I honestly can’t decide which bit of Matt Inman’s paean to his Tesla Model S I like the best. The part where Falkor the Luck Dragon makes sweet love to a Ferrari? The part where he goes into the basic indestructibility of the Model S¹? The part where he points out that if you have solar panels on your roof and plug your Model S into them, you’re not powering your vehicle with combustive explosions happening three feet from your crotch, but rather with the sun, whose explosions are 92 million miles from your crotch? I think that may be it, especially the part where he draws a graph about the distance of explosions from his crotch vs general happiness.

The kicker, of course, is Tesla doesn’t do advertising, so Elon Musk can’t hire Inman to write his ad campaigns, since Tesla doesn’t advertise. Nevertheless, the comic would be a great addition to the Tesla site, even with the occasional (prominent) naughty (your eyes will catch fire and churches will burn) naughty word included. Perhaps, given that Inman spends the second part of the comic asking Musk’s support for the actual building of the Goddamn Tesla Museum (the previous campaign only saved the grounds of Tesla’s lab; getting the museum built will require millions more), something could be worked out.

I see a quid pro quo here; Musk comes up with a hunk of change for the museum, Inman continues to make Tesla-themed comics for the Tesla website, and the social mediasphere goes crazy. Win-win-win, I’d say.

In other news, Friend of Webcomics and blogger extraordinaire Josh Fruhlinger of The Comics Curmudgeon got interviewed t’other day by the digital arm of The Atlantic and he had some great things to say about meth dealers in Mary Worth, the stark, existential horror² of Anthony’s moustache from For Better or For Worse, and webcomics. As a result, David Willis, Ryan North, Matt Lubchansky, Jeffrey Rowland, and David Malki ! may now all plausibly claim to have been mentioned by [a small part of the media empire of] one of the most prestigious magazines in American history! Well done all on [a more than slight stretch to reach] that [semi-plausible] honor!
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¹ I like the part where he points out the Model S has a frame strong enough to support the weight of four more Model S-es on its roof

² Sadly, no stark, existential horror about the nonstop depression parade that is Funky Winkerbean.

I’ve finally gotten around to fixing the fact that my main PC was running a now-dead operating system and getting a more modern one on there.

• Lesson #1: This is the last Windows system I’ll ever install¹. Holy glob, “no direct update” from the most popular O/S you’ve ever made? Are you high,e very single person in Redmond, Washington?
• Lesson #2: Repopulating my feeds, getting my apps installed again², and figuring out why iTunes is pooching my podcasts is a project that will take more than a weekend.
• Lesson #3: You are never done applying fresh updates and patches. This disc of Windows 7 was pressed in the past few months, it should not need more than a hundred damn patches.
• Lesson #4: But if you have to do all this crap (instead of keeping up on what’s happening at TCAF), dual-booting to make the old data easily accessible is marginally less painful than any of the Microsoft-supplied alternatives.

So here’s what I know about webcomics today:

• TCAF was awesome. Just check out the Twitterfeed of anybody that was there, and you will quickly come to the conclusion that the only problems TCAF has is the over-abundance of situations that require a high-five, potentially leaving your high-fiving hand sore. Plus, there was a last-minute (literally, in the last hour before show wrap-up) unannounced Ryan North/Randall Munroe panel & signing, and George was sighted on the grounds of the Toronto Reference Library with something he should never, ever have: puppets of Yuko Ota & Ananth Panagariya, meaning he now has his own private Yuko & Ananth. If you ever meet “Yuko” or “Ananth” at a convention and George is hovering nearby, maybe check for a healthy skin color, un-felty hair, and a pulse, just sayin’.
• Time’s almost up for comics professionals to nominate worthy works for this year’s Harvey Awards. How about we make sure that the utterly inexplicable absence of Dean Trippe’s Something Terrible from the Eisner ballots isn’t repeated at the Harveys?

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¹ I am already in talks with these fine nerds.

² I haven’t even gone near getting Steam migrated yet. If I lose my cheevos, I’ma be pissed.

Welp, everybody’s on their way to Toronto for TCAF, where I would ask that all attendees hunt down showrunner Christopher Butcher (above) and give him a big ol’ hug¹. He’s done fantastic things with the show and for the exhibitors, and he should be acknowledged for that. Oh, and if you happen to know Butcher personally, I’ma suggest you just assume he’s in a coma from Monday until, oh, let’s say Thursday.

