One of the more gratifying aspects of Strip Search has been watching a pretty significant explosion of creativity from the Artists; while they surely would have continued on their individual trajectories of comic-making, that period of time when they were cooped up together in a luxury mansion and able to resonate off each other has produced a lot of interesting work, not all of it seen yet. So when Tavis Maiden offered to talk to me about his plans for his next comics project, I was happy to do so.

The back-and-forth that we had was so extensive, I’ve had to split it into two parts. Today, Maiden talks about how being a father has influenced the forthcoming Tenko King, what he wants to achieve with it, and his thoughts on Kickstarter.

(more…)

Friday afternoon, hooray. Here are some places you may want to go or things that you may want to pay attention to.

• “William Tallman”¹ has announced some changes at Reptilis Rex², which should result in a bolder, more experimental strip:
  

  [T]he next few weeks will see some changes in Reptilis Rex. Firstly, the schedule will be changing from “Monday –- Thursday” to “Sporadic!” I added the exclamation point in there to soften the blow. Did it work? Hooray!!!! Part of the reason for this is because my family is going to be growing by one in the next few months, and I know that, for a while at least, time will be a commodity I simply don’t have enough of. Like money, or self esteem! Secondly, (and this is the stretching legs part), I wanted to try out a larger format, and that means more work, which means not-so-daily updates. But it is my hope that the expanded format will allow me to tell bigger, better stories. My goal is to update at least twice a week with double-sized strips …

  We at Fleen dig Reptilis Rex big time, and getting the story in bigger (albeit less frequent) chunks should allow “Tallman” some interesting storytelling possibilities. Now if only he hadn’t ended up such a terrible cliffhanger today, with Snive (or “Robert” as he prefers to be called when in mammal drag, but I think he looks more like a “Greg”), coming to a crisis point. He’s been on the verge of breaking away from Krel for some time, and he may have finally achieved that in the worst possible way. Sure, Krel on the surface is an impotent, incompetent, self-important bully, but he used to be a hated dictator with power and perhaps a taste for genocide. How he might react to Snive’s anger is … terrifying, actually.

• New Achewood, second in the space of a week. It’s a flashback to the Small Times of Ray and Beef, but I am cautiously optimistic.
• Ignatz Award nominations out, with the most indy-oriented wing of comics coming together to honor its own (as is not uncommon with the Ignatzen, there is little to no overlap with the other major awards). Good luck to all the nominees, especially those for Outstanding Online Comic: Annie Szabla, Ken Dahl & Gabby Schulz, Sam Alden, Gabrielle Bell, and Jillian Tamaki. The Ignatz Awards will be handed out at SPX next month.
• Freelancers! Want to help make it harder for the bozos who (inadvertently) contribute to the content of For Exposure? Answer some questions for Katie Lane of Work Made For Hire and you can help set the expectation that your work is worth money:”
  

  If you freelance will you take a moment and help fill out this sheet on what your rates are? http://bit.ly/14Ex5QX

  I want to use it as a resource for people who might ask for free work. They can look at the sheet & realize, “Oh! I can afford that.”

  Or, alternatively, “Oh, I didn’t realize I was asking for $3000 worth of work!”

  My modest suggestion? Take the free out of freelance. It may sound silly the first thousand times people call themselves feelancers, but the idea that there’s a fee associated with your effort is a notion worth sounding silly for.

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¹ Who, as my previous research has conclusively proved, is actually David Willis.

² And goodness, has it really been running for 18 months and I’ve neglected to add it to the blogroll over yonder to the right? Time to fix that.

So there was a tweet earlier today from Oni Press supremo James Lucas Jones to the effect that :01 Books associate marketing manager Gina Gagliano is the absolute best, to which I responded This is mathematically provable. Before I had a chance to crunch the numbers, Ms Gagliano obviated any need for me to do so, as today’s mail brought review copies of Derek Kirk Kim [Edit to add: and Les McClaine]’s Tune: Still Life and Paul Pope’s Battling Boy.

But that’s not all, because she also sent along a matted print of Battling Boy and a T-Rex, to which I can only say, Thanks Gina, and sorry T-Rex, you are no longer the awesomest dinosaur in the world of comics. It’s gonna take some time to savor these books, so look for reviews of Battling Boy and Tune: Still Life in the coming weeks.

