Sometimes, a detail jumps out at you and catches your attention, and it leads to something that leads to something and before you know it, something secret and disturbing is revealed. Down the rabbit hole we go.

David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™ ^etc) hitting a Big Round Number last Friday prompted me to go check out the stuff that he’s doing that isn’t Irregular Webcomic — his ongoing series of proofs that the Earth is not flat, his lengthy list of creative endeavours, his personal blog. It was at the latter that something jumped out at me that led me … some unsavory places.

From the blog entry dated (remember, Morgan-Mar is in Sydney, meaning he is many hours ahead of almost everybody reading this) 3 March:

On the way back, I popped into my local art supply shop to get some new felt tip markers and drawing paper, because I planned to spend today doing some drawing. This is for a secret project which should be completed tomorrow, and which I’ll announce in the next few days. And drawing was pretty much what I did for the rest of the day.

For a guy that’s famously a photographer¹, this reference to markers and drawing paper caught my eye. To the best of my knowledge, the only drawing he’s done has been his recap comic of old-school Trek, Planet Of Hats. It very much a comic you read for the writing, but it noticeably improves over its run, at least as much as some other famously rough starts improved in their first 110–120 strips.

Morgan-Mar’s got a Patreon, where the most recent locked posts just barely reveal the text:

Some character study sketches for a secret project

and:

Super-duper sneak preview, definitely patrons only! A thing that will go public this weekend.

and a post title:

Star Trek stirrings

Put the pieces together, people! Morgan-Mar has clearly fallen back into the Gene Roddenberry trap, and being the completist he is, there’s only one possibility: having exhausted all the original Trek episodes, the animated series, and the original cast movies, he will naturally move on to recap G-Rod’s next live action projects, Genesis II and Planet Earth.

Which, if you’ve never seen them, oooof, maybe don’t? They’re both essentially the same story, with Leading Man Dylan Hunt (played by two different actors) waking up in a primitive future of mutants (GII)/a primitve future of mutants and also a society where women rule and men are slaves (PE). Several characters repeat between the two stories (Yuloff, Haper-Smythe), several actors are cast in both (like Majel Barrett), and Ted Cassidy — best known as Lurch from The Addams Family² — managed to do both, cast in both as the looming giant Isiah.

How bad are these? In Genesis II, Mariette Hartley reveals that she’s a despised, twisted, evil mutant by displaying her two belly buttons. That’s about the high point for character and drama, and apart from some stuff that ‘splodes real good, nothing of value to be found in either. There’s a third, Strange New World, but that one features multiple hibernating characters waking up on a spaceship and no Majel Barrett or Ted Cassidy so it’s barely worth mentioning. Also, I didn’t see that one.

And this, I’m certain, is what Morgan-Mar is going to inflict on us. At least I hope it is, because the alternative would be he’s about to start recapping Tne Next Generation and hoo-boy, the first 50 or so episodes of that were stinkers. You got the first Borg episode, the wargames with the Picard Maneuver, Data on trial for his life, and the rest³ should be blotted from memory. At least Genesis II has Alex Cord with a sweet ‘stache, and the general … Seventiesness of it all can be explained by the plentiful cocaine Hollywood was awash in. Maybe if it is TNG, Morgan-Mar will skip the bad episodes and jump ahead to when they got the collars on the Starfleet uniforms and/or a beard on Riker. We can only hope.

Spam of the day:

Tim Skwiat just wrote a brand new free report showing you the top 14 foods to boost your thyroid, and he’s giving it away for free

Do these idiots not know that having too much thyroid activity is also a health problem? They don’t, do they?

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¹ He’s got multiple photo-based webcomics, he’s one of the experts that determines what international photographic standards actually are, and he’s now got a shop of some of his best photos from around the world.

¹ Although he also voiced characters like Moltar on the original Space Ghost and the Gorn in the original Trek. The connections are right there in front of you!!

³ Planet Of The Joggers! Planet Of Women In Charge (guess Roddo finally got that story made)! Planet Of Don’t Do Drugs! Planet Of Space Irish! The Ship Full Of Space Idiots That Kidnap Geordi To Make It Go! And others that I can’t be bothered to look up!

Well, that’s for damn sure a Big Round Number:

Welp, that’s 5,000 comics.

The very sexy R Stevens did 4000 comics in the first incarnation of Diesel Sweeties and 1000 since — not counting his foray into newspapers for a year and a half. Now those 5000 comics weren’t all on consecutive days, what with weekends, and the occasional MWF update weeks, but imagine they were. How much is 5000 days?

