Guys, this is the last time I’m going to mention STRIPPED for the immediate future, except to update you as to how they’re doing in their goal to become #1 on iTunes today. As of this writing, they’re sitting at #5 in Documentaries and #59 overall; considering some of the biggest and most acclaimed films of last year are newly released and sitting in the #1 and 2 slots overall, it’s going to be some tough sledding. I’m confident, however, that they can surpass that Belieber “documentary” with your help..

Honestly, it’s a masterpiece, it’s out on iTunes today, it’s out lots of places tomorrow, and if you love comics you owe it to yourself to watch it. I’ve watched it through multiple times now, I keep noticing new things and I know there’s more there still (for example, the credits acknowledge the kind permission received to include an Oglaf [NWFNearlyEveryW¹] strip, and I haven’t spotted it yet. I wonder which one such goodly-hearted young men as Freddave could possibly have used.

In other news, happy strippiversaries this week to Christopher B Wright and K Brooke Otter Spangler who this week are celebrating, respectively, 18 and 8 years² in the webcomics mines³. After you’re done with STRIPPED, spend some time with their archives.

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¹ If you’re at work and it’s okay for you to click that link to Oglaf, I want to know if you’re hiring.

² Brooke, please have permalinkable blogpostings some day. For those wondering, the two links in that image go here.

³ Coincidentally, both of them are also making serious inroads in the world of e-books.

Now this may be a new one — I’ve seen Kickstarter campaigns to print comics that have already been released to the web, and I’ve seen Kickstarter campaigns to support the production of new webcomics. I can’t recall seeing the two wrapped up together in a combo platter of past and future comics before, and as nature abhors a vacuum, so Rob Balder’s Erfworld abhors the opportunity to try something new. Thus, the newest Erfstarter (the fourth by my count) is to both produce a print version of Book 2 and determine how fancy Book 3 will be. The rough breakdown will be:

• 100% funding (already achieved) — Book 2 (comprising nearly 250 pages, and more than four years of updates) and assorted tchotchkes made, Book 3 released as prose only
• 138% funding — Book 3 will be prose with inset panel illustrations
• 198% funding — Book 3 will be alternating comics and prose/inset illustrations, as were Books 1 and 2

… with the differences in funding correlating directly to the costs of paying artist David Hahn and his almost frighteningly-skilled Periscope Studiomates.

Balder’s previous overfundings on a percentage basis were 354%, 476%, and 537%, which would seem to make his top stretch goal pretty easily reachable; however, Balder’s previous dollar goals were well below the US$49,000 he’s seeking here (as of this writing, he’s a little north of US$54,000). In fact, his previous top funding target in dollar figures only half what he’s seeking now (US$24,000). Then again, that project raised nearly US$85K, which is a bit less than the US$97K that reaches the top stretch now, and he’s got another two years of fandom and goodwill built up in the meantime.

Applying the ol’ Triple-F calculation¹ give a prediction of Balder ending up somewhere between 204% and 408%, and since even the extreme low end of the predicted range clears the threshold for the top stretch, I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet (with 25 days left to go) that Balder will be writing fewer text pages and more comics scripts. In any event, this oddly hybrid, looking-forward and looking-back campaign is something I expect we’ll see more of in the future, so I’m sure I won’t be the only one watching to see how it turns out.

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¹ The Fleen Funding Factor, or Formula, or some combination of three f-words: take the trend value of the project at the 24-30 hour mark from Kicktraq and divide by both three and six; the final total will most likely be somewhere in the middle of that range. In this case, the trend at that point was sitting as close to US$600K as makes no difference.

If you should wander by the Periscope Studio booth at Emerald City Comic Con (that would be number #1214), do be a dear and find Dylan Meconis and high-five the everliving crap out of her for me, will you? Because her longform webcomic, Family Man, just got nominated for a frickin’ NCS division award, alongside some luminaries as Jenn Manley Lee’s Dicebox, Eddie Pittman’s Red’s Planet, and Jeff Smith (who just happens to be one of the all time giants of comics) for Tüki Save The Humans. Dag, yo.

