Who says that service outages are always a bad thing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s Thursday morning and there is an ever-shifting cluster of Homestuck trollgirls in the vicinity of the TopatoCo booth; I had the opportunity to meet a pair of them walking into the con this morning (their costumes really were very good; they were stopped for photos approximately every 60 seconds on the approach to the convention center), and was pleased to find out that while they enjoy dressing like trolls, neither of them thinks that they actually are trolls. This led to a later discussion at the Dumbrella booth where it was posited that the collective noun for trolls should be a Tumblr.

Stray thought — they may not allow strollers in the panel rooms any longer, but that hasn’t stopped people bringing small dogs with them. A man just walked by with a small Corgi in his arms that seemed bemused but mostly bored with all the outlandishly dressed two-legs around him. Adorable dog.

There was a disappointingly small crowd for Karl Kerschl’s spotlight panel, but the right people were there — lots of cameras, lots of photos, there to watch a livedrawing of next week’s Charles Christopher.

Kerschl laid out a few rough ideas that he had (a process that often takes half of Wednesday day, with a two-row strip requiring two to three hours work to pencil and ink, then to coloring), with the thought of doing something con-related. His first idea (which he wound up using) involved his cockroach therapist character, dealing with another animal (to be determined) on the topic of “agoraphobia”. The unused, second idea (which may form the basis of the following week’s strip) involved the porcupine character and LARPing. I won’t spoil the gag of the strip Kerschl drew, but it involves a grumpy ferret.

While roughing out the strip and working up the placement, Kerschl answered questions from the floor; in no particular order, he shared:

Of the ancillary characters that have really grown on, the owls are the most prominent; all of the relationships in the strip became parental relationships, which largely was from before he became a parent.

The time setting of the strip is intentionally loose — Gilgamesh, 18th century elements, bolt-action rifles, contemporary language, the practice of psychology all mix together. In a lot of ways, the color palette he uses reflects that ambiguity a lot, makes it very hazy.

On the topic of panel composition Kerschl noted that since almost starting it was most informed by film pacing. He attributed the film influence to the fact that he does a lot of silent storytelling, setting up a scene and showing reactions to it. Any success to humanity or sincerity in the story is from those reactions.

Kerschl was always interested in drawing animals. Looking back at the oldest art he has, from the age of 8 or so, it was all cougars and bears and things; as a teenager his interests switched to action-adventure and superheroes until his mid-20s. He doesn’t draw much outside of work, but when he does it’s usually a bird or some form of wildlife. Even trees, trees are very relaxing, you can’t screw them up.

Charles Christopher is the only work Kerschl still does with pencil and paper ; in the last two years, everything else has been digital. Working digitally is a lot less stressful, since I have so much freedom to undo and experiment. But it’s nice to have a finished piece of work when you’re done, and I haven’t found a way to replicate this brushpen, which gets used a lot for things like fur and texture. You get a lot of happy accidents.

Kerschl doesn’t find it difficult to get emotions from animals (which he may have just researched via a Google Image Search). The weird thing is, I don’t go out of my way to put human expressions. If you give them a bit of a googly eye, that works. It’s all body language. Along those lines, the last panel of the strip wasn’t completed, as Kerschl felt the ferret’s body language needed more careful development than he had time for.

Almost all of the storylines came from one-off gags, and pretty much all of the recurring characters. Like Sissi Skunk at first was just [he gives a dual thumbs up gesture and wide grin], and now it’s become this story of intrigue. When I first drew that skunk it was Sissi, and now I’m not sure there is a Sissi. It’s like Wal-Mart, or Aunt Jemima, this corporate thing protecting the sales force.

Most interestingly, Kerschl is working on a bunch of other webcomics. They don’t have names yet, but there are four different concepts right now. All are in the early stages of development as he works up ‘tone pieces’ to get the feel of what they could be. Probably going to pick one to work on primarily, but all will come out eventually for web/mobile/ electronic distribution..

Kerschl laid out a few rough ideas that he had (a process that often takes half of Wednesday day, with a two-row strip requiring two to three hours work to pencil and ink, then to coloring), with the thought of doing something con-related. His first idea (which he wound up using) involved his cockroach therapist character, dealing with another animal (to be determined) on the topic of

There’s always an odd feeling on the floor in the hours running up to the launch of SDCC; expectation mixed with seeing people you haven’t seen for months mixed with a smidge of existential dread. Plus, if you’re lucky, you can get some questions answered.

