Let’s dive right in, shall we?

• A couple of people that I follow have mentioned the lack of tools for creators to use in analyzing their Patreon campaigns; of late, I’ve seen people mention a third-party, public-data tool (much like Kicktraq, which I could dig around in all day), but I didn’t see the appeal until Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett told me to check it out. Silly me, I thought that Graphtreaon would only be of use to creators and not have a cornucopia of fascinating data.

  For example, I now know that the top-funded Patreon campaign is pulling in more than US$32,000/month, that if you want to make a mountain of money on the platform, you should be making adult videogames, be Amanda Palmer, or have a massive comics audience (Jeph Jacques and Zach Weinersmith are, respectively, the #26 and and #27 highest-funded creators … outpacing one of Patreon’s own founders, as it turns out; for reference, Alex Woolfson, Tracy Butler, and Tom Siddell are the other comics creators in the Top 50)¹.

  There’s a pretty heavy overlap between the most-backed campaigns and most-funded campaigns, too (with the same project sitting at the top of both lists). I’d love to see a scattergraph of funding rank vs patron count rank and see how closely they correlate (note to self: break out the spreadsheet next week), but I’m seeing a lot of the same names, just in a somewhat jumbled order. Anyway, if you like looking at data, all of this is neat, and we at Fleen thank LARDK² for pointing us as our new toy.

• Speaking of toys, I see from around the web that the floor map for SDCC 2015 has been released³, meaning it’s time to play around with the interactive version of said map. I’ll go through it in the coming week and put together the usual guide to where you can find webcomickers in the wild if you’re going this year.
• BOOM! Studios continues their mining of webcomics creators and properties for their BOOM! Box line of comics (where one finds things like Midas Flesh, Lumberjanes, and Giant Days); this time, they’ve gone to Tyson Hesse of Boxer Hockey to revive his old project Diesel. Given that Boxer Hockey hasn’t updated for a while and as a result its story is incomplete, it’ll be a treat to see Hesse get the opportunity to finish a story without other commitments impinging on his time (he’s been doing comic work — especially Sonic and MegaMan related — all over the damn place; yay for his bank account, but I want to see his stories).

  Diesel will launch in September for a four-issue miniseries, and I’ll note that BOOM! Box minis have a habit of getting extended, so maybe we’ll see more down the line.

Spam of the day:

There is a big chance to go viral.

Man, I hope not; antivirals are expensive.

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¹ Then again, two pieces of human garbage that spent time insulting the crap out of each other before possibly making nice are n the Top 30 with a really high per-backer average, so please don’t conflate dollar figures with quality.

² Oooooh, that’s an unfortunate acronym. Yikes.

³ In past years, I got such news from the press releases, which I didn’t get, which I guess finally answers my question of whether or not I was ever renewed on my credentials. I think that means last year was my last SDCC.

Ideally I’d have a third Scott to talk about, but we’ll make do with two.

• The thing about that photo up there? It was taken about eight months after I first met Scott McCloud, and he was as old then as I am now. He pretty much looks the same, but I’ve definitely got more grey than I did then. It’s maybe not the best photo of McCloud to use, because as anybody that knows McCloud in person (as opposed to via his works) knows that he’s not a solitary creature; he’s half of the indivisible pair known as Scott and Ivy.

  Whether you look back at them as little baby Scott and Ivy (photo by Scott’s Aunt Pat) or as they are today (photo by Lisa Corson for the New York Times), they are mad crazy in love and it’s not possible to separate them in your brain. All of which is to say, Happy Birthday to the youngest fifty-five year old I know. You taught (and continue to teach) us a new way to look at the world and the art we love.

  Also, weirdly, searching for pictures of you on Google results in a considerable number of hits for Bernadette Peters. What’s up with that?

• You love Scott C, right? His paintings (especially the Great Showdowns) are whimsical and full of heart; I’ve got a couple of them on my walls at home and I love them. His books (art books, children’s books) are even more so; C’s world is one where there is no malice, only misunderstanding, and even that can be resolved by staring at your opponent with smiles on your faces.

