I’ve been contacted by a number of people about Scott Kurtz’s comment on yesterday’s NCS nominations story. While I’m touched by the concern, it’s unnecessary. Two of the things I appreciate about Scott are his passion and his complete and utter willingness to let you know where he stands on any issue; it’s not always fun being on the receiving end of those opinions¹, but it’s always instructive. We’ve been over our viewpoints and opinions and I’m happy to announce that I’ve been granted provisional BFF status by Mr Kurtz², subject only to my completing something called “Operation Wigwam Wedgie”, the details of which will be revealed to me at a later date³.

• Speaking of, I’m trusting you saw the mysterious tweets yesterday leading up to the announcement that the first of two guest weeks⁴ at PvP will feature an Axe Cop/LOLBAT team-up⁵. And we all know what’s not on deck for PvP the second week of Kurtz’s absence, so there’s that to look forward to.
• Every year about this time, I note that Canadian comics awards seem to have a much higher ratio of unassailable quality nominees than those in other parts of the world. That’s because every year about this time, the Doug Wright Award nominees are announced, starting the season of comics awards with their bestowal at TCAF in just over a month.

  Anyhoo, the nominations are dominated by Drawn and Quarterly this year, with Kate Beaton up for still more well-deserved recognition for Hark! A Vagrant and Emily Carroll capping off a year where her recognition skyrocketed with a nomination for the Spotlight Award, which recognizes talent deserving of wider recognition (which she surely is).

• For those of you wondering how Rich Stevens was coming along with prepping well over 3500 comics for e-distribution, the answer appears to be, Just fine, thanks:
  

  I hit a bit of a milestone last night– 2,600 comics down, 1,000 to go. The plan to stay on schedule involves being done with this first draft by the end of the week.

  The good news is that somewhere around the 2,000th comic… my wrist evolved like a Pokémon and my carpal tunnel pain seems to have majorly faded. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

  I always said that Stevens was nigh-indestructible; only a world-wide coffee drought can even slow him down. That, or reeeaaaalllly expensive perfume⁶.

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¹ If I only associated with people that agree with me 100% of the time, my circle of friends would be much smaller.

² I’m sorry, Kris Straub, I didn’t want you to have to find out this way, but what Scott and I share is real.

³ Hints have been dropped that the date in question will be 9 April, which by an amazing coincidence is Brad Guigar’s birthday.

⁴ Necessitated by Mr Kurtz’s travel to the far antipodes with former-BFF Mr Straub and sometimes homebrewer Mr Wheaton, despite the fact that it’s well known that everything in Australia wants to kill you. Everything. Godspeed, gentlemen, and watch out for drop bears.

⁵ Not a dream, hoax, imaginary story, etc.

⁶ ‘Cause it’s got a metal head!

Congrats to Matthew Inman, Mike Krahulik & Jerry Holkins, and Jon Rosenberg as the first-ever nominees in the Online Comic division of the NCS Awards.

I’m actually kind of limited in how much it would be appropriate for me to say about this topic, since I was involved in the screening process for comics that were then passed to a jury, which determined the three nominees for voting. It’s not possible for committees of this sort to do their work in public so I won’t be talking about any of the discussions we had, except to say that the committee’s unanimous belief was that we should put the best work forward, and when we had doubts as to whether or not a candidate met the (admittedly imperfect) criteria, we passed them along.

With any luck, next year’s award will be better, and the year after that, until the distinction between media is gone and work competes solely on its merits. Like I said back in January, Perfect is the enemy of done, and changes of this magnitude will always happen incrementally. I’m proud to have been part of the first effort to overcome the inertia and get the metaphorical ball rolling.

