Scope and scale seem to be slightly askew today.

• This page has, for the better part of a year, been bringing you news on The Bear, the Ryan Sohmer-penned, Becky Dreistadt-illustrated children’s book-in-progress; today, The Bear launched its Kickstarter campaign which still isn’t accumulating backers and dollars to the degree I’d anticipated.

  By which I mean, it’s “only” at 10% of goal in the first five hours or so, meaning the 30 day campaign is pretty much a guaranteed success, but previous Becky-heavy projects have been hitting the US$10,000 mark in about this time. I’m particularly surprised because the backer rewards feature not one, not two, but four Dreistadt original paintings up for grabs, which are normally the sort of thing that go in about ten minutes each, and they’re all (as of this writing) still available.

  I can only attribute this to a lack of the word getting out on this, the last big travel/vacation week prior to work/school life resuming next week¹. Me, I’m stocking up on a couple of these bad boys, give ’em to friends with new sons like I give copies of Blueberry Girl by Gaiman & Vess to friends with new daughters.

• If The Bear’s response is smaller than I’d figured on, it’s nice to know that there’s a balance, and the latest webcomic-related server-wanging came not at the hands of one of the behemoths that manage such things without intention², but at the paws of the modest-sized A Girl And Her Fed. Specifically, a stray mention of The Koala Hospital in Port Macquarie, NSW was enough to make their server fall down and go boom.

  Although I know for a fact that AGAHF creator Ms K Brooke “Otter” Spangler is the sort to feel absolutely horrible about taking down a non-profit, I hope that she finds in herself a little bit of pride that she could muster enough readers that want to contribute to the furry little VD-infected³ buggers as to constitute a “horde”. Assuming you think that koala care is a good thing, give it until tomorrow maybe, and pace yourselves? As of this writing, The Koala Hospital site is up, but throwing some warnings.

• Speaking of unexpected sizing, John Allison returns to the latest case at Bad Machinëry today, and I just want to publicly recognize him for his newest character design revisions. Flip back to the beginning of BM some three years back and compare Lottie and Shauna to what they look like now. This isn’t just artistic drift over time, it’s a deliberate act on Allison’s part to reflect the passage of time as his characters age and mature.

  We haven’t seen Sonny, Linton, or Jack yet, but I’d wager that they’ve upped their gangliness factor by about 40% since the end of The Case of the Fire Inside; by contrast, the first thought I had on reading this morning’s installment was, Dang, Charlotte and Shauna are almost young women. When did they get so old? Then again, I wonder the same thing about my nieces and nephews, my next door neighbor’s kid, and nearly everybody I see, so maybe it’s just me.

  Nah, it’s totally Allison. Nice work, The Englishman.

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¹ Or maybe because this one is in the “Publishing” category instead of the “Comics” category, meaning people aren’t seeing it in their searches?

² Jerry Holkins one wrote that he sometimes fears linking to things he likes might be interpreted as an act of aggression.

³ It’s hard to beat captions like One Direction member Liam Payne said he fears catching koala chlamydia after cuddling a koala that peed on him.

(more…)

Ready for the weekend? I sure am hell of ready.

• Thing Number One: heard while still in a waking state on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, courtesy of science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce, the story of an attempt to build a museum devoted to Nikola Tesla, and how by the time the story aired, the Matthew Inman-led campaign had cleared a cool million dollars. In the eight hours since crossing the megamark (as of this writing) an additional US$50,244 has been raised. Assuming a constant rate (which won’t happen, but what the hell) we’re looking at the next 37 days raising an additional five and half million dollars. With that kind of money, I’m calling for do-it-yourself deathray kits in the gift shop.
• Thing Number Two: seen and heard this morning while somewhat more awake, David Malki ! goes sound-and-video for today’s Wondermark. It’s a little less … uplifting than the Tesla museum story, but it does follow the Malki! mystique pretty closely. That is, it makes me wonder exactly how much of it was repurposed from original material¹ as Malki ! is wont to do, and how much he created himself (he being a rather talented filmmaker). Applying methods which one has mastered in one medium to a completely different medium? That’s one of the hallmarks of genius, my friends.