5000 days ago, they were still doing primary cleanup from Hurricane Katrina. Donald Rumsfeld was still committing war crimes, Windows Vista didn’t exist, Mooninites hadn’t sparked the stupidest terrorism panic ever, and Bob Barker was waiting for you to come on down.

And by complete coincidence, today has a second Big Round Number, as David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™ ^etc), without fanfare, hit Irregular Webcomic number 4200 today, which also makes you wonder about the confluence of the two. It would make no sense to add those two, very large numbers together, you end up with 9200.

9200 comics, at one per day, would take you back more than a quarter century, you’d find Calvin & Hobbes on the comics page, Christopher Reeve walking around; it was world with no Pixar movies, no understanding of what it would sound like to introduce Oprah to Uma, or knowledge of who Kevin Mitnick is. Then again, you wouldn’t be able to learn most of that because there was also a near-total lack of search engines worth anything.

Heck, that takes you back far enough that my evil twin had only been cranking out daily comics for a little more than four and a half years. As of today, that makes for 7021 consecutive strips, but it’s not a Big Round Number so we’re not talking about it. We will, however, wish Howard Tayler a happy birthday tomorrow, his 13th since he made his appearance 52 years ago on Leap Day 1968. 13 and 1968 and 29 aren’t Big Round Numbers either, nor is 52, but believe me — when you’ve lived for 52 years, it’s feels like a big number.

Spam of the day:
Spammers don’t get to share the day with Rich, David, and Howard. Buy their stuff.

Know what? It’s my birthday. More than that, it’s a Big Round Number birthday. I’ma take the day off. See y’all tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

Strongest Charging Cables Ever

Fancy-ass cables with magnets and such? Does it protect against Goddamn Martians?

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¹ Book Two of Strong Female Protagonist, which will presumably be added to the store soon enough. SFP is a comic I can only read in big chunks, so every one of these pages is new to me. And, because I only read it in big chunks, I pulled down Book One to refresh myself. I may have spent more than a few hours that I should have been sleeping. More on this in another day or two.

What with it being American Thanksgiving this week, making for an abbreviated work week, in which a full tranche of work must be done, in addition to plans for the big meal om Thursday. Cranberries must be cooked down, birds brined, bread baked, and pies prepared. Pies, people. Let’s do this.

• The Creators For Creators grant was announced in April 2016, with applications open for about six months that year, and was first awarded this past March. It looks like the timing of the 2018 grant is going to be a little different, as applications just went live and will run until 31 March 2018. No word yet on when the decision will be made, but one thing’s for sure: it’s worth US$30,000 for a creator or writer/artist team to make a graphic novel. Details at the site.
• Speaking of just went live: Minna Sundberg and Hiveworks launched the Kickstarter for book 2 of Stand Still, Stay Silent around midnight EST and cleared goal around ten hours later. In fact, the nearly 640 backers (as of this writing) are rapidly approaching stretch goal #2, at the US$50,000 mark. We’ll give this until tomorrow morning and see what the FFF mk2 has to say, but for now it appears that come May, I’ll have a handsome hardcover matching book 1 on my shelves.
• And while it technically happened yesterday, it was pretty darn recent, so speaking of it also: Chris Yates has emerged from his madness place with the four-friggin’-thousandth of his Baffler! puzzle series. 958 pieces, eight levels, difficulty level 9.95¹, it can be yours for a cool US$2695 and honestly? It’s worth every.

  last.

  penny.

  All of Yates’s previous Big Round Number Baffler!s has been snatched up by one of his dedicated puzzle-collecting fans, and I suspect that #4000 will be gone in short order. In the meantime, enjoy the photos of what it took to construct the 5.4 kg behemoth².

Spam of the day:

The world’s top influencers in media, technology, and finance use Nuzzel to save time and stay informed. Nuzzel Media Intelligence uses data from thousands of influencers to show you what important people in your industry are talking about, in real time.

You named your very serious company Nuzzel? That’s not the name of a media intelligence company (whatever that is), that’s the name of a tissue, or a fabric softener, or maybe a tissue infused with fabric softener to make it even softer for all your tender bits.

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¹ Yates once told me that the difficulty scale is logarithmic.

² Shown here with a life-sized Yates for comparison.

Well, I guess time continues forward at a rate of one minute per minute after all. Today being the first of the month, let me remind you that you have until 11:59pm EDT tomorrow, 2 August 2017, to email me a copy of your donation receipt to The Trevor Project, which I will match. Last time we raised US$500 in matching funds (rounded up from US$305) and I’d like to exceed that if at all possible this time around.

