It’s an incremental kind of day today — additional details here and there, but nothing like the big news we got yesterday. Let’s run down the list.

• Meredith Gran, Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb¹, and the ghost of Ryan North got some recognition from media outlets that may pay no less attention to webcomics than we at Fleen, but it’s not their main focus. Specifically, Comics Alliance called out Gran’s Octopus Pie as one of the best comics of 2012 and The AV Club recognized Paroine, Lamb, and the late North’s work on Adventure Time in a similar fashion. Not much recognition of webcomickers elsewhere in those lists, but I see it less as token webcomics recognition and more of spectacularly talented creators hanging with the best that various comics media have to offer.
• Speaking of the best that various comics media have to offer, Jim Zub dropped some of his hard-earned wisdom (again!) at his blog, this time talking about why there are no overnight successes when dealing with big name comics properties². Highlighting his thesis for those that don’t want to read what’s clearly written:
  

  There’s no open spot waiting for you. You have to earn it. [boldface original]

  … which he highlighted with a quick rundown of a twelve-year process of getting to the point where 2012 could legitimately be called A Big Year For Zub (and 2013 potentially more so).

• Yesterday’s Strip Search news has been edited to add the name of contestant of Tavis Maiden, who was initially overlooked. Also, news came from Loading Ready Run regarding their role in hosting and producing SS, as well as a peek behind the curtains around the judging/elimination process from Mike Krahulik. Underscoring Robert Khoo’s mention of how unexpectedly connected the judges got to some of the art, Krahulik remembered:
  

  We had some no bullshit fights while judging a few of these comics. I remember one night, Robert actually had us all step outside to cool off for a bit after things got especially heated. The winner of this show will get fifteen thousand dollars and the ability to come and work at the Penny Arcade office for one year. So I expected Strip Search would be a life changing experience for the contestants, but I didn’t expect it to be a life changing experience for me.

  Krahulik also mentioned something in passing that caught my eye:

  As mentioned over on the Loading Ready Run site, the bulk of the show has already been filmed.

  Khoo wouldn’t say definitively if the SS filming was complete, or if some number of finalists were still subject to competition — reading between the lines, it appears there may be some filming yet to take place. Could be a final final elimination, or a reunion show, but I imagine we’ll get the skinny soon enough. And despite Hurricane Erika getting to indulge in the greatest cliche of reality shows³, it appears that the selection process really did avoid The Puck Situation. Something tells me when we get down to the ultimate winner/runner-up decision, the runner-up is going to be genuinely happy for the winner.

_______________
¹ It occurs to me that I have not always given Paroline and Lamb their due in noting the success of Adventure Time, having sometimes focused too much on their late, lamented writer. Assuming that the now-exploded North left behind sufficient scripts for them to work on, they should be able to show their work to even greater effect in future issues.

² One ought to note that there may be seemingly meteoric rises in the world of indy/webcomics, but while working for yourself may compress the timeline a bit, you’re still looking at years of honing your craft before suddenly launching that upwards trajectory.

³ In an unused detail from the interview, Khoo noted that sometimes the presence of reality show tropes and cliches is because they work.

We’re less than eighteen hours into 2013 where I am, and already things are off to a fast start.

• Firstly, more news of Strip Search has come to light, including details I couldn’t get Robert Khoo to divulge if his (or, more likely, my) life depended on it. Maki [Edit to add: I’ve discovered that Maki is not uni-named, and is more fully known as Maki Naro; Fleen regrets the deviation from our usual naming conventions], from Sci-ənce dropped news that he was a participant, that production took place in December, and that the other eleven creators vying for the top prize were Lexxy Douglass, Amy Falcone, Ty Halley, Alex Hobbs, Abby Howard, Monica Ray, Katie Rice, Mackenzie Schubert, Nick Trujillo, and “Hurricane” Erika Moen.

  [Edit to add: Missed one! I took my list from Naro’s posting, and did not notice that there were only ten names listed rather than eleven; Naro initially omitted Tavis Maiden, and I missed his name on Lexxy Douglass’s post. Mr Maiden helpfully contacted me via Twitter to point out the oversight; Fleen regrets the error.]

