Only one of which you need to — perhaps I should say only one of which you can — pay for!
• Let’s start with that one. Readers of this page are perhaps familiar with the fact that I dig on Magnolia Porter’s comics, in large part because she gets voices down. Her characters are people, not roles that need to be filled. If there’s a wacky character, you can be certain that she’s that way because of what’s happened in her life and backstory, not because the Big Book O’ Storytelling says And don’t forget to add a wacky character! I dug my way through Bobwhite, and I stand second to no man in my love of Monster Pulse. But I’d never had the chance to read her first comic, a full-length graphic novel about a criminal and his eleven year old daughter/partner.

  Until now:

  Good news! My very first graphic novel, The Good Crook, is now available in digital form on Gumroad for just 12 dollars. This is a complete 223-page comic that is no longer available online in any other form. I decided to release in a digital format since I couldn’t imagine ever finding enough time and energy to devote to publishing it in print, on top of my more current projects.

  The Good Crook has been offline for a while now so if you want to read my earliest work, you finally have the opportunity.

  The story is very dear to my heart and even though I was still learning a lot about writing and drawing while I was making it (in high school and my first years of college), I’m still pretty proud and happy with how it ended up.

  Here is why I want to read The Good Crook (apart from obsessive completism): Magnolia is a good twenty years younger than I am, and here’s an entire work that is old enough that I missed it years ago, and looking at her first work I can enjoy how good she was, how much better she’s gotten, and how much improvement she still has in front of her. Also, bargain? That’s like five cents a page. And that’s what I’ll be doing tonight.

• In fact, to get in on a greater bargain than The Good Crook, you would have had to make a decision some months, nearly a year, back. You may recall that about a month ago we told you how David Malki ! shared the fact that if you had pledged US$3 or more, you would get a bundle of webcomics in electronic form as part of a stretch goal. I estimated the value of that bundle at north of US$250, so let’s see how far off I was, because in the latest MoD Game Update, Malki ! has shared the manifest for that Webcomics Pals E-bundle:
  

  [copied from image]:

  • A Girl And Her Fed, Rise Up Swearing
  • Alaksa Robotics, Poseidon and Athena
  • Diesel Sweeties, Pocket Sweeties vol 1
  • Dinosaur Comics, All of 2011
  • Dumbing of Age, This Campus Is A Friggin’ Escher Print
  • Gastrophobia The 12 Labours of Gastrophobia
  • Gunshow, Superbook One
    Maximumble, Book 1
  • Ryan North, Poor Yorick
  • Sam and Fuzzy, Fix Your Problem (preview)
  • Scenes From A Multiverse, Book 1
  • Sheldon, Coffee: It’s What’s For Dinner
  • Skullkickers, 1000 Opas And A Dead Body
  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Save Yourself, Mammal!
  • Spacetrawler, The Human Seat
  • Spike & Diana Nock, Poorcraft
  • Wasted Talent, We Are The Engineers

  Holy crap. That’s more than 2043 pages (I don’t know how long the Sam & Fuzzy preview is, and I couldn’t find the AK Robotics book in the store); taking existing e-book prices (or half the price of a physical book, if no e-book is found) gives a total value of US$102; going just from the prices of physical books (when available — Maximumble and Wasted Talent only have e-books at this point; the 2011 Dinosaur Comics strips aren’t collected yet, but the previous three full-year collections went for 20 or 21 dollars), we’re looking at US$214 of value. Actually, it’s a good deal more than that, since the only way to get a copy of Poor Yorick if you didn’t back the Kickstarter is to pony up a princely US$1000, but that will also get you the Dinosaur Comics from 2011, so call it a minimum of US$1100 or so to create this collection by other means.

  So good going, 10,666 people¹ who backed the MoD game! You got a whole mess o’ entertainment for zero extra dollars. Everybody else, you’re kinda pooched². But pooched or not, I think we can appreciate what an undertaking Mr Malki ! has engaged in here, and resolve to let him know that we’re totally glad that The Wizard isn’t plaguing him any more. So, good job, Malki !, I hope that when the shipping is done you don’t get bored.

  Yeah, right. Like you don’t have five other projects just burning a whole in your future waking hours.

