A little behind the times on some things, pretty up to date on others.

• Just a reminder that Lucy Knisley’s Relish will be in stores next week, and that it got the Fleen Seal of Approval and you should totally pick it up. As an appetizer, why not check out Knisley’s collaboration with Erin Meister at Saveur’s Recipe Comix?
• Time for a periodic reminder that you New York area types can drag your silly comic-obsessed asses into adult sophistication with the help of a little wine education, courtesy of Kristen Siebecker¹ and her recurring Popping Your Cork series. The Spring PYC will be Wednesday, 10 April (for all you people maybe hanging around after MoCCA?) at Simple Studios in Midtown. Previous classes have sold out so hurry — and use the code FRIEND10 for a 10% discount.
• One of the hallmarks of Kickstarter is that you can’t solicit for charity, which makes sense — you don’t want to get into a dispute where you wonder if money raised under the pretenses of going (wholly or partially) to charity doesn’t. So Machine of Death impressario David Malki ! didn’t come close to mentioning that he wanted to devote some of the proceeds of the MoD game to the literacy and writing charity, 826LA. From the MoD project update page:
  

  MYSTERY STRETCH GOALS:
  Continue reading this post on the Machine of Death blog!

  And from there, the news that the MoD Squad planned to donate one dollar per game (both physical and PDF) ordered to 826LA, for a total of 10,938 games which rounds up nicely to US$11,000. This was enabled by clearing the US$382,600 level. And as a further act of being an stellar person, Malki ! announced that by clearing 8260 backers, MoD books and games will be donated to 826LA for sale in their shop to support their programs. As if that weren’t enough, there will be 826LA-exclusive MoD game content for purchases of MoD stuff via the 826LA online store starting in June.

  Given that the Machine of Death game is about creative and collaborative storytelling, I can’t think of a better place for their largesse to go — 826LA (and its affiliated programs around the country) may well be responsible for finding the next great storyteller, one that wouldn’t have been nurtured without 826’s help.

  Malki ! also did a vlog interview with Matthew Lesko². I suspect that although the interview was very well managed by Malki ! and conveyed his philosophy of Kickstarting very well, the wrong message may be taken by a percentage of the people that watch it. Lesko’s spent so much time hawking the idea that there is free money out there for the having, and here this guy wound up with half a million dollars, that the people most receptive to Lesko’s message will only hear that number and apply it to the message he’s so well known for.

  This is not an unknown situation in crowdfunding, and while those that watch the video because they know Malki !, or MoD, or Kickstarter in general will likely be more resistant to the siren call of Free! Money!, I sincerely hope that he (Malki !) has put in place good filters on his email, as he’s most likely going to be getting a substantial number of people wanting to know how they can get half a million dollars, too³.

• Oh, and one more thing: new Nicholas Gurewitch cartoon at Boing Boing! Great gag, terrific visual, and Mass Casualty Incident classes will be using that last panel to illustrate what a cluster MCIs can become.

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¹ Sommelier, wife of a comics guy of some note, and original showrunner of MoCCA Fest, the latest iteration of which is approaching rapidly.

² Full disclaimer: I have encountered Lesko twice in person at random — once on the streets of Bethesda, MD and once in New York’s Penn Station. He looked really annoyed at life both times and kinda elbowed me in the ribs semi-accidentally on his way through a tight slalom of people.

³ We at Fleen haven’t done a comprehensive survey, but this is most likely the new contender for the longest, most convoluted sentence in the blog’s history. Yay?

GIFs and graphics process and generational struggles, oh my.

• Oh Rich Stevens, you coffee-fueled, pixel-wrangling, furiously-kerning machine, how I wish I could put a copy of today’s strip up there in all its animated GIF glory. More to the point, props for constructing a strip that can be read in more than one pattern and still make sense — it’s like a small-scale exercise in Carl.
• Off to a good start: PC Weenies creator and process geek Krishna Sadasivam has set up a Tumblr that allows him to ask artists he admires four questions about how they work:
   
  1. Who are you and what do you do?
  2. What’s your hardware setup?
  3. What’s your workspace look like?
  4. What tools do you use to make your cartoons?