  Best news: most of these creators aren’t known to me, so I can now get exposed to new talent. Even bester news: the three whose work I am familiar with are really damn good, which gives me confidence in the other nine. Specifically, I’ve had my eye on Douglass’s¹ art blog since she was featured on PA: The Series going through the hiring process; Rice has been tearing it up at Dumm Comics for going on five years, and Moen is basically an unstoppable force of nature. My already-high level of anticipation for SS just went through the roof.

  One last thought — I’m really hoping that Maki didn’t speak out of turn (it is mere days since Khoo wasn’t willing to tell when production took place or who was involved) and as he (Maki) rightly observes:

  Khoo is a very kind, friendly, and utterly terrifying man

  I kid, I kid, Douglass also disclosed her involvement today, but she didn’t make a show of terror so she doesn’t have as good a pull quote. Obviously, the NDA period is over — or Maki and Douglass are dangerously overconfident, not realizing that their doom is nigh.

• Speaking of fast starts, Ryan Estrada has launched the second iteration of The Whole Story (six months after the first), this time on Kickstarter. Since the launch at midnight EST, TWS: Winter 2013 has exceeded the extremely modest US$2500 goal, which had the entire purpose of reimbursing Estrada for the out-of-pocket costs that he fronted to creators and translators; everything that comes in from this point will be split among the creators (of which Estrada is one, meaning he gets a share, but not the entire total going forward).

  Moving TWS to Kickstarter from its earlier distribution site makes sense — it’s easiest to just set the “pay what you want” model to a minimum of a buck, and to add bonus content by exceeding the average amount paid in the prior incarnation, than it is to adjust those pricing structures on the fly. Having a set period of time for the campaign creates a scarcity that wouldn’t exist otherwise for electronic content.

  And holy jeeze, there’s a lot of previously-released and brand-new content available, including KC Green’s latest story comic at the pay-what-you-want level; the bonus level (a paltry thirteen American dollars) includes almost 200 pages of Ryan Andrews comics that bore themselves into your soul and don’t let go plus Green’s magnum opus, The Anime Club. At this point, just call The Whole Story the e-book equivalent of Benign Kingdom.

• Finishing up on the Kickstarter front, at the beginning of December we at Fleen mentioned a Kickstarter from longtime mystery man Eben Burgoon for a project called B-Squad, wherein characters will be killed off by the roll of a die and replaced by others waiting in the wings. Burgoon’s project is four days from completion, and I’m particularly interested in its progress, because it’s the first test of something I learned back in October.

  Some may recall how I shared some information from Kickstarter Director of Community Cindy Au, at the B9 panel at NYCC; specifically, the magic inflection point appears to be 1/3 of goal. If you reach 1/3, you’re extremely likely to succeed, and if you fail, you very likely didn’t approach even 1/3 of goal. As of this writing, Burgoon’s B-Squad is at 39% of goal, with four days to go.

  The projects I’ve had my eyes on since I learned of Au’s thumb-rule haven’t hung around the 1/3 mark for more than a few minutes before racing ahead to success, so I’m curious to see what happens here — a big push to get support and a slide over the line before the campaign closes? Or a statistical outlier? Dare we, as Kickstarter attention-payers, turn Ms Au’s prediction on its head? That could cause the laws of Kickstarter physics to start to fail and create a tear in the fabric of crowdfunding-spacetime, the likes of which not even the ghost of Ryan North could navigate. I’m just saying, if Kickstarter eats itself, we only have ourselves to blame.

_______________
¹ That’s entirely too many “s”es.²

² So is that.³

³ And Guigar.

The last American Elf.

James Kochalka will have plenty of new projects, but for now, let’s just give him a little respect for his fourteen-plus year run at a daily diary strip.

As a bitter, haggard wordbeast (thanks Jeffrey) of long standing, I love words (or hearing myself talk, opinion varies); if you want to know how I feel about them, read Henry’s cricket bat monologue from Act II of Stoppard’s The Real Thing (too-brief snippets of which may be found here). It’s a natural that I would be drawn to the wordamancy practiced regularly by Jerry Holkins, what with his punctuation and long words. But oddly enough, Holkins is only one of two master wordbenders at Penny Arcaded Industries.

