The last 24 hours have been as much of a stress test of Twitter as ever I can remember, what with big items in the news provoking a lot of social media connections. Speaking as a guy with a day job, it’s tough to keep up with the backlog at times, although honestly, it’s mostly an embarrassment of riches.

My criteria for following people on Twitter (I don’t use other social networks) is twofold: smart and interesting gets you added, but the problem is that smart and interesting people tend to follow each other, which tends to lead to smart and interesting traffic that is exponentially greater than if all of my friends were strangers to each other. I wonder sometimes if MC Frontalot didn’t have the right idea¹ after all.

All of which is to say, I feel guilty that I don’t have time to keep up with all the people I want to; I held off for the longest time adding even three of the Strip Search Artists to my twitterfeed, on account of I just can’t manage the time to follow all twelve. The “hippie love commune” that developed during filming that gave Messers Krahulik and Holkins such difficulty means that these kids² communicate with a fervor and regularity and volume that I cannot keep up with. I had figured it might have tapered off a bit, seeing as how they all just met six months ago and those exciting new friend! tendencies fade after a while.

Nope, they still can’t get enough of each other, even though they all seem to be migrating to Seattle; soon they’ll all live within 10 km of each, meet daily at a coffeeshop, and still tweet to each other rather than call across the room.

All of which is even more to say, I love that photo of the Artists imitating their cardboard cut-out self-portrait stand-ups. Monica and Abby are adorable, Amy and Tavis are fierce, Katie’s pose cracks me the hell up, and Maki the pagan athiest science-guy is one haircut away from Jesus in da Vinci’s Last Supper. Damn them all, it’s been half a year, I should be able to stop talking about them.

Except they keep doing things. Case in point: Ms T Falcone let me know this morning about plans she’s got for the immediate future. Now that she’s safely ensconced in the Pacific Northwest, a new locale demands new projects. Cardigan Weather, her diary comic, will be ending to make room for a new comic to tell the things she wants to tell:

I don’t want to give away too much, but I can say this. Have you ever felt like logging on is like coming home?

Watch this space for further information regarding Untitled Amy T Falcone Project, her inevitably runaway-successful Kickstarter, and the rest of a career that is going to kick so many asses. Also watch this space for what will probably be regular announcements for everybody else involved in Strip Search; I suspect the answer to When can I stop writing about these darn kids? is Never.

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¹ For a considerable period of time, the esteemed Mr Alot had a policy of only following 50 people on Twitter to keep the information to a manageable level; to follow somebody new, somebody old had to go. It appears he’s relaxed his limit somewhat these days, but he’s still following considerably fewer than the 250 that I allow myself, and I have no idea how some of my friends follow 700, 800, 1000 or more people.

² I’m old, I can call ’em kids. Heck, Hurricane Erika just turned 30 yesterday, meaning that I was taking finals in high school while she was objecting to the new, bright, loud, cold world she found herself ejected into. Kids.

While I managed to finish Boxers and Saints last night, there’s no way I’m ready to write anything about them yet — they’re too big. China is too big¹ and these books contain within them the smallest fraction of The Middle Kingdom’s history, and that fraction is enormous and must be thought on carefully. However, I realized something this morning that I do want to share, which is virtually everything I know about Chinese history, I know because of comics.

Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe has more than 100 pages of history from before the common era, and I have a collection of three comics treatments of Chinese military classics (100 Strategies of War; Three Strategies of Huang Shi Gong; Six Strategies For War, all illustrated by Wang Xuanming). They’ve taught me about the Warring States, Lu Pu-Wei, Liu Bang, Cao Cao, Liu Bao, the Spring and Autumn Period, the Battle of Red Bluff, and a dozen other centuries worth of history. It’s still just the surface, but it’s more than I was ever taught in school².

• Ever wonder what 14,000 books looks like? Like this. Ever wonder what kind of man could sign all those books and not die? The Toronto Man-Mountain, also known as Ryan North, Cyborg King of Awesome Things. We at Fleen wish Ryan North good fortune and hope that those books — he is their creator, they owe him their lives — treat him kindly and don’t cause his hand to fall off.
• At MoCCA Fest last year, I was talking with Ananth Panagariya³ was talking about projects not involving his long partnership with Yuko Ota, which conversation was rather roundabout and coy because he couldn’t talk about everything yet. He gets to talk about it now, it being BUZZ, a fully-contained story with Tessa Stone which was previously described as a regularly-updating serial at Oni’s website.