  … and then get them to tie that information into a demonstration of their art via the simple instruction Draw Me A Robot, thus delving into the mind of a fellow creator. No word yet on what Sadasivam plans to do with those minds (one hopes nothing too icky, but as we all know, there ain’t nothing so fun as having a pile o’ brains), but until it all turns sinister, you can enjoy the questions and answers.

  Quick note, though — if you’re not reading DMAR on mobile, the pictures of hardware, workspaces, and robots won’t show until you click on the navigation arrows that are to either side of the artist’s photo (Sadasivam has coded things so they’ll highlight in orange when you mouse over them), so don’t overlook those. If you’re on mobile (at least, on my Android), you’ll see all the photos for a given post together.

• That National Cartoonists Society announced nominations for its various division awards this morning, including the second year of webcomics getting nods (and the first for long-form webcomics). Okay, this is gonna require a couple of disclaimers.
   
  • I was part of the screening committee for the webcomics awards again this year. This meant that we received all of the self-nominated works, vetted them against the criteria that the NCS established. We were able to add additional comics for consideration¹, and forwarded the list of self-nominees and committee adds onto a jury, which whittled each category down to three comics.
  • That illustration up there at the top of the page? A webcomicker happily webcomicking? That’s by Meredith Gran, who is a friend of mine.

  Everybody got all that? Cards all on the table? Good. Because I want to point out that one of the nominees in the long-form category this year is — Meredith Gran for Octopus Pie, and I can’t think of anybody that deserves the recognition more. Reached for comment, Gran said

  It feels rad. These guys are the foundation of my comics experience. And I’m so pleased to see the new category for “long form” comic strips, a format that has really thrived in webcomics.

  Now it wouldn’t be an award if there weren’t a difference of opinions². Quoth Jon Rosenberg³ (winner of the very first NCS webcomics division award, last year), on Twitter:

  All three of the Online Comic Short Form nominees are from GoComics/Universal. None are independent. Pathetic. http://www.reuben.org/

  That prompted a rely from Tom Richmond, NCS President, member of the usual gang of idiots, and exception to the rule that cartoonists are malnourished, hunched-over physical wrecks; seriously, he’s huge with arms the size of my chest cavity. Enormous, muscular, and thankfully very polite man, because he could definitely intone the answer to What is best in life? and make you believe it.

  Where was I? Oh, yes, Richmond responded to Rosenberg about the nomination process, and I believe that they finished on good terms; awesome, disagreement but polite. Apparently, not everybody was as generous towards Rosenberg, which is unfortunate.

  The process isn’t perfect — I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again — because no process is perfect, at least not until I’m made Benevolent God-Dictator For Life and get to decide who lives and who dies. As I’ve said before, perfect is the enemy of progress, and the way to get closer to perfect is to participate.

  I’ve been honored to participate on the screening committee for two years now, because I want to see the best creators recognized; the fact that it has to go through another set of hands (which may or may not track my views on what is the best work of the year) doesn’t change the fact that my views are at least getting into the process.

  Richmond is participating; probably nobody has worked harder to get these categories considered and now finally implemented. Rosenberg is participating because he’s now a member of the NCS and at some point they’ll call on him to be a part of one of these juries because what the heck — he knows what the kids are doing because he’s one of them⁴.

  Think the nominations could have been better? Awesome — join (or replace!) me and Tom and Jon in the process next year; join the NCS if you’re eligible and before you know it you’ll be part of the generation running things, while the new kids wonder why you’re keeping them down. You can tell them it’s my fault, that’s cool.

  And with that thought in mind, the full set of nominees for webcomics at the NCS Awards this year will be:

  Short Form
  Graham Harrop for Ten Cats
  Jonathan Lemon for Rabbits Against Magic
  Michael McParlane for Mac

  Long Form
  Vince Dorse for Untold Tales of Bigfoot
  Meredith Gran for Octopus Pie
  Pat N. Lewis for Muscles Diablo in Where Terror Lurks

  Fleen congratulates all of the nominees and wishes them good luck, but is totally in the tank for Meredith.