Over in the short form category, you can find Jim Horwitz’s Watson, Ryan Pagelow’s Buni (my favorite of the three), and the New Yorker online comics of Mike Twohy. The last one strikes me as a little weird (or perhaps redundant), as Twohy is also nominated in the category for magazine gag cartoons, which raises the possibility that the same cartoons seen in the magazine and online could be separately recognized in two divisions. Since the divisions handle nominations separately, the NCS may need to draft policy in the future to deal with such situations.

[Edit to add: NCS President Tom Richmond has clarified the matter in the comments– Mike Twhohy’s nominations are for works that appear in different media and they do not overlap. We at Fleen apologize for the confusion on my part, and thank to Richmond for the clarification.]

And to round out a good day for webcomics, Emily Carroll’s Out of Skin racked up yet another recognition, as it has been nominated in the Doug Wright Awards for the Pigskin Peters trophy.

The Doug Wright Awards will be given out in conjunction with TCAF on 10 May, and the NCS awards at the Reubens weekend in San Diego on 24 May (with special guest “Weird’ Al Yankovic).

Vattu: The Name And The Mark is book one of Evan Dahm’s Vattu, the latest story from Overside, which feels like it’s presently approaching the end of book two.

You guys, in case I haven’t said before — and I know I have — Vattu is so good, and having the book in hand is making me read it all again in one go. The last of this book — the story of how Vattu came to the city and made her way to the streets to live on her own, with the companionship of the War-Man — was some 250 page updates ago, or nearly two years. We hadn’t seen any of the politics of Sahta, or the Surin, or wonderful, wonderful Juni. The mysteries of unweight haven’t been explored yet, nor what feels like the seeds of two revolutions: Vattu’s being violent and freedom-seeking, Juni’s being scientific.

Instead we get the story of Fluters, Those-Marked-in-White, and Vattu’s birth. The petty anger and hatreds of Vanni who became the Priest and sold out Vattu. The dangers of living a nomadic life that is short and a challenge to survive each day. It’s lush and beautiful and Dahm’s ecosystems (rivers and oceans, plants and animals, predators and prey, yes — but just as much empires and colonies and tributaries) retain their organic, evolved, lived-in appeal.

Vattu: The Name And The Mark was produced via a Kickstarter campaign, and as fulfillment of those orders finalizes, I would expect to see two things happening:

1. The book should appear in Dahm’s store and if you don’t have a copy you should buy the hell out of it; you may also perhaps have the opportunity to do so this weekend at Emerald City Comic Con.
2. Before too long, we’ll reach the end of book two, and there will be a new Kickstart to get that collection in our hands.

Personally, I’m ready to give Dahm the money for it right the hell now because damn, this is a marvel and the story only gets better from here.

Despite what it may look like, today is not merely an excuse for me to tell an amusing college anecdote. That’s just the bonus.

• On a long-ago episode of Webcomics Weekly (I don’t recall which one, so have fun searching), the strapping four lads agreed (that was what stuck in my mind — all four of them agreeing on something) that you can’t really put out a professional quality webcomic without engaging in some degree of commercialization and money making. If you were that degree of professional in the making and content of your comic, the argument went, it was inevitable that you would be making some amount of money from it.

  I always thought that was too reductive a world view, considering that people like David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) exist who have produce pro-level webcomics with no desire to make a living (or even pocket money) from them. The comic is its own reward, regardless of desire to follow a comics career¹.

  I bring this up because I’ve been thinking a lot about a piece written earlier this week by Liz Greenfield (creator of the much-missed Stuff Sucks, now lost to time) on the value of non-profit comics:

  Over the past seven weeks I’ve been in Bristol, working closely with a dozen amazing individuals to write a graphic novel. We did it in record time and the resulting manuscript is impressive. It’s full of true stories and fantastic lies and imagination. It’s the most exciting and bravest work I have been involved in yet and I can’t wait to share it with you, but I will have to draw it first.