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¹ I’m guessing 1950s era industrial hygiene films.

With the rough cut done and the fine cut approaching, Freddave Kellett-Schroeder are, in mere hours, conducting what I believe is the first test screening of Stripped in LA, at something called “The Marina”, which I presume means something to Angelenos. Guys, I can’t tell you how much work has gone into this film (the last post about the making-of aspects to run on this page was just about one year ago exactly, at which time they had put in more than two years of work), and how much of a splash it’s going to make in the world of [web]comics. Let’s all think good thoughts in the direction of SoCal, oh, let’s say an hour from now. If nothing else, the Dave half of Freddave has a new little one at home and I’m sure he hasn’t slept more than an hour a night since San Diego Comic Con six weeks ago.

• Thing to look forward to #1: We at Fleen have spoken with Magnolia Porter at numerous points since Bobwhite wrapped, and it appears that a collection is finally on its way. Don’t get us wrong — Monster Pulse Porter’s best work yet, and The Good Crook was full of charms¹, but Bobwhite was the first time she really made us sit up and take notice. For you lucky attendees of SPX in three weeks, Porter will have a limited run of Bobwhite: Year One while she completes work on the comprehensive single-volume collection.
• Thing to look forward to #2: In actual fact, I don’t usually discover stuff that I’m super-interested in Kickstarter’s emails with their featured projects², but every once in a while, there’s a damn good one. And as luck would have it, this one is five times over goal after four days (in a thirty day campaign), so it also comes under the heading of “sure thing” for those of you that don’t appreciate the “will they make goal or not?” aspect of KS. Specifically, there’s a customized notebook for comic-making, which combines a class moleskine-style sketchbook with a series of comic references and how-tos.

  I DRAW COMICS is proudly stamped on the cover, and boy, will you ever with one of these in hand. My only disclaimer is that from the (admittedly few) sample pages shown on the KS page, it appears to draw a focus on superhero-type comics, which is understandable given that one of the project coordinators is an artist at Marvel. To the extent that body proportions are solely skewed towards the capes crowd³, it may not help every aspiring comics creator, as so many interesting comics don’t follow the stylistic conventions of the DC/Marvel Wednesday pull-list.

  But I have a hard time believing that even a sketchbook entirely serving the aesthetics of superhero comics would be entirely worthless to non-superhero creators; heck, I may even grab one myself, and I can’t draw much more than stick figures — and not even good enough stick figures that Randall Munroe needs to worry about competition.

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¹ Not to mention the fact that you could see Porter develop as an artist and storyteller as it developed, and my goodness has it been nearly five years since it launched? Yes, it has.

² Which is not to say that projects I’m interested in don’t get featured — it’s just I know about them before the email shows up.

³ And I trust that they have the good sense to not include Strong Female Characters-type bodily examples.

Almost the very first thing I wrote for this page was a comparison of a one Mister Jeffrey “JRo” Rowland and Tex Avery. Somewhat later, I found similarities in the work of John Allison and Frank Tashlin, and Jon Rosenberg and Chuck Jones.¹

This (old) (incomplete) idea came back to me today, wherein I tagged Meredith Gran as Friz Freleng-like, although she sees herself as a Bob Clampett. I based my call on her willingness to go as far as necessary for a perfect scene, no matter how many pages or panels it might take, much as Freleng was willing to put in extended sight gags that had little to do with the main action, taking up precious time² in an animated short to do so. These were frequently silent, which is another kind of storytelling that Gran excels at. So, open question to creators — do you find yourself identifying with an animator’s aesthetic, and if so, who and why?

New idea: tuxedos make you look great, but if you don’t wear one regularly, man can you look like David Byrne in his large suit, not that I would know. I think it’s because most tuxedos, being worn infrequently, never loosen and soften with wear and thus always look a bit stiff and large on the wearer.

But sometimes you are just a dapper enough muthascratcher to pull off that look, and every once in a while, they give you a fancy-shiny award too. In the hierarchy of awards for creative types, I doubt the Philadelphia Geek Awards will ever challenge any of the EGOT (well, maybe the Grammy), but to have a perfect evening with your best friend in the world and get a light-up plaque conveying the respect of other creators? Well done, Brad Guigar; no matter what awards you may or may not win, you’ll always be the best geek in our hearts.