  He may have hit a career best in one of his most recent pieces — the enormous paean to Mad Max: Fury Road reduces the murderous action of that movie to a casual mid-afternoon gathering, where everyone is just in such a relaxed good mood; it’s the exact opposite of the heavy despair that pervaded much of the movie and yet it’s perfect, goshdarnit. It’s also provided the basis for a peek into Mr C’s methods and approach to painting — check out the process writeup he did, showing the evolution from sketches to final painting. It’s gorgeous.

Spam of the day:

Il est dégueulasse. (désolé je n’avais vraiment pas d’autre mot pour le coup)

D’accord, vous allez devoir être plus précis.

Today’s post is not about spam in that it’s about something that actually is relevant to this page, but which was crafted so poorly as to make calling it out necessary.

Let me back up a moment and take a trip into history. There is an expression in the newspaper biz called burying the lede, where the lede is the leading idea of your story¹, the part you want the reader to take away. When you bury the lede, you hide that key idea in irrelevant information or fail to mention relevant information up front. The greatest possible example of such, the ur-buried lede, was promulgated by the Associated Press a little more than 150 years ago:

WASHINGTON, APRIL 14 [1865] — President Lincoln and wife visited Ford’s Theatre this evening for the purpose of witnessing the performance of ‘The American Cousin.'[sic, ²] It was announced in the papers that Gen. Grant would also be present, but that gentleman took the late train of cars for New Jersey.

The theatre was densely crowded, and everybody seemed delighted with the scene before them. During the third act and while there was a temporary pause for one of the actors to enter, a sharp report of a pistol was heard, which merely attracted attention, but suggested nothing serious until a man rushed to the front of the President’s box, waving a long dagger in his right hand, exclaiming, ‘Sic semper tyrannis,’ and immediately leaped from the box, which was in the second tier, to the stage beneath, and ran across to the opposite side, made his escape amid the bewilderment of the audience from the rear of the theatre, and mounted a horse and fled.

The groans of Mrs. Lincoln first disclosed the fact that the President had been shot, when all present rose to their feet rushing towards the stage, many exclaiming, ‘Hang him, hang him!’ The excitement was of the wildest possible description.

It takes until the third paragraph to get to the fact that Lincoln was shot. Now, while what I’m about to share with you is not that bad, it’s a pretty poor way to write a press release. I received overnight an email with the following subject line:

Press Release: Los Angeles Resident’s Comic Strip Now Available on GoComics

Los Angeles resident sounds an awful lot like The Onion’s Area Man. The fun continues into the body of the release which begins:

GoComics, a part of the Universal Uclick syndicate family, is excited to announce the addition of “Drive” to its lineup of new and classic comic strips, including Big Nate, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Garfield and Peanuts.

Created by Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, the comic strip “Drive” is now available on GoComics. Kellett is an award-winning cartoonist and the co-director of the hit documentary “Stripped”, which includes interviews with more than 70 cartoonists.

The fact that Dave Kellett live in LA is not the relevant thing that we should be discussing, people. The fact that he’s a longstanding creator of multiple strips, has published a dozen collections, been nominated for the highest awards in comicking, and is an award-winning filmmaker who go the first audio interview with Bill Freakin’ Watterson in decades are not less important that the fact he lives in LA.

Note that all those things I brought up are in the release, three paragraphs later, in an attached PDF.

I hate attachments. Best case: I have to download and open and go rooting through to get the information I need to write my story (or, quite possibly, cut-and-paste). Median case: the attachment is a goddamn image (let me be clear, that did not happen here, but it has happened in the past) meaning I have to re-transcribe the information that you want to share with me so I will share it with my readers — making it more difficult for me to tease out this information makes me want to toss your press release (or mock it).

Worst case: you have some hideous virus on your computer and your attachment infects my computer, which is why every other press release I’ve ever received with the relevant information in an attachment has gone straight into the trash and the topic that was meant to be shared died unloved and unmourned. I took the risk in this one case so I could find out if the useful information actually appeared. This will never, ever happen again.

I don’t mean to shit specifically on GoComics (and I’m not naming the person responsible for this steaming pile of failure); I’ve gotten plenty of bad press releases from individuals, and from PR shops both large and small. I just didn’t expect this stunning level of profound skill-lack from a very large syndicate with decades of experience dealing with newspapers (who, after all, are the traditional targets of press releases).

