Especially long-time readers of this page may recall that David Malki ! has, on occasion, been referred to on this page (not entirely seriously) as “The Dreamcrusher”, due to his role in rejecting a piece I submitted to the original Machine of Death open call lo these many years past. Crushed I was, all my dreams leaking dream juice because nobody would ever read anything I wrote ever. Sadface.

Well, the day has come to officially recant that particular nickname (though I’ve not used it in a good long while), and that’s because yesterday I did something creative and personally amusing that I never would have without Malki !’s example. Specifically, to aid my wife’s semi-required departmental holiday decorations (theme: Nations of the World; her assigned country: France), I constructed a diorama I like to call The French Revolution Comes To The North Pole, having been inspired by the cardboard-constructed Machine of Death that Malki ! took to conventions in 2011.

For inspiring me achieve an entirely different dream¹ in cardboard and tape and festive wrapping, I thank David Malki !, and apologize for ever characterizing him as somebody who would crush dreams of any sort. Feel free to hum either La Marseillaise or Wind Beneath My Wings if you like.

• Hey, guess who was a bozo and forgot to take photos on Saturday when visiting with Danielle Corsetto, Bill Ellis & Dani O’Brien, and Jamie Noguchi? That means you get to imagine the perfect Kane face when the lid to the mini-cheesecake I brought him got stuck. I’d often wondered how Noguchi manages to draw such incredibly expressive faces, and now I know — he’s constantly making them himself and his brain is translating the feeling of muscle here, skin there, a teensy bit of boiling rage for flavor, and telling his drawing hand what to do. It’s a rare skill, and it serves him well.

  In any event, many thanks to Wild Pig Comics for hosting the creators, and thanks to Corsetto, Noguchi, and Ellis/O’Brien for creating comics that entertain me for free; you should pick up all their books, as they’re quite good.

• Also obtained over the weekend: the post brought me copies of Tiny Kitten Teeth (it has an enormous trim size, and the textured cover stock makes it feel like a storybook from the 1940s) and The Abominable Charles Christopher volume 2 (with its beautiful red flocked cover, a “sketch” of an Asiatic Black Bear² up front, and two of my favorite Charles Christopher strips of all time inside). I am running out of shelf space with all these wonderful comics I’ve gotten, and I suspect that more will be arriving in the next ten days or so. Problems, man.
• With a bit more than three and a half days to go, Ryan North’s TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST is approaching US$375,000 and if it were to stop accumulating money right now it would be the most-funded publishing project in Kickstarter history by some US$87,000. As it is, I think the Toronto Man-Mountain has a better than even chance of clearing US$400K in the 88 hours left to him (and I’m not the only one), which would make for a truly amazing end product. Well done everybody that’s pledged, and everybody else kindly get to it, as I want to see what that last unlockable goal is.

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¹ Namely, the dream of sticking it to corporate overlords that make it difficult to say no when told you have to go spend money to decorate your desk because Teamwork!.

² Because what Karl Kerschl calls a “sketch” any rational person would call a “finely detailed animal portrait”.

So it’s approximately the Fleeniversary ’round these parts; the official announcement of my entrée into semi-abusive opinion-mongering occurred in the old Goats forums on 22 December 2005, but I’d been banking postings as far back as 5 December, and was really into the daily posting routine (even though nobody was reading yet) around the 15th or so. Which is a long way of saying — today is as close to seven years of what the masthead calls The webcomics blog about webcomics as you’re gonna get.

If I’ve got all my dates right, at this time seven years ago Jon Rosenberg¹ was not yet staring down 40 and had never changed a diaper. Seven years ago, people were somewhat more justified in thinking that Yuko Ota was in her early teens. Seven years ago, Jeff Rowland had proved himself unkillable by mere killer spiders and had started the great and vast TopatoCo Empire, even tangling with weird t-shirt company perverts.

So many of the tools and services we take for granted in webcomics were missing; at that time, there was no Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Kickstarter, Project Wonderful, or :01 Books. Seven years ago, George Rohac had not yet sprung fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.