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¹ Briefly: Rowland’s Wigu is suffused with an anything-goes attitude, but living by a single cardinal truth: if it works in the mind of an eight year old boy, it’s plausible. Allison is about social situations, the proper way to act, and subversions of that order spiraling out of control. Rosenberg’s work relies on structural rules and quickly establishing how far each premise can stretch those rules without … quite … breaking them.

² In the sense of taking a break from the main action and then returning to it, Paul Taylor’s has definite tendencies in that direction.

Wanna see something pretty? Becky Dreistadt, of the eponymous Becky and Frank, has put together a new portfolio site of her best work. And the best part about it? Concept art for unannounced projects; if I told you some of the projects that these things have been designed for (and which may — Lor’ willin’ and the creek don’ rise — see the light of day in full productions after the usual development time), you’d never believe me.¹ So browse your butts over to BeckyDreistadt.com and get to appreciating.

Wanna see something that’s simultaneously funny (ha ha) and funny (true)? We’ve mentioned French comicker Boulet previously, with respect to a 24 hour comic that has to be seen to be believed. What we didn’t mention at the time is that he also has been doing webcomics for about forever, and has more recently begun the long process of translating them into English. With a years-long archive, as you can imagine, there’s a bit of a backlog. For example, this bit of realizing that your awkward past was in your own head was originally run in March of 2008, which means that if he stopped making new work tomorrow, it would be years before we Anglophones caught up. He should have been in the blogroll before now, and today we rectify that error. Go trawl through and enjoy a comicker with a keen eye for observing life.

Wanna see something quantitatively jaw-dropping? It has been five days since we reported on Matthew Inman’s Operation: Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum, by which time the campaign itself was approximately 20 hours old. At less than a week in and 40 days still to go, O:LBaGTM is still bringing in US$1000 every fifteen minutes or so² and is closing hard on US$820,000, which means sometime before the day is out, the necessary funds to build a goddamn Tesla museum will have been raised. The only question in my mind is, how nice will the goddamn Tesla museum be? Overages have been earmarked for making things better (the US$850K goal is just to purchse the land), so with five million dollars easily within the realm of possibility, the answer is likely to be “pretty goddamn nice”. I’m holding out for decorative Tesla coils in the bathrooms, at least until somebody discovers that fluids are a good conductor and they have to turn them off. Wusses.

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¹ I was originally going to word that more rudely, but I’ll never be able to have the facility with casual blasphemy that Lore has, so why bother?

² Based on a thoroughly unscientific process of me refreshing the page every few minutes.

Understand that it was more than 30 years since I’d read A Wrinkle In Time when Hope Larson¹ announced that Madeleine L’Engle’s literary executors had asked her to adapt the classic book into a graphic novel. I couldn’t imagine a better mix of talents two and a half years ago, and now that I’ve got my hands on a copy², I am more impressed than ever.

Given that the original Newbery Medal-winning book is fifty years old, and given the entirely valid assumption that anybody that loves comics will likely have read AWIT, this review is not going to follow the usual approaches — plot and story will be freely discussed, no spoiler warnings will be given, and one may safely conclude that AWIT:TGN will fall squarely in the Required Reading category upon its release in October. What we will be talking about is how Larson adapted the source material into a unique offering.

I’m not sure about you, but I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so … let’s say nonplussed as by the first two Harry Potter movies. It was clear to me that the marching orders that Chris Columbus had been given boiled down to Make it as familiar as possible so the kids can follow along, don’t change a thing, and for God’s sake, don’t screw this up and we’ll all be employed for the next decade. The very literalness of the transition from page to screen, the almost complete absence of any real artistic changes meant that the films could bring nothing new beyond the visual design and the quality of the acting.³

By contrast, a little bit after Prisoner of Azkaban came out, I found myself (over beers after the close of day one of that year’s MoCCA Festival) holding the opinion that Warner Bros should just give the rest of the series to Alfonso Cuarón, because that movie cast off the literalism and showed a determination to be its own story. This wasn’t a movie that relied solely on what JK Rowling had written on the page to define the entirety of its world, it filled in between the words to create a dynamic, living, breathing, feels-real sense of place. Instead of viewers being told Only what’s on the page needs to be shown, the message was Here’s what one person’s imagination found in the story, which might not be what your imagination found, but isn’t it cool to think that your imagination can be a participant in the story?