Questions such as, What’s Up With The Penny Arcade Kickstarter, which was the major topic of a generous talk I had with Robert Khoo. The brief answer is, it’s an experiment, which will determine not so much what Penny Arcade does over the next year as how they do it. There’s been a lot of opinions floating around in the 36 hours or so since launch, reactions and counter-reactions as opinion yo-yos in the nerdosphere. Talking with Robert, the key to it is opportunity cost.

It’s a matter of how to get the money necessary to run Penny Arcade, and advertising (which is a great deal more than just accepting an ad and cashing the check) pays for a significant amount of PA’s operational costs — rent, health insurance, things that have a lot of zeros associated with them. As Khoo puts it, Mike and Jerry could do a lot of things for the audience, but right now they’re working for the advertisers. If this drive succeeds, they can work instead for the readers. The guys I have working selling the ads, they have other things that they can produce.

It’s not a whim, it’s not a campaign that’s going to get shut down for ToS violations (anybody that’s ever met Khoo knows he does his due diligence; you can bet that Kickstarter were extensively consulted in advance), it’s a discrete event that, in either the event of success or the event of failure, is going to provide data to PA and inform how they conduct their business.

And in the event of success, there’s going to be a lot of media companies (from webcomics up to larger enterprises) that will (or at the very least, should) be paying very close attention and determining what they can learn and implement themselves. Khoo’s goal has never been to run a webcomics company; it’s been to find new ways to provide creative media as pervasively and ubiquitously as possible. And, given the sort of businessman Khoo is, this is not an isolated event; I’m expecting two or three more shoes to drop in the near future (which ones likely depending on what happens over the next 34 days of crowdfunding).

The other question that got answered today: was the purported Rob Liefeld/Owly drawing that made its way across Twitter in the past week legitimate? Andy Runton looked a little sheepish as he confirmed the story behind its creation — that some fans had gotten the pencil sketch from Rob Liefeld and enticed Runton to “enhance” it. The best part of the conversation was explaining to Runton’s mom (who was working up custom Owly shoulder bags) exactly who Rob Liefeld is. This is such a beautiful idea that I don’t think you need to consider anything else today. Just revel in that.

As we hurtle headlong into next week’s San Diego Comic Con, now is as good a time as any to remind you that postings next week will be on their own schedule. Cool? Cool.

• Previously noted, the hands-down best publisher of graphic novels, :01 Books will be at SDCC, but now it’s time for me to share with you some of who and what they’re bringing (many thanks to Gina Gagliano at :01 for passing along the info, as well as numerous advanced copies throughout the year).

  To start, I realize that some of you may object to that “best publisher” claim that I made, so check out the Eisner nominees from :01 this year: Nursery Rhyme Comics (Best Publication for Early Readers and Best Anthology), Zita the Space Girl (Best Publication for Kids), Anya’s Ghost and Level Up (Best Publication for Young Adults), and Zahra’s Paradise (Best Graphic Album — Reprint). Bascially, a :01 publication has a one in three shot of being recognized by the most prestigious awards in comics.

  Second, check out who will be visiting the booth: Jorge Agurre and Rafael Rosado, Vera Brosgol, Zack Giallongo, JT Petty, Thien Pham, Nate Powell (also an SDCC Guest of Honor), Dave Roman, and Jen Wang. They’ll all be signing at least a couple of times during the show, so drop by the booth for the schedule. Also check out the program guide for the many :01 creators and staff that will be talking about various topics near and dear to their heart; if nothing else, try to catch up with Colleen AF Venable to tell her how awesome her book designs¹ are. Among those book designs: the just-received, not-yet-released Sailor Twain, which I can’t wait to get my hands on (October, can you come quickly enough?).

• Know what you won’t be able to pick up at SDCC? The Schlock Mercenary boardgame. When my evil twin told me that his game guys wanted to send me a review copy, he didn’t mention it was going to be the single largest item ever delivered to The Fleenplex for review. This thing is heavy, on account of it’s stuffed full of thick cardstock pieces, in a box that is far more solid than anybody used to American boardgames would ever consider necessary. Those of you that like Euro-style games, it probably feels right at home.