Return to Sender had only been on hiatus for a year, TCAF had only started to conquer the world, Commissioner James Gordon Hastings had not been whelped, the Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge had been going for less than a year, we had only just met Dan McNinja’s moustache, and the Great Outdoor Fight was still a month away from its stealthy beginnings, and further from its legendary majesty.

Rich Stevens was exactly the same, endless and unchanging, save only he is now married and likes dogs.

They say seven years in is when you get tired of things, but I have to say, I still enjoy the heck out all of this, so I hope you’ll join me as I start Year Eight of working out my thoughts on various matters — mostly webcomics, but no promises — where you can hear them. Also, if you happen to be in north/central New Jersey tomorrow, do drop by to see the webcomickers at Wild Pig Comics from noon to 4:00pm, won’t you?

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¹ Who, Svengali-like, planted the seeds in my head and made them bear the desired brainfruit that I should be writing all of this stuff.

Some of you may have noticed a brouhaha in the web-o-spheres over the past day or two regarding another webcomic scraper by another person that couldn’t be bothered to ask permission from creators before lecturing them how copyright works (his version: I can do what I want because I want to). I didn’t mention it earlier on account of the takedown requests were flying fast and furious and he was at least removing strips from his site (albeit with a lot of whining, as I understand it). Less attention given, the better.

Which is why I do want to mention a webcomic reader (an app this time, for iDevices) that’s Doing It Right. Comic Chameleon is the brainchild of Bernie Hou, creator of Alien Loves Predator, so he knows what a creator wants from an app. He’s contacted other creators and asked permission up front to include their work. Instead of being a glorified browser or RSS reader, the app permits panel-by-panel reading, so there’s actually a functionality value-add there.

Best of all, he’s worked out a revenue-distribution plan so that ads within CC itself end up paying the creators (granted, probably not a lot of money, and divided a bunch of ways, but still — it’s a choice that indicates the app is for their benefit, not his). Look for Comic Chameleon in early 2013, and check out the demo on YouTube.

• There was a very nice comment in yesterday’s posting by a fellow named David Welsh; as is my practice when I see a poster I’m not familiar with, I followed the link to Welsh’s site and found … okay, let me back up for a moment. Something you should know about me is that I cannot even think of certain scenes in stories without getting choked up; any time, any place, they will get to me without fail. Mayday, mayday, India-Golf-Niner-Niner is buddy spiked; It shames the armored cavalry to abandon a courageous warrior. Our squad wishes to ride in support of Princess Nausicaä; Let’s make sure history never forgets the name ‘Enterprise’; Su per man.

  At the top of that list, the top of the top, will always be stories (sometimes just scenes, but more often the entirety of the story) of extreme loyal dogs. I will seriously use this single issue to judge your entire worth as a person; there is something wrong with you, like sociopath wrong, if you can think about Seymour or Hachiko¹ without being moved to your very core.

  Which is a roundabout way of saying, when I followed Welsh’s link, it went to a new (fewer than ten updates) webcomic that he writes, the topic of which is the original loyal-beyond-death dog, Greyfriars Bobby. And just for topping on the heart-tugging, this version of Greyfriars Bobby returns to his master’s grave every night not just to guard it, but to fight supernatural beasties that would threaten all of Edinburgh. Extraordinarily loyal and brave? I’m not made of stone, people — I am in, all the way in.

  I should also mention that art, by Junelle Faye, treads the line between cute and threatening nicely, and hopefully both Welsh and Faye will be able to crank out more strips on a regular basis. Check out Greyfriars, and let the sniffles begin.

• Received at the comic store yesterday: the 300+ page Dr McNinja: Timefist and the concluding issue of Marceline. Two thumbs up for each of them, which requires me to borrow a couple of thumbs.
• Received in the mail when I got home yesterday: Benign Kingdom, Fall 2012, hardcover edition, plus additional goodies. I cannot begin to tell you how gorgeous this book is, and as soon as Danielle, Emmy, Anthony, or Aaron² can point you in the direction of sales, buy it. I suppose you could get the individual art books, but you don’t look like a chump, so get the very handsome hardcover to go with the Spring 2012 edition.
• Expected in the mail any day now, like tomorrow, because I got an email from TopatoCo: Tiny Kitten Teeth. Hell, yes.
• Not expected in the mail anytime soon because of time-sink potential: Either of the Homestuck collections, although I do not know what my deal is on delaying. I should just take the week between Christmas and New Years and binge my way through all 6000+ pages just like the mother of two who is powering her way through and has made it as far as the Midnight Crew intermission.