In contrast to the playfulness of language that is the hallmark of Holkins, Robert Khoo is precise: he wields words like a mirror-bright Masamune blade, separating those that shade away from his intended meaning until only the exact information he wanted to convey remains. Alternately, the words are used to construct the perfect degree of opacity that he requires in the situation. So when I had the opportunity to talk about Strip Search, the webcomics reality-TV competition that will form the next season of PA: The Series, I could feel him choosing words with utmost care, answering and deferring questions so as to simultaneously share information and not give away more than necessary.

The continual peppering of his responses with You are free to infer that and I’m not saying that and Ahhh, I really want to tell you but I can’t right now formed a delicate process of invito, derobement, parry-riposte, esquive, and remise, and many lines must needs be read between. Some of what I have for you today is definite, some of it is conjecture, some of it is maddeningly vague; some dealt with the nature and logistics of a reality competition, some with creator’s rights, and some on how the project took on a life of its own. All of it was fascinating.

Let’s start with the purely factual elements, much of which matched my speculations from about six months ago: about 1000 people applied to be part of Strip Search, and found themselves in a process not unlike the Khoo–designed hiring gauntlet, which you ought to familiarize yourself with. The initial applicants were filtered down to about 300, then 100, then 40, 20, and finally 12 via a process of skill and personality tests, phone and video interviews, and background checks. The very thorough process had the dual purpose of finding contestants that would be able to have a successful webcomics career, and also to avoid what Khoo called The Puck Situation.

For the younger folks out there, round about the third season or so of MTV’s The Real World, a housemate named Puck made himself into a pain in the ass of such monumental proportions that he was thrown out by the other residents (who included a pre-fame Judd Winick and AIDS educator Pedro Zamora). This is reassuring, as it underscores that the purpose of Strip Search is to find the person most suited to a lasting career, not to manufacture drama out of interpersonal conflict. So if this is maybe the first reality show that hasn’t sought to fill 40% of its contestants with undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder cases, who are they?

Khoo described the final twelve as all having the ability to create very good content, and saw the purpose of the selection to find elements in the contestants that were unique. Ultimately, each person had those unique characteristics, but to find such via phone or video interviews is very challenging. Khoo summarized the process as First tier: Could you work with us? Second tier: Do you have ability to actually do the work, talent to do it, and can you do it without driving us crazy?.

The choice of twelve contestants was possibly the first place where the Strip Search concept evolved away from its original intention; the initial pitch called for ten contestants, but operational considerations dictated that twelve would be the minimum number that would actually work. By “operational considerations”, we mean “the mechanics that make a competition show work”, more on which in a moment.

Asked for details on the contestants, Khoo would divulge very little: they ran the gamut from definite fans of Penny Arcade to those who were indifferently aware of PA, but didn’t read it. Their own webcomics tended more towards humor than longform story-driven, not because Khoo, et al, felt it was more likely to succeed (in the show and as an ongoing career), but because it tended to fit the format of the show better. By coincidence, six men and six women made the cut. The youngest is 20 and the oldest 38. Having signed their contracts¹ and landed in Seattle, they surrendered all means of communications with the wider world and were locked in a giant mansion. While there would be outside trips for various challenges, they would not get away from the audio/video crews or each other for the duration².

Okay: challenges. With one exception everyone in the PA office watches a lot of reality TV, that exception being Khoo himself, who doesn’t watch TV. Fortunately, he had the able assistance of Josh Price, who watches an insane amount of reality TV and was able to educate Khoo on the rhythms and structure of competition entertainment. Khoo’s background in designing the the PAX Omegathon means that elimination competition is not new to him, and he was able to leverage that experience into the particular forms of televised competition. Khoo also credited his past running large projects as preparing him for showrunning duties, but says what was probably most helpful was the bachelor party³ that Khoo arranged for PA VP Mike Fehlauer.

Exactly what those challenges were, Khoo picked his words very carefully. He allowed that the majority of challenges had a purpose of relating to some skill that would make for a good webcartoonist, whether direct or indirect. He elaborated with two challenges that were not used in the show: asking the contestants to find the best travel deal for a convention would be a directly-relevant skill, while determining who could talk to a group of people and have them like (as on a panel at the convention) would be an indirect skill. Asked if there were any unique challenges or elements not previously seen in reality competitions, Khoo would only say to watch what they did at The end of every day.