  The plan had been for serials to launch in January and OniPress.com to be a daily-updating content hub, but I didn’t see any of that go live. Serious question here — did I just miss Oni’s version of the :01 Books preview books as webcomics sub-site, To Be Continued? Because I have no recollection of that happening. In any event, BUZZ will now be going to print in November, the story of one-on-one spelling bees as street-level contact sport. Looks sweet.

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¹ Back in college, my political science professor asked us what we wanted to write our first paper on and one guy in class said, China!. Thad (that was his name, Dr Thad “Call me Thad” Smith) looked at him and said, You’ve got eight pages, you might want to narrow that down a little.

² This would probably annoy Gonick to no end, who groused in the introduction to Volume 9 of CHOTU — the first concerning China — that San Fransisco, his hometown, with its huge Chinese population that were instrumental in building the city, had not one street with a Chinese name. This may have changed since it was published in 1994, but the sentiment is the same — we have an enormous collective blind spot in our culture, one big enough to hide a fifth of the people on the planet and everything they’ve ever done.

Another thing not taught to me in school: romanization methods for Chinese names; I’ve taken the names as they’re presented in the comics, which may or may not match the most popular methods today. I imagine you’ll make do somehow.

³ AKA Mr Eyeless, Aaah~~I hope Anath-sempai likes me!.

Gina Gagliano and Colleen AF Venable may be my two favorite people right now. Today’s mail brought pre-release copies of both Boxers and Saints by Gene Leun Yang, 500-odd pages of comic goodness from one of the finest creators of our times, with much of the logistics of :01 Books bringing these volumes to print (and to my hands) landing squarely on Gagliano’s skilled shoulders.

The cover design is by Venable, and as much as I’ve praised her work previously¹, she’s blown away all previous efforts with these handsome, matching volumes — the covers sit in opposition to each other: substituting red for blue, dark for white, male for female, left for right; the place where they match is in the rage expressed on the faces of their respective protagonists. I. Can’t. Wait.

• We spoke last week about Brad Guigar² and his Kickstarter for a sequel to How To Make Webcomics; he was playing coy at that time about stretch goals, but on Friday after we at Fleen went to press, he announced two of them:
  • At US$12,500 (original goal was $10K), a new podcast would be launched where Guigar interviews interesting people in Webcomicistan
  • At US$15,000, a new episode of Webcomics Weekly

  Those first goal got met before I could tell you that the first guest lined up for the interview podcast would be George³; a little while ago the second goal was met, so it looks like we’ll get another WW. And Guigar’s updated his stretch goals again:

  • At US$17,500 (original goal was $10K), Webcomics Confidential (the new podcast) gets Zach Weinersmith for episode #2
  • At US$20,000, a second new episode of Webcomics Weekly

  I see a pattern developing here. I can’t speak for Brad, but every person that ever said, When does Webcomics Weekly come back? now appears to have a clear pathway to ensure that it does: chuck Five Large into the pot and that’s another episode, plus an episode of Webcomics Confidential. You got three and a half weeks to see how many you can get in the bank.

• Bunch of things happening this summer at the Cartoon Arts Museum for those of you in San Francisco:
  • Summer classes in cartooning for parents and kids! Wednesday 3 July and 7 August, on four different topics for just ten bucks a head.
  • This Saturday, 29 June, a free all-ages workshop entitled Where Do Toons Come From? with Robert Gordon, a Chicago- and Paris-based architecture & design educator and avid cartoonist. Bring your sketchbook and favorite pens!

  Bay Area peeps, be sure to let the rest of us know how these sessions go; they look like a blast.

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¹ And I realize that it’s an unusual thing to have a favorite book designer, but there you go.

² The handsomest man in webcomics. Grrrrowl!

³ Rohac, that is, he of the single name and Plans.

At 1:21pm EDT today, the longest day of the year (at least in the northerly climes), Abby Howard launched a Kickstart for The Last Halloween, seeking US$9000 to launch the once-weekly multi-page-updates spoooooky webcomic. At 1:39pm EDT — eighteen minutes later — 120 backers had cleared her funding goal as her totals began rolling over literally faster than I could refresh my browser.

Howard’s approaching this one smart: a lot of the rewards are non-physical, so she won’t spend months on fulfillment and shipping¹, she’s offered some high-price tiers that have attracted supporters². In this time it’s taken to write those two footnotes, she’s halfway to her first stretch goal (US$25,000) and there is no end in sight. As soon as I’m done with this sentence I’m backing this campaign (at a level sufficiently high to get a recipe for Sadness Brownies and a recording of Abby telling a scary story), and writing myself a note to be prepared to back the inevitable Kickstart for a print collection in a year or so.