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¹ And did — by my count, nineteen additional short- and long-form comics were added by the committee.

² Let me be perfectly clear: I am not indicating any agreement nor disagreement with any opinions opined upon by various people here, and am acting purely as a hack webcomics pseudojournalist. Given my participation in the process, I feel editorializing on the nominations themselves is bad form.

³ Disclaimer time again — as noted a few days ago, Jon and I have deep ties.

⁴ Frank Zappa wrote of how the explosion of musical talent in the ’60s really happened: a cigar-chomping record company exec said to his assistant about the kid in the mailroom, Sherman, listen — I think we can trust him. We’ll make him an A&R man — let HIM talk to these stupid fuckers with the tambourine ‘n incense. He understands this shit — he’s got the same hair. (page 204).

Not webcomics, but I first noticed it because of the Twitterfeed of Cameron Stewart: a new collaborative project to wrangle 468 artists to each reinterpret five pages from the six volumes of Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira in the style of The Simpsons. Bartkira, as it’s been dubbed, now has over 300 artists participating and a character assignment map that is brilliant in how appropriate some of the choices are. Part of Stewart’s contribution (with Ralph Wiggum in the title role) is shown above.

All together now:

BAAAAAAART!
MIIIILLLLLHOOOOOUUUUUUSE!
<mutations, lasers, sattelites ‘splode stuff>

• Howard Tayler¹ sent me a very nice (automated) email over the weekend, regarding his recently-concluded Kickstarter campaign and pointing me towards something I hadn’t encountered before.

  After The Crowd is a pledge-management solution that imports the data that a creator (Tayler in this case) receives from Kickstarter, and allows the mapping of pledges to specific rewards (Tayler had several tiers that amounted to choose any x out of these y options) and add-on purchases.

  Unfortunately, I can’t show you the very nice interface that I was presented with (access to that part of ATC is via individually-tailored² links that are good for one use), but trust me, it was spiffy: pictures of all the possible rewards, an accounting of what I’d already pledged, what I’d already be receiving, and an easy way to tinker with my desired order. Then the money got added up and if I owed more for add-ons (I didn’t), a link to PayPal.

  Per Tayler, the add-ons that were so very easy (and tempting) to add pushed his funding total as of yesterday from 8571% of goal to over 9000 [A/V]. For anybody that’s running a Kickstarter³ with a wide variety of pledge rewards (or a mix-and-match approach to rewards), I’d strong urge you to check out After The Crowd or one of the similar solutions that will inevitably be developed in the very near future.

• Also, a little bit after that, Tayler wrote up the most recent of his received wisdoms re: crowdfunding where he opines that the worst risk of a Kickstarter isn’t failing to fund — it’s a mixture of failing to deliver or to learn. Or maybe it’s just the risk of finding out that the world disappointed you deeply [NSFW?]. Bad world, bad, bad world!
• In case you hadn’t seen it yet, Randall Munroe is playing out a story very, very slowly in today’s xkcd — from my casual observation it’s running about one frame per hour. Undoubtedly, once it’s complete it will be collected many places around for you to take in the full experience at a faster pace, but for the moment it’s utterly captivating, melancholy, and on the verge of existentialist dread. It could be telling us either a gentle, hopeful story or one full of loss. There needs to be an adjective to describe that midpoint between anticipation and dread.

________________
¹ Evil twin, opposites in all ways, etc.

² Or perhaps “Taylered”, in this case.

³ And isn’t able to get Make That Thing to handle all the logistics.

PAXEast kicked off this morning and if I’ve done my timekeeping correctly, a whole passel of Strip Search Artists are, even as I type, on a panel having just watched the second elimination episode with the PAXers on a suitably large screen. Two thoughts:

• These eliminations are starting to get both heartbreaking and heartwarming, as Mike and Jerry clearly are pulling no punched in the judging, yet going out of their way to encourage the Artists in such a way as challenge them to better themselves in their careers. Can’t wait to see when in the season we get to peek in on what’s happening at The Afterlife¹.
• The editing process must have been tougher than the producers estimated in January, when it was predicted that the episodes would track in the 12 – 15 minute range. So far, only one episode has been less than 15 minutes, two between 15 and 20, and the remainder over 20 minutes. Instead of a three-episode day taking the equivalent of 45 minutes (an “hour” of TV minus commercials), it’s going to be closer to a full hour, meaning this show is more content-rich than actual broadcast alternatives.
• Okay, third thing, I lied. Strip Search Artist Monica Ray is crowdfunding her first Phuzzy Comics collection, and the video is alternately hilarious and adorable. Were I not backing Hurricane Erika, I think that Monica would be one of my picks to win the competition, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want her book. Others seem to agree, as she’s a day in and over her goal by a good 20%, with 30 days left to go. If you were at the panel and saw her, I hope you told her, “Gary said hi”.

________________
¹ The name given by production staff to the house where the eliminated Artists were held until the competition was done. Once again, I am compelled to point out that even when given a specific opportunity to do so, Robert Khoo did not deny that The Afterlife was stocked with booze and hookers of all genders. I wonder how airtight the NDAs actually are….

Jon Rosenberg¹ is in the midst of running a Guest Month at his comic, for the very best of reasons: knuckling down to complete a project that was Kickstarted longer ago than he’d like to admit. For the record, he is behind on that project for an even best-er of reasons: the demands on his time presented by medical circumstances that saw his wife beat the odds on a gestational syndrome that frequently claims the lives of unborn children.

Jon’s twin sons were born tiny, premature to a degree that would have meant certain death only a decade ago. Today they are adorable and healthy, but with developmental challenges that would sap 28 hours a day from people who are not also trying to maintain an independent arts career².

Where was I? Oh, yes: the muse, she is sometimes fickle when you’re trying to work out a physical therapy regimen for toddlers, which means Guest Month frees up the time to produce Goats IV: Inhuman Resources, the progress of which is now kicked into gear; all of this is right and good. However, Jon found a way to make it right-er and good-er this morning with an announcement:

Just received the Goats IV foreword, written by none other than @doctorow himself. I’m at a loss for words. It’s wonderful.

At press time, it was not determined if Cory Doctorow either wrote or delivered the foreword in question while wearing a red cape and goggles, nor if either activity was performed in/by a balloon. It is confirmed that Doctorow’s command of language is absolute:

The words “ferocious headmeat” are employed.

I for one cannot wait to see what follows those two words, and thanks to the generosity of Jon’s colleagues³, I won’t have to wait much longer.

_______________
¹ Full disclosures: Jon is almost entirely responsible for my immersion in webcomics circles, and entirely responsible for the launch of this blog. Also, he owns my soul (I got a dollar for it) and despite his general aversion to being in physical contact or even being closer to me than three postal codes, remains a very good friend.

² He is also regularly beset by idiots in social media that don’t know shit about him or his situation and feel this gives them the right to explain exactly how he is therefore wrong. Seriously, fuck those guys, and especially fuck you, guy that threatened from the far side of the globe to report Jon to child protective services because you didn’t know what the word physiatrist meant.

³ David Willis, Zach Weinersmith, David McGuire, Chris Yates, and William Tallman so far, with more to come.

Spring when all is good and well again and we may venture outside and breathe deep of the outdoors and almost get murdered by a psycho in a van. Best wishes to John Arthur Kelly, aka the three meter tall grumpy guy from Johnny Wander¹. So maybe stay indoors where you won’t get splattered by a sociopath and if you live in New York and need some work done, you can ask the HVAC company that owned the vehicle in question if they’ve identified their employee that tried to kill John, and too bad, guess you won’t use their company after all since they’re harboring a threat and/or menace.

• Some 14 hours after closing (long enough to be confident that all last-minute adjustments were complete), the Machine of Death card game Kickstarter stands complete at US$556,596 and 10,666 backers and holy crap you guys.

  What may be most impressive to me is the number of people willing to back the project at levels that were clearly some kind of Dadaesque statement (show your copy of the game to a goat before shipping: five people paid more than a US$100 premium over a tier where they could get the same stuff without the goats) or merely to screw with creator David Malki ! (one person pledged nearly US$500 to make Malki ! hand-write all the card, which come to more than 900 separate items).