As of now, we’re at US$360 in receipts sent. If I could make a suggestion? All of the super cool Kickstarts that you’re backing right now? Pick one, and donate an amount equal to just the shipping charge. If just one out of every ten of you did that, we’d be into the thousands of dollars and my budget for the next month will be happily blown. I know that Fleen readers are, in general, the sort of people that would make Mr Rogers proud and happy. I know you’ve got this.

• I didn’t know how much I wanted a Jess Fink guest comic at Oh Joy, Sex Toy until I saw it. I don’t think I’ve ever smiled as broadly as when I got to the panel that said, quote, SO you want to draw DOWNTOWN KISSES, followed by art tips to make oral sexytimes look better. Thanks, Jess, Erika, and Matt!
• I confess, Chris Yates not boothing with Dumbrella for the comics shows the past couple of years means that I haven’t kept as close an eye on his Baffler! puzzles as I should. He just released a tranche of new ones, bringing the total number of brain-numbers up to three thousand, nine hundred and thirty-six. As Big Round Numbers tend to bring out Yates’s most extravagant work, look for the imminent Baffler! #4000 to feature about a dozen levels, multiple sub-puzzles, and a solving time measured in fortnights.
• TCAF remains one of the very best shows on the continent, and it’s never too early to start planning for May 2018. News went out today by means of the Twitter machine that applications will be open starting Monday, 14 August, until the end of October. My experience? Lots more people want to exhibit than the Toronto Reference Library can accommodate, so get your applications in early is my advice. Sign up for their newsletter if you need a reminder to check out the process rules come Monday after next.

Now you’ll have to excuse me, I have to make a bookstore run to pick up Abby Howard’s new dinosaur book, Dinosaur Empire!, which releases today. Heck, yeah.

Spam of the day:

Can’t see tiny buttons? Get a senior phone

I’ma tell you exactly what I told the Medicaid scammer that called yesterday, thinking me much older than I am: I can see a church by daylight. Besides, aren’t there enlarged button dialer apps for all the phones now?

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Uncle George, and we discover that although Ray dug down deep to find he truly was Blood of Champion, he was ready to bribe his way out of the Fight the minute it became necessary (or at least attempt to). Ray contains multitudes.

We’re heading east today, to the continent of universal health care — that would be most of the rest of the world, Gary — and borderless borders — a contradiction in terms! — and ancient wines, beers, and cheeses¹. Europe!

• Our first stop is in France, cradle of so many of the arts (comics not the least of them) and home of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin. One may recall that about a month ago I mentioned that Stela — the new mobile comics delivery platform — was getting a lot of attention and precisely zero release on Android, so I wasn’t able to offer up anything resembling a review.

  But! FSFCPL is in the iDevice fold, and Stela has recently released a French version, and he’s shared some thoughts on it for you. Key takeaway points:

  [O]nce you use it it becomes clear Stela’s purpose is to publish comics that embrace the 5 centimeters (that’s about 2 inches, for the metrically-challenged) width of today’s smartphone screens.

  That’s good, but Lebeaupin notes that Stela is really designed for handsets; viewing comics on an iPad means the comics are just scaled up, which makes for funnily huge lettering.

  These are comics that are native to that world: the panels are only as wide as the screen (nary a vertical gutter in sight) and can only extend vertically, but they can do so as much as desired because they are read by vertical scrolling. A panel may not necessarily fit on a screen (at least on an iPhone 5/5S/SE; I haven’t checked on the larger models)! An iPhone 5 screenful is a common size, but most of these comics have widely varying panels sizes, and anyway have conversations for instance that extend over multiple screenfuls: they don’t follow a pattern of identically-sized pages. The result is a very fluid flow and a reading experience that is meant to be fast. [emphasis mine]

  Bolded because I think that’s probably the most important selling point of Stela, however it should be balanced against another discovery:

  [I]mages are loaded dynamically and present a spinner if your scroll too fast before they have had time to load, as is traditional in iPhone apps: prioritize the flow, even if that means betraying some implementation realitie

  And some of the decisions (both technical and economic) are a bit bewildering:

  The comics are updated chapter by chapter (which make for checkpoints as well); the economic model is that the first chapter of each story is free, and you can get a subscription (using Apple’s in-app subscription system) to read after that. It is a single subscription global to the app, not per-series, so it works a bit like an anthology series. Comics are always loaded from the network, which bothers me a little: there is no way to preload while on WiFi to avoid eating into your phone data allotment, and no way to read at all if you are off the network. iPod Touches exist, you know. [emphasis mine]

  And depending on your inclination, those might be the dealbreakers right there — let your subscription lapse and you have nothing to show for it — as you’re only given access to what you’re reading right now. Stela is less a comics app than a comics rental platform; those that like to own their media (digital or otherwise), take note. And as always, thanks to FSFCPL for his review.