I’m basically just killing time now, having worked out links and the title image and all, waiting to give you a number for the end of the first hour of funding, and here we go:

• Total Backers: 347
• Total Funding: US$18,387³

For reference, that’s nearly 25% more than the actual Strip Search cash prize, and the money keeps on a-comin’. Well done, Abby, and I can’t wait to see The Last Halloween.

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¹ Postal costs could be a killer, assuming she’s shipping from Montreal and many of her backers will be in the US.

² As of this writing, 22 minutes in, she has support for:

• $850 I will design you a custom-made monster, AND you get a death scene in the actual comic. (1 of 2 left)
• $1150 Abby will put you on her “D-List”, a page on her website with a list of names (or aliases) of all those on her D-List accompanied by a sketch of that person (from a picture supplied by you) (Please do not send me a picture of your D). She will also send you a picture of her making a sexy face. Each sexy face will be unique. (9 of 10 left)
• $3200 Abby will tell you her deepest, darkest secret. (9 of 10 left) NB: This reward is accompanied by a sketch of Abby saying Nobody pick this reward okay. You are not allowed.

³ Also the US$850 tier is now sold out, but there’s still room on the D-List!

Two new webcomic-related Kickstarts, not nearly enough time to dig into them as deeply as is probably necessary¹; forgive any superficialities, please.

• On the one hand, Fred Gallagher has bounced back from his most recent health challenges and launched a Kickstart for a “visual novel” type game adaptation of Megatokyo², which has in approximately 45 hours cleared 375% of its US$20,000 goal, hit a bunch of stretch goals, ensured a sequel, and has another 28 days to go. If US$20K seems a low bar for funding a video game, it’s a game type that akin to a text adventure overlaid with art from the comic and a bit of audio — technologically, not something that requires oodles of money, a studio full of people, and a year or more of effort. The US$150,000 stretch goal to make Megatokyo The Visual Novel Game a three-game series seems a virtual certainty.
• On the other hand, Ryan Sohmer launched his third Kickstart of the year for a multiplayer RPG-type game adapted from Looking For Group³, which has in approximately 18 hours raised more than US$40,000, putting it slightly ahead of the Megatokyo effort in the backers-per-day and dollars-per-day departments. However, a multiplayer RPG with full animation and voice acting, with the possibility (via stretch goals) of multiple O/S platform support is something that requires oodles of money, a studio full of people, and a year or more of effort.

  The fact that the basic goal — US$600,000 — is more than the final pie-in-the-sky-no-way-we’ll-reach-it-maybe stretch goal for the Megatokyo project (US$500,000) should give you an idea of the difference in scopes and scales of these two projects. If LFG & The Fork of Truth succeeds, it will be the first high-goal videogame Kickstarts not proposed by an established studio that I can recall (but I don’t follow the videogame section of Kickstarter especially closely), and may prompt further projects of this type. We’ll know soon enough, one way or the other.

• Calling it: Achewood is now on indefinite hiatus, presumably because of the efforts around the proposed animated series. It is for situations like this that RSS (whose demise is greatly overstated) was invented.

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¹ In this case, it’s because I don’t regularly follow either of the webcomics in question.

² Itself inspired by Japanese visual novels, in a nice bit of circle-closing.

³ Itself inspired by MMORPGs, in a nice bit of cirle-closing.

It all comes back to comics:

Sometimes I stop and think about the fact that Homestuck is the 4th longest work in the English language and just kinda nod. — George Rohac

• Know who’s been making himself damn near indispensable to comics as a whole, constructing what may well be the definitive filmic history of the art form? Freddave Kellett-Schroeder, the hive mind that’s been toiling for pert-near four years to bring STRIPPED to a big screen near you. Last night, Fred and Dave released the first five minutes of the film to backers of their Kickstarters, and my friends — it was glorious. Somewhat less than 5300 people have had the opportunity to see that tease, and with any luck the entire world will be able to see the entire thing soon. It’s gonna be great.
• Know who’s been making himself damn near indispensable to an entire community of webcomickers? Brad Guigar, editor and everything-in-chief of Webcomics Dot Com. And in case five years back is fading from your recollection, Guigar was one of the authors of How To Make Webcomics, which tells you exactly what it says on the cover. The thing is, as good as HTMW is, it covers a medium that changes rapidly, and five years is a near-eternity in internet terms.