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¹ If one were to multiply the number of people eligible for the reward by the estimated value of building up the collection yourself, it could be argued that Malki ! is responsible for more than US$11.7 million of economic activity!

But that would be silly.

² That strip is from 2 September, 2011 so I guess you get one of the 2011 strips for free?

What? Vacation weeks are over? Everybody’s back to work? Well, crap. Fine.

• A few days back (Friday, to be precise), Dean Trippe launched a Kickstarter to print his beautiful, unsparing, painful, and ultimately uplifting Something Terrible. Some people that launch day doubted that Trippe would meet goal over 30 days¹, but those of us that know Trippe’s work knew better.

  Now it’s absolutely true that you can get a copy of Something Terrible for a buck via Sellfy, so why would you back a Kickstarter where the support tiers go to hundreds of dollars? Glad you asked.

  1. Starting at US$5, you get a revised, expanded version of Something Terrible; actually expanded is a weak term, since it’s twice the size of the original.
  2. Starting and US$10, physical rewards come into play, including various sized prints of the splash image You’ll Be Safe Here from the end of Something Terrible.
  3. Sometime today Trippe is getting cost estimates for bumping the print version of Something Terrible to hardcover.
  4. He’s also added a support tier for ten copies, pitched at comic shops and bookstores.

  Now bear with me here, and keep in mind that I’m just spitballing, but what if we combine item #3 with item #4? Hardcover means durability; mass sales means lots of copies; those two items together means libraries and schools can get in on this, and people who really need to read this story (who wouldn’t otherwise) get that opportunity.

  I’ve had my PDF copy for months; I would have backed this campaign regardless; the fact that Trippe brought up hardcovers means I’m upping my pledge because the higher this goes, the greater chance that somebody who needs this book gets to read it. Trippe’s as much as hero as any of the characters he turned to for example and solace; helping him now is closest I can come to making sure his cape is clean and pressed.

• We’ve mentioned Matt Bors and his curatorial efforts at The Nib previously; I love the fact that he’s been seeking out a wide cross-section of [web]cartoonists and paying them American cash money to put their comics up. When we spoke, he included this on the topic of his talent roster:
  

  I have a regular stable of contributors now and that will only be expanding in 2014. I have a substantial budget to do this and you’ll be seeing other names you recognize in coming months.

  Today we found out what his substantial budget is getting him (and us): Fifteen regular cartoonists, three different ones every Monday through Friday. Additional longer-form comics journalism and auto-bio on a weekly basis. Names like Stevens, Weinersmith, Tomorrow, Moen, and Pequin are on the daily list, the likes of Wertz, Neufeld,and Knight will be contributing monthly, and creators such as Bellwood, Delliquanti, Glidden, and Rosenberg are on deck for later in the year.

  Bors, modestly, describes this as A good start, which just makes me excited to see what other shoes he’s going to drop. In the meantime, make The Nib part of your daily reading habit.

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¹ Case in point: a Kickstarter-tracking site called Sidekick gave Trippe a 7% chance of success when he was 8 hours in and 2/3 of the way to goal, which tells me that their algorithms are seriously off. They’ve since decided that yeah, he’ll succeed, so thanks for that, Sidekick!

Meanwhile, the Fleen Fudge Factor (take the Kicktraq trend target at the 24-30 hour mark, and the final total will most likely be one-sixth to one-third of that value) puts Trippe with a likely final total in the range of 3.6x to 7.2x of goal, or about US$23,000 to US$46,000. Heck, he’s more than halfway to the lower bound of that range in three days, with a mere 27 days to go.

There are certain habits you have to have to keep up with as many webcomics as I keep up with¹ — some things get read when the RSS updates, some you wait for the trade (more often because it’s a story that reads better that way), and some you drop in on from time to time to see what’s going on, since you know they’ll be there for a good long time.

Case in point: Arthur, King of Time and Space by Paul Gadzikowski. Launched with a plan to run daily for 25 years² (which wound up being reduced considerably, but still planned to run from 2004 to 2017, which is a damn healthy run), reaching the 75% mark in the Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge³ (having outlasted the likes of Dean Trippe, John Campbell, Scott Kurtz, Greg Dean, Phil McAndrew, Chris Crosby (!), Natasha Allegri, Steve Troop, Tom McHenry, and Jennie Breeden), AKOTAS was just going to always be there.