  So yeah, all those pieces (which, by the way, are double-sided) — gonna be a while before I get the chance to punch ’em all out but when I do, I can tell that the good folks at Living Worlds Games love me and want me to be happy, because one of the items in the box was a little bundle of sealable bags to sort those pieces into. Just saying, I had to make a trip to the supermarket for Zip-Locs when I bought Settlers of Catan.

  My only complaint being (and this is preliminary, as I haven’t punched out all those double-sided pieces yet), the designers put in such necessary play-pieces as banana peels and cursing, but didn’t manage duct tape or an ominous hummmmmm? Priorities, man! On the other hand, the entire purpose of the game is to be recklessly violent and make a bunch of attorney drones go Pop! Mostly; the rules (which I have had time to read through) feature different styles of gameplay, from kill people and break things to retrieve the macguffin without dying. With all the characters, tools, objectives, floor layouts, and game styles, it’s going to have a hell of a lot of replay value.

  Schlock Mercenary: Capital Offensive is up for pre-order at Game Salute, or you can get it from Howard Tayler at GenCon Indy (mid-August) or ChiCon 7/WorldCon70 (end of August), and eventually at his store.

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¹ You could also note that she’s got the Best Tattoo Ever, but if you lead with that it could come off creepy.

Before we get into this, I think I have to thank Zach Weiner. But Gary, I hear you cry, Mastering Comics is by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden and Zach Weiner has nothing to do with it, so why thank him? Right you are, Sparky, and if you’ll simmer down for just a moment I’ll explain.

See, Mastering Comics: Drawing Words and Writing Pictures Continued (hereafter MC, and thanks as always to Gina Gagliano at :01 Books for the review copy) is, perhaps more than any book I’ve reviewed previously, not for me; it (and its predecessor) are textbooks, intended to be used in semester-long classes to teach people who are serious about comics the breadth and depth of skills necessary to that goal. I am the furthest from that person you can be and still love comics.

But Zach wasn’t a physicist or a mathematician when he decided to pull texts on those topics and start reading; he goes through, chapter by chapter, learning what he can, translating it to his own experiences, doing the exercises, and sharing what he learns. If he can do it, I can tackle the relatively easier task to telling you about a book.

Not that I wish to minimize the contradictions inherent in that task — if MC is skewed to the serious student (and keeping in mind, it’s not the introductory text), me being not being able to follow along isn’t an unreasonable thing; likewise, if I find it easy to absorb, that’s not necessarily a virtue. I decided to follow a rule of thumb from grad school¹ and figured if I could make sense of the first 40% or so of each topic and then get progressively lost, it was probably properly balanced.

On average, I followed the first 38% of each new topic.

Interestingly, I did better as I progressed through the text, as Abel and Madden made excellent use of repeated examples. Perspective, point of view, page layout — all were tracked from the earliest, sketchiest presentation, then refined further and further as more techniques were introduced. Inks, shades, and colors built upon a two panel excerpt of an outer-space story that followed a dozen or more different pathways and made me recognize subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) differences in end results that I’d never have noticed previously.

For me, the last-third portion of each discussion invariably came about when Photoshop tools and techniques were discussed. As I’ve mentioned more than once on this page, I am no kind of artist² much less a digital artist, but even here I was able to learn. The fundamentals of color reproduction are less mysterious to me and I have more of an idea what artist friends mean when they talk about “flatting” or “tones”.

Most interesting to me was the fact that about halfway through, Abel and Madden began talking about webcomics and essentially never stopped. Rather than define them as some kind of distinct beast, they became just another means for practice, and pretty much all of the remaining exercises involved incremental progress to a webcomic, culminating in posting that sucker for all to see. However, the ease of distribution and low barrier to entry of webcomics didn’t push out more traditional techniques; interleaved with the extended webcomics exercise were assignments to work up longform and shortform stories, make a mini, and even bookbinding.

Where I was able to fully engage once again was roughly in the final quarter of the book. Interspersed with the topics of production, Abel and Madden introduced material on professional concerns — schedules, collaboration, publishers and editors, agents, funding, distribution, marketing, publicity, even contracts and lawyers — all the things that might be shoved to the side in a purist exploration of capital-a Art. Those that want to make comics purely for themselves may find this section of less use, but for everybody that wants to be working in comics, I suspect it will be the most critical.

