Yeah, we got some stuff for you today, and I’d probably be more enthused about some of these ‘cept for the part where I’m working on a low-grade fever and feeling all blah. FEEL MY ENNUI, DAMN YOU ALL.

• Anagrammatic numbers department: Minimumble strip #250 hit the same day as Maximumble strip #520. Huh.
• Pay what you want department: The entirety of Box Brown’s Bellen is now available as a name-your-price e-book. Neat.
• Take the money and run for the border department: Yuko and Ananth are possibly terrified, maybe appalled by how much money their Kickstarter has raised. And the total keeps going up, increasing their terror and/or appallor proportionally. If they hit US$70K, I fear one or both of them may spontaneously burst.
• Why would you even … no, just no department: Never try to gross out Randy Milholland. Ever.¹
• It’s like a webcomics utility department: David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) has decided to get out of the archive-binge non-biz (on account of it makes no money) known as Archive Binge and has turned the whole shootin’ match over to the folks at Comic Rocket to run. Comic Rocket, as you may know, is a non-evil webcomic aggregator that doesn’t piss off creators², so this makes a great deal of sense. By the way, CR are trying to fund the development of a mobile version of their reading page at IndieGoGo, which might put an end to scrapers once and for all, so give ’em a look, yeah? In the meantime, you can find Archive Binge here.

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¹ Be sure to read the commentary in the bottom gutter.

² That is, make money from them by hotlinking, stripping out news/ads, or screwing with their presentations.

But before the Ryanness begins, a quick thought for a friend: Happy Two Yeariversary, Ro.¹

So! Ryans! Ryan North, that is, as the Kickstarter for TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST has cleared US$200,000 (or 1000% of goal) and thus will have a live-action, internet-path-choosing stage adaptation in Busan, Korea, courtesy of Ryan Estrada:

To Be Or Not To Be: The Play Of The Book Of The Play. Shakespeare in Busan is going to transforming this book into a stage performance in South Korea as an incredible improvised play. AND since people all over the world are supporting this project, the performance will be livestreamed worldwide, and when a choice comes up, the entire internet will be able to vote. The play will be directed by webcartoonist and Machine of Death author Ryan Estrada. He feels sorry for his poor stage manager who has to have sets and props ready for thousand of scenes that you might not even choose, but HE KNEW THE RISKS.

Is it insane? ARE WE ALL LITERALLY INSANE?? It is impossible to tell.

Piling on top of that good news, The AV Club loved the heck out of North’s Adventure Time #10 (the choosable-path issue, coincidence!?) and also Meredith Gran’s Marceline and the Scream Queens. Meredith is, the last time I checked, not a Ryan, but reciprocally neither is Ryan a Meredith. They’re all doing terrific work, though, and that’s a cheering thought to take with you to the weekend. See you on Monday.

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¹ Although what’s with all the RTL text on the archive page, Randall? Jeeze.

Those of you that follow Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson in their various endeavours may know that they’re in the midst of a continent-hopping trip that took them from their home base in LA to New York, London, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, and they still have parts of Europe and then Japan to go¹. Those of you that follow them may also know that Becky paints about 300 of her watercolor/gouache paintings a year, which makes for a challenge when so much of your life is taken up with travel, conventions, and suchlike. So it’s good to know that even on vacation, when the muse strikes Becky’s gonna paint the everloving heck out of that muse, and it’s going to be awesome. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the sketchbooks and notebooks full of words and pictures that they’re presently filling will make for one hell of a travel story and I can’t wait to see it.

• Speaking of paintings, I just learned of an art show that I had to share with you. Way back in the long-ago, there was a wonderful webcomic called Patches by the equally wonderful Kelly Vivanco, which went on hiatus at roughly the same time that Vivanco started producing moody, dreamy, whimsical-on-the-verge-of-disturbing paintings².

  If you find yourself in the Greater Los Angeles area on Saturday, you may want to head to Culver City, as Vivanco will be opening the latest solo exhibition of her paintings at Thinkspace, which is found at 6009 Washington Boulevard. The opening reception (read: snacks and booze) runs from 6:00pm to 9:00pm, and the show itself will be up for three weeks.