  There’s a word for actions that have little direct bearing on the mechanics of our lives but which create their own emotion (in this case: amusement and schadenfreude, respectively), and that word is Art. It maybe disguised as a card game, but Malki ! used it as a vehicle for something more, I think.².

• In a month and a half, it might be safe to go back outside again, particularly if you rush back inside and the famed Toronto Reference Library for the equally-famed TCAF, which announced some new featured guests yesterday. The one that caught my eye is French [web]comicker Boulet (en Français ici; in English here), who will apparently be making a third appearance on this side of the Atlantic, where he may still have copies of the extremely limited print version of Darkness that will be available at Stumptown³ and MoCCA in the weeks prior.
• We spoke about Howard Tayler (my evil twin), his nearly-concluded Kickstarter campaign, and the value of reining in the stretch goals a few weeks ago, and Tayler is now chiming in on the same topic in what is likely his last update prior to the close of campaign:
  

  Enough With The Stretching

  It looks like you’re going to unlock at least three if not four ship coins.

  Once that happens, I am done designing coins for this project. Why? Because the designs take about a week to hammer on and get right. Four coins right at the end is already a bit of a stretch (ahem) and I want to make sure that I actually ship all of these coins out in April, like I promised to.

  Think about that for a moment. A successful project should ship ON TIME. A wildly successful project should ALSO ship on time, right? I’m reining it in as best I can, and agonizing over every potential slip of schedule. [emphasis and large text original]

  Drop in the obligatory noting that a wise man knows his limitations and gratitude towards whoever taught the youthful Evil Version of Gary From A Parallel Reality the values of both time management and fanatical devotion to promised goals.

_______________
¹ Most of that sentence is a lie; I’ve met John and while he may look enormous next to Yuko, he’s not three meters by any stretch. He is also a delightful person and even the dreaded Punishment Shirt turned out to be not so bad as I’m told Cricket falls asleep in there now. We are very glad to hear that he wasn’t badly injured, and hope that there’s some form of justice for his destroyed bike.

² Also — look at that chart of backers and dollars by day; that’s just amazing to look at. Malki ! broke nearly every single rule on this campaign and when Kickstarter Theory is taught in the MBA programs of the future, this will be Case Study #1.

³ The annual awards of which, by the way, now include a Best Webcomic. Nominations [PDF] accepted until 30 March.

First thing that doesn’t happen very often: It looks like Holly Rowland was wrong when she said:

Sorry, @malki – I was pretty convinced you were going to hit $500K until the Veronica Mars project dropped. ;)

in reference to the Machine of Death game Kickstarter because dang, y’all, it’s up more than US$45,000 since yesterday and (as of the time of this writing) within spitting distance of a cool half-mil¹. It’s also exceeded the initial Kicktraq projection, whereas Gary’s First Law of Kicktraq Projections is they overestimate the final total by a factor of three to six².

Oh, and that “by the time I’m done eating lunch” call was obliterated; with nine hours to go, today is already the second-highest day for fundraising in the MoD game campaign, eclipsed only by yesterday. Upticks at the end aren’t unheard of, but only the true outliers exceed the totals of the first couple of days.

Second thing that doesn’t happen very often: a webcomic hits 3000 updates. In the four and a half years since I waxed rhapsodically about Irregular Webcomic hitting the 2000 mark, quite a few more webcomics have hit the multiple-thousands achievement, but it’s still pretty damn impressive. This time the new That’s A Lotta Damn Zeros Club inks another tickmark next to the name of Greg Dean, who hit 3000 strips of Real Life today, despite a toddler-driven irregular update schedule and a general eschewance of the convention circuit. Well done, Mr Dean; now get to work, you’ve got #3001 to do.

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¹ It is an absolute certainty it will be over five hundred thousand before I’m done eating lunch — and I’m a fast eater, you guys. I guess in all fairness, “Webcomic Kickstarter hitting a half-million dollars” is the thing that doesn’t happen very often, but I’m giving 50-50 odds on Aaron Diaz³ hitting the mark in the next week. So yeah, Holly being incorrect is the uncommon thing in this discussion.