Mastering Comics belongs on the shelf of every serious student of the craft of comics; for the enthusiastic fan of the art, maybe not so much as books meant for more general (even “civilian”) audiences. For those wanting to learn by doing, and see how the skills required by webcomics relate to other forms of comics, it’s as indispensable as How To Make Webcomics or Making Comics (both of which are given their props in Mastering Comics). And if you happen to understand all the parts that baffled me, let me know how good they are. I suspect: very good.

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¹ It was universally agreed that everybody should be able to follow along with the first third of your presentation, you should lose half the audience in the middle third, and by the end if you hadn’t left everybody scratching their heads and trying to work out the math, you hadn’t really figured out anything new.

² Although back in the day, with a t-square, drafting triagles, a compass, and engineering paper, I could construct circuit diagrams that were far more aesthetically pleasing than they strictly needed to be. I blame A Canticle for Leibowitz.

At least half. Look, it’s got books in it, okay?

For instance, there’s a comic book that’s been making the twitterrounds with its Kickstarter the thing is, Tomorrow Jones looks like it’s got an interesting story hook, as Joey Softerworld pointed out:

The “updates” section on this comic kick-starter have some thoughtful posts about the depiction of women in the comic.

The section in question:

I was faced with the decision of how her universe was going to work. Would everyone, or at least most characters, also be less sexualized? I ultimately decided it would serve the story better if Tomorrow were unique amongst the heroes and heroines in her world. Her mother wears a revealing costume, most female heroes will. But Tomorrow doesn’t. Tomorrow is bucking tradition and trying to do things her own way. She will face pressure to conform and act like everyone else. That is going to be an active conflict in the series, but more so, it makes Tomorrow unique in her own story as well.

So, a strong (literally) female character that’s not a Strong Female Character — very laudable. But Tomorrow Jones is less than a week from closing, and (as of this writing) only at 31% of its (very modest) goal. It’s doing better than in March, when an extremely similar pitch closed unsuccessfully, and with less funding than the current attempt.

I can’t repeat this enough times — no matter how enticing the project sounds, unless it fulfills a need that nobody knew they needed before (there are numerous examples in the Design section of Kickstarter), the most clear indication of a successful fund-raise is going to be the built-in audience and credibility of the creator based on past work.

Brian Daniel seems like a perfectly capable creator, but for somebody to plunk down money on a perfectly capable creator that they don’t know, there needs to be more than a few art samples, a decent story description, and ten bucks burning a hole in their pocket. I’ll go so far as to say that the convenience that Kickstarter offers probably works against Mr Daniel here, as many, many people would fork over that ten bucks for a mini comic or sketch book of developmental work at a show, following a quick flip through something physical.

The end effect of operating at a distance from the creator, one that doesn’t have an existing audience, a pent-up demand, or a positive word of mouth from people who’ve actually seen the book (or all three), is that many perfectly worthy projects are going to be non-starters¹.

The only thing that might help an unknown in this situation is the recommendation of a trusted authority; for instance, I’ll wager a lot of people that haven’t heard of Ryan Pequin’s Three Word Phrase would be willing to splash out for his new book because it carries the TopatoCo Seal of Approval². And that’s where we have the classic Catch-22: Daniel needs the money to finish the book so the has something to show you that will convince you (or convince me to convince you) to fund the book, which doesn’t exist yet. I hope he raises the money because I suspect Tomorrow Jones would be a decent comic book. If my suspicion is enough to convince you, the Kickstarter page is thataway.

Other things:

• Oh sweet merciful dog, yes: the beginning of a crowdsourced topic index of Webcomics Weekly episodes. Can’t wait to rediscover exactly where Brad Guigar’s rant on “champing at the bit” was. For reference, the good part of Laugh Track starts at about five minutes and goes until Scott promises to burn down our technology-based society.
• Danielle Corsetto gave you a gift today — feeling under the weather and not wanting to half-ass a pivotal point in her current storyline, she elected to use a guest strip that was previously submitted during an open call; it’s quite good, but that’s not the gift I was referring to. The gift is Corsetto dropped all her other banked guest strips on you at once. One hundred and ten of them to be precise, in an act of generosity and optimism on account of she hasn’t left herself any to offset future sick-times. That sound you hear is productivity plummeting across the world.
• There’s a new Recipe Comix update over at Saveur; this time, Jennifer Weber drops some potato dumplings on you. This looks to be the simplest way to fancy up potatoes since Anthony Clark’s potato wedges which for the record are crazy delicious.
• Advanced notice: Great Showdowns, book, October, forward by Neil Patrick Harris. Hell, yes.