Despite all the planning that went into designing the show, there was a significant amount of re-planning during production. Khoo said that they hadn’t anticipated How connected some us would become with the art that was created in the show, and it made us re-think the structure of the show while we were on it. He’s promised more thoughts on that once the show is running and the outside world is closer to seeing the time when the original plan was modified.

The hosting for Strip Search hasn’t been announced, but Khoo says that It will make sense. Likewise, judges aren’t being divulged, but he did say that judges were drawn from both inside and outside the PA offices, and that the judges were Always contextually appropriate to the challenges. Mike and Jerry have a role in the show, but not as a Tim Gunn-type mentor (asked if there was a Tim Gunn role on the show, Khoo said Not 100%).

With a few hojillion hours of footage, the task of cutting down into episodes (not to mention crafting a coherent story arc, a new challenge for PA:TS) was most likely considerable, as Khoo says the final number of episodes isn’t yet finalized. While the episode run time of 10 to 12 minutes (possibly as long as 15 if necessary) is pretty set, the season could run 26 to 35 episodes. It would be very difficult to frame an entire challenge in so short a runtime, and Khoo confirmed that there will not be an elimination in each episode. Curiously, he also was careful not to say that episodes would run weekly, leaving the possibility of multiple updates per week. He did say that Strip Search will launch in Q1, wrapping up by the middle of the summer⁴.

Naturally, that prompts the question of whether there will be another season of Strip Search; Khoo says that there hasn’t been a decision about further seasons yet, and I would speculate it wouldn’t make sense to have another until about the time that the first winner was finishing up the in-house year. If there will be further seasons (and Khoo’s excitement at all that was accomplished with the first season indicated more seasons would be just as exciting), I’d expect them to be interspersed with full seasons of “regular” PA:TS.

The thing about Penny Arcade is, somebody there will have an idea and what might have been a one-off project blows up huge. It doesn’t become an ongoing project because the staff wanted to make it bigger and better; they find ways to make it bigger and better because the project has already taken on its own life: a simple meet and greet has become an intercontinental series of gaming expos; a reaction to a shock jock’s denigration of gamers has become a multi-million dollar charity. Judging from Khoo’s carefully chosen words (both spoken and unspoken), Strip Search grew in the making, and the showrunners may have had as much of an unexpected ride as the participants.

Or maybe not — you can never tell with that guy.

_______________
¹ Regarding the contracts, Khoo would only say that Strip Search is, to his knowledge, the only creative-based reality show explicitly avoiding any claim on what the contestants/winner create. We don’t own anything they make; the contract grants us a license to use the art on the show, but nothing further. They explicitly own 100% of their work, that was very important to us. Although Khoo would say nothing further, we may surmise that there is a very strong NDA component.

² Khoo would not say how long the contestants were locked in that mansion, whether eliminated contestants were released to go home or kept with the production, or even if the competition is entirely finished. There is precedent in the creative end of competition TV for finalists to be sent home for a period of time to work up a portfolio for final judgment, which may or may not be happening with Strip Search.

³ Go watch those episodes to give yourself a feel for the sort of challenges that Khoo may have dreamed up, because he wouldn’t give even the barest hints on any of them. Also note that Holkins refers to Khoo as “a depraved madman”.

⁴ Khoo was emphatic that Strip Search will not intersect in any way with their other mid-summer event, PAXAus, as the logistics of trying to tie them together would be — and this is a quote — “crazy”.

First, watch this.

Second, tell people you know to watch this.

Third, maybe drop a line to George Rohac and tell him he’s a goddamn hero.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that You Can Do Good has the potential to become the next It Gets Better, and it’s important for all the same reasons. You heard the man: I figured I’d go first. First in saying mental illness challenges me, but it’s not who I am; I’m more than what my mind tries to shoehorn me into being; I can prevail over this, and so can you.