• A bit futher east and north then, to the land of sauna and tango and linguistic anomalies — I’m speaking naturally of Finland — and Minna Sundberg. We at Fleen have been big fans of Ms Sundberg’s since we saw the crowdfunding campaign for the very pretty book of her first comic, and that regard has only grown since she launched her ongoing magnum opus, Stand Still, Stay Silent. Readers of this page will recall the fact that SSSS took the NCS Division Award for Online Comics — Long Form last May.

  And she’s been cranking out between three and five full pages a week (along with the odd interchapter hiatus of ten days or so) 879 days since November of 2013 — 500 pages in total as of today — making her one of the most productive cartoonists working right now. A page of comics written, penciled, inked, colored, and lettered in less than two days for nearly two and a half years? Sundberg is an unstoppable comics machine, and shows every sign of reaching Sergio Aragonés levels of speed and skill while still in her mid-20s. I can’t wait to see what she’s like in another decade.

  Happy Big Round Number Day, Ms Sundberg. Your work is great and you should feel great.

Spam of the day:

Implant-Providers

Damn it, I told you people I neither need nor want breast implants!

Dental Implants You Can Afford

Oh. I’d say Never mind but I don’t need dental implants either. Gots all ma teeths, don’t need fangs or tusks or anything like that.

______________
¹ Now we’re talking.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: We see how fallen fighters are removed from The Acres.

• Speaking of, Happy Birthday to the nearest thing this broken world will ever have to a real-life amalgam of Achewood characters, KC Green. He is the best parts of the entire cast except Pat, because Pat’s a jerk and KC is no jerk. Celebrate with some of his comics, or perhaps by pre-ordering Graveyard Quest.
• TCAF announced its second lineup of special guests today, and oh boy is this one talent-heavy show. You got your Boulet (appearing in conjunction with the launch of the English translation of his 10-volumes-and-counting Notes series), you got your Faith Erin Hicks (launching the first volume of a new trilogy from :01 Books), you got your Emi Lenox (launching a new boo, Plutona, co-created with Jeff Lemire), and I guess that means you also got your Jeff Lemire (also launching the second print collection of Descender).

  In addition, the very international character of TCAF’s guest list is on full display, with creators from Germany, Portugal, Japan, Italy, and the very odd lands of Canada and New Jersey [NB: jenniferhayden.com; no link since I’m getting a security warning, but you can visit if you like]. TCAF runs at the Toronto Reference Library on 14 and 15 May.

• It’s Big Round Number season in webcomics — 4000-plus for R Stevens, 5000-plus for Jennie Breeden, and now 5400-plus for Brad Guigar, taking 14 February as the 16th anniversary of his descent into madness pro cartooning, and counting up contributions from five different series plus Patreon naughties and miscellaneous strips that may not rise to level of ongoing series yet.

  The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but I think you can bet that cartooning success goes to whoever is stubborn enough to keep improving, keep showing up every day, and to keep developing a laugh that will frighten off scavengers in the night. Happy Big Round Numberday, Brad!

Spam of the day:

Hello Stella. it’s Mike. can you please send my photos from Jake’s wedding? thanks.

I think I’ll reply with this link.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Still waiting for the Fight to start; things really kick in tomorrow, though.

• Ordinarily, I’d have run the story that linked to the art as the first item, but this is too big to go anyplace but the lead slot; I trust that Kate will understand. Re: our call two days ago for book purchasers to push Raina Telgemeier from holding 60% of the New York Times Best Seller List to 70%; that didn’t take long. Thanks, book purchasers! Now hold on until Ghosts comes out and make it 80%!
• Now then: Kate Beaton, who all right-thinking folk regard as a treasure and one of the very best creators in both comics, and in any creative medium from the Great White North. Beaton was tapped to provide a show poster for TCAF, and it’s a beaut. More than all the geekly references, it’s also terrific because the message could not be any more clear: TCAF¹ is for everyone. Be sure to thank Beaton when you see her at the Toronto Reference Library on the 14th & 15th of May.
• I got a press release and some sample pages from a guy named Derrick Johnson recently, and I wasn’t going to do much with it — another first release of a webcomic in print form, I see those literally every day, and mention only the ones that grab me in the eyeballs and don’t let go. But something about Johnson’s missive did grab me, and I wasn’t sure exactly what for a couple of minutes. Then it hit me:
  

  I’m a comics creator, that posted comics regularly to my website for a 4 year period in 2007-10. After a long hiatus, I decided to collect the best strips from that time and self-publish a book, The Best of Colored Comics, Volume 1.