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¹ Not to mention the fact that the reward structure for Tomorrow Jones goes up to US$150 without actually including a copy of the comic. Ten bucks gets you a signed physical copy of Poorcraft, fifteen for a copy of Daisy Kutter, and US$20 for Sad Pictures for Children, each of which are actual book books in the hundreds of pages. The Kickstarter free money machine never existed except in myth, and you aren’t getting that free money now.

² Oddly enough for a company that regularly deals with the Better Business Burro, there are no comics documenting the existence of a Seal of Approval up in TopatoCo World Domination Headquarters, and I for one think that’s a damn shame.

I had a revelation on my morning commute about chef Grant Achatz and molecular gastronomy in general. Bear with me.

I have never previously gotten the appeal of molecular gastronomy and the mad scientists that pursue it. Sure, they have food experiences that sound unique and creative, but I’ve always wanted a meal that didn’t just transport me, but which was recognizable as food.

Food is made of basic ingredients and skill and can be recognizably reproduced by anybody with the time and patience to practice. I will never have access to the ingredients or sense of flavor or even the knife skills of a commis in a top flight kitchen, but I can roast a chicken; the differences between my roast chicken and the best roast chicken in the world will be obvious, but it’s still a roast chicken.

For me, the Grand Unified Theory of cooking revolves around the fundamental forces of heat, moisture, salt, and time; they can be manipulated in fairly fundamental ways, arranged by some fairly basic tools¹ and techniques, all of which go back through the history of human endeavour to keep ourselves fed with something that tastes good. The most commonly-used implement in my kitchen has not changed its basic structure in millenia.

This philosophy is why dinner tonight will consist of flour + water + yeast + salt, thrown on a hot rock with tomato and cheese and mushrooms, which will transform itself into something simple and satisfying and delicious. I’ll probably drink a wine made by a retired nuclear physicist who, for all the modern equipment at his disposal, utilizes techniques as old as civilization and operates on a small scale so that he can be sure that everything he produces is as good as he can possibly make it, but doesn’t want to be precious about things. He wants his wine to be shared with food by people that enjoy each other. Simple.

Topic shift: my favorite restaurants are owned by a pair of guys that have provided me more good times than I can recall². They’ve passed me more free nibbles and drinks than I can count, graciously entertained friends old and new, and at least one of their bartenders is a genius. They also do a podcast that’s really good, and their latest show features Grant Achatz, perhaps the maddest of America’s molecular mad scientists.

I won’t even get into Achatz’s frankly amazing history, from working at the fabled French Laundry to founding molecular temple Alina to the now God’s just screwing with us level irony of his cancer diagnosis — cancer of the tongue, which destroyed his ability to taste. None of that’s important right now. If you want an idea of the sort of stuff that Achatz is doing, the stuff that I just didn’t get, Lucy Knisley did a comic about the experience which you should go read now. How do you get so far from food, I’ve always wondered.

Halfway through the podcast, I was starting to get my answer. Achatz does these things not because he’s in love with technology for its own sake, but because he’s got crazy ideas and wants to see which of them might stick. Prime example: having a tablecloth made of silicone that can have food prepared directly on it and used as the servingware was a crazy idea. But it changes the interactions of diners with the food, and with each other. We’re still in Crazytowne³, but I’m understanding his POV a whole lot more. Then I got to the segment of the show starting about 43:19, and lasting around ten minutes. Go listen to it now.

See, Achatz’s major project these days is called Next; every three months, it changes to something new. The opening menu/decor/concept/everything was about recreating a classic French meal, circa 1906. Then it became for three months an exploration of Thai cuisine, just because that’s as far from classic French cooking as you can get. There was a period that explored Achatz’s youth, mid-70s in Michigan (lots of mac ‘n’ cheese and peanut butter & jelly, I’m told), and so forth. There’s no reason to keep changing what he does except he can, and it forces him to continuously up his game. He has taken an act of creation and instead of resting on success, responds by chucking it all when it gets well known and starts over again.