It’s a cliche that greatly creative people have a touch of madness about them; it’s a truth-fact that in the eight or nine years I’ve spent getting to know webcomics creators, I’ve met more people with various diagnoses and medications to help control psychiatric conditions than I’d ever known in the first 35 years in my life. Could be because they’re mostly younger than I am, and were more likely to be diagnosed that people my age; could be they’re just more willing to talk about mental illness and a huge number of my contemporaries are in the psychiatric closet.

What I can tell you is, this move to destigmatize mental illness can only help things; I literally watched George’s video for the first time last night five seconds before my EMS pager summoned me to help the second patient in three hours having a psychiatric crisis. Undiagnosed, untreated, unacknowledged, these conditions eat away at lives and leave people damaged to the point of ruin. Getting help¹, not letting shame or contempt prevent that help — so many lives can be improved and saved.

Like I said — a goddamn hero, and all of his considerable contributions to comics aren’t as important as what he’s started. We can all do good; get doing.

_______________
¹ Which in large part is going to require us all to demand that those who need help have realistic means of getting it.

Whole lotta people taking the week off, or going to reruns, or just being quiet. I figure that dearth of fresh entertainment (apart from a new Dresden Codak, which I almost didn’t notice as Aaron Diaz¹ and I have been busily corresponding on the minutiae of both published and unpublished hobbity lore) is what brought you here, desperate for even my opinion-mongering.

Well, no opinions today. Instead, I’m going to point you towards two updates today that (to me) show a total of three creators really hitting their stride and doing a killer job on their story arc-heavy webcomics.

On the one (somewhat bloody) hand, Magnolia Porter’s Monster Pulse has veered from slightly menacing conspiracy against plucky kids² with pet monsters into something much darker, while never ignoring the fact that these are children. No matter how grown up they try to be, they’re not able to bear these burdens without hurt. Start from the beginning, read forward, and read the current chapter twice.

On the other hands, Christopher Bird and Davinder Brar have been working away quietly on Al’Rashad, an infuriatingly slowly-revealed look at a world that might be described as fantasy, except for the distinct lack of fantastical elements. No magics (okay, maybe some abominations that used to be dead men, but I’m still not convinced they’re undead; maybe some kind of will-sapping drug like historical Haitian zombies), but quite a lot of extremely well thought-out political games, as nations (one Vikingish, the other Arabic) poke and prod at each other while factions within each play power games.

Nobody comes out and says PAY ATTENTION TO THE NARRATION HERE IS WHAT’S GOING ON, meaning we learn things alongside the characters in bits and pieces³, leaving us (okay, leaving me) hungry for just one five-page infodump to learn more of the history and shape of this world. It is hooky and sticky and original and if Brar and Bird could figure out some what to give it to me more than one page a week that would be awesome.

________________
¹ The Tolkien Scholar Par Excellence.

² It can’t be toomenacing or otherwise kids couldn’t stand against the conspiracy, and all our suspension of disbelief is already taken up with the monsters.

³ Which is not to say that it’s a Bendis-style decompressed story. Al’Rashad moves, but nobody has all the information

She finally did it. There are googly eyes staring at me as I write this. Send help.

Things to keep an eye (so to speak) out for:

• Well done, ghost of Ryan North, you’re officially the most-funded publishing project in Kickstarter history, more than doubling the second-place contender. Also, what was up with raising more than US$101,000 in the last full day of the campaign? That is nuts and the people that support you, we they are nuts.
• Want to drive yourself crazy? Check out the 19 page preview of Cameron Stewart’s next project, NIRO. Crazy, because now you need to see the rest of the story, and Stewart hasn’t released it yet, ha ha ha¹. 180 degrees removed from the psychological drama of Sin Titulo, NIRO appears to mix some apocalyptic setting here, some unspeakable danger there, and a loner with a moral/religious code trying to do the right thing right about … h’yahhh. NIRO will release as choose-your-price (99 cents or more) digital issues starting early next year, culminating in a print collection.
• Erika Moen has been doing a public service behind the scenes for a good while now, studying to become more knowledgeable about how human sexuality works than anybody this side of the Kinsey Institute for the purposes of putting together a graphic novel that’s an educational resource for teens. It’s slow work, though, and she’s dying to share helpful information with the reading public before 2015. What to do?
  