• Speaking of the twitters, does everybody remember about a month back, when some Scandinavian webcomics types hit the road for a casual drive to Mongolia? By the next day they were hanging in the vicinity of Prague; in the four weeks since the occasional tweet and approximate location update on their progress map assured us they were still alive and unconsumed by feral animals, although details were scarce on the blog. There were four or five days of updates through to about Romania, then a jump forward to 28 July in Uzbekistan, then nothing for two weeks.

  Last night (around 8:30pm GMT-4) however, the tweetstorm began:

  http://fms.ws/DPLFh Ulanbataar?

  The position map actually put them on the outskirts of Ulanbataar, Mongolia’s capital. Some eleven hours later:

  Finally made it to Ulaanbataar!!! Boom! First shower since Russia!

  Finish line kit, we f’ing made it!! Now, three days of fun in UN, and handing in the car tomorrow :)… instagram.com/p/dCHlYXEN96/

  We had to tow the UNO the last 350k, and recharge the battery every 40 minutes. Adventure!!… instagram.com/p/dCH9PMkN-e/

  Amazing camp has been had, waking up with this view…. najs. #teamventure #mongolrally instagram.com/p/dCIKcZkN-m/

  Finish line steak! :D @ Blue Sky Tower instagram.com/p/dCIjuYEN–/

  Finish line champagne. #mongolrally #teamventure #abataarworld instagram.com/p/dCQ7BYkN4F/

  That was followed by a posting of the first videos from the trip, and presumably a hearty period of sleep. Congratulations to the members of Team Venture for the safe conclusion of their adventure, along with the hope that they picked up some good drinking stories and maybe an interesting scar or two.

  Expect to hear more details about the adventures had along the way, and the wagers on who the next webcomics-related team will be to brave the Mongol Rally starts … now! I’m calling dibs on a team made up of Jon Rosenberg, Paul Southworth, and any other webcomickers with three small children, just for the relative opportunity to catch up on sleep that bribing ex-Soviet border guards and dodging bears would offer.

• For those looking for a comics-related adventure that involves slightly less death defiance, may I recommend Columbus, Ohio in November? The triennial Festival of Cartoon Art¹ will by coincidence be occurring about the same time as the grand opening of a new facility at the Festival’s home, the Billy Ireland Carton Library and Museum at Ohio State University.

  As a result, this year’s iteration of the FCA should be one of the best in memory, with a murderer’s row of speaking talent, an impressive-as-all-hell program schedule, and a registration cost of seventy-five bucks. Considering that registration is capped in range of hundreds², not tens of thousands, if you attend you’ll be in immediate proximity to some of the greatest creators and commenters on comics alive.

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¹ The last occurrence of which featured Dave Kellett’s address on the changing nature of comics and a stack of interviews that eventually made it into STRIPPED. Which, why look, will be screened for FCA attendees.

² Specifically, 275. At any major comics convention, there are more than 275 Homestucks waiting in line to get Andrew Hussie’s autograph.

Lagies and jenglefens, I have at long last my copy of To Be Or Not To Be A Chooseable-Path Adventure by Ryan North, William Shakespeare, and YOU (hereafter TBoNTB). While I understand that it is necessary that somebody be the last to have their book go in the mail (especially when there are more than 14,000 books to be sent), but given that shipping started a month ago I’ve been quietly getting more and more desperate for my copy.

I am just saying, had I opted to buy a copy of TBoNTB in San Diego, I could have gotten it signed by Brandon Bird, Tony Cliff, Evan Dahm, Lar DeSouza, Aaron Diaz, Becky Dreistadt, Meredith Gran, Christopher Hastings, Tyson Hesse¹, Mike Holmes, Andrew Hussie, Matthew Inman, Dave Kellett, Kazu Kibuishi, Braden Lamb, Sam Logan, David Malki !, Dylan Meconis, Carly Monardo, Ethan Nicolle, Shelli Paroline, Jon Rosenberg, Jeffrey Rowland, Andy Runton, Kris Straub, Zach Weinersmith, and Jim Zub, which would have been a modest headstart considering there are more than 40 other artists who contributed. But I didn’t and now I have years of artist-chasing to get the entire thing signed and that is okay Ryan we cool we can still be pals.

Instead of dwelling on it, I riffled the pages to a random story end illustration (by Faith Erin Hicks on page 582) and it is now my goal to read through TBoNTB however many times it takes to end up on that page. Spoiler alert, it features Ophelia doing something awesome but does not require her to stab hell of dudes. I also expect to find the book even more delightful than I did last year when Ryan North asked me to proof a not-quite-complete version of TBoNTB.