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¹ Don’t even get me started on service dogs like Endal or Comet.

² The Latin Hobbit-Throb.

That calendrical coincidence out of the way, let’s talk webcomics.

Meredith Gran is somebody whose cartooning skills I hold in the highest regard (and goodness, would today be the day that Marceline and the Scream Queens releases its last issue; yes, it would be), so when earlier this week she pointed me towards a webcomic that I wasn’t familiar with, that immediately went to the top of my to-do list. Seriously you students in the SVA webcomics course, listen to Mer, she’s super-smart.

What I got pointed towards was Rachael & Penny by Lauren Zukauskas, which has (for about ten months now) been telling the story of a hot new music star (Rachael) and her somewhat overwhelmed manager (Penny), trying to navigate the pitfalls of these things called Fame and Friendship and Life. There’s a lot to like in R*P, especially the fact that the storytelling follows the Warner Brothers model instead of the Disney model. Let me ‘splain.

Think back on the old WB cartoon shorts that we grew up watching on Saturday mornings — they’re still in rotation, 50 or 60 years later. By contrast, Disney was cranking out short cartoons as well, but very few of them persist in the popular consciousness. Seriously, right now I could rattle off titles and plot descriptiosn of probably 50 WB shorts off the top of my head, but I’ve got maybe a handful of Disney cartoons with that degree of stickiness¹.

I think a big part of it is because so many Disney shorts (despite being lushly animated) felt forced in terms of their writing. Mickey’s funny! Donald’s funny! Let’s invent a situation where they can be funny in the same place at the same time! We’ll call it Wacky animals go to a place and then do wacky things because they’re wacky.

The WB shorts, by contrast, were more commonly defined by character; Bugs and Daffy didn’t do things because they were wacky, they did things (okay, wacky things) because who they are demanded that level of conflict between them. It wasn’t a case of What happened to whoever happened to be there?, it was a case of Who was there, and who else and ohhhhh boy, that’s not going to end quietly.

Thus, Rachael is impulsive, a bit thick, and completely bought into the rock star lifestyle and its attendant behaviors; Penny is overworked, frazzled, sees herself as Rachael’s friend but holds herself at a professional distance², and is maaaaybe nursing a bit of a crush. Throw a complication into the mix (say, bad publicity to be overcome with a public good act) and let ’em rip.

Artwise, Zukauskas has settled very quickly (there are not quite 50 updates, each a page in length, from the start to the latest) into an adorably flexible style that echoes Bryan Lee O’Malley, Chynna Clugston, Faith Erin Hicks, Natasha Allegri, Vera Brosgol, and David McGuire; I’m not saying that Zukauskas is aping any of those styles, but that she has the same tendencies to shift from detailed to loose as the story demands. Examples: Rachael suddenly goes all scribbly (and that face-plant gag is great), Rachael’s eyes simplify to dots, anger is diffused by the power of caricature, and unexpected behavior shocks the world into black-and-white.

At present, Rachael and Penny updates weekly (Fridays), which means you’ve got a couple of days to get caught up before we see the fallout from the present situation (basketball game with Rachael, Penny, and a young lady who could best be described as a “hate-fan”), given who these characters are, who they think they are, and who they want each other to think they are. It’s going to be a fun, bumpy ride.

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¹ Um, you’ve got Der Fuehrer’s Face, that one where they’re in the car trailer that breaks away and careens down the mountain road, and … yeah, that’s all I’ve got right now.

² She always refers to her by surname: “Miss Amps”.