Take a lesson, kids. Nobody cares that General Grant took the late train of cars for New Jersey. Although one good thing came out of this: from now on, I will always refer to the creator in question as Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett.

Spam of the day: See above.

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¹ Not lead; newspapers developed the alternate spelling of lede because at the time presses used type that was cast from molten lead (the metallic chemical element, Pb) and they wanted to avoid confusion. Not that anybody would be burying hot type in the ground or anything. Look, it’s a charming artifact of another age, okay?

² The play is actually called Our American Cousin, but we’ll give the reporter and fact-checker a break after a century and a half.

I’m in a good mood today, how about you? It’s actually suspicious how well today’s been going.

• Oh, it’s a good day in webcomics, for we are at the start of the most festive time of year. I speak, naturally, of the start of Kate Beaton’s latest visit home to Nova Scotia, and the Kate’s Family Comics (aka Kate’s Mom Comics, aka Momics) that result.

  I’ve noticed eight of them arrive so far; if past visits are any indication, we’ll get 12 – 15 a day for a week or so, and Beaton will gather them all together in tall recaps when they’re done. In the meantime, keep an eye on her twitterfeed for little snippets of perfect humo[u]r, where we all get reminded that Kate’s Mom is the best, Kate’s Dad is the best, and Kate’s comics are the best.

  Oh, and the countdown to the release of The Princess and the Pony is on: 30 June, y’all.

• Alert readers may have noticed that Dante Shepherd managed to put together some appropriate comics in the wake of his second daughter’s birth; he took four days off when said child was imminent, then produced most of a week before wisely declaring a paternity leave. The first of the guest entries is up today, with Rosemary Mosco contributing thoughts (as she is wont to do) on nature, and taking the time to pay homage to Shepherd’s ever-present Red Sox attire. I loved it, and can’t wait to see what other clever people take a whirl at the chalkboard.
• Explain to me how the hell it’s been a year since BACK debuted. Time is running too damn fast these days.
• Word came this afternoon that Chris Eliopolous (of Misery Loves Sherman and the lettering of seemingly every Marvel comic of the last two decades) has had a pleasant Monday:
  

  Cosby and Eliopoulos’ Cow Boy Headed to TV With DreamWorks Animation http://comicbook.com/2015/06/08/cosby-and-eliopoulos-cow-boy-headed-to-tv-with-dreamworks-animat/ … via @comicbookdotcom

  Cow Boy (written by Nate Cosby, illustrated by Eliopoulos) released a couple years back and it’s a delight; the deal with DreamWorks makes two big option announcements for BOOM! Studios in as many weeks¹ and once again, I’m hoping that this means a decent paycheck for the creators more than the publisher. In any event, congrats to Eliopoulos and Cosby!

Spam of the day:

Buy Flagyl Online

Why the hell would I do that? Flagyl makes everything taste like pennies forever and if you aren’t careful taking it, it messes up your gut bacteria and you end up with C. diff which means months of crapping uncontrollably. A’course, this is black market flagyl, which means it’ll probably not be real and have other charming (side-)effects. Have fun with that.

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¹ Cow Boy publisher Archaia was bought by BOOM! a while back.

Because you can never have too much John Allison, whether it involves the extended/extensive Tackleford continuity, or his other projects, two bits of recent news caught my eye and make me happy.

First, from BOOM! Studios associate editor Jasmine Amiri, word that Giant Days, Allison’s side-story of Dark Esther at university, has been extended from six issues to twelve, with a new combo edition of the first two issues to catch up late arrivals. This is particularly good news because Giant Days issue #3 is recently out, and the third issue is often the make-or-break point.

Issue #1, people buy that¹; issue #2, they’re still deciding if they’re going to keep buying it or not; issue #3 is where the drop-off is going to occur, if it occurs, and maybe there’s no issue #4 and up. It’s a scary place to be, even when you’re doing a miniseries rather than an ongoing².

On the other hand, it’s also where limited or miniseries get extended, or converted to ongoing — if memory serves, Lumberjanes and Samurai Jack both got their runs bumped up off the back of issue #3. If another couple issues of Giant Days show solid numbers and growth and BOOM! wants to pay Allison (and artist Lissa Treiman) a fair price to keep it going, I’ll be the happiest geek with a Wednesday pull-list.