• Anybody have an eBay account and a sense of justice? Firstly, observe Mary Cagle’s really wonderful Kiwi Blitz, say this page right here, and note the young lady with the hat and the artificial leg. Secondly, this eBay offering, which features a suspiciously similar young lady with a hat and an artificial leg for sale, and which is not offered up by Mary Cagle. Next up, the Report Item page, which requires an eBay account, and where one can (I imagine) notify eBay that Mr or Ms Vinylcustom is violating the rights of an independent creator. Remember the rules, kids: be factual, and be polite.
• Kickstarter roundup: TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST is just over a week into its campaign and closing in on US$200 large³, the Johnny Wander bookstarter needs to think up more stretch goals for its last four days, as it’s blown past the last one. Also, I saw that Neil Gaiman retweeted the Kickstarter twitterfeed, and I said to myself, Self, that sounds familiar:
  

  The beautiful blue businesswoman Gabrielle explodes from Claire’s toilet and informs her she’s pregnant with the new Messiah.

  And indeed it was, which is how I learned that Sister Claire has a Kickstarter going to print the first eight chapters (or roughly 200 pages) of relentlessly cute and just the right amount of blasphemous webcomickry for your reading pleasure. I see that creator Elena Barbarich (or Yamino, if you prefer) has reached about the 86% mark in about three days, meaning she’s statistically certain to make goal⁴ and surpass it. Oh, and obligatory disclaimer: Ms Barbarich, like seemingly half the kids I know in webcomics these days (cf: Gibson, Dreistadt) went to college with my niece, so there’s that.

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¹ Even better, they managed to hop across the Hudson while in New York and visit me and my wife, on account of they are awesome people.

² They’ve always reminded me of fairy tales, at the moment just before everything starts to go seriously wrong.

³ It helps if you read that in the voice of Rodney Dangerfield when he shouts Hey everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!

⁴ Fun fact I learned at the B9 panel at NYCC this year: Cindy Au (Director of Community for Kickstarter) shared some statistical information that included the number 1/3. Projects that fail typically do not get anywhere near goal, and almost never make it even 1/3 of the way to goal; projects that make it to 1/3 of goal almost always go on to meet or exceed goal. Neat!

One of the most fascinating discussions I’ve ever had with a creator was when Jim Zub were chatting off the record at NYCC 2011 and he broke down the numbers on making Skullkickers, with the somewhat depressing conclusion that it was costing him money to put out each issue. When I spoke to him after Skullkickers launched on Keenspot, giving away what he was already in the hole for, his readership was (comparatively) through the roof:

In our first week at Keenspot we had more unique IP visits (i.e.: new readers) than all three printings of Skullkickers #1 combined.

All those readers for free, instead of paying out of pocket to reach them! By SDCC 2012, while it still cost him out of pocket to put out the floppies (to those of us that needs our fix of mayhem), there was now an upside in trade sales:

I’m at a show and somebody says, “I love Skullkickers!”, so I ask them where they know if from, and it’s always online. So then I get to tell them, “Oh, we’re running pages from issue three online now … and we just released issue thirteen to stores.” Ten issues they haven’t seen, and there’s the trade collection sitting on the table and they have to have it.

The hard numbers are what make up the by now widely-spread blogpost that Zub put up yesterday on the economics of creator-owned comics, using a 5000-copy print run of a single issue costing three bucks. He’s adjusted some numbers to make it more accurate than in its original incarnation, which has had the effect of changing the money left over for the creative team (after distribution, printing, and publishing costs) from the pathetic US$31.50 to the slightly less pathetic US$37.50 per page on a 20 page comic. I’ve heard you’re doing pretty good in the comics game if you can produce a single finished page per day, so yeah — we’re talking well below minimum wage (split among all the creators, not just the artist), and approaching restaurant waiter with no tips territory.

For everybody who’s ever wondered, why webcomics? There’s your answer — the webcomics angle is what drives enough readers to the reprints to make this a not-quite-break-even enterprise; were Zub to abandon the monthly floppies and adopt a purely web+reprint volumes model (aka “Going Foglio”), he might even make a modest sum (in the future, well after paying his artists). We’ll have to wait until Zub shares the numbers on trade sales, convention sales (no distributor! no store!), digital sales, and website ad revenue to draw real conclusions, but for those who are wondering what kind of madman would go to all that work and not make any money:

Believe it or not, I’m not bitter about all of this. It’s the price of doing business in the mainstream comic industry via retail outlets and international distribution. That’s how it works. I just want to make it very clear so people understand what I mean when I say I’m not getting rich making my own comic. Skullkickers is the most expensive hobby I’ve ever had.