  Everybody catch that? 2007-10. Comics creators (like artistic types of all sorts) that I know have a definite tendency to be their own worst critics. The most well-balanced of them can stand to look at their most recent work without berating themselves, but maybe on an 18 month rotating cycle. That is, today’s work is pretty okay, anything from last year is barely adequate, and older than 18 months is fit only to be burned. Of course, 18 months from now, today’s work will fall firmly into the burn category. Thus does skill push itself to improve, on the back of total neuroticism.

  So to read that Johnson worked at Colored Comics for four years, then to set it aside for five with plans to print, then to resume? That’s an act of supreme bravery. The samples that Johnson sent along, I can tell which are older and which are more recent; the new comics on the site reveal that regularly updating or no, Johnson’s been practicing and improving. I can’t imagine what it was like to go through work almost a decade old to prepare it for print, but it’s the most self-challenging and fundamentally optimistic act I’ve seen in quite a while.

  Confidence is a major part of creativity, the feeling that putting a part of yourself out there won’t come back to bite you in the ass, that the random cruelties of a thousand internet griefers won’t drag you down. So yeah — if you’re looking for what early work (that improves as you read it, and gets better still past the end) looks like, Derrick Johnson’s your guy. Here’s hoping he continues to develop without falling to the 18 month neurosis, because I want to see just how good he gets. The Best of Colored Comics, volume 1 is US$15 from Johnson, and pay what you want at Gumroad. Check ‘er out.

• Oh, and 4000 is a hell of a big number, minus maybe a couple dozen guest strips, plus more than 700 for the newspapers. Happy Big Round Number Day, Rich Stevens. You’re a goddamn inspiration.

Spam of the day:

Discount COSTC0 MEMBERSHIPS

So I’ve gone from being on the sexy MILFs spam list to the bootleg warehouse-club membership spam list? Guess it’s just a matter of time before I end up on the oatmeal-and-diabetes-meds spam list, then the prepaid funeral services spam list. Welp, it was nice knowing you.

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¹ Indeed, comics, and nerdery, and all fandoms you can think of.

Know what’s even better than Chris Hallbeck achieving the ur– Big Round Number (aka “1000 strips”) for Maximumble? The fact that he did it on a secondary strip. Recall: Maximumble (and its companion, Minimumble) are offshoots of the long-running The Book of Biff, which has itself accumulated 1902 strips back to the start of 2006. Add in the more than 500 Minimumbles and today’s achievement isn’t so much a 100th strip as it is a 3449^th. That’s a lotta damn cartoons, and congrats Mr Hallbeck.

• I’ve spent more than one moment of my life over the past 18 months or so trying to figure out exactly how Erika Moen approaches her work on Oh Joy, Sex Toy, and I think I’ve finally got it nailed down. In talking to Laura Hudson in the hallowed pages of Wired¹, Moen is gleeful, patient, instructional, and above all, evangelical. She’s got a mission to spread the good word about sex & reproduction, and all the myriad aspects of how they work and why we should enjoy them. Sex is fun is a simple truth that waaaay too many people need to be reminded of, and Moen’s just the one to do it.

  Plus it led to this exchange on Twitter:

  Deleted joke about Erika liking her old sex toys best: “she discovered that the things she wanted the most had been inside her all along”

  @laura_hudson Booooooo

  @dmeconis @laura_hudson YOU TAKE BACK THAT BOO RIGHT NOW, MECONIS.

  I live for moments like that.

• You know what I like to see? Kickstarters that run more smoothly than the creator anticipated; it helps when the creator’s done the crowdfunding production/fulfillment dance before, or when they’ve built in very generous timelines to be sure as to succeed, but it’s still a thrill². Now I don’t want to put pressure on, or set a creator up for unrealistic expectations, or maybe cause a jinx that makes a container ship founder at sea. But! It appears that Evan Dahm has had some unexpected good luck in the production of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:
  

  Received the bookplates today and they look PERFECT. And I got proofs a little while ago, including some prints of individual pages to check the color. I was anticipating some back-and-forth on that, but in fact we are GOOD TO GO. Paying for the print run later this week!