Then Allison had to go and make me even happier:

I’m reprinting Murder She Writes, just re-read it while proofing. Not to sound conceited, but that was a nice piece of work.

Murder She Writes was one of the “in-between” stories that Allison used to break up the long story arcs of Bad Machinery; they tended to be very silly, very Shelley-centric, very good, and very absent from the archives once they went to print. The fact that it’s getting a reprint gives me hope of someday seeing a comprehensive omnibus collection of the in-betweens and latter-day Bobbins strips, basically because I am a huge completist and will make room on my shelves for the totality of Allison’s oeuvre³.

Okay, Friday afternoon — enjoy the crap out of your weekends, people, or I’ll be forced to shove Giant Days into your brain until you do.

Spam of the day:

The company founded in 1985, has total assets of RMB1.52 billion, occupies a total area of 800,000 square meters, and employs 3,000 staff members, including 98 senior engineers and technicians and 319 mid-level engineers and technicians.

That is oddly specific information about your company; too bad you never told me what they do with all that money, space, and expertise.

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¹ If only because speculator types are hedging their bets that in 20 years, they might be sitting on the equivalent of Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #27, or Amazing Fantasy #15 and cash that sucker in for a million dollars.

² If you aren’t reading Carla Speed McNeil & Alex de Campi’s No Mercy, what the hell is wrong with you? If this gets cancelled from low sales and I don’t see the end of the story, I’m taking vengeance on all of you bozos.

³ Also, somebody at Marvel should pay Allison to do a She-Hulk/old-school rollerskates-armor Iron Man team-up to get racked next to The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl; you know it would be the best comic book ever.

Webcomics is a relatively small group of people trying their best to live a creative life, most of whom will spend a significant time flirting with poverty (or at least under-earning compared to their age cohort); this is a situation that is tailor-made for adopting a zero sum game mentality that says If I can undermine that guy over there, keep him from making a couple sales, maybe I can get his booth space at SuperMegaConOrama. Maybe that will make him give up and go back to the day job. Maybe I can sweep him his audience then and by this time next year I won’t have as much trouble making rent.

And yet that doesn’t happen. Every day, I see acts small (What was the name of that Photoshop brush you used? Did you know you can do this, it saves me a mountain of time. Hey everybody, I just discovered this great new comic, go check it out!) to huge (I will pay my artists bonuses above what I’ve already paid them. Here is what I’ve learned about making it as a creator, so you don’t have to learn the lessons over a decade like I did.) to potentially life-changing (I will fund scholarships for my future competition.) fly around the webcomicsosphere like it ain’t no thang. As a rule, creators keep an eye out for each other and want everybody to succeed.

And sometimes, that out-kept eye requires a bit of digging so as to prevent colleagues from falling into a hole. Enter David Malki !, webcomicker, filmmaker, pilot, firearms technician, woodworker, game creator, author, editor, darling of the Maker community, podcaster, and (in context of today’s discussion) financial canary in the coalmine:

This has bugged me for a long time. I’ve received Bank of America merchant-service promotions in the mail; I’ve gotten phone calls about it; and I’ve even had firsthand experience dealing with it, on behalf of other businesses.

So, this is a small-business public service announcement! Don’t believe that guarantee. Or anything, really. Don’t believe anything, ever. [emphasis original]

You really want to follow that link, if you’ve ever thought I need to get an account to take credit cards for my creative business; Malki ! has systematically taken apart the offer made by (in this case) Bank of America (I’m sure other large banks offer similarly bad arrangements) for a merchant charge account and a lease on a credit card swiper. Short version: Sign up with them and you will pay far more than you would with, say, Square, and will be locked into an equipment lease for years, racking up thousands of dollars of excess fees and costs, with little to no recourse to get out. This is honestly the sort of warning that could keep somebody from failing in an on-the-edge business (or make failure less painful and protracted). It’s not something that he ever had to share once he’d satisfied himself as to the relative merits of BoA’s offer¹; that he did share it was an act of generosity and community that should be acknowledged.