It’s that compulsion to create, even without material reward (and figuring out the slowest way to lose money on that creation) that also gets a discussion in Christopher Wright’s discussion of how he learned to stop worrying and love self-publishing. Wright found himself unable to Chucke aside the notion that self-publishing was for

• Deluded authors who were being played by vanity press outfits
• Failed authors who had more ego than talent

getting scammed by vanity presses. Even with more than a dozen years of producing Help Desk under his belt, it took a period of years to realize that webcomicking is self-publishing, and all of the arguments made against it (at least, where you aren’t paying a vanity press thousands of dollars to do things you could easily do yourself) are essentially the same as the arguments made against webcomics in their infancy. It’s an excellent companion piece to Zub’s thoughts, and well worth your time.

Awesome, I might get to use the naked wrestler guy graphic again! Longtime readers of this page may recall that Steven “Cloudy” Cloud, he of fiercesome beardery and hiatused comicking once drove to Mongolia from London in a Nissan Micra for charity and adventure.

Apparently, every half decade some webcomiker or other has to do this damn-fool thing this is now a tradition, and Pontus Madsen & Christian Fundin from Little Gamers will, with friends, be fielding two three-man teams in the 2013 Mongol Charity Rally This involves driving from Sweden to Ulan Baator, Mongolia in two tiny-ass cars via central Europe, Russia, and a series of countries whose names end in -stan.

Want to see six grown men do something incredibly unpredictable to benefit two charities? Team Venture has an Indiegogo page set up so you can kick a few bucks in and send them on the adventure of a lifetime and/or hurtling to their dooms. I suppose it depends on whether you like them or not.

Oh, and should you, like the members of Team Venture, ever find yourself at an ex-Soviet checkpoint in the middle of absolutely nowhere, being pestered by a man with a uniform and a Kalashnikov¹ for a bribe? Cloudy says the secret is to enthusiastically smile and nod and thank them profusely until they figure that you just don’t understand them and send you on your way. It’s possible at some point in the negotiation they just decide to shoot you, but I’m pretty sure that Cloud’s beard made him bulletproof, so maybe that’s why he made it home safe. Look, just don’t die out there and we’ll call it good, okay?

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¹ Fun fact: Mikhail Kalashnikov is still alive.

Today is Jon Rosenberg’s annual reminder that he and I are connected by the day of our respective births, no matter how he might try to forget that fact. Nevertheless, in an act of stunning generosity he texted me four years ago to congratulate me on my shift from list 3A to 3B, which is the greatest gift I’ve ever received. Happy Birthday, Jon and remember — you don’t want to break out the stasis chamber until next year when you hit 40.

In the meantime, life has gifted me with some coincidental birthday presents.¹

• Present Number One: Octopus Pie is back, and it looks to becoming at us three times a week until Meredith Gran says “enough”. On the one hand, I’m extremely bummed that the reason that Gran is back to updating Octopie with a vengeance is she’s finished her work on Marceline and the Scream Queens on account of I love that series and this is irrefutable proof that there’s only one issue left.

  On the other hand, I’ll take Octopus Pie three times a week over nearly anything in the world, especially as Gran does something so very, very rare in large-cast storytelling — taking the time to flesh out the peripheral characters², give them their own stories and lives and decisions that happen while the main cast are doing other things. Nobody’s a placeholder, put into storage when off-screen, just waiting for Eve or Hanna or Marek to interact with them; Ollie, Julie, and even Puget Sean are people, and people aren’t static.³ Everybody’s got something interesting for us to discover about them.

  Typing that out, I realize that in that respect, Octopus Pie is actually quite similar to Adventure Time and that just makes another reason why Mer was a crazy good choice to set loose in the sandbox of characters that is the Land of Ooo. A’course, she’s only better with her own characters, and now’s the time to get caught up with Octopus Pie.

• Present Number Two: Oh, and there’s a new episode of the increasingly-misnamed Webcomics Weekly; Scott, Kris, Brad, and Dave have so much fun together that I’d listen to them read the phone book. In fact, I’m listening to it now as I type, and that means that I’m doing neither thing very well, so I’m going to focus on the listening part now. See everybody tomorrow, which is not my birthday and therefore a much less interesting day.