Oh, and according to the copyright page up front (I’m the guy that reads the copyright page), somewhere in TBoNTB will be found the lyrics to Rapper’s Delight by The Sugarhill Gang which I note came out in 1979 which means that Ryan North has never lived in a world without Rapper’s Delight. I think this is the exact situation that Willie Shakes was describing when he wrote O, brave new world that has such tight rhymes in’t!.

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¹ Who also illustrated the copy of Poor Yorick which I also received.

Chris Sims (who I had the distinct pleasure of meeting in San Diego this year, it was a genuine pleasure to finally make his acquaintance even if we do disagree on FilmCritHulk), a man that makes comics, writes about comics, is called upon as an expert witness on comics, and loves comics in ways that you can scarce comprehend, has been playing with a birthday gift. But do his varied visual vignettes veritably find validation as comics¹?

The unimpeachable reference on the topic, Understanding Comics, might seem to imply that the answer is no, insofar as the somewhat wordy definition that Young Scott McCloud settles on is juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, and these goofs from Sims aren’t juxtaposed and we all know what that means: not comics².

But you know what? I would argue that these are not five¹ distinct single-panel comics, but instead individual panels that represent Batman and Robin climbing a very, very tall building, encountering new people at windows every third floor or so. Comics! Even when he’s just playing with his new toy, Sims can’t help but make comics.

Yeah, yeah, they can’t all be 800 words on the nature of creativity, sometimes they’re just about what amuses the crap out of me today, which often as not takes the form of an amazing coincidence³.

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¹ At the time I wrote this, Sims had produced five window gags; there may well be more since then.

² Could be worse though — it might be juxtaposed and feature the most miserablist characters ever to grace the form, but as Sims has another two weeks before he has to dig back down into the Funky/Cranky-verse, we’ll let him have his happy times without bringing them up.

³ From Randall Munroe’s excellent what if?, today taking on the topic of orbital speed and Australian Scottish pop songs.
Edit to add: Many thanks to Fleen’s onetime resident Australian and Killer Robotics Expert for pointing out our error.

I love it when creative types are creative in more than one way, and I mean that as sincerely as I’ve ever meant anything in my life. Case in point: Andy Bell has more creatures, critters, robots, and things in his head than he can reasonably contain, and within the room I presently occupy, I see them in the form of vinyl toys, paintings, stickers and printed books. Were I to move to the kitchen and open the freezer, I’d see them in the form of ice cubes; somewhere upstairs is a zipper pull shaped like meat, and there are also sculptures and plushes and things that I don’t own. Specialization is for insects.

• But, Gary, I hear you cry, that’s one webcomicker type that works in multiple interesting ways. Who else? Glad you asked me, Sparky; how about Jeph Jacques, one of the proverbial¹ giants of webcomics, has launched a project close to his heart: a Kickstarter to record his next Deathmøle album in an actual studio, leading to CDs and possibly vinyl.

  The Permanence campaign cleared goal in an entirely predictable 2.5 hours, no surprise there — until you consider that it launched in the dead of night when not so many people were paying attention, and that 2.5 hour mark was at approximately 2:15am. In the twelve hours since, the project has closed in on spitting distance of US$25,000 and is well on track for six digits of total given that there’s still 29 and a half days to go. Heck, even if metal’s not your thing, check it out just for the names of the backer tiers, and keep an eye out for stretch goals once Jacques has a chance to think them up.

• Okay, that’s two. What else you got? How about voice acting, a topic that is near and dear to my heart? I trust that you have all seen Natasha Allegri’s complete Bee and PuppyCat, yes? And you noticed Wallace, right? And you noticed that Wallace was voiced by Frank “Becky and Frank” Gibson, right? This makes our Frank the sixth (and possibly best) Frank Gibson at IMDB, officially qualifies him for a Bacon Number of 3 (via Tom Kenny), and makes him entertainment industry royalty. Yay, Frank.
• These examples are somewhat obvious, Gary; can’t you come up with something that stretches the idea a little? Straight to the breaking point, if you like. Look, merch design is a part of the webcomickin’ game, and thus the push of Penny Arcade into the world of cloisonné pins is just another bit of merch. Except what they’re making isn’t just merch, it’s a social ecosystem with rules, artistic and business partners, and a touch of fanaticism for good measure:
  

  If you have pins from a previous show (Boston or Australia) you should bring them [to PAX Prime] to trade or just to show off. I saw a guy in Australia holding a cardboard sign on the last day that said “Will trade dignity for PAX East pins!” If you do have some pins from another show to trade I can promise you they will be like gold at Prime.