And seriously — go read it and then understand that behind every offer that a powerful oliogarchic company makes to you, there lives the potential for this kind of screw-job. Read the contract, understand the terms, get the assurances from the smiling, slick sales-type in writing and notarized. As was observed on this page seven years and a day ago:

I was once challenged for saying, [A]ll contracts are inherently about ensuring that — if needed — you can cut the other guy’s heart out and he’s legally obligated to provide the blade.

Don’t be on the receiving end of that blade.

Spam of the day:

brandsecretーブランドシークレット

In case you were wondering, the string of katakana just says “brandsecret” again. But bonus points for sending me spam with a link to, and I quote, idrinkleadpaint.com. Which is apparently a legit site that ran a Kickstarter a couple years back. Ain’t no way I’m clicking through to see what the deal there is.

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¹ Which is to say, you suffer from having too much money and want to give some to a very rich corporation.

It’s a bit of a roundup today, folks.

• See! For those of you in Pittsburgh-adjacent areas, the ToonSeum is running a Little Nemo exhibit through 28 June; specifically, an exhibit of tribute and inspired-by works by some of the great contemporary comics artists, taken from the award-winning anthology Nemo, from Locust Moon Press. If I were on the correct side of Pennsylvania, I’d drop in just to see what Carla Speed McNeil was doing with Slumberland as inspiration.
• Do! Update your links and feeds for regular Nib contributors who are now scattered to the nine vectors. Thanks to alert reader Craig L, we now have GoComics (ugh, but you gotta take what you can get) links for Brian McFadden, Shannon Wheeler, Jen Sorenson, Matt Bors, and Gemma Correll’s Four Eyes strips. Also, a link to Correll’s Tumblr, which supports RSS. Many thanks, Craig!
• See! A list of exhibitors at this weekend’s Special Edition NYC, the comics-centric comics show that’s in its second year as an adjunct to the much larger (and not all that comics-focused) New York Comic Con. I’ve actually heard good things about SENYC, about it being on a more humane scale than the megashows, and how the roster of guest and programming are blessedly free of wrestlers, videogame marketers, and TV shills. In any event, circumstances outside my control have conspired to keep me from being able to attend last year or this year, but you should go if you’re in town, because there’s going to be a healthy webcomics (and webcomics-adjacent) presence, including TopatoCo and Periscope creators.

  On the floor, you’ll find the likes of Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Brad Guigar, Brandon Bird, Chris Giarrusso, Dean Haspiel, Dylan Meconis¹, some combination of Mike Isenberg, Oliver Mertz, Daniel Lapham, and Jeff McComsey, Jeph Jacques, Jim Zub², Karl Kerschl, Kate Leth, Lucy Bellwood, Meredith Gran (Sunday only), Molly Ostertag, Phil Foglio, Ramón Pérez, and more! Heck, there’s even a Webcomics Fans meetup on the schedule.

  Speaking of schedules, webcomickers are going to be all over the Freelance Like A Rock Star panel (Saturday, 3:45pm, Theater 2, featuring Katie Lane of Work Made For Hire³), and Creating Comics: The Real Stories (Sunday, 2:30pm, Theater 1). Zub will be on three panels in case you can’t get enough of him — and honestly, how could you?

• Do! Make a note for about February, to send me an email yelling at me to clear my weekend for Special Edition next year, on account of I’m clearly missing out. Thanks for that.

Spam of the day:
Okay not quoting from this one. Unlike the PR email I got yesterday that was wildly inappropriate for this blog, I got an email that was relevant, but put me off for a different reason. Namely, the subject line was A desperate attempt to get your eyeballs on my shameless self-promotion.

Don’t do that. Not the self-promotion part, not the shameless part, but the desperate part. You shouldn’t be desperate to get my attention — you have something that you want me to cover? Let me know. I’ll cover it, or I won’t, but anybody that you want to pay attention to your work can smell desperation (even when you don’t state it outright) from 1.61km away, and it’s not an attractive smell. Being desperate to get my attention is like telling somebody This is my work but it sucks, I’m terrible. STOP DOING THAT.