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¹ Cue Andy Serkis: Precioussssss.

² In this case, Marigold — once a stoner artisinal soap-maker, presently working for The Man and reasonably okay with that, despite feeling a bit adrift since breaking up with Will.

Oh, and sorry about the sparkly text, but it’s justified in this case.

So Ryan North continues to make all of the money, as To Be Or Not To Be: A Choice-Filled Adventure By Ryan North And Also William Shakespeare Too has, as of this writing, passed the US$132,000 mark, and is rapidly driving the continued economic recovery by itself.

Personally, I’m hoping North will pass the dollars/word ratio of 3.0, which would make the past year’s effort of coming up with some 80,000 words pretty darn worthwhile especially considering that freelance writing gigs are normally measured in pennies per word. Naturally, North doesn’t get to pocket all of the money raised, what with having to produce the books and pay his artists, but it would still be a nice, round target for him.

• Speaking of Kickstartings, this page has had the opportunity in the past to mention the campaigns of one Mr Darren “Dern” Gendron, who doesn’t usually work within the comics sphere on Kickstarter, but who has run some darn successful campaigns, considering that his least overfunded project raised 108% of goal. The others have done, respectively, 117% of goal, a staggering 5015% of goal, and 3385% of goal with about two and a half days to go.

  Big numbers, although to be fair it helps when your goal is in the US$500 to US$1000 range to hit huge percentages like that. But! — and this is a big but — does this mean that Gendron is sitting pretty from the (approximately) US$101,000 he’s raised since September of last year? Funny you should ask, as Gendron’s thrown open his metaphorical kimono to share some numbers on his latest project:

  Right now [approximately three days ago as of this writing — Gary], we’re at 1,101 backers and $32,807.

  After the Kickstarter and Amazon fees, that’s $29,854.

  We have a chart tracking how much has been collected for international shipping fees. That’s a 0-profit area, because every dollar brought in for that goes right back out. Currently, that fund is taking out $3,615. So we’re at $26,239. We’re also budgeting in another $3,888 in current domestic shipping orders, so our subtotal drops to $22,351.

  So then the next big check is production. And lumping together the cards, the chips and the dice, we’re at $19,006 in costs.

  That leaves O [Gendron’s artistic partner, O Abnormal — Gary] and I with $3,345 currently.

  So to round off the numbers somewhat, out of about US$33,000, the creators are left with about US$3300, or ten percent. That number put me in mind of something that Howard Tayler said at SDCC years and years back when this page was just a lil’ baby blog, about how 90% of a book’s cost was going to end up in pockets other than the creator’s; Tayler’s point was to get more of the percentage by taking over other jobs, and on the surface it appears that Gendron’s experience is disproving Tayler’s thesis. Read on, though, and learn about economies of scale:

  We’re pushing to hit $40,000. Because almost all of the high-ticket production items are covered, we’ll probably pull in about $6,000 more from that final $7,200. And we’ll have a good supply of playing cards to sell for the next couple years.

  Catch that? If the high-ticket items are covered and the incremental costs on the lower-priced items come down, you’d get a return of (very roughly) US$9300 out of US$40,000, or comfortably in the 20-25% range for rate of return. One may also note that Gendron includes in those numbers stocking up for future sales, which doesn’t show up as immediate benefit.

  It’s a nice reality check for those considering Kickstarter, seeing one of the repeat users of the platform lay out exactly what the expected return will be (and honestly, I know a lot of small businesses that would be thrilled with a 10% margin). I’m wondering if anybody would be willing to run a Kickstarter with these numbers laid out from the beginning — here’s what I’m asking for, here’s what it will cost, here’s what we’re left with — and update those numbers (as closely as can be approximated) during the run of the project. I think it would serve to demystify the platform a great deal, remove some scales from eyes, and perhaps also to change a few minds about how “rich” project owners are getting from their runaway-success campaigns. In almost all cases, I’m betting it’s a lot closer to break even than to Kiss my ass, bitch! I’ll be at Duane’s!¹.

• It’s more than a year since Rebecca Clements did a charming 24 hour comic/chooseable-path story called Come Inside My Body, and with her recent return to comickin’, Clements has put the you-decide guided tour of her own interior spaces up as a you-decide-on-a-price e-book for instant download.