Except it’s not anymore; thanks to lazugod for the link to Tuesday’s strip:

[transcribed from the comic]

The Monday before Thanksgiving it was announced in this space that the hiatus period that’s been going on would end at the first of the year. Perhaps you didn’t notice that it didn’t actually say anything was going to follow.

[M]y wife and I have been going through a major life transition since, in retrospect, August.

The time and effort of producing a daily webcomic of any quality in one’s off hours effectively constitutes having a second part-time job. I’ve reached a time when I don’t know whether I can do that again; when, unfortunately but importantly, I don’t want to do that again.

But I’m not going to allow AKOTAS to go out on hiatus format cartoons. There’s about a week’s proper cartoons coming to wrap things up.

Life transition is perhaps too kind a term; were I Gadzikowski and his wife I’d be using words like fuck cancer, but it’s evident that they have both far more poise than I would in this situation, undoubtedly a side effect of having far more experience in this situation than I would wish on anybody. Given the choice: a second part-time job, done for free, to entertain strangers on the internet vs help my wife deal with tumors that have metastasized to her lungs and brain?

That is not even a choice. Which is why the last bit of the explanation from Tuesday reveals exactly what a class act Gadzikowski is:

Sorry about the mess. Thanks for reading.

Never apologize to us, Paul. Thanks for letting us read. At whatever point in time it doesn’t impact the well-being of your family and the muse strikes you, we’ll be here to read whatever you might share with us.

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¹ The first being, recognizing that you will never read more than a bare fraction of what’s out there.

² A plan so broad in scope that it’s really only matched by Dave Sim announcing at the very beginning that Cerebus would run for 300 issues, which is exactly what wound up happening. Please note, however, that Sim is batshit insane whereas Gadzikowski seems to offend people about as often as Mr Rogers.

³ Which, by the way, has now been running for 3231 days.

Just before Thanksgiving, the to-date total of Child’s Play stood at US$20 million and I gave them a 50/50 chance of clearing US$25 million by the end of 2013’s campaign. Honestly, though, I thought it was a stretch; it would require the year’s take to be in the neighborhood of US$7.5 million, or about half again 2012’s total, or an amount greater than that raised from 2003 to 2009 inclusive.

Drum roll, please:

Our final fundraising total for 2013 is an astonishing $7.6 million.

The bulk of our donations don’t come in the form of huge grants: the millions are made up of the $10, $20, $50 donations. They come from game marathons, golf tournaments, eBay auctions, and bake sales. They come from the incredible community that makes the tag line “Gamers give back” an understatement. [boldface original]

By the way, that’s up from US$5.7 million just four days prior. So let’s update the numbers, then:

2003: $250,000
2004: $310,000
2005: $605,000
2006: $1,024,000
2007: $1,300,000
2008: $1,434,377
2009: $1,780,870
2010: $2,294,317
2011: $3,512,345
2012: $5,085,761
2013: $7,600,000
To date: $25,196,670

Anybody that reads comics online knows that when Kate Beaton goes home to Nova Scotia, the comics that result are always gold — heartfelt, hilarious, occasionally bizarre, and always featuring the inadvertent comedic stylings of her mum and da.

In case you missed them as they hit Twitter over the past ten days or so, Beatonmas Comics 2013 are collected for you on Beaton’s Tumblr in five very tall roughly chronological sections. Go read them now.

Every year, Jess Fink’s in-laws hold Jessmas a few days before Christmas, as Fink isn’t able to spend Christmas Day with them. Taking a lead from Beaton, this year’s Jessmas made it into comic form as well and if there are fewer of them than of the Beatons, there’s about 100% more contextless mentions of vagina so that’s all right. Go read them now.

Perhaps feeling that the west coast was underrepresented, David Malki ! got into the famiy holiday comic-making game as well, with a series featuring Earth’s feistiest grandma. Go read them now.

All told, that’s about 100 comics to tide you over until next year; if you have trouble waiting that long, just go back to one of those links on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and read one update each time. And if you draw comics, maybe grab a Moleskine or two when you head home next.