I am not naming the person(s) that sent my that email. I’ll cover them in the coming days/weeks, or I won’t, and if I do I won’t ever say that they’re the offender(s) in this situation. I’m not going to hold this subject line against them, I’ll cover them (or not) based on the quality and newsworthiness of what I find … but seriously, don’t do that.

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¹ Dylan Meconis is going to be on my coast and I’m going to miss seeing her! This is killing me.

² Who is in the middle of this list instead of the end, thanks to SENYC listing creators by first name.

³ Dylan Meconis and Katie Lane are going to be on my coast and I’m going to miss seeing them! I’m already dead.

It’s been odd, the past half-week or so: The Nib has been quiet, with no comics more recent than three or four days, a sad echo of what was the best congregator of editorial comics, story comics, confessional comics, comics journalism, and just plain comics¹ that we’ve seen come down the pike for a good long time. And they paid. We knew the end was coming, but it’s still disturbing to see the final week’s entries getting older. There was a new comic from (once and possibly still) site editor Matt Bors today, but it wasn’t his usual editorial work, more a randomized snark.

In a way, it’s a perfect companion to the new focus that Nib overlords at Medium want — more social, less contextual, more likely to be shared and digested in a quick bite than require some time and thought. Said overlords changed their minds about what they wanted from The Nib once, maybe they’ll change them again — or at least decide to take a hands-off approach to Bors’s editorial vision. Maybe he can get the band back together. Maybe it wasn’t just a fleeting moment that we’ll never have again. At least they went out with sharp elbows and some of their best work even as the lights were being turned off.

Happier notes:

• If ever somebody doesn’t get why Oh Joy, Sex Toy [Not Safe If Your Work Is Insufficiently Awesome] is wonderful, show them today’s strip. I don’t know if I’m more in love with Erika’s description of the doodad² or the illustration of the pokébattle³ at the end, which she has seen to provide a mostly SFW version of at her twitterfeed. I don’t need a device that tracks how I’m doing my Kegel exercises, but thanks to this comic, I kind of want one.
• Speaking of things I didn’t realize I wanted: of all the webcomickers that have drifted away from my daily attention, probably none has been so neglected as Marc Ellerby, creator of the long-wrapped Ellerbisms. I don’t know what it is — I like Ellerby’s work a whole lot, but if I don’t actively pay attention to him, he just slips off my radar for embarrassingly long intervals. The upside to this is I sometimes find in my absence, he’s completed entire works of comics that I get to enjoy all at once.

  Or maybe I’m lucky enough to catch a retweet of an announcement, such as this morning when Ellerby let us know that Gumroad has pay what you want pricing for Ellerbisms and Chloe Noonan. Ellerby’s Gumroad store is here and there I learn — holy crap! — that Ellerby is also illustrating for the Ricky & Morty comic book (makes sense — his style is right up the R&M alley). So go give him some attention and — more importantly — money.

• I am behind on the news that Lumberjanes is being made into a movie; I could claim that I wanted to wait a couple of days to see if there would be any women assigned to the early creative effort, like pairing up with (or replacing) the screenwriter, but nothing since the news broke last week. That’s not really it, though — I saw the news last week and inexplicably didn’t write about it. Anyway. Lumberjanes is great, and if somebody on the inside can confirm something that I’ve been wondering about since the news hit — do Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, and Shannon Watters get paid as a result of the rights sale, or just BOOM!? — then all will be well (assuming I get the answer I want, namely, yes, the ladies are cashing big checks of screw this! money).

Spam of the day:
No quote, but a story. I got an email from a PR firm (bad start) that obviously just sent out a blast to every blog it could find regardless of relevance (gettin’ worse), asking me to consider covering the story of a 72 year old opera singer who is recording her first album and has only eight days left on her Kickstarter to reach funding. But the thing that tells me that this PR flack that I’m not going to name is very bad at her job is the fact that she didn’t include a goddamn link to the goddamn Kickstarter.

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¹ Man, I’m gonna miss having Gemma Correll delivered straight to my brain.

² A FitBit for your ClitBits.

³ Of course it’s Squirtle. I see what you did there, Erika.

Because it’s not a person, there’s no body to bury … and if it were, it’d be the type of person to claw its way out of the grave and snack on the mourners at the funeral for maximum surprise. Joey and Emily are just spontaneous like that.