I don’t want to stretch the analogy too far and say that a too-slavish transliteration is to a proper adaptation what the relationship between the hyperconformist world of Camazotz is to the bursting-with-creativity Murry household, but maybe I do. Particularly given the way that comics (as McCloud taught us) actively involve the reader as a co-conspirator in the story, a skillful determination of where to deviate from the source is an absolute necessity for AWIT:TGN to be a worthy addition to the Murry-O’Keefe stories. Fortunately, that’s what it is.

Larson follows the story closely enough that long-buried details of story came rushing back to me, but added nuances that wouldn’t have worked in the original. For example, the anachronistically formal way that many of the characters have of speaking (particularly Charles Wallace, but even the straightforward Calvin is capable of dropping lines like By what countries is Peru bounded?) serves to place the story in a timeless time instead of tying it explicitly to a particular year or decade. Along those lines, I will wager that it was a deliberate choice on Larson’s part to not show cars, phones, or other physical objects that would lead the reader to a too-specific determination of when the story takes place — it takes place in its own time and returns five minutes before it left.

Working with a palette of only black, white, and blue in various combinations (an overall blue wash for flashback, oppressive black for Camazotz), Larson is able in the space of a panel to convey mood and emotion more effectively than pages of adjectives could accomplish. Her character designs don’t look like the characters in my head (or yours either), but they do look like the characters themselves. Meg and Calvin reveal on the page how they feel about themselves — Meg’s shoulders and stance become stronger when she realizes that it’s not possible for others to repair things for her, Calvin’s ears get slightly larger and he becomes gawkier and less guarded when he finds kindred spirits in the Murry kitchen.

Most impressively to me, her renderings of Charles Wallace are subtle and powerful: the slightest change in the tilt of the head, curve of the mouth, or shape of the eyes are sufficient to change him from bemused and friendly to starkly malevolent. For a certain period of time, while their moral framework is still undeveloped, children that can walk and talk and act on their own are just this side of sociopaths, their entire world defined only in terms of themselves. When given over to IT, Larson’s Charles Wallace conveys that cruelty and utter lack of empathy; he is the very embodiment of selfishness and need to see the world conform exactly to his wishes, and it’s chillingly effective.

Larson’s interpretations and adaptations work as well as they do, naturally, because of the strength of the story that they’re built on; she knows when not to change the source material — it’s not possible to improve on defining dialogue like Well, a line or Tesser, sir! — and by recognizing where to keep and where to change, she’s built something that is recognizably L’Engle’s, but simultaneously all her own and easily the equal of the original. But as Meg Murry would angrily remind IT, Like and equal are two entirely different things.

Madeleine L’Engle found ways to tell a story that was about the uncertainties of now (and not-now, and every time), to make concepts like Good and Evil both starkly delineated and subtle, to delight children and piss off those who don’t want children exposed to “the wrong ideas”. Hope Larson found ways to make that story resonate in a new medium for a new generation of readers. In another fifty years, some new practitioner of some new artform will find a way to adapt AWIT for yet another generation. The story belongs to all times, and if you haven’t read it in far too long, you have the perfect amount of time to leisurely reacquaint yourself. Because from October forward, it won’t be possible to fully know A Winkle In Time without also knowing A Wrinkle In Time: The Graphic Novel.
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¹ Let me repeat for the benefit of those who only know Ms Larson because of her husband and figure she’s only known because of him, knock that shit off right now.

² As always, my most sincere thanks to Gina Gagliano at :01 Books; L’Engle’s longtime publisher Farrar Strauss and Giroux, their imprint Margaret Ferguson Books, and :01 are all part of the Macmillan family of publishers, thus Gina was able to get me a review copy.