² Case in point: the Schlock Mercenary challenge coin Kickstarter, which is on a nice gentle glide path towards 7400% of goal, plus or minus. Based on the first day’s backing totals, I predicted a finish between 5550% and 11,100% (respectively, 1/6th and 1/3rd of the initial estimate), and it looks like we’ll land square in the middle of that range.

³ Tolkien and dinosaur scholar par excellence.

It all seems to be about the green¹ today.

• The first of the Big Four Webcomics Kickstarters of February Aught-Thirteen has wrapped, with the Cyanide & Happiness guys netting just over US$770,000 with a slight upward tick at the end there. For reference, as of this writing the other three of the Big Four are sitting at:
  • Machine of Death: US$454,000
  • Schlock Mercenary: US$115,000
  • Dresden Codak: US$362,000

  For a grand total of 1.701 million dollars American cash money. Granted, there’s Kickstarter² fees and Amazon fees and taxes and all the rest, but the compelling story remains: more money, more value for your backer contribution.

• The ur-example of more value for your backer contribution remains the Choose Your Own Hamlet by the Reconstituted Toronto Man-Mountain, who is even as we speak laying out the book, overseeing the recording of the audiobook, prototyping lil’ plush Yorick skulls, and giving us a sneak peek at one gorgeous map of the choices that can be made, which is itself made too look like Yorick’s skull. Dang, y’all.
• In fact, the only part of the increasing coolness of the Choose Your Own Hamlet that the aforementioned RTM-M³ isn’t responsible for would be the live-action version of Choose Your Own Hamlet, which will have its premiere this weekend in Busan, South Korea, thanks to local director (and webcomickin’ madman) Ryan Estrada. The presentation of To Be or Not To Be (a live, choose-your-own-adventure play) will be this Saturday at 9:00 EDT (GMT-4, or check your local time here) over the internet.

  Sure, the live audience will have the thrill of watching the actors try to manage hundreds of possible story paths, but you at home can do the same thing, and you can vote on those choices that will affect the story. Just don’t make the choices that keep Ophelia in her original, put-upon, depressive, dishrag-type personality because if you do, the text of the book (and presumably the play) will say that you aren’t allowed to be Ophelia for a while.

  The details on To Be or Not To Be (a live, choose-your-own-adventure play) are at Google+ where you can choose to watch the streaming glory and participate. It is in all likelihood the first live play designed for such social media technology and you’ll want to be able to tell your grandkids where you there at the beginning.

• As part of my theme on money, I was going to point you to a situation where a billing mishap left The Adventures of Dr McNinja facing a shutdown later this week, with the possibility of creator Chris Hastings being sent to collections⁴. Fortunately, that all got resolved before I had a chance to say anything about it, so well done McNinja fans. As always, there’s a lesson here, which in this case unfortunately is of the variety that you have to police the people that are (supposed to be) taking your money because if they don’t do so successfully they may make your life miserable.

  I once had a cable company that received the checks I sent them and credited my bill as paid, but never actually cashed them. This went on for six months and only came to a head when I moved house and tried to get my cable disconnected. Then they tried to hit me with hundreds of dollars of “late fees” because I dunno, they lost my checks or something? The fact that I had statements showing that my bills were paid each month didn’t seem to matter until I mentioned involving utility regulators with the state of New Jersey, then they decided to write it off in the interests of keeping a satisfied customer. Then I moved and never used them again THE END.

  Where was I? Oh, yes — it seems stupid to have to follow up with people to make sure they’re actually taking your money (you’d think they were really interested in doing so on their own), but sadly it’s true. You have to be more business type than artist to make it as an independent artist, so take those steps towards due diligence and it will make your life easier in the long run.

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¹ Note for people not in the US: our paper currency is boring, kinda greenish on one side and mostly black on the other. We desperately need somebody from a country that knows how to make pretty cash convince the stick-up-their-asses types in Washington that bills don’t need to be drab.

² How ubiquitous is Kickstarter these days? My sister brought it up the other day, asking me to explain how her friend, a musician, managed to raise US$49,000 to master & press an album and what the crap-hell?