  Like a lot of social ecosystems, I’m not sure that I want to get in on this one — I have enough completist tendencies that the “Gotta catch ’em all” impulse would likely become dangerous to my sanity, my wallet, or both. However, I will state here and now that anybody cared to set me up with a Robert Khoo and/or Brian Sunter, that would be awesome. No particular reason, nope. Definitely not a secret shrine in my basement, no way. Honest.

• Finally, if you want to get a good idea of what kind of multi-modal² creativity exists/mutates/is possible in webcomicking and beyond, the annual symposium³ to such ideas will be kicking off in the DC Beltway ‘burbs the weekend after next. Intervention is back for its fourth iteration, having hit that self-sustaining point far quicker than is usual for the smaller-scale, single-hotel type shows.

  The guests and programming are eclectic, the participants range from audience to enthusiasts to major pros, and the cross-pollination of creative energies are going to be considerable. For those looking to step into other areas of creative expression, it ought to be of considerable interest.

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¹ Literal as well. How large is Jeph Jacques? In that photo at the top of the page, the Cintiq in the foreground is the new 57 inch prototype.

² Oof, what a horrible word. Sorry for that.

³ In the original sense of the word: drinking party.

So it appears that the necessary stars have aligned with Chris Onstad’s brainmeats and selectively produced whichever bit of neurochemistry prompts the creation of Achewood, and there was … to be honest, scattered rejoicing. This is, after all, the first strip in 415 days, and only the 16th episode at all since the Ray In Rehab storyline started.¹

Not that I am complaining. I’ve written previously about how I try to regard Onstad’s schedule; it’s clear that whatever my desire for more Achewood may be, he has long since regarded his primary creative identity as something other than Achewood’s writer/artist. That’s cool; David Lynch doesn’t do comics very often, either². I’ll leave the indefinite hiatus descriptor over in the blogroll for a while yet, see if Achewood comes back on something resembling a schedule; if not, I’ll enjoy it whenever it drops. All I have to do is regard it as the webcomic with the waiting for the trade habit built in.

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¹ On 23 November 2011, meaning that 16 strips have been spaced out over 625, or an average of one update every 39+ days, meaning that Aaron Diaz is pleasantly surprised to find he works faster than Onstad does.

² Or perhaps more aptly, Thomas Pynchon doesn’t give us novels very often.

Although the best rule one can follow on the internet is Never Read The Comments, I find it for somewhat obvious reasons useful to go through those at this site. The post from Tuesday of this week attracted some comments that caught my eye, not only for their length, but for the mention of something that’s been on my mind a fair bit. Responding to my commentary on his latest Kickstarter, the probable cover identity that self-identifies as Eben Burgoon discussed his logic for resubmitting an initially-unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign; here’s the important part:

I really fundamentally looked over the Kickstarter last time and rethought my plan of attack. The main thing –- hire Lauren as the artist and do so with my own pocket money so that my goal was far more reachable. She’s an incredible talent, deserves to be paid for her hard work, and if I am going to ask the internet for money to help see this work to it’s end –- I sure as hell better pony up too.

The Lauren referred to would be Lauren Monardo, a colleague via the Brainfood Comics project, and creator of several comics that aren’t really accessible on the web right now¹. Monardo’s credentials (which are excellent) aren’t the point here — the important part is the bit about deserves to be paid for her hard work and I sure as hell better pony up too.

Burgoon’s regard for his artist made me happy, particularly because I’ve spent entirely too much time reading Ryan Estrada’s For Exposure twitterfeed and watching his dramatic re-creations of people that don’t think artists should be paid. Hopefully (although in truth, I hold out very little hope for this), the bozos who have provided Estrada with so much material will look at Burgoon’s example and realize that their pathological short-sightedness is not the only way to approach making comics.

• Speaking of art having value, there are times when you can get away with not paying a creative collaborator — when said collaborator finds value in something other than up-front cash², or volunteers to work for free, or is dead and the work is out of copyright. That last one doesn’t come up too much, but may do in the not-too-distant future.

  Evan Dahm (whose work you should be familiar with, seeing as he’s put a few thousand pages of it out there for you to enjoy for free) has of late been noodling around with images inspired by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; that would be the original Wizard, the novel by L Frank Baum, adapted a few million times³ since it was first published in the dawning days of the twentieth century.