  There have been many requests for a sequel over the past half-decade, and Guigar has leveraged his writing for WDC to make that sequel, The Webcomics Handbook, now available for pre-order on Kickstarter. This one’s a no-brainer, folks, especially considering that all backer tiers come with — quoting here — Guigar’s “undying friendship”. Remember, the sooner you pledge, the sooner you can book a weekend for him to help you move.

• Strip Search — let’s face it, season one of Strip Search — wrapped up its finale last night which means you’ve had 16 hours (as of this writing) to have seen it, and if you don’t want to be spoiled on it, look away. I was conflicted watching Katie Rice get named the winner: zero surprise, as she’d utterly dominated the back half of the game; elation because her work was so very, very good; crushed because Abby Howard and Maki Naro didn’t win¹.

  In the end, it came down to what comics almost always comes down to — personal preference. Jerry and Mike had to decide what they personally most wanted to see:

  • A longform, horror-based, immersive-world graphic novel² from Abby, and one where they liked her off-the-cuff work better than her planned work
  • An almost anthropological personality study from Maki, not so dependent on your traditional-type punchlines
  • A loose-continuity, every-strip-has-a-punchline story that was the most comic-strippy of the finalists from Katie, and one where as strong as her final competition entries were, her pitch material was even better, giving confidence about how strong a work with plenty of time could be

  From the beginning, they showed a clear preference for work in the vein of what Katie presented, and you know what? That’s okay. Their show, their judgment, and it’s not like giving the nod to Camp Weedonwantcha means that The Last Halloween or Sufficiently Remarkable are erased from our collective memories. I will be reading (and more importantly, buying) all three of those projects because they all hit different pleasure centers in my comics brain³.

  Everybody associated with Strip Search is bound up into a web of professional and personal connections that will last and pay off for decades (Maki had some really gracious thoughts along the same lines today). As was determined back in January:

  Khoo stressed the responsibility that PA had towards the winner. We will do them right. People put their necks out there and trusted us; we didn’t tell them shit. They didn’t know what the show would be like or how we would make them look. For taking that risk, Khoo is determined that the reward is as good as he can make it.

  It’s pretty clear that the doing-right is extending to all the Artists; consider that Alex, who we didn’t get a chance to know, Alex has moved to Seattle, as has Amy, and also Monica (I half expect to hear that Ty and Nick are scoping out the U-Hauls). Add in the proximity of Mac and Erika, and it’s clear that whatever benefits accrue to Katie being in-office will spread fairly immediately to the others in the PNW, and only slightly later to those still scattered across the country. Being part of Strip Search surely helped the crowdfunding that Monica and Lexxy undertook to success, and Erika’s new comic, and the soon-to-be-announced Kickstarts from Maki and Abby. Also, is it a coincidence that since he was on the show, Tavis and his wife had a kid? Okay, yeah, probably, but you never know.

  Whatever else Strip Search achieved (and from everything that Khoo, Jerry Holkins, and Mike Krahulik have said, it wasn’t intended to achieve much beyond being entertaining), they’ve created a resonance cascade of skilled creators who are going to make each other better. Somewhere out there are people that either didn’t make the cut or want to be on a future iteration and are stepping up their own comics games; almost none of them will make it onto the show (whenever a new season might occur), but a nonzero number of them will share their comics with the world.

  Penny Arcade Industries has given us all far more than US$15,000 of comics that we will get to enjoy. Oh, and it’s entirely possible that they’ve created a competitor that will eventually challenge them for their position on the top of the webcomics heap, so it’s a good thing that they’ve still got Khoo on their side … for now.

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¹ Unlike virtually every reality competition ever, I was fully invested in all the finalists; there was no villain or obvious weak link there, meaning that it was guaranteed I would be happy and sad when it was all over.

² AKA, “filthy continuity”.

³ Although to be completely candid, of the three I think Sufficiently Remarkable spoke to me the most and I’m not sure if I can articulate why. In my perfect world, Sufficiently Remarkable has both “daily” and “Sunday” type strips, with the latter having the same feel as the first strip in Maki’s submission packet with Riti and her father.

A pretty deep swath of webcomics had their traffic interrupted yesterday because of malware warnings; the thing of it is, there was never any malware to begin with. Somebody, bored presumably, decided to toss some code into an ad frame whose sole purpose was to trigger Google’s malware detectors, leading to automated warnings and who knows how many reluctant readers. Known to be affected were comics associated with Hiveworks, Questionable Content, and The Devil’s Panties — none of which, it should be stressed again, are believed to have been an actual risk.