• For those of you not heading north, or heck, maybe you as well, let’s look to some city-specific comics-things happening in a different part of the world. Unfortunately, work kept me so busy last week when I was in San Francisco, I didn’t have the chance to drop by the Cartoon Art Museum; it’s a terrific place filled with terrific exhibits. Fortunately for all, my lack of available time didn’t prevent the CAM from continuing in its mission, a big part of which is outreach to the community and spreading the knowledge and habit of making comics to as many people as possible.

  To that end, CAM will be running cartooning classes every Sunday in July, with two parallel tracks aimed at kids (7-12) with parents², and independent youth (12-16) who already have some cartooning chops. Kids and parents sessions run 11:00am to 12:30pm, and older kids 1:30pm to 3:30pm, at a cost of US$10/person (kids + parents) or US$35 (US$30 for members) for older kids.

  Supplies are provided (although older kids are encouraged to bring their own portfolios & tools), museum admission included, and the sessions will be taught by Nina Kester (6 and 20 July) and Brian Kolm (13 and 27 July). Check out the scheduled topics for class (Ninja Turtles; Animation; Heroes & Villains; Adventure) at the ticket site (kids+parents; http://guestlistapp.com/events/251868) for more information.

• Yep, called it: Heart of the City continues its love affair with Smile today. Given that Sunday’s strip is probably part of the week’s storyline, tomorrow will likely feature Heart’s mom loving Smile, as all right-thinking people do.

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¹ Alternately, a big ol’ slug of booze. Depending on the state he’s in, it might be more appreciated than the hug.

² Up to two kids per adult; sorry, grown-ups, you need a kid with you to attend.

Oh my goodness I’m not sure which of these surprises I should share first. Coin flip! Okay!

• Raina Telgemeier — previously noted on this page (and all other pages that matter) as one of our cartooning national treasures — graphic novelist par excellence and 100-week New York Times bestselling author, must have gotten a thrill this morning on seeing some respect thrown her way by that most establishment of all cultural endeavours, the syndicated comics page.

  Smile got some love from Mark Tatulli¹ Heart of the City strip for today², and given the setup of Heart and her mom arguing about whether graphic novels count as book books, may continue to have its praises sung for the next day or so. I’m guessing that Telgemeier has got to be feeling pretty great right about now.

• About ten months ago, in the dead of the night, the greatest thing known to mankind up to that time was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. I speak, naturally of Tom McHenry’s Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery, which laid bare essential lessons about the nature of life, and horses, and the importance of mastering your horse. I’m proud to say that I joined the ranks of Horse Masters, and I have the bleeding stump of a little finger³ to prove it.

  Literally and without any exaggeration whatsoever, life could not be any better than when one is horse-mastering.

  Until now, at least for those going to TCAF this weekend, for McHenry has been busy:

  In case you missed it last night, this is a thing that exists for TCAF

  3 glow in the dark buttons, a completely unnecessary full-color instruction manual, the whole game on a horse-shaped USB drive.

  All in this stylish #HorseMaster box: pic.twitter.com/8FNsDIzMGV

  Then I wept, for I am not going to TCAF. But then McHenry assuaged my grief⁴:

  Ordering info for non-TCAF goers will come soon!

  And there was much rejoicing, and the pupae of horses everywhere did swell with quickening tendrils, waiting for the day they could ripen, and escape, and feed.

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¹ Tatulli actually does two strips and while Heart of the City is pretty okay, his silent and subversive Liō may be the most brilliant thing left in syndication.

² That link may go away in the future, so please enjoy the permanently-linked version at the top of this page.

³ Not to mention a drug habit, criminal record, and seared-in memories of too many teeth in a gaping maw to go along with it. These are the prices of ascending to the political and social elite.

⁴ And coincidentally probably removed the need on my part to physically harm one or more of the friends that would go to TCAF, for a true Horse Master would let nothing stand in his or her way of obtaining this treasure; not family, not friendship, not blood. Oh glob, so much blood.