  I’m thinking I’ll start up a smaller comic to run in the mean time. I’m thinking a sex toy review comic. WOULD YOU READ THAT?

  I am asking everybody reading this now to contact Moen (her Twitterpage should suffice) to say Yes, please, let us see this comic of yours as often as you can produce it!

Several subsets of Alliday will be dropping in the next week or so — whichever things you might celebrate or find comfort in, enjoy the heck out of ’em. We at Fleen will do our best to scrape up news in the coming days, but it may be kind of scarce on the ground.

_______________
¹ If I get driven crazy from the cliffhanger, you’re all coming with me.

To quote the ghost of Ryan North:

boom

That would be the formerly-living Nexus of All Webcomics Realities (Great White North Division) ceasing to exist in our plane of reality as he sploded a little more than an hour ago. Astonishingly, I can only assume that North’s backers had murder on their minds, as his Kicktraq pledge history shows that today is already his single highest-grossing day with some nine hours still to go¹, a situation which I’ve never observed. Kickstarters are always frontloaded, and yeah you’ll get a tick upwards at or near the end, but to have your highest daily totals then is unheard of.

Heck, his projected total is trending upwards for the past couple of days, and it’s entirely possible he could hit US$550,000² before things finish tomorrow morning. HE’S ALREADY DEAD YOU BASTARDS, YOU CAN’T KILL HIS CORPSE ANY MORE.

As amazing as all of that is, the most amazing part of this month-long rollercoaster was revealed earlier today by the onetime tallest man in webcomics on what used to be his Tumblr, regarding a man named Tom Helleberg:

… who is the nicest guy. Sorry everyone else, but you’re all tied for second place now. About a week after To Be Or Not To Be launched I got an email from him that congratulated me on the success of the book, said I now owed it to him to make it the best book it could possibly be, and concluded with the fact he’d been talking to publishers and shopping around his own idea for a book without success for the past two years: also a choose-your-own-path version of Hamlet.

It took me two days to write him back, because I kept putting myself in his shoes (I’m about to launch my Kickstarter when Quirk³ or someone announces Tom’s book) and it feels awful. Just awful. What could I say to him? When I did write him back I basically said those things: I felt terrible, and I couldn’t believe we’d both come up with the same idea and had such different experiences with it. Again, Tom was the nicest guy (he thanked me for being a decent human being: honestly touching, and he said he was dismantling his large-scale revenge photocollage about me: also nice) and he mentioned was actually relieved to be done with the project and able to move on to his next idea — and when that’s done, would I be willing to supply a quote for the back of the book? [emphasis original]

Reached for comment, the late Mr North remarked that he had tried to find a definition for “explode” in the OED that would forestall his gruesome death, but was unable to do so before his demise, where witnesses report a couple was observed to be high-fiving. We at Fleen extend our condolences to North’s wife, family, friends, dog, and to Mr Helleberg, who will now have to find somebody else to write that blurb.

_______________
¹ In today’s totals that is; there’s still some 17 hours in all for the campaign.

² Also known as “2750% of goal”, or “getting pretty damn close to double the previously highest-funded publishing project in Kickstarter history which was done by marketing guru Seth Godin, dang yo”.

³ Editor’s note: Quirk are the publishing house behind such ventures as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and it’s amazing that they didn’t announce such a think as choose-your-own-Hamlet already. Tough luck, Quirk. Maybe you can negotiate with North’s literary estate for the rights to mass-market editions once the Kickstarter rewards are all distributed.

In the most reckless stretch goal of all time, North has promised that his final stretch goals for TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST will be:

$425,000 = another 25 books sent to libraries and schools!
$450,000 = another 25 books sent to libraries and schools! Also I will … create a pizza that looks like Hamlet and… eat it?
$475,000 = another 50 books sent to libraries and schools!
$500,000 = I will literally explode [emphasis original]

Judging from the uptick in support in the past couple of days, it appears that he just might do it. Please, people, think of Chompsky! Do not cause Ryan North to explode, if only because he is a giant of a man and the pieces would require immense cleanup .