  Guys, if you’ve ever wondered what all those squishy, squirmy, goopy organs do, this is the ideal time to find out. If you have a gross anatomy exam coming up, this is the best way to study and if your teacher tells you that your views on the spleen are incorrect, you can point out that they are entirely correct and who would know about a Clementine spleen better than Clements anyway? It’s less than any of those human anatomy coloring books and far more amusing.

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¹ In this analogy, everybody wondering where their Kickstarter reward is “bitch” and a bottle-service cabana in Vegas is “Duane’s”.

Two quick items for you today, and it’s not like any of you aren’t suffering from pie coma anyway.

• Thanks to a couple of classes on optical engineering back in my college days, I know a bit about the additive nature of color, but I never really understood how artists see it; enter a nice primer on color (or colour, if you prefer) theory from the artist’s perspective, which I found nicely informative and I hope you do, too.
• Weirdly, Brad Guigar does not entirely depend on punnery for humor (or humour, if you prefer), which was demonstrated when he did a stand-up comedy set back in the springtime. For anybody that got to listen to the recording¹, Guigar’s brad-up comedic stylings are very old school — he’d have killed in the Catskills if only his name were “Shecky”.

  In any event, Brad’s heading back to the microphone and bare stage, and you can check him out yourself if you’re in Philadelphia on Sunday, 9 December. The Bradster will hit the stage of the Helium Comedy Club² at 7:30pm, and please remember to tip your waitress.

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¹ Or watch the video, here.

² Try the veal.

Look what Chris Yates went and lasered¹ up for me!

In all, Aperture #26 is three layers deep, and I haven’t had the courage to spill it out and try to assemble it. Also, it’s just too pretty to disturb yet. Also also, Chris and Assistant Emily threw in a bunch of art extras because they are awesome dudes.

Quick note: there are some photographic artifacts due to the transparent nature of the material and our old friend, compound interest refraction: the outside vertical edges really do line up, and the signature is not really smeary like it appears in the image.

In conclusion, the Pilgrims ate well at the first Thanksgiving because of Squanto and they survived the boredom of that first winter with clear Baffler!s from Chris Yates Studios. The End.
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¹ It is too a verb, shut up.

I have an entirely rhetorical question for you, and by “you”, I mean “you individually and in particular”, not some more abstract “you”: Do you like it when language is bent into patterns that delight and entertain? Because I have something that you will want to see: an 80,000 word book written by master languagebender Ryan North re-envisioning Hamlet as a choosable-path adventure, which has (predictably) surpassed its Kickstarter goal in about three hours.

I should pause here a moment to issue a disclaimer — Ryan asked me proofread a near-final version of To Be Or Not To Be: A Choice-Filled Adventure By Ryan North And Also William Shakespeare Too, which I gladly did, and so I’ve had the opportunity to read through the entire thing.

I also played through every single story node for both Ophelia (who kicks ass and does not resemble the inertial doormat that Shakespeare portrayed) and Hamlet’s dad, King Hamlet Sr (who dies on the first page and must play as a ghost and that is awesome). I did not play through every story node for Hamlet because I have always felt that Hamlet is a CHUMP and I do not traffic in CHUMPS but I’ve read enough of his story paths to see that North does manage to DECHUMPIFY him in some of the paths so that’s good.

True to form, Ryan North has put together an amazing Kickstarter campaign (including what may be the definitive Kickstarter video which is itself choosable-path) featuring awesome backer rewards, including visualizations of the story structure which is a thing of mathematical beauty and intricate, interwoven geometries. Speaking of interwoven geometries, should you read your way through TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST, keep a chessboard handy; no spoilers, but let’s just say that I would have died fewer embarrassing deaths had I not been trying to keep a chess game straight in my head.

Speaking of those embarrassing deaths, 30 of them are illustrated by the finest creators in webcomics today, and further funds raised only increase the number of illustrations until all 110 deaths get pictures. The full set of illustrations happens at US$50,000 and given that Ryan is already north¹ of US$25,000 about four hours into this thing, that’s a certainty. The only question is how long it takes to get to US$70,000 and the audiobook, and to US$100,000 and the sequel, which I hope concerns Ophelia branching out from boring pre-Renaissance Denmark into other times and places and maybe wrestling dinosaurs.