  Many people have taken their artistic whacks at the Oz milieu since W W Denslow’s original illustrations, notably the work being done presently by Skottie Young for the Baum novel adaptations being published by Marvel. Dahm isn’t talking about doing a sketchbook though, or an adaptation; he’s thinking bigger:

  My name is Evan Dahm and I would like to illustrate and publish an edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It was published in 1900 and is now in the public domain. I like it a lot and I think I can illustrate it in a way that works with the story and has a visual character that’s distinct from other interpretations.

  I can’t recall anything like this happening previously. There was an edition of Huckleberry Finn with racist language softened a few years back (which prompted an emulation with the n-word replaced with robot), and there have been some pretty beautiful comics editions of classic works (Kipling seems to be a favorite there), but I can’t recall somebody producing a new edition of a prose work to do their own spin on illustrations.

  And what illustrations! Dahm’s new Baum-sketchbook Tumblsite is full of promise as he starts what will likely be a lengthy project; he’s set ground rules for himself that guarantee that it’ll be years before The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum with illustrations by Evan Dahm sees print. However long the wait, I’m ready to grab a copy.

• Also speaking of art having value, here’s an emergency commission announcement from Dean Trippe. whose MacBook had a crisis and requires replacement as soon as possible. If you like Trippe’s meld of clean line and capes, he’s declared an impromptu convention complete with bargain pricing for superheroic inked drawings. DeanCon lasts through the weekend, so get your requests in now while you can.

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¹ The Slightly Askew Adventures of Inspector Ham & Eggs leads to a dead page, the Brainfood Comics page has a bunch of unreadable symbol placeholders and a Call of Duty 2 ad, and may be somebody squatting on Monardo’s former domain.

² Possibly an ownership stake.

³ Sadly, a Google search for “wizard of oz” puts Baum’s novel (the first of 14 in the Oz series) sixth behind various references to the 1939 film, although some of those are because one of three surviving Munchkin actors died at the age of 89.

Corrections first, as yesterday during the hourly updates of A Softer World #1000 I spoke of alt-text disappearing as each new row of images was added to what ultimately was a twelve-part story. In fact, the alt-text changed with each new update but was not lost — it was added immediately below each row of photos, below panel #1, in grey text, upside down, and I overlooked it. It’s even right there in the screenshot I used in the post and I missed it. Fleen apologizes for the error.

• Also yesterday, I happened to notice that both Dinosaur Comics and Surviving the World dealt — by coincidence, no doubt — with the subject of time. The last time I can recall a coincidence of such proportions, two strips had hideous monstrosities from the deep, and before that there were the crocoform references the day that Steve Irwin died. Precedent and all that.

  A’course, then both Messers Shepherd and North decided that each was the future self of the other, which is a weirdly Möbius-like kind of time-tangle of the sort that gives me headaches. If they are each other’s future selves, Shepherd seems to be taking a cautious approach to the risks involved, North appears to be doubling down, and Rich Stevens knows what time really is: a vector for regret. I trust this will tide us over on the coincidence-o-meter for the next two, two and a half years.

• Big Round Number o’ The Day: Jon Rosenberg¹ has just dropped the 500th consecutive scene on us over at Scenes From A Multiverse. While 500 updates on a MWF schedule over three years isn’t all that uncommon, bear in mind the more than 2000 updates over at Goats (presently between hosts, but accessible via the Wayback Machine), where it updated regular-like from April 1997 until April 2010; together they represent an unbroken stream of increasingly dense storytelling, complete with bizarre side-trips, twists, turns, and existential crises.

  If you can think back as far as April 1997, think about what there wasn’t: no PvP, Penny Arcade, Diesel Sweeties, Schlock Mercenary, Sheldon, SMBC, or even other webcomics with names starting with letters other than P or S.

  The Walkyverse was still six months from launch, Achewood another four years out, xkcd another four years still. Matthew Inman was still more than twelve years from launching the site that would eventually explode all over Charles Carreon, nobody alive could tell you about Homestuck, and even “Iron Man” Crosby’s Superosity didn’t start until 1999. Of all the webcomics still updating, pretty much only Help Desk and Kevin and Kell predate Rosenberg’s run.Oh, and there was that inaugural NCS Award for On-Line Comic Strip and all.

  Rosenberg’s cast a long shadow and now seems as good a time to recognize. Congrats on 500 Jon, yeah, whatever — and thanks for the innumerable contributions before.

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¹ Standard disclaimer: Jon got me into this blog-based opinion-mongering gig, and at present is kind enough to spare the server space to host my daily word dumps. Our relationship is close enough that I actively avoided mentioning him on this page for close to six months after Fleen launched, to avoid any appearance of impropriety. With all that said, feel free to take this item with the appropriate amount of salt.