I can’t think of too many webcomics that could disappear for six-plus years and pick up right where they left off, but then again I can’t think of too many webcomics as influential and well-loved within the circle of webcomics creators as A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. And hell if that isn’t exactly what Dale Beran and David Hellman did yesterday: ALILBTDII #42 has all the surrealistic grandeur that endeared it to its audience before going on hiatus in May of Aught-Six; if not the most widely-read webcomic that ever existed, it was surely near the top of the personal enjoyment list of people that make their living doing webcomics.

It’s as exciting to see Hellman and Beran reunite as it was to contemplate their return when it was teased half a year ago. At that time, Beran and Hellman described the return of ALILBTDII as a “one-off”, but we can dream, can’t we? The only return from the great hereafter that would make me happier would be Return To Sender, and I ain’t holding my breath on that one; like an actor who died too soon, these comics never had a chance to decline and will always look young and beautiful to us.

In other news, the Kickstarters continue to filter into creative fields, with varying results; the claim that you need 800 supporters to succeed on Kickstarter made here is surely skewed by the relative costs of filmmaking vs comic printing, and the lesser chance of indy filmmakers to have regular, excited audience members, given that you can’t crank out a film three days a week and have as regular contact with your supporters.

It’ll be interesting to see how Kickstarter eventually produces differing received wisdom for different creative communities, with (say) theatrical endeavours eventually settling near a requirement for x number of supporters, and fashion projects requiring y number. Something tells me that comics is on the lower end of the “entry and success” costs spectrum, and may find KS to be a more reliable tool in the business plan toolbox than (say) food or dance.

Webcomics are beginning, ending, making transitions … it’s an unusually busy end-of-year timeframe, presumably because of the oncoming Blood Wave and Dogstorm and general Superpocalypse. Better get these mentioned before we all expire in terror.

• Goodbye For those that missed the (admittedly soft) announcement, James Kochalka is ending American Elf in an orgy of dental hygiene. But at the same time, the animated SuperF*ckers is off to a good start, which brings us dangerously close to a chorus of the circle of liiiiiife, etc, so let’s just be glad we got as much of American Elf as we did, and watch to see what Kochalka does next. My guess? Something awesome.
• Hello Scott Kurtz has been talking up the work he’s put into developing the soon-to-launch Table Titans for so long, it was easy to think of it arriving at some nebulous point in the future. Well, the future is here, kiddies, with Table Titans dropping on 28 January, with updates as needed to tell the story at a pace that best suits it. Seriously, if you haven’t listened to the latest episode of Webcomics Weekly, there’s a fascinating bit in there about how Kurtz may challenge the long-held idea that regularity trumps almost everything in webcomics — Table Titans may run a variable number of days a week depending on need, interspersing with PvP.

  It’s always interesting to watch the status quo not only get questioned, but actively experimented upon; granted, not everybody has the audience that Kurtz does, and success in such variable scheduling may be restricted to those with the most established audiences¹. Oh, and did I mention the part where Table Titans is teaming up with Wizards of the Coast to not just publish collections, but to treat the storylines as actual playable D&D adventures? That partnership, in an ongoing fashion rather than being a one-off project, looks to be the beginning of anew way of producing creative content beyond the daily strip; watch for more such expansions beyond strippery from other creators in the next couple of years.

• Hello Again Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant was one of the prettiest, most lush webcomics on the scene when it launched in June of last year, and given that the story had (over the next nine months or so) a definite beginning, middle, and end², it was a no-brainer that its 160-odd pages would get collected into a nice, neat, print collection sooner rather than later. My only question was who would land Tony Cliff’s tale of derring-do, and it’s really no surprise who won that particular sweepstakes:
  

  We’re thrilled to be bringing you @TangoCharlie’s DELILAH DIRK as a graphic novel next fall, + here’s the cover! pic.twitter.com/8lBpnW2J

  That would be the estimable :01 Books, for those of you that didn’t follow the link, and it is certain that they will give Cliff’s gorgeous story the treatment it deserves.

Oh, and nearly forgot: TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST has cleared US$300,000 in its Kickstarter and thus will be in colo[u]r. I am nearly afraid to see what happens at US$400K, given a whole ten days still to go.