There’s a pair of longrunners on semi-hiatus right now; I say semi-hiatus because there’s no question that the webcomics in question will be back, and because there are updates occurring in the meantime.

• On the one hand, the return of Bobbins continues in lieu of Bad Machinery, and it’s the same town and same timeline, but featuring characters we’ve not seen in a dog’s age (Hi, Len! Hi, Tim!). We’ll be back to the youth-sleuths soon enough, and in the interim seeing the end of Amy’s pregnancy is a treat.
• On the other hand, a dun-dun-dunnnnn declaration wrapped up volume 13 of Girl Genius on Friday, and creators Professoressa & Professor Foglio are taking a break to get the second half of the Girl Genius saga¹ in shape and in the meantime they’ve got Christopher Baldwin doing a fill-in story from the first Girl Genius radio play. All the details are found at Girl Genius today, except for one, which Baldwin shared with us last week, on the occasion of the Spacetrawler bonus story wrapping up.
• Namely, in addition to the Girl Genius story, Baldwin is launching a new sci-fi webcomic today, One Way by name, at both Spacetrawler.com (for those of you with clicking habits) as well as at Baldwinpage.com (which will be more in the way of its official home). With one update to its credit, One Way is already clearly exhibiting the two elements that have been used to describe it: sci-fi (space ships, zero gravity, serious looking people in serious uniforms) and gag strip (gotta say, that punchline surprised me).

  Spacetrawler started that way and became pretty heavy in and around the laughs, but we knew it was going to be tragic from the beginning; come to think of it, Starslip did the same, and Drive had had more than a bit of serious mixed in. We’ll see which way One Way goes soon enough, I expect; I also expect that it’ll be really good.

• Aaaannd not really fitting into the theme of the day at all, something I’m adding here mostly so I remember it: Danielle Corsetto announced her first public appearances of 2014, including the weather-delayed Bmore Into Comics this Saturday in Baltimore, and then two weeks later on Saturday the 18th at Wild Pig Comics in Kenilworth, New Jersey. See you there, Danielle!

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¹ You read that correctly — thirteen volumes, or approximately 2000 pages of comics, comprise the first half of the overall story. Prof. Foglio has been noted to remark that a breakpoint is necessary, perhaps a renumbering to volume 1 again, to keep from scaring off new readers. I expect that when Girl Genius returns to Agatha and company in March, it’ll be an ideal time for those that haven’t developed favorite Heterodyne stories to jump in easily.

Also, Happy Starpocalypse Release Day Plus One.

As promised the long-awaited SMBC project dropped yesterday; it’s got a would-be prophet, a would-be robosexual, the alternating triumphs of (thoroughly insane and perverse) God and (thoroughly disdainful of everything other than neuro-helmet induced orgasms) Science, and James Ashby¹ getting torn apart. It’s five episodes of a rudely hilarious sketch-comedy series thrown together to form a full season, complete with cliffhanger. Oh, and in and around the various perversities and transgressions, there’s the question of whether humanity should put its faith in anything blindly, whether the supernatural or the scientific².

If the effect look a little rough, keep in mind that it was done on a budget that wouldn’t cover a day’s craft services on a regular sci-fi movie or TV show, and in that context, they look damn good. I’d go so far as to say that I enjoyed all the FX, and was disappointed only in that there weren’t more effects of James getting destroyed in creative ways, but there’s always Season Two! Order it up for three measly dollars here, and enjoy the blasphemy.

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¹ History’s greatest villain.

² Although many of the scientific types are dicks, they also didn’t invent suffering and vengeful smiting like the malevolent alien pervert claiming to be God did. Potato, potato.

Much to get done in preparation for tomorrow, with its mirth and cheer and (maybe my house only) marathon of Doctor Who Christmas episodes¹.

But before any of that, I get to see, at long last, the new Hobbit movie at the theater that will bring booze to your seat and does not allow under-21s at all (certain auditoria there do allow under-18s with adult accompaniment; it’s glorious).

I suspect that I will enjoy a movie that I have waited roughly 35 years to see, but in truth I require nothing more from The Desolation of Smaug is for it to be a DDD — a dwarf delivery device. However, the opinions of those I know whose tastes I can map to my own, or whose Tolkien scholarship I trust implicitly lead me to believe that this movie will be far more than a mere DDD.