I watched Jon Rosenberg’s Kickstarter campaign close just north of US$55,000 and in all-time the sixth highest slot for comics projects¹, and I started wondering if there were anything in common among these high-value webcomic Kickstarts. Waaaay too much number-crunching later, I find there actually is something among the most successful. Caveats ahoy:

1. The sample size is small, being drawn from the most successful and concluded comics Kickstart campaigns
2. I’ve excluded the Womanthology as it’s not the product of singly-identifiable creators, working from an established property
3. I’ve excluded the Order of the Stick campaign for several reasons:
   • The numbers are skewed by the high number of reward categories
   • The numbers within those categories are skewed by highly-variable reward limits (some limits in the range of 100, some in the range of five or six)
   • The numbers are even further skewed by a high incidence of “add on” rewards, where a supporter could get something not offered at their reward by bumping up their pledge by a given amount
4. I wanted to compare against campaigns that were just shy of successful for comparison, but it’s really damn hard to find those; a fairly exhaustive search of failed webcomics campaigns causes me to tend towards the conclusion If you’re gonna fail, you’re gonna fail big
5. To simplify things, I arranged reward levels in broad ranges, since there are no “standard” reward intervals; where you see the number “20” in the graphs, that means “greater than the 10 level to the immediate left, up to and including 20”

All that being said, I did find a fairly interesting commonality among the projects that I ultimately did data entry on:

1. Erfworld Year of the Dwagon — US$84,981 pledged, 1148 supporters, average pledge level US$74.25, 354% of goal achieved
2. Diesel Sweeties eBook-Stravaganza 3000 — US$60,209 pledged, 1520 supporters, average pledge level US$39.61, 2006% of goal achieved
3. Benign Kingdom — US$59,775, 1095 supporters, average pledge level US$54.59, 332% of goal achieved
4. Goats Book IV: Inhuman Resources — US$55,348, 906 supporters, average pledge level US$61.10, 461% of goal achieved

Looking purely at the stated support levels (and there’s no adjustment here for artificial limits on how many of a particular reward were offered, nor for people pledging at an amount “between” official reward levels, there’s not a lot of obvious correlation to be seen:

[click to embiggen]

With some really significant outliers there from Diesel Sweeties. But the curves of each comic’s pledge frequency seemed to be similar (at least, if you’ve spent a bunch of years looking at data), which led me to add some logarithmic trendlines²:

[make with the clicky]

Three of those comics have trendlines that are similar enough to arguably be within the bounds of the margin of error (if not for the fact that the very notion of a margin of error on such a small sample is ludicrous). There’s a real tendency towards buy-in the lower half of the reward structure, and the second quartile is where the real action is. The top rewards look impressive when a couple people plunk down a couple grand each, but they aren’t what’s important. The middle tiers are where you’ll find the make or break point.

The Diesel Sweeties curve is again an outlier, starting higher and decaying more sharply. I didn’t feel like cleaning them up, but random samples of failed Kickstarts from across the comics category revealed a similar pattern — when the greatest number of pledges are at the lowest levels, it’s really tough to make your goals. The only other successful Kickstart I found with a dominant skew to the very lowest end was the Double Fine door-buster, where more than 50% of all backers are at the lowest possible level³. So how do Double Fine and Diesel Sweeties get by on front-loading the low end, and why do so many other campaigns that do the same fail? I see two reasons:

• Sheer numbers The scale really cannot be overstated here. A cursory examination of the top-funded project in each major category revealed that you can take the total number of pledgers for all of those projects together and still not equal the 47,946 people that pledged at the lowest level to Double Fine. But numbers can work against a campaign, since any reward more more tangbile than warm fuzzy feelings will cost a significant amount of time and effort to send to a lot of people, on small margins. That leads us to …
• Free rewards You get the new Double Fine game, which requires no shipping, no handling, and it’s likely Steam will supply the bandwidth. Likewise, the lowest reward for the Diesel Sweeties campaign is a digital download that doesn’t cost Rich Stevens even one trip to the post office. Yeah, sure, bandwidth costs. Peanuts compared the effort and cost of getting anything physical to 490 people.