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¹ Yes, Table Titans is new, but it’s leveraging directly off of more than a dozen years of PvP, and will bring a substantial portion of that audience on day one.

² And yes, Delilah clearly had adventures before we first saw her, and yes, it wrapped with Delilah and Selim clearly heading out for more exciting times … it was still a self-contained story.

Seriously, people — all kinds of mid-week days I’m scrambling for content, and then this gets dumped on me all at once? Do none of you want a weekend?

• Hired! Jim Zub may be the smartest guy working in comics, and working every angle of them — publishing licensed work, writing original creator-owned comics, writing revived videogame IP, and thinking very hard about everything he does. To that we can now add writing for DC, as Jim Zub is taking over Birds of Prey. It’s a pretty high-profile gig, as BoP is regarded as a well-written book (having a long legacy of Gail Simone as chief wordsmith), and not just an IP-parking exercise in stasis. Here’s hoping that he can keep up all his own projects while still working for the bigs; nobody deserves success for all his hard work more, but I confess that I’m more interested in the things that are uniquely Zub than things dreamt up by somebody else getting a Zub spin. The first one is just … Zubbier? Zubesque? Zublike¹, I guess.
• Kickstarted! How did I miss this? Girl Genius is doing a videogame, and with two weeks left in the Kickstarter, they’re up over 500% of goal. More interestingly (since GG fans are pretty rabid and any project related to Agatha Heterodyne was going to be supported to the point of success), this is the first time I’ve seen what appears to be a new cultural evolution of Kickstarter projects, in the form of the Kicking It Forward pledge.

  Short form: people running Kickstarters promise to dedicate no less than 5% of the profits from their campaigns (after costs and fulfillment of their own projects; we’re talking actual profit here, not gross proceeds) to supporting other Kickstarters from other project teams in the future. This is a terrific idea, and puts me in mind of something I saw on Twitter the other day (heck if I can remember who tweeted it originally, sorry); in a nutshell, it was an opinion that people running Kickstarters who have a track record of backing other projects are more likely to see support (at least, from the twitterer in question) than somebody who’s first interaction with the platform is to ask for money. Kickstarter is a terrific tool, a key part of business plans for independent creators of all kinds, but having it be a real community may be where its full potential gets unleashed. I’m very excited by these developments.

• Unmasked! Search the archives of this page for Eben07 or Burgoon and you’ll find many references to a shadowy operative, a peerless spy-type agent and the webcomic he’s produced for a half-decade, and now he’s just gone and made himself all public and every-damn-thing. Eben Burgoon has Kickstarted a new project about an underfunded set of misfit mercenaries sent on deniable missions with a reality-show twist: every mission, somebody will be eliminated, leading to lots of funerals. The B-Squad, as it’s called, sounds like a hoot, so do give a look, yes?
• Speaking of! Kickstarters for the last time today: Ryan North is up over US$275,000 for TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST, which means mini-plush Yorick skulls. Something tells me that Ryan North may be in the mood to celebrate come Monday, 17 December for the Third Annual Beguiling/Dinosaur Comics Holiday Party with fun and good times and Ryan and Kate and Joey and a Secret Santa and booze. The party starts at 7:30pm and goes until whenever Paupers Pub is tired of the shirtlessness (Ryan), tomfoolery (Joey), and knife fights (Kate). You’re on your own for bail money.

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¹ Insert your own Being Jim Zubkavich joke here. Zubkavich, Zubkavich? Zubkavich. Zub.

Speaking as a 40-something without kids, this isn’t what Christmas looks like, Matthew Inman from The Oatmeal! It’s actually what we at The Fleenplex call “Wednesdays”.

• Ryan Estrada is the latest [web]cartooner to shake up the viral internets (as he is wont to do from time to time) with a posting on Art and Creativity and How To Get Better At Them Both, which comes down to a simple premise:

  You need to screw up.