Guys, I am excited for this project to come to fruition and I’ve already read it so it contains no more surprises for me, but every one of you (yes, you) that reads TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST has delightful hours of delight in front of you, so get in on this while you can and thank Ryan North for the herculean labors of the past year, secretly and carefully bending language into its most perfect form.

Oh, and for those of you wavering, the early adopters have got your back — every US$5000 raised above the initial US$20,000 goal reveals another story page and a choice, to be decided by backer voting. Thanks to Update #1 voting, it appears that we will get to read the book’s acknowledgments, which SPOILER ALERT could lead to a page where YOU GET TO BE RYAN NORTH.

If you are awesome enough to support TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST click here. If you are so CHUMPY to make Hamlet himself look like somebody who is NOT A CHUMP AT ALL, I don’t know, maybe go look at pictures of cats on the internet? I mean, that’s nice and all, and your CHUMPNESS doesn’t make you a bad person or anything. Just … let’s not talk about this possible choice anymore and we are still friends.

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¹ Ha, ha.

Friend o’ Fleen Rick Marshall did a set of live, on-camera interviews at Long Beach Comic and Horror Con earlier this month the first of which is now available for your viewing pleasure. Be sure to turn your speakers UP, as the little percussion sting at start takes on a Lalo Schifrinesque character when given sufficient volume. Don’t wuss out with little speakers on your laptop, either — give that sucker some bass.

• We’re a little more than two weeks into this year’s Child’s Play holiday campaign which makes it a good time to note that the current take is north of half a million dollars, which if the current giving rate can be maintained will produce a total normally only seen attached to things like Homestuck Kickstarters.

  Though unlike Kickstarters, which see a huge front-loaded effort that then drops off (maybe regaining momentum at the end of the campaign), Child’s Play tends to see week-on-week increases through at least the first half of the campaign, typically peaking around the phenomenally well-funded charity dinner/auction (which this year will be on Thursday, 6 December in Bellevue, WA). Recall that Child’s Play has an unbroken streak (even through the economic meltdown) of increasing totals year-to-year, which means another US$3million need to be raised to keep the tradition alive.

• Speaking of Child’s Play, there’s an entire calendar of events covering the next few weeks, meaning that nearly everybody has a chance to do something that’s simultaneously fund and beneficial and maybe even local. Case in point: my favorite recurring event is Ümloud!, because you really can’t have too many umlauts in your life.

  Having long since grown beyond its conception as some people playing Rock Band in a bar, this year’s Ümloud! will stream the Rock Band fun over the internet, so everybody can enjoy it. Everybody that’s not at the charity auction in Bellevue, that is, as it’s also on 6 December. If you’re catching the fun from home, maybe check out the participating hospital map¹ and find a local beneficiary that you could toss a few bucks? Just sayin’.

• Interesting: a Top 100 Most Important People List (such as you would find this time of year), this time referring to movers and/or shakers in the comics industry. Unsurprisingly, it’s reportedly overwhelmingly male² with the first woman not showing up until slot #29 (Diane Nelson, head of DC Entertainment).

  In fact, all but one of the women are outside the creative end of comics, the one outlier, the single woman deemed important from a creative standpoint being Kate Beaton. While I have to object that no other female creators are worthy of recognition, it’s hard to argue with the influence Beaton’s had, particularly given the very wide swath of attention that she’s earned both inside and outside comics for the past year and a half or so.

  But seriously, no Amanda Conner? Fiona Staples is redefining how beautiful comic art can be with her work on Saga, Carla Speed McNeil is breaking the boundaries of SF work with Finder, Colleen Doran’s Gone to Amerikay has been received with universal acclaim, and Spike Trotman released Poorcraft to fill a niche that nobody else even recognized. Raina Telgemeier continues a multi-year domination of the YA market, and Hope Larson and Meredith Gran are hauling new/young/female readers into comics hand over fist.

  Granted, the list is reportedly focused on who has power within the industry, but if you don’t have comics that people want to read, you don’t have an industry. If you can’t see how these women (and I could name plenty more) are influential on comics today, and especially to keeping comics alive as a vital industry for the coming decades, you’ve got some research to do.

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¹ Which initially centers on North America, yes, but which is scrollable for reasons. Drag ‘er around to other hemispheres, see what you can find!

² On account of the whole thing won’t be revealed until tomorrow, in the inaugural issue of a print companion to the Bleeding Cool website.