleine L’Engle’s classic of YA SF, A Wrinkle in Time as a graphic novel. This is terrific news, as I can’t imagine anybody less talented than Larson able to tackle a book that’s so widely read, so intensely beloved, and which contains concepts and characters that are so difficult to visualize, forcing every reader to come up with mental images that are surely unlike anybody else’s.

  Handled poorly, everybody that picks up the book would protest That’s not what travelling through a tesseract/Mrs Which/IT looks like!, but I have every expectation that Larson will rise to the challenge and produce something her own, yet recognizably familiar to all and sundry.

  Still doubting? Consider that every work that Larson has done has somehow been stronger than the previous. If, a few months ago, I thought that Larson had reached a peak of visual storytelling with Mercury, I previously thought the same of Chiggers, and Gray Horses, and Salamander Dream. True, adaptation is a different kind of beast, but I’m hopeful.

• Speaking of Mercury, might it be possible that one of you creative types could ensure that it’s properly considered for a Harvey Award? Nominations (from anybody who writes, draws, inks, letters, colors, designs, edits, or otherwise makes comics) remain open until the 23rd of April, so hop to it. While I’m on the topic, any number of people over there to the right are also probably deserving of your nomination.
• Finally, this: having previously been made into an opera, Dinosaur Comics (which sometimes gets no love from the arbiters of taste) has now crossed over into the ultimate of musical expressions: a marching band routine via the justly-famed¹ (and slightly deranged) Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band.

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¹ It wasn’t me; I was still in high school and can’t even play the trombone.

I met Dorothy Gambrell briefly at last weekend’s MoCCA Art Fest, and one thing that I meant to do but neglected to, was to compliment her on her talent in bringing data to the fore. Whether its musical analytics, demographic and sociological breakdowns, or philosophical digressions, she presents it clearly and intuitively enough to give Edward Tufte cardiac palpitations of excitement.

Now she’s turned that analytic eye inwards. One of the recurring themes in webcomics has been But what about the money? Without hard data, the analyses done by every navel gazer in the community (not excluding a certain hack pseduo-journalist have fallen woefully short of statistical rigor. We just don’t have enough, or accurate enough, data from creators to draw any conclusions about things like traffic, audience size, and earnings potential. And honestly, when sharing even a bit of (what can rightly be seen as proprietary) financial information brings down the scoffing attacks, why would any creator bother to share such information?

Because it makes a really kick-ass graph, maybe? Gambrell’s put herself out in the open, for the sake of honesty and art. The fact that it’s (wholly unsurprisingly) visually appealing is merely icing on the cake. Thanks for letting us see some of what it takes to create, Ms Gambrell.

Speaking of seeing what lies beneath, you might want to check out the latest Blamimation from Messers Kurtz & Straub. The linking structure for this one was brainstormed on stage at PAX East, and a mere nineteen days later — BAM. On the web, ready for your consumption and subsequent laugh-chuckles.

I’ve long held that just handing a microphone to Scott Kurtz and giving him a stage to speak from is pretty much a guarantee of a laughter until it hurts, and much like Voltron, he only gets stronger when he combines with Straub. Hopefully, when the DVD of PAX East 2010 comes out, a good portion of this panel will be on it, because comparing between the process and the final product is entirely fascinating.

To start, a few things missed in yesterday’s post: I got a copy of the minicomic pre-release pre-view of Tracy White‘s How I Made It To Eighteen, and it looks like powerful stuff. Speaking of power, R Stevens was rocking a beta-test iPhone dongle that allowed him to swipe credit cards, have customers sign on the screen with a finger, and optionally supply an email address so that a receipt could be sent. Wow. Also, I missed getting back to a gentleman that had an interesting-looking self-published comic book done entirely from typography, and (because I’m an idiot) didn’t get his name. If you’re he, drop me a line.