• You know who’s a stellar (pun intended) guy, just an amazingly wonderful representative of all the best that [web]comics offers? Dave Roman. Sometimes he gets lost in the shuffle when his wife, the fabulously talented Raina Telgemeier goes and dominates the New York Times YA bestseller lists for two or three years at a time, but just look at the stuff that Roman’s done (oftentimes with partner John Green): Jax Epoch. Teen Boat¹. Agnes Quill. Fantasy, goofball teen angst, mystery — all genres and audiences find something by Roman to call their own.

  And, as he has for some time now, Roman also brings in the youngest readers with the Sci-Fi school days adventure of Astronaut Academy, the second collection of which is rapidly approaching. This is the book I give to kids just starting to read longer books for pleasure; when they’ve outgrown it, there’s plenty more Roman to keep ’em busy. So thank you, Dave, for all your varied work, and keep doing what you’re doing.

• Today’s reason to keep on going in an uncertain future: Tracy White’s return to webcomics:
  

  About to start drawing my first new comic (online only) in three years. #goodtobeback

  I’ll got out on a limb and guess you’ll be able to find the new work (as yet unnamed) at White’s main site, Traced. Given the two and a half years since How I Made It To Eighteen was released, I’ll go out on another limb and say that White’s got some stories building up just waiting to be shared with the world. Keep your eyes peeled and your hands inside the car at all times.

_______________
¹ Obligatory warning: do not ever Google the words “teen boat” without appending the word “comic(s)”, and especially not image searches. Just … just trust me on this one.

The thing about Rich Stevens is, even when he’s just tossing ideas around on Twitter with little to no intention of following up, it’s a hoot and a half to read. As agile as he runs his business¹ (and he’s nothing if not agile), his mind is running faster still, bouncing from brilliant idea to brilliant idea, mining only the barest minority of them and turning them into something beautiful.

Case in point: A rude ashtray begets temporary tattoos and possibly sweatpants. Case in other point: speculation about existing media properties that aren’t making comics leads to genius ideas that would make a million billion dollars. Or maybe “Gumby” is just as fun to say as “smock”: Gumby, Gumby, Gumby, smock.

So as we approach the end of the year, looking forward to our long crawl back into a season of growing things and new possibilities, know that the closest thing to an actual Spark or mad genius is in Western Massachusetts, mainlining robot juice and dreaming up crazy things to do purely because they’ll amuse you and also him. Mostly him². We should all be so lucky.

From the Charity Front:

• Some year, Child’s Play will not raise more money than the previous year … that will not be this year, seeing as how they’re now up over US$3.3 million with plenty of time to clear the US$3.512 million achieved in 2011. To put this in perspective, this will mean that 2012’s total will be more than the cumulative amount raised in Child’s Play’s first five years, and will likely clear US$16 million over the ten year history of the project. Well done Ms Lindsay, Ms Dillon, Messers Holkins, Krahulik, Khoo, and everybody that’s made this possible.
• Far less organized, but no less impactful: Kiva’s Team Webcomics (founded by Ryan North and Zach Weinersmith, who just so happen to have written two of the most successful choosable–path books in history) has lent more than US$321,000 to micro-entrepreneurs around the world, contributing to the bettering of the lives of entire families and villages.
• Somehow we missed checking in on Worldbuilders, the Patrick Rothfuss-run charity that benefits Heifer International, in 2011. That’s a shame, as there’s usually some primo webcomics creators contributing fabulous prizes to be won via the Worldbuilders auctions, lottery, and store.

  Just announced: a slew of webcomicabilia from the recently-held Webcomics Rampage in Austin, plus jam art, books, plushes, prints, and more. Jacques! Watson! Willis! The aforementioned Weinersmith! DenBleyker! Sohmer & DeSouza! Weaver! Corsetto! Melick! Krahulik & Holkins! Casalino! Foglio & Foglio! And introducing Randy Milholland as Chewbacca’s Family.

_______________
¹ And the thing about agility is, you can’t keep it going forever — patterns get engraved, The Right Way of Doing Things becomes The Only Way, and you stop reinventing yourself. Stevens, by contrast, has been a blur of motion for more than a decade because he doesn’t know what he can’t do, therefore he does it.

² In my less-rational moments, I imagine that when Frank Zappa died, his Dada-anarcho tendencies wandered the world until deciding that Stevens was an appropriate host body.