Before we get to some things that are happening in the various places, one piece of catching-up: remember what I said about big items yesterday? I missed one: Anthony Clark has a new sketchbook up for sale that clocks in at nearly 400 pages. It’s pay-what-you want, with a minimum that’s less than a dollar per hundred pages, available at Gumroad and/or Sellfy.

• The Society of Illustrators may have finished up with the actual festival aspects of this year’s MoCCA Fest, but that doesn’t mean that all MoCCA-related activities have ceased until next spring. One may recall that SoI instituted an awards program for work appearing at MoCCA Fest, and the winners are the subject of an exhibit that opened in the Society’s second floor gallery last night and runs through the 24th. Along with the exhibit, two other things are happening:
  

  All materials chosen in the jury’s initial survey will be acquired by Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library for the MoCCA Arts Festival collection, to be expanded annually.

  A Happy Hour and Celebration will take place in the third floor Hall of Fame Dining Room on May 21st beginning at 5pm. A $5 cover charge will go towards the Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Fund.

• Oh, and if you’re in New York City on 15 May, there’s a lecture/reception/signing for Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer. Short review (of a copy graciously sent to my by Gina Gagliano at :01 Books): it’s a story that hurts in a real, tangible, maybe-necessary-maybe-not way. I suspect that if I’d been an almost-teen girl at any point in my life, it would ache and resonate even more. Getting to the truths below the surface of the One Summer in question is like having to peel away a bandage and finally let the healing of the wound below finish up.
• Tangentially related, I don’t know if anybody ever looks at the member’s bulletin board section of the SoI website, but you know what I noticed there today? Job listings. Anybody want to head up the Sequential Arts department at SCAD? They’re looking. Brad Guigar, this is your chance to not just teach arts entrepreneurship, but to remake an entire generation of comics kids in your own image. Your boisterous, eternally-laughing image.
• There’s other stuff going on this month in other cities, but let’s just make today about New York and call it good. Original MoCCA showrunner Kristen Siebecker once again breaks out the booze and education for the latest iteration of Popping Your Cork. This time it’s Thursday, 29 May at 6:30pm in Chelsea for a look at wines from around the US. It’s twenty five bucks to register, but because you are reading this page and Kristen likes us, she’s given us a discount code good for 15% off the tuition; just type in FRIEND10 when checking out, and enjoy the fruit of the vine.

Topic, scope, scale, ambition — everything I see today is ambitious and/or large.

• The first actual human-human primate, not one of the near-humans that are scattered in our evolutionary past, and the very first one to take it in mind to leave Africa behind and seek out the larger world? Ambitious. Large story eventually (if not quite yet), and it’s from living master of the comics form, Jeff Smith. We’ve spoken of Tüki Save The Humans before, but now those of you inclined to support creators that give you free entertainment can do so — the first issue of Tüki is solicited for a July release, the first Jeff Smith comic in pert-near two years. It may be playing out slow, but it’s thoroughly and entirely a Jeff Smith story, and that means it’s damn good.
• Nearly 2700 color comics, a sprawling cast, and storylines that go to weird places taking all the damn time they need¹? Huge. Such a story needs sizable book collections, and with 900 strips in each of the first three reprint volumes, Jeph Jacques² could have kept pattern for the fourth Questionable Content collection, but instead he went bigger. Only 200 comics this time, but printed half-a-comic to a page, QC volume 4 clocks in at 560 friggin’ pages while keeping the US$18 price point. Watch for the earlier volumes to eventually be reprinted into this form factor, leading obsessive completists (damn you, Jeph!) to have to buy them over again.
• Know what’s even friggin’ huger than Jeph Jacques (both personally, and as a body of work), André “The Giant” Rousimoff, most famous professional wrestler of all times and subject of Box Brown’s André The Giant: The Life and Legend, a book which I greatly enjoyed. You can enjoy it now too, as today is launch day for Mr Brown and Mr The Giant, or at least check out the starred review from Kirkus.
• I’m not sure that anybody has engaged in more expansive worldbuilding than Evan Dahm, whose Overside stories now comprise thousands of pages of comics, tens of thousands of years of history, and story locations sweeping from continent to continent, culture to culture, and alphabet to alphabet. And now, because he loves you, Dahm is sharing a good chunk of the miscellany related to Overside — promotional art, illustrations, sketches, things that fit into the existing stories and things no doubt meant for future stories, extensive commentary, eight years worth in all — and put it into one massive art book at Gumroad on a pay-what-you-want (five dollar minimum) basis.