So here we stand: after one thousand two hundred and forty-three perfect little pillows of hope/despair, melancholy/sanguinity, sexiness/moresexiness, Emily Horne and Joey Comeau leave behind the project that has brought them some measure of internet fame, some measure of internet wealth¹, and critical adoration. Tomorrow’s going to be a less weird place, knowing that they aren’t conspiring together to put exactly the right words and photos together for maximum discomfort, disturbance, and serenity².

Instead, tomorrow they’ll be conspiring together to come up with exactly the right mix of comics for their retrospective collection, Anatomy of Melancholy, the Kickstarter for which will be open for another three hours or so (as I write this). At present, the campaign sits at a hair over US$230,000 which is a good 25 grand higher than the FFFmk2 predicted; it appears that they never added a stretch goal that amounted to We get to choose the good ramen for once, which personally I would have loved to have seen. It’s never good when a Kickstart fails to meet its obligations to backers, but if ever two people were perfectly suited to take a quarter-mil (minus fees) on the lam and never be heard from again, I’d say it’s Joey and Emily. It would be perfect.

But alas, everybody is gonna get exactly what they paid for, and Horne & Comeau will hopefully make a modest profit, but never enough to make up for the dozen years of toil and privation. Thanks for sharing what was inside you, I’m sincerely sorry it didn’t make you rich and famous, and remember — when faking your own death to make off with the money, the secret is to cut all ties with friends and family³. Just sayin’.

Spam of the day:

Bosley Special Anniversary Offer

Seriously, hair replacement? I need hair replacement less than I need to drop 26 pounds for bikini season. The only spam I’ve gotten that’s more wrong-headed was the one with the return address Racy Ukrainian Girls and the subject line Russian Girls are Pursuing Western Bachelors, Communicate Free Today Only. Russians and Urkainians are not the same, idiots!

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¹ That is, minimal, but neither of them starved to death or died of exposure.

² Except for the fact that they hit a stretch goal and will do five comics randomly over the next year.

³ I know Ryan says he can keep your secret, but he’ll slip up. Safer to just disappear.

• Alison Wilgus, one of the new invitees to TopatoCon, was kind enough to drop a comment on yesterday’s post to let us know that there are still more new invitees to TopatoCon that we at Fleen missed.

  Aatmaja Pandya, Maki Naro, Matt Lubchansky, and Olivia Stephens are added to the list, the full version of which sits below the cut. Thanks for the info, Alison!

• Also yesterday, TopatoCon invitee Dante Shepherd¹ let us know that his second great creative work, one that’s been under development for most of the past year, has launched:
  

  Holy hark. I’m a Dad. Again.

  Hey, world! Meet Torpedo! She’s 6lb 7oz and she’s utterly awesome.

  My ChemE dept just sent out an announcement that the baby arrived. They announced that her name truly is “Torpedo”. So that’s delightful.

  Torpedo, welcome to the world. It’s kind of loud and noisy and bright right now, but that’ll settle down soon enough. It’s also kind of stupid and cruel at times, but I think that if you follow your dad’s lead, it’ll become less so; if everybody followed your dad’s lead, it’d be cleared up before you’re old enough to read this. In any event, it’s the best world we have right now, and the only one we can offer you, so we’ll try not to mess it up too bad before we turn it over to you.

  Best of luck to you and your big sister Cannonball (senior henchman); she’ll help you learn your way around the important things in life, like your dad’s lab coat, his Red Sox cap, the junior faculty, and the chalkboard in the spooky basement. Remember not to eat the chalk, no matter how delicious it looks. Try to give your parents the occasional full night’s sleep and they’ll love you more than you ever thought possible.

  Oh, and maybe give your dad a break at feeding time? He’s not as tasty and nutritious as you might have hoped.

  Torpedo and mother The Swede are reportedly doing well; best wishes to everybody at STW Headquarters.

Spam of the day:

It is no secret that a boost in confidence and having a positive self-image can contribute to a woman’s over all well being but the majority of women do not have cosmetic surgery for anyone other than themselves.

Are … are you negging me?

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¹ A pseudonym for mild-mannered professor of chemical engineering Bruce Wayne.

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