I heard that and names started to pop into my head: Gurewitch. Onstad. Beaton. The nimbleness, the reinvention, the metaphor of culinary creativeness as webcomic stretched beyond all credible boundaries and what the hell is wrong with you Gary. The he told the audience what he does when a three month rotation at Next closes.

He gathers up all the recipes, compiles them into an e-book, and sells it through the iTunes for seven bucks⁴. He’s made his mark, he’s not going to repeat himself, and he wants to put it out there for everybody for damn near free. This is the very model of the independent creator as driven, screw what I’ve done what can I do next obsessive.

Now I get him. Grant Achatz works in food (sometimes down to molecules). Webcomickers work in images (sometimes down to pixels). They have an infectious enthusiasm and a restless energy and a desire to share it as widely as possible. Hell, if you listen to the end of that segment and hear about the concept of “Last”, he’s even got the possibility of the equivalent of a content scraper.

So yeah, that’s where my brain’s been today. Still not enough to go eat at Alinea, but damn if my conceptions of creativity haven’t expanded a bit. And if nothing else, the bit in the podcast about the duck press was hilarious

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¹ Like Alton Brown, I have only one uni-tasking tool in my kitchen.

² Also, if you can keep two restaurants afloat for a combined 27 years through the greatest recession of the past two generations, you are a steely-eyed businessguy of Khoo-like proportions.

³ The conceptual-slash-performance art district.

⁴ And you know what his seven dollar recipe collections won’t call for? Diode-pumped lasers in the hazardous power ranges to break shit down into its atomic components so you can put it back together in an arbitrary shape. I’m back from the molecular brink, because I can guaran-frickin’-tee that the nitrogen cooling system for that laser is the goddamn definition of a unitasker, and it is not going to appear in a recipe book made for the edification of anybody that wants to screw with the recipes. This is the culinary equivalent of a Creative Commons that permits derivative works.

12:04:14 EDT (approx), I submitted my hotel request for San Diego Comic Con. Last time I was in the wrangle¹, it took me until about 12:06:30, which resulted in absolutely zero communications from the hotel reservation service for more than 72 hours past the promised response window, and no offer of a room for a full week (by which point you’re basically not in the same time zone as the convention center). I’m told that the system was better last year, here’s hoping that it’s better still this year.

Um, all those of you that were doing setup at/traveling to Seattle for Emerald City, hope you aren’t attending SDCC in a van down by the Tijuana border. But even if you do end up in a van, you have an opportunity that I don’t, namely to see what looks like the most topic-random and potentially wacky panel of the year. From Friend o’ Fleen Frank Gibson:

We are doing a panel with Bryan Lee O’Malley, it’s an Oni panel which has a late night talkshow theme, there is a cooking segment. Our lives can be somewhat surreal at the best of times. 7pm, Room 2AB on Friday! [emphasis mine]

Looking forward to seeing you for MoCCA! HOORAY!!!

It’s possible that last sentence was meant only for me, but Frank’s a friendly guy; I’m sure he’s looking forward to seeing you at MoCCA as well. Also, here is where I have to confess that I’ll be missing Sunday at MoCCA because I’ll be at a brunch featuring the musical and drink stylings of Dale DeGroff. Look, I love comics and all, but Dale DeGroff will have booze. Booze what I need.

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¹ Which, to be fair, was 2010, the first year utilizing the present system.

It’s too nice a day out for people to be inside reading comics; grab your mobile device and go read them at the park or something. While you’re doing so, please enjoy a few things that you may or may not have full access to.

• Firstly, Brad Guigar¹ got out in front of everybody else (i.e.: he thought to do it) and interviewed Henry Kuo of Just The First Frame for Webcomics Dot Com. A’course, WDC has a paywall, so if you haven’t got a subscription, you don’t get to read more than the abstract. Without going into too much detail and diminishing the value that Guigar provides to his subscribers², I will say that I got the impression Kuo seems to have been caught slightly by surprise by how much his project has captured attention; he comes across as a very humble guy, and determined to make the experience of JTFF better for those that use it.
• The last update of Teaching Baby Paranoia (the occasionally truth-adjacent weekly foray into the corners of history, culture, coincidence, and conspiracy) by suspected apopheniac Bryant Paul Johnson may have gone up more than two years ago, but he hasn’t stopped his comic and comiclike work. For the past few months he’s been working on a project for the Girl Scouts, who have a self-directed Make Your Own Badge program.