So, if you didn’t catch my tweets the other day, NPR devoted nearly ten minutes of airtime on Sunday’s All Things Considered to Youtube darlings Pomplamoose and their do-it-yourself approach to a musical career. Listen especially to this exchange between host Linda Wertheimer and guests Nataly Dawn & Jack Conte, around the 3:40 mark:

WERTHEIMER: So is it totally old fashioned to think of a record label as the best way to become a hit band? My understanding is that ultimately, if you really want to make the big bucks, you’ve got to have the record label. You’ve got to have their distribution, their promotion. That is the way to go still.

Ms. DAWN: There’s no simple answer to the question, I don’t think.

Mr. CONTE: Yeah.

Ms. DAWN: I mean, if you can’t just do it all yourself, then you do need help. If, for example, you’re somebody who writes songs, like Lady Gaga, and you need everything, you know, that’s going to make you Lady Gaga, then you need a big, fat label. But if you’re just a band, I don’t think we’re in an era anymore where you need that sort of major backing.

Mr. CONTE: Yeah, I mean, what does it mean, really, to need a label? I mean, we’re making a living. We’ve got a sustainable business. We’re growing every year as a good business should. We’re happy. We don’t have to do things that we don’t want to do. We don’t have to please people that we don’t want to please. We get to make the music that we love.

Yeah, we’re not on the front page of Rolling Stone magazine, and we’re not getting $10 million checks in the mail, but we don’t need that to have a nice life.

Ms. DAWN: And also, our goal has never been to be a huge hit band. We just started…

Mr. CONTE: We want to make a living doing what we like to do.

Ms. DAWN: Exactly. We’re just making a living.

Wonder why I found that bit interesting? Also of interest was an exchange a bit later on the topic of rights (approximately 6:34):

WERTHEIMER: So what happens if Lady Gaga turns around and says: Wait a minute. Did I sell the rights to that song and just don’t remember it?

Mr. CONTE: Oh no, we make sure that we have all our ducks in a row. We bought mechanical licenses to all of our covers before we put them on iTunes. So it’s all legit and legal.

(Soundbite of laughter)

WERTHEIMER: We were sort of curious about that because I think that would be one of the parts of the process that wouldn’t be so cheap.

Mr. CONTE: Oh, yeah.

Ms. DAWN: Yeah. No…

Mr. CONTE: No, but it’s really easy. You go onto harryfox.com. You click buy mechanical license, and boom. You…

Ms. DAWN: That’s the thing. People think that, like, all of these things have to be done by, like, geniuses from, like, behind huge desks or at the top of skyscrapers, but actually you can just go online and do it yourself.

That put me in mind of Wil Wheaton’s experience getting some of the aforementioned Mr Stevens’s t-shirts on TV:

I got to pick out my T-shirts again, and since I was already wearing an Electric Sheep shirt from Diesel Sweeties, I suggested that the costume department may want to look at Rich’s store for ideas. Just like last time, when I suggested Penny Arcade, I was able to get permission from Rich almost instantly via text message. In the old days, this would have been a complicated, time-consuming, inefficient process involving FAXes, phone calls, and a whole bunch of bullshit. It delights me that it’s as simple now as grabbing my phone, sending a text message, and waiting for a reply.

Nearly twenty-five years ago, I first read William Gibson’s description of a specialized company competing against corporate giants: small, fast, ruthless … all Edge. Now, watching independent artists manage their business, nimble enough to turn on a dime, I think I’m finally seeing in action what Gibson had in mind.

The flip side to that, of course, is that the artists have to conduct themselves in a manner that keeps them fast-reacting (ruthless being a matter of opinion), which is tough to maintain over the long term. That being said, just as proto-mammals found a pretty good living on the scraps that behemoth dinosaurs left behind, there’s a lot of eyeballs and money that entertainment conglomerates just don’t know how (or don’t want to bother) to gather up. That’s your target, creators.

We’ll wrap it there; I’ve got some stuff in the mailbag that I want to get to, but I doubt anybody’s still reading after all those quotes. See you tomorrow.