  It’s safe to say the past eight weeks of workshops and the process of writing using physical theatre exercises, improvisation techniques, group workshopping etc. has altered my practice forever. One thing that emerged was the advantages of non-commercial work – this project is being supported by the Arts Council of England and the Arnolfini in Bristol – over work whose end goal is to satisfy sales targets and generate profit for the writer, artist, publisher.

  I’m aware that most of my colleagues in comic books aren’t familiar with this model of creating, as these opportunities are still fairly new and far between (outside of France and Belgium, who subsidise comics as any other art form with generous grants, residencies, prizes, awards).

  If you’re in the same boat as me, maybe the reason you haven’t made a change is you’re waiting for someone to swoop in and bind it and put in on the shelves of a library/bookshop. My advice is: don’t. Don’t give way to a fantasy and let it stunt you growth. Don’t labour robotically under the illusion that someone will recognise your determination and see through all the levels of artifice you guard it with. This work should be made of doubts and hope and insecurities and love, or not at all. If you’re going to hate your job, at least find one that pays properly.

  It’s worth a read, and Greenfield invites her fellow art bastards to add their opinions on personal and not-for-profit projects.

• Speaking of (very) personal and (potentially) not-for-profit projects, one of those comes to a fairly big denouement in a few hours, as Dave Kellett and Fred Schroeder have a public unveiling:
  

  Try to spot the guy who’s a nervous little nellie for his premiere tonight.

  STRIPPED has its public gala premiere in about six and a half hours (as I write this), and if you cock your ears in about eight hours towards LA, I’m pretty sure you’ll hear sustained applause, as well as four years of tension and stress suddenly releasing in Messrs Schroeder and Kellett. If your ears are especially good, you might make out some of the questions and answers that follow, but as I’ll be on EMS duty I won’t be able to relay them to you. Anybody attending the premiere want to share the experience? Drop me a line.

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¹ Perhaps analogous to the experience of a visiting professor of history when I was in college. Being an engineering school, we only had one professor of history and when he went to Japan for a year on a fellowship a replacement was found from a large state university a few hours away. Halfway through fall term he stopped suddenly in the middle of class (War, Revolution & Society 1789 — Present; being the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, he was playing it for all it was worth) and said I just realized something. You guys are all engineers and scientists, but you’re doing the same work that I would give to history majors and you’re all doing well. You’re doing as much reading in a ten-week quarter as they would in a 15-week semester. He paused, then continued, What the hell?

We explained that although none of us would be historians or use what we learned in our careers, we just enjoyed it; taking a 400-level history class (or literature, or psychology, or whatever) was like a hobby for us, since it would be the one class that term without math.

Also, it gave us an opportunity to write papers, which allowed for some serious pranking possibilities. Having nothing better to do one night, my buddy Thrice² and I wrote up a fake first page for a paper on All Quiet On The Western Front that used outrageously out-of-context and artificially conflated quotes to prove that Remarque was a bloodthirsty, warmongering proto-Fascist who regarded life in the trenches as one long, drug- and booze-fueled, dude-on-dude sex party. The real paper started on page two.

² AKA John Costain Knight III. Not very much later, he was serving on board an aircraft carrier ensuring that the nuclear reactor didn’t unexpectedly go boom!, which is exactly the sort of responsibility you want to give to a guy that you’ve seen drunkenly throw up after midnight in a booth at Hardee’s. On the other hand, the John C Stennis never went boom!, so I guess it all worked out okay.

It’s nearly time for Emerald City Comic Con in the city with the needle that reaches to space. Half of webcomics will be there, what with TopatoCo throwing down a challenge to all and sundry:

We are outgunned and outnumbered but we believe we might win. Maybe. We have street smarts and gumption and all that. We will have STUFF. We will have THINGS. We will have surprises. We will have the WILL TO SURVIVE. But most importantly, we will have friendship. And street smarts.