  Johnson’s role was to do illustration work, some of which is visible at the dedicated website for MYOB if you have an account. Which I don’t. Because I’m a 44 year old dude with no connection to any Girl Scouts³ who doesn’t want to get put on any lists. But for those of you who can set up access to the site (lookin’ at you, Miss Danielle), there’s a badge design tool that allows girls who have completed requirements to get their individual study recognized in actual, full-color, embroidered form.

• How’s about we close on a topic that everybody can share? The recurring series of Recipe Comix continues on at Saveur, and has been on a bit of a dessert kick lately. How do you feel about chocolate soufflé, rice pudding, and halo-halo? If you didn’t at least silently think that at least one of those sounded delicious, you are lying to yourself.

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¹ He’s dreamy.

² Also his hangers-on; in the interests of full disclosure, he has comped me a WDC subscription.

³ Aside from an unholy love of Thin Mints.

He is eleven years old today, and yet I am 44. If you’re not sure how that works out, it’s because of his powers. Evil powers, which will fully manifest when he hits the cranky teenage years in 2020.

• Following up on a discussion of Kickstarter and taxes from last week (including comments¹ on same), I came across a link (via the twitterfeed of Colleen Doran, who always finds/thinks the best stuff) regarding this very topic. Key takeaway — consult with a professional, since there are lots of rules (which may or may not apply to you, and may or may not seem to conflict with other rules), preferably before launching your Kickstarter campaign.

  It appears that the US federal tax rules have been worked out (you’ll get a 1099-K; if you don’t know what that is, consult with a professional), but state and local rules (especially with respect to sales tax issues) are going to vary widely. When in doubt, refer to the exchange between Kurtz and Stevens here.

• A little while ago, “Uncle”² Randy Milholland announced an original art sale that left me with a few thoughts. To wit:

  Milholland is (and I’ve told this to him in person) criminally underpricing his work. Granted, he doesn’t do full strips, per se, with borders and the rest on bristol board; a lot of one-off character bases and extraneous elements (backgrounds, hands, eyes) get done on paper and then assembled in Photoshop, but still — US$20 for four sheets, which may include multiple characters? It’s the bargain of the century, and only the fact I don’t get to paw through the box looking for favorite bits³ is keeping me from buying up Milholland’s work by the kilo.

  I am reminded of another art sale (for all intents and purposes) that took place years ago, one inspired by Milholland’s famed “pay my salary” fund drive. That was the event that brought me into the orbit of creators, as US$100 was exchanged for original art. Goats wasn’t the first online strip that I followed, nor was it the first webcomic that I bought merch from⁴, but that first original was purchased because two years earlier it was when a casual interest turned into a rabid interest. Jon Rosenberg intersected a Manhattanite’s rage over the intrusion of K-Mart culture into a place that rejected big-box stores with a rage over the burgeoning, post-9/11 security state and made it hilarious with two words:

  Anal sovereignty.

  That moment, in the opening days of 2002, when Carl went spelunking was the start of this infatuation, which led to the exchange of money for goods, which led to many, many beers which led to my absolute privilege to have an ever-expanding circle of friends made up of the best people on earth.

  And now, the strip that started me on this journey to new fresh hells considerable laugh-chuckles is coming back if another US$18,000 (roughly) can get raised in the next 22 days. Milholland may not have intended his announcement to be a Proustian madeleine, but it worked out that way.

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¹ I didn’t comment on Warren Terra’s “I’m a complete layman, but” assertion at the time, but he seems to be conflating the tax implications of corporations and those of individuals (who may or may not have a formal business structure, whether a single-proprietorship, an LLC, an S-Corp, among others).

² Possibly of the “creepy” variety.

³ I am the proud owner of “came a brain” and this bit of fanservice.

⁴ That would have been the oft-hiatused but never fully gone You Damn Kid, which I happened upon via a particularly circuitous route following a purchase of a BoFH collection from the now-defunct Plan Nine, volumes of which were predominantly illustrated by various Keenspot creators of the day. But the YDK collection, and a sketchy of Jethro featuring the famed frog rocket wiener (re-released several times, most recently here), that was the first purchase, and the reason that Owen Dunne will always have a place in my list o’ webcomics over there to the right, no matter how long the current hiatus may be.