³ Known around the house as Ryan North

⁴ If you don’t happen to know Chris Hastings, you should be aware of two things:

• He is just the nicest guy, even nicer than he appears to be via the internet if you can imagine such a thing
• He is too pretty to be sent to collections, you guys

Long week, so let me just leave you with this still from John Allison’s entirely wonderful Bad Machinery; it’s the end of The Case of the Unwelcome Visitor, and I think it perfectly captures the joy of being young, carefree, and with your friends, without so much as a word. And as long as we’re on the topic, the first Oni Press collection of Bad Machinery drops in twelve days, so get ready to pick that up because this right here? It’s not optional.

Sorry, @malki – I was pretty convinced you were going to hit $500K until the Veronica Mars project dropped. ;)
— TopatoCo and Make That Thing impressario Holly Rowland, yesterday afternoon.

This is likely to be ramblier and less structured than much of what I write. Apologies in advance.

I am deeply conflicted on the burning-hot Veronica Mars movie Kickstarter (presently about 16 hours in and a total of US$2,749,938 raised). Not because I never watched Veronica Mars when it was on TV and am not invested in it — the fact that I don’t have any interest in the project doesn’t make it threatening to me or the projects I want to back¹. I’m conflicted because it’s got me wondering deeply about the purpose of Kickstarter.

Some people in the Net-o-Sphere are objecting to the project because it’s large, because it’s not a personal endeavour done by a creator (or small group), but that doesn’t bother me either. Kickstarter can be for little folks as well as big folks². Rather than finding the scope troubling, I’m worried more about the why of Kickstarter in this case.

Let’s take another moving-pictures example. The Cyanide & Happiness folks have raised (as of now) US$583,142 towards a streaming TV show. While C&H is pretty darn successful, I kind of doubt that between them Kris, Dave, Matt, and Rob have the quarter-mil that was their original goal sitting around in the couch cushions; without the campaign, they couldn’t have made the show happen³.

I’m sure that Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas likewise doesn’t have two million dollars (his original goal) to make a movie sitting around — but that’s not to say that the movie couldn’t have been made. It’s my understanding that although VM is his baby and brainchild, the rights and ownership reside with Warner Bros., who merely have chosen not to make a VM movie because they didn’t think it would be profitable enough. They could find two million dollars if they wanted to without even dipping into next month’s hookers-and-blow “office supplies” budget, but decided instead that Thomas should do the legwork to prove the demand for such a movie.

In other words, Kickstarter is being used not as a funding instrument (like a bank loan), but more of a second-order financial instrument; if my listening to Marketplace hasn’t led me astray, it’s akin to the process known as “leverage” — I put up a bit of money, get others to put up more, and then they have an ownership interest but the risks are still mostly on me to make the enterprise work. It’s how takeover-and-dump financiers made money by breaking up or shutting down companies in the ’80s and ’90s.

Not that Thomas is of an ilk with the financial cowboys who trashed the economy two or three trashings ago; he’s a creator that wants to make something, but has to play by somebody else’s rules. Warners, in this case, has created a situation where they are guaranteed to make money — Thomas has raised the money to make the movie and gin up the audience, they distribute/own it, keep some of the money and pay him some⁴, and don’t have to bear any risk. They will make exactly as much money as they would have had they put up the two million in development/production costs, but without having to put up the costs in the first place.

Which I guess means they make two million dollars more than they would have. Sweet deal for them.

It really reminds me of the very bad publishing contracts that Scalzi has been writing about where the publisher (in this analogy, WB) expects the author (Thomas) to bear all the costs and risks that would traditionally represent the publisher’s investment against the possibility of profit. It’s disturbing.