³ The best thing about those first two movies — and this is not meant as a slight — was the casting. The choices of child actors that were (luckily) able to grow into the roles, and of the greats of British film (particularly Alan Rickman) were their enduring contributions.

Happy anniversary to a webcomic that I’m pretty sure I’ve never written about before — Jerkcity is fourteen years (that’s like 98 to you or me) and 4975 strips old today. I’m far more likely to follow Rands in his other, less boner-related aspect, but still — fourteen years is a long damn time in internet terms, and virtually the entire time that webcomics have been around.

Particularly on a day when word comes down that one of the great comic strips of all time is about a month from ending, that continuity is something that I think we can all appreciate. Happy birthday to Rands, Pants, Deuce, Spigot, and all the other semisensical reprobates. You’re something like respectable for one day.

I mean, webcomics has had some fairly good ones, like Operation Kill The Bad Guys And Take Back Our Library or Operation Freedom Showers, but it’s tough to beat Operation Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum.

Inman’s love for Nikola Tesla is well-documented, and he had turned his famously effective ability to whip up a cash-generating frenzy to the goal of, well, building a goddamn Tesla museum. So what’s new?

Mostly, the intake rate on all that sweet American Cash Money; in Operation Bear Love Good, Cancer Bad Inman raised the target US$20,000 in the first hour; this time he doubled that to US$40K in the first 60 minutes, US$100K in 200 minutes, and (as of this writing) at just over 20 hours into the month-and-a-half campaign, has raised let’s just round up to US$400K.¹ At this rate, the target of US$850,000 will be achieved sometime before the weekend’s over, and Nikola Tesla will get his goddamn museum.

Oh, did I mention that he’s caught the eye (and a public pledge of support) from at least one actual billionaire? Also as a side note, it should be illegal for people as serially successful and innovating as Elon Musk to be younger than me. Hear that, Elon Musk? Stay the hell off my lawn!²

Anyway, we now have empirical evidence that every time Matthew Inman comes up with an Operation, he will double his first-hour fundraising total; if he can keep that record alive, in another dozen or so Operations we’ll be in the neighborhood of Operation Fix The National Debt.

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¹ Actual number: US$399,436, which is within the margins of roundoff error.

² By which I mean, feel free to be on my lawn anytime you like, Mr Musk, it is totally okay. Have a pear off the tree if you like, you just have to fight the squirrels for it.

Will I ever be able to put Kickstarter behind me? Probably not — the admixture of nerdy analysis and optimistic financials will, I suspect, always captivate me, and I’m not alone. Yesterday, TopatoCo Vice Premier In Charge Of Kicking Your Ass Holly Post pointed out an infographic and article at Wired that I’d previously missed, despite the fact it’s been out for most of a month. Then again, it hit while I was trying to catch up from San Diego Comic Con, so I don’t feel too badly about it.

Said article is about the generalities of Kickstarter campaigns, and correlations that state the more X is true, the more (or less likely) Y will occur — there’s some nice, quick take-aways in the infographic about how if you succeed, you’ll likely squeak over the line rather than destroy your goal, and if you fail, you’ll likely fail big (the latter of which squares with my own, earlier analyses). Drilling down to the underlying article, however, something caught me on my first read.

Namely, webcomics seem to buck a lot of trends. Go read the work of Jeanne Pi and Ethan Mollick (of the Wharton School), and it seems that their first (and most prominent) conclusion doesn’t track well with our corner of funnybooks:

Projects that successfully fund tend to do so by relatively small margins. 25% of them funded at 3% or less over their goal. And 50% raised only 10% over their goal. In other words, when you succeed, it’s not by much. Projects that raised double or more over their goal are the exception.

I’m not going to gainsay their conclusions because I know they’re speaking from a large population of data (as much as 99% of successful projects and 82% of failed projects from the entire history of Kickstarter), and the webcomics I looked at were a pitifully small population by comparison (39 projects, if I remember my math), and that’s exactly the sort of situation where local contradictions to larger truths can hide. So if you were wondering if webcomics are inherently special, the answer is “Maybe, sorta”.