I’d almost be able to understand this behavior better if there had been some kind of reward in it; if there were some kind of equities market for webcomics and driving down readership for some high-traffic sites meant that somebody could make some money by shorting those comics, that I could understand (it would still be reprehensible and sociopathic, but at least there would be a motivation). This, though? Pointless.¹

• In entirely better news, the Digger Omnibus Kickstart is well over goal with three weeks still to go, and The AV Club has thrown a little love towards creator Ursula Vernon. Not that Vernon has necessarily noticed, what with being on her honeymoon in Alaska and contemplating interesting purchases which with the success of the Omnibus is probably surprisingly affordable.
• Today’s mandatory² viewing: Ryan North on what to do to optimize human history should you ever come into possession of a time machine: bone down on hotties invent the most crucial and challenging technology of all.

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¹ Congratulations, Expert Hacker, you annoyed a bunch of people that you will never meet, caused work for people that had other things to do, and it didn’t benefit you at all beyond the fact that you proved to yourself that you could. We all agree now: you exist, you matter, you’re just as important as you always suspected you were and you are so cool. No, really.

² You have to watch something while waiting for the Strip Search finale to air in … just under eight hours.

Every so often I get reminded of that time, when Randy Milholland got sick of people who bitched that the free entertainment he offered wasn’t on a regular enough schedule to suit them, and challenged them to put their money where their mouths were. I suspect that said schedule-bitchers never ponied up a dime, but enough people that did want to support Milholland did, which led Milholland to quit the day job and make free comics for our entertainment for a living.

I’m reminded of it this time because tomorrow marks nine years since Uncle Randy walked away from a crappy job and into that free, no-pants paradise that is modern webcomickry¹. Happy Nineiversary, Randy, and thanks for not murdering any of the schedule-bitchers² because incarceration would really mess up your update schedule.

• Today’s really awesome Kickstarter launch is by Evan Dahm, who is funding the first book of his third Overside saga, Vattu: The Name and The Mark. Clocking in at 270 pages, V:TNaTM forms a nicely self-contained story while still forming just the beginning of a much larger story (I’d estimate that by the time it’s done, Vattu will run 1500 – 2000 pages in all, so maybe six to eight collections this size?). In the five hours since launch (as this is being written), Dahm’s at some 97% of goal, which means he’s going to hit the only stretch goal announced so far:
  

  If it makes goal within the first day (by 10 am EST Tuesday), I will include a Kickstarter-exclusive small print with all physical rewards.

  Evan? You might want to think up some more stretch goals, on account of you’ve still got … 20 days and 19 hours, more or less, and I think you might go just a bit over goal.

• Are you a fan of awesome things? One would hope so, as that’s pretty much the focus we at Fleen have. Hope Larson, in addition to creating some of the finest [web]comics of the past decade or so, has over the past year dipped her toes into film-making, and her first efforts are now available for you to sample. Bitter Orange, Larson’s screenwriting and directorial debut, is now streaming, and it comes with an endorsement from no less than the finest writer on movies presently working in the English language.

  I speak, naturally, of Film Crit Hulk, whose observations on film are always a delight, and who gets Larson’s work like few others. Seriously, every time I write about one of Larson’s new books, I know that I won’t be a fraction as insightful or erudite as Hulk.³ But honestly? The best part of Bitter Orange comes at the very end of the credits; no easter eggs here, just a line that says:

  COPYRIGHT © MMXIII HOPE LARSON

  She thought up a story, she found a way to make it in her medium of choice, and now she owns it. In the wake of a damn-near internet-wide fight about whether or not large corporations can farm out their IP to movie-makers that may or may not understand what makes characters special, having a creator in charge of their vision is always worth celebrating.

• On Friday I speculated as to whether or not the Strip Search finalists knew who had won yet. Today, I noticed a tweet from Abby Howard in advance of tomorrow night’s finale screening/streaming:
  

  This is going to be my first non-stressful flight to Seattle! There’s no mystery or fear or uncertainty awaiting ONLY FRIENDSHIP #FRIENDSHIP

  Interpret how you will, and be ready to watch the whole thing come to a crescendo at 7:30pm PDT tomorrow, 18 June 2013.

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¹ Note to casual readers: no part of comicking is entirely paradisiacal, but the no-pants thing is frequently true.

² That we know of, and if you were tried by a jury of your actual, no-pants peers, not only would they not convict, they’d send you home with a medal.