As noted last week, A Softer World launched a Kickstarter campaign and released their 999th update, leaving everybody (or at least me) wondering what Emily and Joey would cook up for strip #1000.

Wonder no more.

What initially appeared (to me, at least) as a double-size update has been growing over the past few hours:

We are updating the 1000th comic all day! It’s like a story! A whole big STORY! *passes out* PS KICKSTARTER

As of this writing, it’s eleven rows tall, and each time another strip is added the alt-text changes with it. I suspect that there may be meaning — even a parallel story — there, all those yellow pop-ups will be lost in time, like tears in rain.¹

• There’s been a foofaraw in the writerly corners of blogistan for a couple of days, as a posting credited to the VP of the Horror Writers Association (and on the HWA Los Angeles chapter blog) purported to divide the world into professional writers and — gasp! — hobbyists, and succeeded mostly in pissing off a great number of professional writers. As is often the case, I find the John Scalzi (who is not the only writer I follow that scored only 1/10 on the quiz, far below the 8/10 necessary for validation) may have put it best:
  

  Here’s the actual quiz for knowing whether you are a pro writer or not:

  1. Are you getting paid to write?

  If the answer here is “yes,” then congratulations, you’re a professional writer!

  Okay, that’s Scalzi in snippy mode; he made an even better point a bit further down:

  The problem with [HWA VP’s]² quiz is that it confuses process for end result. Her quiz is about process, and presumably her process — what she thinks is necessary for one to do in order to produce the work that create the end result of making money as a writer. But process isn’t end result, otherwise in this case I wouldn’t be a professional writer, which I clearly and obviously am.

  Confusing process and result here is not a good thing. It confuses writers who are hungry to know what “being professional” means. The things [HWA VP] describes can lead to being a pro writer, but it’s not the only path, or a guaranteed one, not by a long shot. In this respect this quiz defeats its own purpose — it offers no indication about whether one actually is a professional writer, only whether one has jumped through the process hoops that one single writer believes are important to become a pro. [emphasis original]

  This thought of process vs status has been on my mind a fair bit; I don’t think that I’m letting any cats out of any bags to say that Brad Guigar asked me to do a first read on The Webcomics Handbook³, and I find it suffused with a tone of Topic A: Okay, here’s how I do it, and this works for me; you may find a variation on this that works better, or a way that’s completely different and that’s cool. What matters is what you produce. and how few absolutes there are. Maybe Guigar should send a copy care of the HWA.

• Speaking of what you produce, readers may recall that international mystery man Eben Burgoon of Eben 07 launched a Kickstart for a side project called B-Squad back in December, one which didn’t fund very well, and was ultimately unsuccessful. Like others before him, Burgoon has opted to resubmit the B-Squad, a technique that is rarely successful.⁴

  Unlike those others before him, Burgoon is capable of learning from his mistakes: he’s redone his project scope (reducing a US$8000 goal to US$3000), tinkered with his stretch goals, and borrowed successful ideas from other projects (case in point: challenge coins). As a result, he’s much more likely to succeed the second time around.

  In a domain where success is too often assumed to be inevitable, it’s natural for Kickstart campaign owners to look towards successes as things to emulate. These might be your own previous projects (such as Bill Barnes, Paul Southworth, and Jeff Zugale funding the second Not Invented here collection), or they may rely on accumulated name recognition and goodwill (say, Tavis Maiden taking a boost from Strip Search to launch a new strip, much like his fellow Artists have done). It’s rare to see somebody adjust approaches after a stumble rather than just have a hissy fit⁵ about it. Here’s hoping that Burgoon is the start of a trend.

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¹ Rutger Hauer is the man.

² I’ve taken the name because it’s pretty obvious in the posting, and because I suspect that the VP in question is taking a fair amount of shit today for the pretty significant overreach in the original article. I just don’t feel like piling on right now, as I’m presuming that the mistake was one of execution and not intent. Should reports come about that no, the execution matched the intent that that’s actually the viewpoint being promulgated, I may reconsider this notion.

³ Spoiler alert: it’s very good.

⁴ No names, but seriously I’ve seen Kickstarts that failed to raise even ten bucks resubmitted with nothing changed expecting a different result.

⁵ Again, no names, but remember the guy whose project failed to fund and he changed the video into an obscenity-laden screed about how the world didn’t deserve his genius ideas? That was great.