  Make mistakes, lots of them, because every one is an opportunity to learn. Challenge every bit of conventional wisdom that says something won’t work, and find a way to make it work — audiences, craft, money, everything needs to be torn down and reinvented¹. It’s a terrific read, a terrific screed (in the best sense of the word), but it strikes me that a certain subset of readers may be paying too much attention to the part that says Don’t pay attention to how they tell you to do things and not enough to the immediate followups that say … because everything they say you can’t do is a chance for you to be the first to discover a new way of doing things.

  Too many people (and I’m not even talking about creative types here; it’s a common situation in my day job, which is in IT) approach things that they find challenging with the assumption There’s a magic bullet, a formula, a secret handshake that will magically make things better; spending all this time working out the fundamentals is for suckers, I just need to get somebody that knows the secret handshake to share it with me, then all my troubles will go away and life will be awesome.

  If you’ve ever thought that way, understand that Estrada is not saying that ignoring the walls in front of you is a complete strategy; he’s saying that those fundamentals that get derided are the starting point, and the skills they engender are what will permit you to find your way around the conventional wisdom. Pay particular attention to his last paragraph:

  There’s no money in ANYTHING until someone puts something great on it. When someone tells you you’re doing it wrong, that’s your clue that you’re doing something that could change all of the rules, and a few decades from now, your style will be the one someone’s drilling into a beginner’s head, and that beginner will be coming to you for advice. Feel free to tell them what you did right, but be sure to also tell them: Do it wrong. [boldface original]

  The important words in that conclusion are “no money”, and “a few decades from now”. You can’t break the rules and expect the world to reward you tomorrow, and if (if!) you should succeed after the long, hard work, there will always be somebody breaking your new model. The fundamental lesson here is not to be a special snowflake that doesn’t have to do things the OLD WAY, OLD MAN … it’s that change is constant, and you can either ride and promote that change, or not.

  Ironically, you may find yourself in a pretty comfortable career by resisting the change than by embracing it². Until, that is, that the change becomes inescapable and you’re so invested in the old ways that you can’t adapt³. The protection against that is to do things wrong until your way becomes right, then keep doing them wronger until you create even more right ways; your revolution starts by looking in the mirror.

• Some of you may have noticed a comment that showed in Tuesday’s post for a few hours that isn’t there anymore. The poster was reporting a link in our blogroll was leading to a porn site, which is naturally something that readers of this page shouldn’t expect to encounter (unless the link is for Oglaf, and Oglaf is less about porn and more about good old fashioned smut). However, a series of tests was unable to duplicate the poster’s situation — neither our link, nor the webcomic in question showed any signs of re- or mis-direction.

  It’s possible the problem was in the poster’s own browser (I hate BHO exploits), or even a case of DNS serving up the wrong site. As a result, I felt it best to moderate the post because I didn’t want the webcomic in question to ever come up in a search in proximity to “porn site”, but since this page has a pretty strict “no deletions without a damn good reason” policy, I figured an explanation to the original poster was in order. That being done, the comment will be restored, with the name of the (as near as I can tell) innocent site redacted, in the interests of fairness to everyone.

• Wondermark calendrical marvels are back! True fact: this is the only calendar I buy for my own use each year.

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¹ Or, as we used to say back in Nerd School, If it ain’t broke, break that sumbitch and build it again different.

² See also: every pedestrian, boring form of popular, safe entertainment ever.

³ See also: every print vs web comics debate ever, and the accelerating fade out of the newspaper comic strip.

Hey, kids, did you see these dates? Things for you to do and/or celebrate, if you are special enough.

• Special people skill #1: being in or near Brooklyn as the constantly on the move Scott C has a signing for The Great Showdowns this Saturday, 8 December, from 7:00pm to 8:00pm. The fun happens at art boutique The Cotton Candy Machine¹ in Williamsburg, at the corner of Roebling & South First, convenient to the JMZ and L subway lines, as well as the dreaded G train. Also at the signing: prints, posters, and puppets.
• Special people skill #2: being in Bellevue, WA, and having the foresight to buy tickets a week ago for the annual Child’s Play Charity Dinner/Auction, kicking off at 6:30pm tomorrow night at Meydenbauer Center and going until all the money has been raised. Considering that CP2K12 is sitting at US$2.1million before this, their biggest single night of the year, gives considerable support to the notion that they may surpass last year’s crazy generous total of 3.5 literal megabucks.
• Special people skill #3: going back in time two days and wishing Little Gamers a happy internetiversary, having survived twelve years of approximately daily cartoonings. You would, naturally enough, have been met with kindly gratitude for your thoughtfulness a not-unexpected show of hostility an altogether typical reaction from self-styled juvenile delinquent wannabe Mr Madsen, and honestly, would you want anything else? While there, don’t forget to check out the progress meter for the Mongol Rally and maybe kick in a few bucks/northern bucks/aussie fun bucks/kiwi even funner bucks/pounds/euros/kronor? Call it a birthday present.