³ To say nothing of my pathetic, puny smashing skills.

David Malki ! of Wondermark¹ has provided a button underneath his strip that says This comic in a blog-friendly format which, when clicked, reformats his strip as 2×2 panels in a pop-up. Heck, if he’s gonna provide it, I’m gonna click it. Neat.

• If you haven’t seen the first part of the Strip Search season one finale, what the crap-hell are you waiting for? Katie, Abby, and Maki each brought a fully-fleshed pitch for Mike and Jerry to pore over, and regardless of who wins I want to see all three of these as a part of my regular rotation. Be sure to look over their submissions after watching the episode, because there’s some marvelous work in there².

  Spoiler #1: It’s a three-way showdown for the top prize, as the Artists are given four hours to produce three strips that fit into their new comic concepts.
  Spoiler #2: Holy crap with less than two and a half hours left Katie asks to abandon her Cintiq and start over on paper. Credits roll just as she starts to put pencil to paper, so we all have to wait until 7:30pm PDT (GMT-7) on Tuesday, 18 June to see how it turns out.

  Spoilery speculation: It’s been months since the three-way showdown, which means one of two things is true: either our finalists have been waiting all this time to find out who wins (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not knowing), or they know and haven’t been allowed to say for all this time (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not talking). Here’s to Tuesday when we can all find out what the hell is going on.

• Intriguing Kickstarter of the Day: Darren Gendron has launched a campaign behind a fantasy (specifically, faerie) themed card deck, and recruited some of the best in webcomics artists to do designs. Gendron’s pretty noted for projects with relatively low goals, fast turnarounds, and low cost of basic (physical) rewards as well as pushing into spaces where webcomics don’t usually go (board books, board games, etc.). In this case, if you’re a fan of Obsidian Abnormal, Evan Dahm, Lar deSouza, Yan Gagné and Mary Garren, K Lynn Smith, LJ Lockhart, Sarah Ellerton, or Jamie Noguchi, you could do worse than popping eight or nine bucks to get a small representation of their artwork on a deck of cards that can also be used to fleece your friends at poker.

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¹ And Machine of Death and TopatoCo and a lot more besides.

² Particularly Katie’s, whose children-in-peril story has a Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends vibe that’s making me feel joy in my black, cynical heart.

It’s been a long damn time since the parallel diary comic So Far Apart by Rene Engström and Rasmus Gran has updated, more than nine months¹ in fact. Last week we got a teaser that — yay! — new updates were a-comin’, and today we saw what Engström and Gran have been up to. I think I speak for most readers when I note that I read the Rasmus panels of this long-distance relationship comic first because he’s on the left side of the page, so I think I’m justified in saying while I understand the benefit of surprises and suspense, that was one hell of a buried lede in the last panel, buddy.

As always in SFA, Rene ‘n’ Rasmus often have differing viewpoints one how to share their lives with us: he catches up the high points and jumps to Oh yeah, we’re pregnant, some months into the process and sonograms and such; she focuses on the decision that they should get pregnant and the surprise that it happened as quickly as it did.

I cannot say how happy I am for Engström and Gran; they are not only obviously in love when you meet them, their love is strong enough to survive great distances² as well as terrifyingly complete honesty; there are plenty of episodes of SFA where one or both of them comes off pretty poorly because that is what being in love is really like — you like each other, you fight, you have petty little disagreements that blow up into anger, and (if you’re lucky) you are still in love. To face those frictions that any couple has, multiplied by 1200km, raised to the power of sharing it with all the world? They’ve got to be crazy in love, because merely crazy doesn’t explain all of it.

There are big changes coming soon to their lives (part of the reason for the distance between them was the need to be with their respective kids, and Gran notes in this new update that his eldest son is now an adult) and we’re just on part one of the catching-up. Congratulations to them both, and hooray for adorable little Swedish kidlings.

• Exhibit A: Strong Female Characters, courtesy Kate Beaton, Meredith Gran, and Carly Monardo.
• Exhibit B: Blood-Thirsty Space Smooch Assassins, courtesy Bravest Warriors issue #9. I’m going to attribute the remarkable resemblance to writer Joey Comeau and artist Mike Holmes knowing a good thing when they see it while also respecting the fact that BW is all-ages. This issue also features body-slams and smooches. It’s rad.

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¹ Keep that number in mind.

² Two days hard riding by motorcycle or an overnight train separate their living places in the southern tip and midpoint of Sweden.