  And just in case you’re the sort to think that five bucks is too much to pay for just about 100 pages, kindly forgo your next dead-tree comic which is probably priced between three and five bucks for 22 to 26 pages, plus ads. That one piece of a massive, linewide crossover that will change everything!!³ will be forgotten in a fortnight; Overside has a way of sticking with you.

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¹ Holy crap, was Marigold’s Hermione and Ginny fanfic really 900 strips ago? Damn, son.

² Himself a giant of a man.

³ No it won’t.

Relatively quiet weekend, relatively busy Monday. Let’s do this.

• Oh my, that blew up further than I thought it would; the last four days of Smut Peddler 2014 were in the top six days of the full campaign, and the final total just cleared US$185K, for creator bonuses of a staggering $US1700. Well done Spike, and everybody that loves the porns. Which, based upon the previous SP collection and the Sleep of Reason collection, leads us to the conclusion that porn is 2.8599 times as popular as horror.
• Speaking of Kickstarts, the latest book from Johnny Wander creators Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya¹ has just gone up, meaning you’ve got a chance to get a copy of Cuttings in a handsome hardcover, or an even-handsomer limited-edition hardcover. It would appear that this collection also includes perhaps my favorite Ota/Panagariya collaboration: PONY COP. Everybody jump on this so I can get PONY COP in a handsome hardcover book, please. As of this writing, Cuttings is just shy of 40% of the way to goal, which is just shy of 60% too little. Step it up, people. Do it for the children.
• TCAF, one of the best shows on the comics show calendar, runs this weekend in a now certified crack-smokin’-mayor-free Toronto. Today, the full programming slate was released, with multiple tracks of goodness packing the two days. There’s a full track for children (Kean Soo! Jeff Smith! Dave Roman! Ben Hatke! Raina Telgemeier!² Kazu Kibuishi! And many more!), a Canadian reading series (Tony Cliff! Karl Kerschl!Jillian & Mariko Tamaki! And more!), round tables and interviews and profiles (Lynn Johnston! Chip Zdarsky! Jeet Heer! Box Brown! Spike! Katie Shanahan! Rachel Duke! Mike Maihack! Noelle Stevenson! Kate Leth! Tom Spurgeon! Heidi Macdonald! Kate Beaton! Meredith Gran! KC Green! Tom McHenry! Jess Fink! Faith Erin Hicks! Becky Cloonan! Cameron Stewart! Becky Dreistadt! Ryan North!), and, of course, George.

  If you think I’m linking to anybody other than the mononymic George, you’re crazy.

• Not to do with Kickstarts, Cuttings, cats, or comics arts festivals, and possibly my even mentioning it could spiral out of control and cause the creator in question to ‘splode, but what the heck: Randy Milholland has heard the plaintive cries of his many fans and lo he has smiled upon us. There are finally — even now, unto the seventh generation we have waited — concrete plans for the first Something*Positive collection.

  It is a long way off, and will involve a lot of work on Milholland’s part, which means that everybody that’s ever wanted a copy had better be prepared to step the crap up and make a purchase³ when the time comes.

  And there was much rejoicing.

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¹ Who were apparently cats all this time. Who knew?

² Speaking of Telgemeier, she’s just reached an astonishing 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for Smile. Wowzers.

³ I am speaking here directly to the many, many people that have bitched to Randy over the years that because he did a donation drive to quit his day job and draw the strip a decade ago that they are entitled to as much free entertainment as they see fit to demand from him. Without fail, these people are never in Milholland’s records as actually having donated, but they have a massive sense of entitlement anyway. Time to quit the passive-aggressive games and prepare to finally drop some cash, fakers.

Two things for you in the meantime:

1. A wide-ranging set of opinions from [web]comics creators on the Great comiXology App-Shift of Fourteen, from Ron Perazza’s Comic Book Think Tank; I was surprised by how wide-ranging, even within the span of one creator’s opinion. For example, John Allison is approaching the issue from at least three different perspective simultaneously:
   

   Viewed from any angle, ComiXology/Amazon should give people pause.