  That’s great news — you pretty much never hear of a print run going with so little difficulty; there’s always several rounds of corrections and fixes, which can take weeks or months. The fact that Dahm (who has a keen eye for artwork and no patience for poor print jobs) struck gold on the first go-around is great news. The fact that he gave himself six months (from end of campaign in November to promised delivery date in May) to make good on his obligations doesn’t hurt. Underpromise and overdeliver and you’ll have happy customers.

Spam of the day:

Your children being privy to Safe Eyes monitoring their online activity will cooperate in undertaking healthy discussions that what exactly is safe and what on earth is unsafe.

You’re creeping me out and I don’t even have children. Stay the hell away from my entirely theoretical children.

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¹ Hudson convinced her bosses to run the story on the basis of it’s kind of like talking about gadgets.

² Like all crowdfunding backers, I’m due some rewards waaaay past their promised dates. Out of the 40 projects I’ve backed on Kickstarter, I’d estimate maybe a third delivered as promised on time; 36 of the 40 have promised delivery dates in the past, with 8 of them yet to completely or partially fulfill, going back as far as early 2012.

How’s everybody doing today? Nice weekend? Having a good one? Good, good.

• Know what I respect as a reason for doing anything? Honestly, truly respect, I’m completely not being snarky here? An arbitrary, meaningful only to yourself, completely petty I’ll show them all! achievement.

  Like, say, blogging about webcomics when my entire initial motivation for doing so has been overturned about three full times since I started because goddammit, I said I was going to blog regularly and that’s just what I’m gonna do. There are others out there that write better, have more developed insight, or actually get paid for the writing they do, but I’ve been doing this for eight and a half years and I’ll keep going out of spite if necessary.

  Not that this is about me.

  Rather, Greg Dean found a bit of inspiration in a completely arbitrary milestone — drawing and posting more strips than the legendary Bill Watterson — and now he’s achieved that milestone. I doubt that three thousand, one hundred and sixty-one comics will ever catch on in the same way that big round numbers have, but it’s got to feel good all the same.

• The Reading Rainbow Kickstarter is down to single-digit days at this point¹; the US$1 million original goal was obliterated on the first day, and the stretch goal of US$5 million looks pretty doable at this point in the long tail. I just wanted to point something out in the latest update to the project.

  A reward item that’s fairly unique² is a 2015 calendar, to be illustrated by the artists behind Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, and tons of your favorite comics and childrens books. Traditionally, there are twelve months in a (non-lunar) calendar, and six of the artists have been named so far: Mary GrandPré (illustrator of the North American editions of Harry Potter before Kazu Kibuishi), Brett Helquist (illustrator of the Lemony Snicket books), and four webcomickers: Mike Krahulik, Chris Eliolpoulos, Katie Cook, and Mike Maihack.

  It makes sense that the comics side is represented by webcomickers, as they are mostly young enough to have grown up on Reading Rainbow, and are getting to the point of having kids themselves. They’re each donating the art for the calendar as well as five prints for inclusion in high-dollar-value reward tiers. It’s not known who will illustrate the remaining six months yet, because they’ll be picked via a an open contest after the Kickstarter is done.

  I know that we at Fleen have more than once urged creators to not participate in art contests where the prize is you get to give away your art for free, but you know what? There’s an exception to every rule, and for the Don’t vie for the opportunity to give away your art for exposure rule³ that would be But it’s okay if LeVar Burton is asking you to help kids learn to love reading.

  The Burton Exception is pretty damn narrow, and I think that’s probably for the best. Anyway, start brainstorming ideas; webcomickers with kids in your lives, this could be the best shot you ever have for them to respect you. And if the calendar goes over large, maybe there will be more of them in future years.

Spam of the day:

Hey, I think your blog might be having browser compatibility issues. When I look at your blog in Firefox, it looks fine but when opening in Internet Explorer, it has some overlapping.

Man, fuck Internet Explorer.

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¹ In fact, while I was typing that paragraph, it rolled over from nine days remaining to eight days remaining.

² It’s only directly included in two reward tiers, one at US$30, and again at US$175 with some other items. But it’s available as an add-on to any pledge for US$25 per calendar.

³ I think I’ll just shorthand it as the Stevens Rule, for the very quotable Rich Stevens observation: People die of exposure.
,