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¹ Founded by comics superstar Tara McPherson and Bay Area transplant Sean Leonard.

By now you really don’t need me to tell you about Ryan North’s Hamlet-themed Kickstarter, and to reflect that fact I’m not even going to mention the dollar figure presently attached to the campaign. I’m only mentioning it because today’s update featured an illustration by KC Green that included the most casually awesome, entirely nonplussed high-five in history, that’s all. I literally cannot look that that illustration without smiling.

• Speaking of Kickstarts, a new — and very ambitious– one opened today, as the Blind Ferret Fun-Making Concern have launched a campaign with a goal of US$78,000 to put together a documentary series focusing on what conventions are like for your favorite band of misfit Canadians. The filming part is done (you couldn’t squeeze past the BF booth in San Diego without ducking past a very attentive camera crew, which makes me wonder how Sohmer managed bathroom breaks).

  It’s got an interesting rewards structure, too — only five tiers, with pricepoints of US$15, $35, $45, $55, and $2500 (no typo), making the “Executive Producer” reward officially the most pie-in-the-sky Kickstarter offering¹ I’ve ever seen. With just a 30 day turnaround and a high target, BF will need some sustained support to meet goal.

• As promised, Jim Zub is back with a second blogposting on the economics of indy-comic publishing, this time on digital distribution. The one thing I learned almost immediately is that there really isn’t a justification for the commonly-held assumption (and I’ve held it myself²) that a three dollar comic should be much cheaper in digital form because you don’t have to pay the printer!

  Let’s work off a common enough digital price point of 99 cents; take a moment to go back to Zub’s earlier essay on indy comics and look at the pie chart. Does the wedge marked “printer” take up 2/3s of the pie? No? Then you can’t drop the price of a comic from three bucks to 99 cents and keep the same amount of money in your pocket. The slices marked “distributor” and “retailer” which made up about 65% in the print chart are replaced by “ComiXology” and “Apple/Google”, and they make up … about 65% of the digital chart.

  The printer bill does offer a savings of 20-25%, but that means a three dollar comic can come down to maybe $2.25; the 99 cent price point doesn’t work unless you sell three times more copies than at the three dollar mark. Hopefully, Zub will let us in on how both of these channels relate to/drive customers towards trade sales.

• In a similar vein about the economics and realities of being an independent creator, a pair of filmmakers talk about self-distribution when you’re not Louis CK with respect to their documentary, Indie Game: The Movie. The parts that stuck out for me are near the end of the article, making three points that successful webcomickers have made time and time again:
  

  “You have to find your audience and you have to engage them,” Pajot says. “You can’t let them find you.”

  The second major point, Swirsky adds, focuses on a work ethic beyond imagination.
  “There’s no way around it, you have to put in the time and put in the effort. You’re literally building your audience one member at a time and that can lead to something quite powerful.”

  Finally … “No one will work for your film as hard as you work for your film…. It can definitely be augmented through other people but no one will work as hard as you’re going to work.”

  Those looking for the magic bullet/secret formula/hidden handshake that guarantees creative and financial success, there it is. Find your audience, work harder than ever before, and realize that nobody cares about your success more than you, so you have to make it happen.

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¹ In terms of cost and rewards differential from the next-lowest tier.

² Although I do think there’s an argument to be made for first issues in series being very cheap (even free), and for out-of-print collections that are otherwise unobtainable to priced under their original cover prices.