   The 30% pay-to-play on in-app purchases within the Apple store’s walled garden is obscene. Comixology Submit’s creator deal was an equitable 50/50 split – after a corporate giant took a vast cut. This inevitably pushed prices up.

   A rump of entitled ComiXology users complaining that their method of reading comics just got *slightly less incredibly efficient* is laughable. One assumes that getting off one’s ass is still not part of the new way to buy titles through ComiXology.

   Amazon’s ownership of ComiXology will have an immediate hammer-down on prices, just like every other sector they’ve been involved in. Amazon’s near-monopoly has sucked a greater part of the life, and money, out of working in books, music, film.

   For the last 20 or so years, comic books have cost more than they were worth. Now get ready for them to cost much less than they’re worth. Get ready to lose your local comic shop, like you lost your local record store and your local bookshop.

2. I picked up the first print volume of Cleopatra in Space by Mike Maihack, and it’s wonderful. Best part: it says “Book One” right on the cover, and in the back it says Cleo will be back in Book Two! Worst part: Book Two won’t be until April, 2015. Boooo, I want more Cleo now.

Okay, time to go get Freedom Fondled. Be good, see you on Monday.

I’ve been thinking about something that might be more suited to coverage tomorrow, but work-related travel may make that impractical. It might be even more appropriate to Monday morning, but regular work means that the majority of my embloggenation happens at lunchtime, and that’ll be too late. So it’s today, Thursday, one of the lesser days of the week, where we discuss it. Feel free to check how my thoughts actually pan out in a couple of days.

Smut Peddler 2014 is currently sitting (as I write this) at US$136,624 on a goal of US$20,000; the FFF predicted a finish of US$133-266K, so yay it’ll land within my excessively wide margin of error.

The question now is, as we enter the last 100 hours or so, will an end-campaign bounce take place? SP2012 had a mid-campaign spike and no real uptick at the end; SP2014 has followed the usual long tail, and may need a final, exciting stretch goal to prompt a sudden spike in funding.

Here’s the other thing I’m very much wondering about — lots of web-type people note that their traffic is highest on Monday, lowest on the weekend; SP2014 finishes just before noon EDT on Monday. Will the relatively low weekend internet browsing levels work against a final spurt? Will the fact that it finishes on a Monday mean that people happen across one last-minute link and get impulsive? It would be very tough to put an effective control on Kickstarter project analyses for launch day and wrap day, but I have a feeling that launching on a Monday (to catch high traffic) and finishing on a Tuesday or Wednesday (to catch high traffic for the this is your last chance reminders) would possibly be most effective. Ask me when we’ve got another 1000 or so webcomics campaigns we can dig through for data. In any event, come Monday (so to speak) we’ll be able to quantify exactly how much people like porn.

Speaking of Kickstarts, click here. Did you spontaneously exclaim Oh man, I love Baman Piderman? No? Then take an hour of your life and watch the shorts because honestly, the only people that don’t spontaneously exclaim are those that are watching Bamanm Piderman for the first time. For about three and a half years, starting about five years ago, Baman Piderman has been a labor of love, and in order to bring it to a satisfying conclusion, creators Lindsay and Alex Small-Butera are looking for a quite modest sum of money (US$50,000) to make five episodes, each running probably about five minutes. In an actual animation studio, that US$50K wouldn’t cover craft services¹ for a week.

But still! Fifty thousand dollars is a lot! Consider, though: US$10K/episode or US$2K/minute gives a budget of US$33.33 per second of animation, or about two bucks for each of 15 frames per second. Are you willing to draw a couple-ten thousand very precisely designed pictures for two bucks a pop? How long would it take you to draw each of those, and would it be worth your time? Fifty grand is a bargain, and it appears that many of you agree, as the Small-Buteras² are sitting at about 90% of goal one day in (and the FFF is giving a final funding of around US$115-330K) with 29 days to go.

Seriously. Check out the shorts. You’ll love ’em.

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¹ Which under the rules of studio accounting would also incorporate the executive hookers ‘n’ blow line item.

² Or possibly Smalls-Butera.