This is ironic, because in the other field where I trust Aaron Diaz’s scholarship (paleontology) and movies are also made that can be described as DDDs (this time, dinosaur delivery devices), I have less hope for transcendence; hell, I didn’t even see the third JP because it was apparent that mere DDD was all the filmmakers were shooting for.

In conclusion, whatever D you may be interested in², Aaron Diaz is your point of reference and may be trusted in all things, the end.

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¹ For the record, this was my wife’s idea. I believe I married her in anticipation of this moment.

² Behave, you.

Guys. Guys. I don’t know how your Christmas week is going, but as of right now, mine is going great. And by great, I mean full-on creepy and existentially dreadful because I got my copy of Broodhollow Book 1 in the mail and it is so good.

So, in case you hadn’t gotten me a present yet, here is what I want — share this story with me. Start reading Broodhollow from the beginning, if you haven’t previously, and then go to his store and give Kris Straub some money so that he will continue to make Broodhollow. You can get a digital edition now, and I’ll wager that in the not-too-distant future¹, you’ll be able to obtain this handsome volume for your bookshelf, where it will proceed to scare the bejabbers out of your other books. I’m sorry if you were particular attached to the bejabbers of your other books, but that’s just how these things work.

On the off chance that:

1. you have been reading Broodhollow
2. you have already given Kris Straub your money
3. your other books still require some de-bejabbering

May I recommend you step outside of webcomics for a spell and check out Rachel Rising by Terry Moore? Dude’s been self-publishing for decades now, with the absolutely stellar relationship-meets-mob-enforcers Strangers In Paradise and the techno-espionage thriller Echo. Rachel just adds to his genre-hopping, as it deals with a little case of demonic assault on a small town, no big.

Compared to Broodhollow’s interior dread, Rachel is more exterior in its scares (if you take my meaning), but between the two of them, they represent the very best of fright-oriented comics², and what more could you ask for in these days of long nights and wintry chills³?

Rachel (and Echo, and Strangers) is available in print collections or at comiXology, and it gets my highest possible recommendation. Everything I said up there about giving Straub your money also goes for Moore. Now if you’ll excuse me, I still have one or two bejabbers that need removing.

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¹ That is, once the Kickstarter orders have been sent.

² In all likelihood to be joined by The Sleep of Reason, once I get a chance to read it.

³ Northern hemisphere only.

Man, there’s nothing like that grinding fan noise that says Forget about getting any work done over this racket, I am just waiting for you to turn your back before I burst into flame and destroy all I can. Oh, wait, yes there is and it’s the hand damage that’s built into the act of disconnecting and reconnecting a bunch of Molex connectors. Love the secure fit, hate the blood that is inevitably drawn.

Let’s finish up the week on some cool news, ‘kay? Mike Holmes, cartoonist¹, main artist on the Bravest Warriors comic series², is also known for his self portraits in the styles of various artists, Miknessess. Today he got a little attention at one of the science-themed blogs at NPR, handled by RadioLab³ co-host Robert Krulwich. Titled One Man. One Cat. Multiplied, there’s not much here from a science angle, but Krulwich knows as well as anybody that sometimes, you just gotta run some cartoony self-portraits in the style of Hergé, Watterson, Larson and more.

In case you’ve never checked out the Mikenesses (and I’ve been remiss in not mentioning them before today), now’s a good time. There’s about 100 of them, there’s a new one this week in the style of Hope Larson that’s really great. If you like what you see, might you be inclined to download the first collection of Mikenesses, 100 styles in all, at Gumroad for five measly bucks? I think you might.

Okay, weeekend now. Also holiday times coming up, so there may be somewhat fewer entries until the new year. Be good.

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¹ As opposed to Mike Holmes, contracturally-sleeveless Canadian building contractor with his own bobblehead.

² I haven’t been able to find issue #15 this week, nobody spoil it for me.

³ Everybody loves RadioLab except, inexplicably, Rene Engström. Minus one point on her awesomeness score, leaving her a total of … 239,837, well above the threshold score for One of the Best People status (15).