But the part that really stopped me in my tracks was this:

Failures happen by large amounts, successes by small amounts…unless you are: An Overachiever

Over·achiev·er: A large project (over $10,000) that received over 10x its funding goal.

• Of the 106 projects that received over 10 times their goal, only 33 were large projects.
• With the exception of a single music project, all of these 33 overachievers were in the hardware, software, games, or product design categories.

Now, Pi and Mollick’s piece is, as near as I can tell, undated, but it is referenced in Wired in mid-July. It also references an earlier piece by Pi which garnered attention in mid-June, so I’m guessing they did the bulk of their analysis in that monthlong timeframe.

Last time I checked, mid-June to mid-July is after February, which was the closing date of a project with a goal over US$10,000, which achieved more than 10x goal, and which did not fall into the categories of music, hardware, software, games, or product design categories. You might have heard of it. Other comics projects may not have met the $10K floor or the 10x multiplier, but Order of the Stick damn well did, so like I said in the title, I’m hoping that Pi and Mollick just missed including “comics” on their list.

Webcomics: special snowflakes kinda maybe, and also easily overlooked.

Also, I’ll note that Penny Arcade’s Kickstarter to kick advertising in the junk will complete in about … ten minutes as I write this, and will probably hit somewhere in the US$525 to 535K range and somewhere in the vicinity of 9000 backers. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the new Number Two.

Edit to add: Yep, there we go.

Oh, cool my wife said as she was bringing in the mail and saw a package with the characteristic look of having come from overseas, where she has friends of long standing. Then her face fell and she said, Never mind, it’s for you.

And so it came to be that unlooked-for, I received from Belgium a copy of the latest print collection by Beardfluff creator Rembrand Le Compte¹, most recently mentioned on this page a little more than a year ago. Le Compte’s art is more assured, and while Beardfluff retains a healthy number of random-topic strips (if fewer journal-style entries starring the creator and a sentient beard), in the Spring of last year, Le Compte started a series of linked stories under the heading Fire & Stone.

The weird, beautiful, show-don’t-tell stories deal with birds (some seemingly ordinary, one definitely a phoenix), golems powered by heat of firebirds, cranes, weasels, a great war in the distant past, and a dark inversion of life’s energy. It drops you immediately into the story, leaves questions unanswered, and it a thoroughly satisfying tale; Le Compte played with the story for most of a year (between May 2011 and April 2012), updating multiple pages in a go, and interspersing with random ephemera until the narrative called him again. It’s a good, affecting story, and it’s a shame that the Ignatz nominees are already announced, because Fire & Stone is right up their alley.

• Also on the book front, Ryan North² today wraps his comprehensive reading of Steven Spielberg Presents: Back To The Future: A Robert Zemeckis Film: The Novel by George Gipe based on a screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale and has decided that it’s too much for one Tumblr. Thus, B^F: The Novelization Of The Feature Film, the e-book, is now available for purchase as North explores just how … very not good a quick-turnaround novelization based on an in-revision script for a movie that’s not out yet can be. Of special note would be the stellar reviews that North is receiving already, particularly this one:
  

  I wrote this book and I think it’s pretty great! It has a lot of jokes and is a fun thing to read with your eyes. Good work, Ryan! Best friends forever, Ryan!!

  Could anything be as wonderful as being best friends forever with Ryan? Only one man knows.

• Does anybody know if Red Bull comes in forties? Because if it does and you have one handy, you might want to pour it out for Ryan Sohmer, who is going Cold Red Bull Turkey due to concerns that mainlining the stuff like he does might actually kill him. Sohmer’s had a relationship with the go go juice that predates the birth of his son, and possibly he has known and loved the ‘Bull since before meeting his wife, so we are talking about the death of a deep and meaningful friendship here. On the other hand, not having to worry about his heart leaping out of his chest cavity must surely be its own reward, so best of luck to Mr Sohmer as he enters this new, brave, and much sleepier stage of his life.

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¹ A man after my own heart.

² Exemplar of All That Is Most Worthy And Awesome (Great White North Quadrant) and Tallest One-Third of the Collective Nexus of All Webcomics Realities.