Word comes this day that one of the Ryan North-designed tools for webcomickers, RSSPECT¹, is on the fast track to retirement:

RSSPECT: April 29th 2006 – April 30th 2014

RSSPECT was in sunset mode for the past several years (no new premium accounts two years ago, no new feeds at all one year ago), and we’d hoped that we could operate in a “last one out, turn off the lights” sort of way. It happily ran itself on a little server in NYC. We didn’t really check in on it. That was our mistake.

Unfortunately, we suffered a database loss earlier this week, and backups weren’t operating properly. Among the data lost was our users table, which tells us which feed belongs to which person. With this loss, RSSPECT has finally been put out to pasture.

I don’t know about the internal functioning of RSSPECT, but I suspect that without the users table, some feeds will have been lost and others might continue on in a mechanical fashion without much ability to control form or content beyond what was configured pre-crash. North continues:

If you liked what we did, thanks! RSSPECT was a fun little project that solved a problem for a lot of people in a pretty easy way. There are a few other sites who have followed in our footsteps, which you can find by searching for webpage into rss feed.

Thanks for using RSSPECT, and I’m sorry we couldn’t end it more gracefully.

For anybody thinking that North should have done more, keep in mind that this was far more a labo[u]r of love than a money-spinner for him (you don’t get rich off of free services), and I doubt it ever made enough money to equal the time he put into the initial development, or the effort to maintain it (at least until the relatively quiet sunset phase).

Now that he doesn’t have thoughts of What to do about winding down RSSPECT?, North will doubtless have enough spare brain juice to think up something new and neat: maybe another community tool, maybe another comic book, or CYOA book, or something completely new and yet so obvious we wonder why nobody ever thought of it before². It was a neato tool while it lasted, Ryan — RSSPECT.

In other news:

• Sean Kleefeld has some thoughts about comics that bounce from place to place (publisher to publisher in the case of floppies; site to site, collective to collective in the case of webcomics), and the requirement that you talk about what has gone before so people picking you up in a new locale aren’t lost.
• Kate Beaton has a new comic on a heroic, historically significant, and sadly neglected raiser of the right kinds of hell, Ida B Wells. Like half of Beaton’s subjects, I had basically no idea about Wells’s story (although I had heard her name, it was absent any kind of context or appreciation of all she accomplished), and like nearly all of Beaton’s subjects, this comic is compelling me to go do some reading because I know that behind these laughs are some tragic, uncomfortable, important truths.
• The usual pattern for some time has been that somebody in nerdly culture does something mind-bogglingly misogynistic and gets called on it, then Lewis’s Lawmanchild attacks on Janelle Asselin (escalating to the point of attempts to hijack her bank accounts, along with the usual death and rape threats, for the crime of being a woman in the boys clubhouse) have not died down in the usual fashion, as if the reasonable parts of [web]comics have finally had enough with the idiots who can’t stand somebody else either not liking something the way they like it, or not liking the same thing to the required degree.

  This time it feels like a corner’s turned; this time it feels like it won’t be pushing back against a particular outburst of infantile behavior, but a desire to have a permanent, standing resolve to push back against the tide of morons. Don’t feed the trolls, Just ignore them, and They don’t really mean they’re going to rape you and kill your children were never adequate responses to the anonymous and cowardly, but there wasn’t a good sense of what an appropriate response would be. I’ve seen a lot of suggestions the past couple of weeks, but the one I think I like best comes from Christopher Bird, blogger, TV critic, political writer, lawyer, webcomic author, and Canadian; he calls it The Full Cobain:

  I write a blog, I does a Twitter, I make comics. And this one goes out to the dickheads out there who seem determined to make life as difficult as possible for fangirls and geek girls and girls generally: don’t read my stuff. Just pass it by. I will make do without your eyeballs, attention, and (when there is opportunity for you to spend) monies. You are not needed; you are the fleshy little wart on the ass of Life, purely extraneous and mostly unpleasant, and I don’t want your business. [emphasis original]

  I’m adopting this; I’m not a vastly popular anything with legions of followers, but I have some and I’m declaring my intentions. If you can’t stand the thought of somebody else liking things other than exactly in the way you find best, and if you decide that along with the fact that they are female means that you can go all Scientology Fair Game on them, find another site. You’re not welcome here until you grow the fuck up.

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¹ The others being content-search tool Oh No Robot and ad marektplace Project Wonderful

² Answer: because nobody else is The Toronto Man-Mountain, that’s why.