So that’s what I learned — there’s a sweet spot for rewards in about the US$25 – US$75 range, and unless you’re dealing with a metric crapload of supporters with an essentially free cost to fulfill rewards, don’t try for success on the low end. Also, these numbers are severely lacking in rigor, so if you make your Kickstarter decisions based solely on what I’ve done here without your own research, you’ll get exactly what you deserve, you silly people

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¹ Although that notion is itself a bit nebulous; for example, the Schlock Mercenary boardgame campaign is in a different category, yet clearly owes its mammoth success (third overall in the category, as of this writing) to the underlying webcomic. Then again, the Not Invented Here IT barrier tape campaign (in the Product Design category) doesn’t rely on the webcomic’s familiarity to nearly the same degree. Your mileage will vary.

² Ask Zach Weiner; he’ll do a better job of explaining it than I will.

³ By contrast, Diesel Sweeties had approximately 1/3 of its support at the lowest level that allowed for an actual reward. Erfworld and Benign Kingdom were closer to 1 in 5, and Goats was in the range of 1 in 8. Note that “actual reward” here is taken to be “at least a PDF of the work in question”. Random thanks, postcards, bragging rights, etc., are not considered an actual reward.

Thursdays famously being the day that one just can never get the hang of¹, how about a few things that are readily hangable?

• Questions have arisen in both the comments to yesterday’s post and in my twitterstream regarding exactly when Angela Melick’s Welcome to the Real World goes on sale. Looking back, I can see the source of confusion, as the WTTRW page mentions an on-sale time of 24 March 2012 11:00am PST, but when I looked up Pacific Time to get the offset from GMT, my search gave me the result for PDT, because we’re in Daylight Savings Time now. At least we are in the US; Canada may be a different beast. Also, the countdown timer would appear to zero out at about 11:00 Eastern Daylight Time, not Pacific. So how about we call it “a bit before lunch in Vancouver the day after tomorrow” and decide that’s close enough?
• As long as we’re talking about things timing out, approximately nine hours from now, Jon Rosenberg will know exactly how much work he has to go to as a result of the Goats Kickstarter campaign, but early indications would point to “a lot”, given that he’s now obligated to return to weekly Goats updates. I’m hoping we see some Shazam Twix or Eva Pudenda sooner rather than later. Speaking of sooner rather than later, after this Kickstart wraps up, I’ve got some more musings on the whole idea of Kickstarter.
• Go, look: a mutual interview (or “conversation” as the hep kids call it these days) between Chris Hastings and Ethan Nicolle is up at the Dark Horse website, and it’s damn good. Similarly, what may be the definitive answer to How Do You Break In To … ?² (in this case, comics) has been posted by Bryan Lee O’Malley, and it’s mandatory reading for anybody who wants to move from creative hobbyist to creative professional.
• Events: Scott C has a new exhibit/gallery show coming up, this one paired up with the book release party for East Dragon, West Dragon, at the usual stomping grounds of Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, California. Opening reception 14 April, 7:00 – 10:00pm, show running until 6 May, details here or here. For those on the opposite coast on 11 May, the book launch party for John Green and Dave Roman’s Teen Boat at the decidedly unusual stomping grounds of an actual boat. Namely, the Waterfront Barge Museum in New York City, which doesn’t have a street address, it has a pier (Pier 25, at Hudson River Park, in the vicinity of West Street and N. Moore Street). Fun starts on 11 May, 7:00pm, and you can ris-vip at the Facebook event page.

  Also, please note that I could have made any number of Guigar-level puns around words like “launch” or “moor[e]”, or embedded any number of I’m On A Boat mashup videos, and did not. You’re welcome.

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¹ We salute you, Dentarthurdent.

² Short version: it’s not a discrete point in time with a secret handshake that gets you in the door.

Jam: Victorious.

[update March 20, 2012]: FINALLY! FINALLY the paperwork went through! My shop works again! WE ARE GO FOR LAUNCH: MARCH 24 at 11:00 AM PST

PST, for those of you wondering, is GMT-7. In case that’s still too much math, there’s a countdown clock until the very moment that you can purchase Wasted Talent book #2: Welcome to the Real World.