Not that there aren’t similar arrangements in popular entertainment already. It’s my understanding that even long-anticipated videogames may be canceled if they don’t garner enough pre-orders to help cover the costs of development. However (and please correct me if I’m wrong, as I’ve never pre-ordered a videogame), if I were to buy a game on Day One of release, I won’t pay any less than somebody who pre-ordered (although I may have to wait for a supply to come in). If I were to back the VM Kickstarter at the lower tiers, my outcome would be:

• Pledging less than US$35: I still have to buy a ticket to see the movie when it comes out (with a PDF script and/or t-shirt as a side reward)
• Pledging US$35 to US$49: I get a digital copy of the movie to download, but still have to buy a ticket to see the movie in a theater (plus the script and t-shirt)
• Pledging at least US$50: I get the DVD when it comes out, but still have to buy a ticket to see the movie in a theater (plus the script and t-shirt)

I’d feel a lot more comfortable if there were some way for backers at some threshold (say US$10 or US$15) to get a free pass to the movie, but accept it may not be possible. However, I’d really like to focus on that third reward: US$50 for a DVD. Compare to somebody who doesn’t contribute to the campaign: I can buy a ticket same as a backer, and when the DVD comes out, it sure as heck won’t cost fifty bucks. The non-backer is advantaged over the backer in this situation. The DVD will not be exclusive to backers; Warners will sell that sumbitch to everybody they can, because that’s money they’d be leaving on the table otherwise.

The advantages to the backer of the Kickstarter are less than to those of the non-backer. It’s not like you won’t be able to see the movie if you aren’t a backer, or have to pay more, or get to see it before non-backers by a significant amount of time. Were Thomas the owner of the project in a meaningful sense, that might happen; but WB is designed to get as many people as possible to give them as much money as possible, which only happens by not treating the backers as privileged.

Finally, Thomas appears to have embraced the Kickstarter ethic of “more money, I’ll make the thing better for you”, talking about how much more he can accomplish within the film with a higher budget. Kudos. Looking at megasuccessful Kickstarts in the webcomics sphere, hitting hundreds of thousands of dollars won’t make Ryan North or Zach Weinersmith or Aaron Diaz richer, because they’re putting the money back into the project and giving the backers more for their money; in fact, given that they’ve taken on more work and production burdens, it’s arguable they come out behind in such a deal.

But I can’t shake the feeling that while Thomas will be giving back to the backers in such a fashion, the more direct outcome will be a bigger inflow of money (given a more polished film that generates more demand) to the studio who — again — seem to be reaping rewards without shouldering any burden. It would kill Kickstarter, which would be no real loss to the corporations, but a devastating blow to the independent creators who were its original reason for being.

So as my thoughts have evolved in the time it’s taken to write this (and as the campaign has increased its take to US$2,759,088), I guess that means I’ve coalesced around several objections:

• Kickstarter isn’t being used to make a project possible for a creator so much as it is to minimize effort by a rights-holder
• Kickstarter is being used as a complex financial instrument rather than a funding mechanism⁵
• Backers are disadvantaged compared to non-backers⁶
• The creator is undertaking the burden of both raising capital and production, but the purported publisher will be making money without a matching risk or investment

I hope that Thomas breaks all records and that VM fans get exactly what they want from the movie; I also hope that this isn’t the start of a trend to use Kickstarter to burnish the bottom lines of corporations that could make projects but choose not to without a guarantee of profit.

PS: US$2,769,005.
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¹ And to be perfectly clear, that quoted tweet up top does not indicate that Holly Rowland is threatened either; in fact, I believe that she’s backed the project.

² As far as keeping Kickstarter a viable platform, having some really huge fundraisers is valuable, given that they make their money and keep their service running by taking their cut from successful projects.

³ At least not on their terms; multiple networks were willing to finance it at the cost of ownership.

⁴ I’m being optimistic here that Thomas is smart enough to budget into the two mil a salary for himself; I don’t think for a second that a studio with a guarantee of income would pay out any more than they absolutely had to, following a decade of accounting voodoo.

⁵ If we continue down this path, there could come into being Kickstarter-based derivatives, and then that’s the beginning of the end. The purpose of the platform will be to make money by making money instead of making money by undertaking projects. It’s also how the economy got trashed the most recent time.

⁶ We’re assuming a successful delivery here; there’s plenty of projects where the backers are disadvantaged by getting their rewards late or not at all, but in those cases non-backers typically don’t have the opportunity to get anything of substance from the project.