Also the power of Emily Horne & Joey Comeau (badass tattoos), Aaron Diaz (once beat up a gang), Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson, Tyson Hesse, Jeph Jacques, Kate Leth, Sam Logan (demolitions expert). David Malki !, Ryan North, Dante Shepherd, and Chris Yates (uses power tools like, all the time).

Opposing them will be the combined forces of David Willis, Joel Watson, the C&H crew, with various assists from Jennie Breeden and her stompy boots, Angela Melick and her 3D printer, Periscope Studios and special asskickers Amy T Falcone & Abby Howard, and the Guigar/Kurtz Axis of Awesome.

Trying to stay above the fray and avoid casualties, one may find vision-impaired mustelids, representatives of the local mad genius, Blerch control, and library communities, a strange attractor of fantrolls, and makers of potentially-killer robots from an isolated lair.

Wondering why they’re surrounded by weirdos, Evan Dahm, Kory Bing, and Magnolia Porter will seek to keep a sense of normality in a 10 meter radius of their booth, which will surely fail due to the proximity of Human Beard Randy Milholland and his handler/convention wife, Danielle Corsetto. Plus whoever I missed.

Don’t even get me started on the programming, where you’ll find Dean Trippe talking about Something Terrible, as well as many of the aforementioned exhibitors. Oh, and that Dave Kellett will be at the Unshelved booth, with STRIPPED DVDs for sale.

Me, I’ll be home in New Jersey, wishing such a great show with so many great people weren’t a continent away. Dang.

Four.

That’s it, no punchline or rhetorical devices. Four. We’ll be back tomorrow assuming I ever dig out from under this backlog.

I was going to put up a picture of Omar Little and Robb Stark in sort of a tribute to Things That Are Coming, but there’s only so far I’m willing to stretch for a joke. We’ll just have to content ourselves with a chunk of space-time instead and look at some new things this week as it wraps up.

• Thing! Experimental evidence of the The Big Bang has been reported here and there all week long, but Jorge Cham¹ is the first person to put it in terms that I could really grasp. Yes, yes, life spent in the study of science and all that, sometimes you only really grasp things with the addition of a good picture².
• Thing! The very sexy R Stevens always has a half-dozen things on his plate at any given time, the result of a genetic makeup that incapable of either boredom or standing still for more than 37 seconds at a time. He took on another one starting today, and it seems such a perfect match I’m surprised it took thing long. Starting today, Stevens launches Multitouch Theater at Macworld; each week will see Stevens opining on “Macs, iOS, and everything in between”, which is sort of like getting paid to just be him.
• Thing! Today, The AV Club launched what they’re calling an “illustrated column”, but which is clearly a webcomic³. Arriving monthly, Iconography will look at artifacts from pop culture, starting off with the golden idol from Raiders.
• No Thing! Despite being de-bejabbered at the prospect of owing her supporters and not being able to make good, Ursula Vernon (obligatory note that I loves me some Digger) has decided to dip her toes into the Patreon pool. I tagged this item as No Thing because that’s what Vernon is promising her supporters, and as such in limiting them to only two tiers of support:
  

  Pledge $1.00 or more per month
  Nothing much!

  Pledge $2.00 or more per month
  Still nothing, but twice as much of it!

  The Patreon campaign is best described as a Keep Ursula Weird slush fund, noting that one and two dollars are enough to purchase (respectively) a cup of coffee and a roll of antacids⁴. Honestly, it’s no different than John Allison’s subscription drive experiment, or any other tip jar or donation link on any number of webcomics homepages and Vernon should feel no guilt or obligation.

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¹ With a technical assist from Jon Kaufman, a member of the BICEP2 team that found the confirming evidence. Sometimes you have to go straight to the source.

² Case in point: I mastered semiconductor physics back in college largely because Dr Art Western (who, among other things, amused himself by sitting on a bed of nails outside his office on Parents Weekend and briefly held the world record for a high-temparature superconductor, back when double digits in Kelvin was a big deal) managed to explain charge migration via a diagram involving crazed squirrels avoiding traps.

Also, shamed by his grade-school daughter for not being a good enough teacher, if you got an A on one of Dr Western’s exams, you got a gold star (two gold stars for a perfect 100!), and collecting three or more by the end of term meant you could trade them in for a Batman sticker. Two exams in the 90s and one in the high 80s meant I came just short of the sticker, but I got an A for the class.

³ Structurally, it’s a series of frameless images with captions, which makes it feel like the work of Erika Moen, or Wendy McNaughton, or Molly Crabapple.

⁴ Necessitated by her I’ma eat weird prepackaged foods with my husband so you don’t have to podcast, Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap. It’s a riot.

There’s a couple of instances of people making fanart, and then the fanart being co-opted by others, and there’s a lot of discussion — light, heat, some signal, lots of noise — about both.

• Case one: the now apparently-resolved case of Anita Sarkeesian and Tamara Gray’s rendering of Princess Daphne, discussed at length on the second episode of Surviving Creativity. The best thing about that episode of SC¹ is the acknowledgment that some actual legal expertise is required (something missing in most internet discussions of trademark, copyright, and fair use), and the promise that Katie Lane of Work Made For Hire will be joining them to add that expertise. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Katie Lane is smart, and that next episode will be mandatory listening for all independent creators.

  Case two: before Gigi DG launched Cucumber Quest, she had a webcomic called Hiimdaisy, which combined fan art and parody of video games (as near as I can tell, I never read it and Ms DG took ’em down some years ago). There’s presently a Kickstarter campaign to continue the work with an explicit acknowledgment that it’s inspired by Ms DG, although it’s a new artist. Ms DG is aware, but is distancing herself from, the project².

  My take on the whole thing is if you wanna do fanart, then do fanart, nobody can prevent you from drawing whatever you want. But it seems a bit classless to make your fanart an extension of somebody else’s visual style (and to trade on their name), and it seems to skirt all the legalities to raise money in order to make your fan-thing.

  Sure, sure, you say it’s non-profit (not that those are two magic Get Out Of Copyright Jail words), but you say that the bulk of the funds your raising are for the purchase of a Cintiq and somebody’s keeping that toy when this is all said and done. Better apply any and all overages in the funding to a legal fund, ’cause that right there is the sort of thing that gets people sued. Each day that goes by increases the odds that the project gets canceled, either by a come-to-his-senses Renard, or (more likely) by Kickstarter.

• Weird that two different second-order It’s somebody else’s intellectual property incidents would pop up in so short a time frame; despite my opinioneering in the last item (it need not be said that I am not a lawyer, but that opinion would inform my thought process if I were a member of a jury, which is possibly just as important) my real thought on the matter is this: it’s better to have your own ideas.

  Case in point: Karl Kerschl, who could spend all day drawing Other People’s Stuff if he wanted to, but who clearly allows the OPS to take up hours that aren’t taken up with his own work. The Abominable Charles Christopher is some of the best work of anybody’s career, and nobody can tell Kerschl what he can or cannot do with it.

  And what he’s doing with it today is announcing preorders for the softcover edition of Book 2 of Charles Christopher. Let me be blunt: the only reason for this to not be on your shelf is if you already own the hardcover. You’ve got perfectly good blood plasma you aren’t using, sell some of that and put in your order.

• And in further praise of coming up with Your Own Stuff, the aforementioned Steve Hamaker shared something on the twitter machine today:
  

  My wife, Jenny Robb interviewed Bill Watterson for the upcoming Calvin & Hobbes exhibition at the @CartoonLibrary. http://library.osu.edu/blogs/cartoons/2014/03/20/new-interview-calvin-hobbes-creator-bill-watterson-and-cul-de-sac-creator-richard-thompson-talk-libraries-comics-and-the-creative-process-with-ohio-state/ …

  Jenny Robb is the curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State, and as such has probably been around more magnificent comics art than anybody else currently drawing breath. She’s frighteningly smart, and she’s scored the Watterson half of what’s actually a double interview, the other half being done with Cul de Sac creator Richard Thompson, conducted by exhibit curator Caitlin McGurk. Read them both here, and if you’re anywhere near Columbus, Ohio and don’t go see the retrospective while it’s running, we’re through. On the off chance that you’re not anywhere near Columbus, Ohio, kindly remember that you have two kidneys for a reason.

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¹ The disappointing part of the podcast was that colorist supreme Steve Hamaker was part of the discussion and was sorely underutilized. If you’re going to have him on, let’s hear about his creative process! Guests can add a hell of a lot to a discussion when the topic is something they’re involved in, otherwise it’s just kind of unfair to them.

² Although project creator Jack Renard takes a different tack on this, presenting the project has having DG’s tacit approval.

Got a calendar handy? You’re going to need it.

• Today If you missed out on any of the Benign Kingdom merch from the various B9 Kickstarts, and you like saving shipping when ordering other webcomics merch, good news! As of now-ish, all the Benign Kingdom books are available via TopatoCo.
• Monday, 24 March Specifically, 9:00am PDT, when registration for what is likely the first webcomics-related athletic event opens up. That would be the Beat The Blerch runs — 10K, half marathon, full marathon — springing from the imagination of Matthew Inman and his paean to running, The Blerch. The runs themselves will feature:
  • “I Beat The Blerch in 2014” tech shirt¹ and medal
  • Large quantities of birthday cake at every aid station along with Nutella and magical grape beverages
  • There may or may not be actual Blerchs in fat-suits chasing you throughout the race

  While it’s true that Inman will have a Blerch-themed book coming out about ten days after the run, I don’t believe that promotional concerns are uppermost in his mind. There are certainly ways to promote a book that will require less time and effort over the next six months (not to mention the fact that Inman will be running himself), and the fact that he’s still looking for sponsors tells me this is more of an Inman thing than a thing with an Andrews McMeel budget behind it.

  Besides, Inman’s got a history of taking on big, weird, wonderful projects, and organizing a mass of webcomics readers to wheeze their way around forested trails seems a perfect fit with his sensibilities.

  Also, this:

  We won’t charge you to download your race photos after the event.

  I gather that’s a huge annoyance with lots of “serious” race events, and tells me this is more about the fun and hell of it than anything else. Blerches (blerchen? blerchi?) will be beaten in Carnation, Washington on Sunday, 21 September, times TBA. From the information shared so far, I feel confident in declaring that this event promises to be the highlight of the September 2014 timeframe in the Pacific Northwest.

• Saturday & Sunday, 5 & 6 April Specifically, 11:00am to 6:00pm, the annual MoCCA Fest will kick off at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, for the low, low price of five bucks a day at the door. The show has been through a lot of changes — the overwhelming majority of them positive — in the years since the Society of Illustrators took over MoCCA’s assets and mission, and I expect this year to continue the upward trend.

  The exhibitor list is up now and includes the likes of Darryl Ayo, Elena Barbarich, Nick Bertozzi, Box Brown, Scott C, Ben Costa, Evan Dahm, Chris Giarusso, Sophie Goldstein, Dean Haspiel, Matt Lubchansky, Phil McAndrew, Sylvan Migdal, Maki Naro, Magnolia Porter, MK Reed, Jaya Saxena, Tom Siddell, Noelle Stevenson, and many more.

  Also many fine publishers of words and pictures, and the goddamn Jack Kirby Museum. Oh, and the usual contingent of creators from various Scandinavian countries will be present, along with educational institutes and a few zillion other awesome people I haven’t mentioned. See you there.

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¹ I don’t believe that is a typo of tee shirt; apparently, active people have things called tech[nical] shirts” which are like tee shirts, but better.