It’s too nice a day out for people to be inside reading comics; grab your mobile device and go read them at the park or something. While you’re doing so, please enjoy a few things that you may or may not have full access to.

• Firstly, Brad Guigar¹ got out in front of everybody else (i.e.: he thought to do it) and interviewed Henry Kuo of Just The First Frame for Webcomics Dot Com. A’course, WDC has a paywall, so if you haven’t got a subscription, you don’t get to read more than the abstract. Without going into too much detail and diminishing the value that Guigar provides to his subscribers², I will say that I got the impression Kuo seems to have been caught slightly by surprise by how much his project has captured attention; he comes across as a very humble guy, and determined to make the experience of JTFF better for those that use it.
• The last update of Teaching Baby Paranoia (the occasionally truth-adjacent weekly foray into the corners of history, culture, coincidence, and conspiracy) by suspected apopheniac Bryant Paul Johnson may have gone up more than two years ago, but he hasn’t stopped his comic and comiclike work. For the past few months he’s been working on a project for the Girl Scouts, who have a self-directed Make Your Own Badge program.

  Johnson’s role was to do illustration work, some of which is visible at the dedicated website for MYOB if you have an account. Which I don’t. Because I’m a 44 year old dude with no connection to any Girl Scouts³ who doesn’t want to get put on any lists. But for those of you who can set up access to the site (lookin’ at you, Miss Danielle), there’s a badge design tool that allows girls who have completed requirements to get their individual study recognized in actual, full-color, embroidered form.

• How’s about we close on a topic that everybody can share? The recurring series of Recipe Comix continues on at Saveur, and has been on a bit of a dessert kick lately. How do you feel about chocolate soufflé, rice pudding, and halo-halo? If you didn’t at least silently think that at least one of those sounded delicious, you are lying to yourself.

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¹ He’s dreamy.

² Also his hangers-on; in the interests of full disclosure, he has comped me a WDC subscription.

³ Aside from an unholy love of Thin Mints.

What’s your favorite number? Mine is e, and in honor of this awesomest of numbers (it kicks π’s ass), all numbers in this update will be related to this most lasting legacy of Lenny Euler^e0.

Okay, this has been a more difficult HTML-wrangling job than any post I’ve ever done, with the exception of the review of the first Dinosaur Comics book. Let’s just … let’s not do this again.

Edit to change: the Otter link, because really, the Animal House gag is so old by now.
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^e0 Okay, that’s a disputable claim, given that Euler has more numbers, constants, theorems, formulas, and every other damn thing named after him than anybody else in the history of mathematics. But for my money, if you’re going to remember just one thing about Euler, it’s gonna be e.

^e0.693147181 Unfortunately, Spangler’s site doesn’t do permalinks to blog postings, so click through today if you want to read the bit I’ve quoted from.

^e1.09861229 Disclaimer: I wrote the foreword to her first book collection, so take that into account when judging my recommendation. It’s not like I get any more or anything, but clearly I’m on Team Otter.

About now as I’m writing this, the last — hopefully not too frantic — polishes are being put on two corners of webcomics, each of which will lead to new and hopefully wonderful things. A third corner is polishing up something different, but we won’t be able to tell how shiny it gets for a while.

• Firstly, this:
  

  Hi everyone. I quit my job today. I will be working on Gunnerkrigg full time now. There will be a proper announcement on Monday.

  Tom Siddell has made the leap into full time comickin’, and I believe all right-thinking folk will agree that he’s going to do very, very well. If absolutely nothing else comes of it (and much will), he won’t have to hold himself to doing three strips on the weekend before allowing himself to relax any longer. Best of luck, Tom, your comics are great and you should feel great.

• Wondercon 2012 opens in a couple of hours, and anybody making the annual trip to San Francisco should first realize they’re in the wrong place, on account of it’s in Anaheim this year. Um, sorry ’bout that. Webcomicky people are to be found there in the small press and main floor area, including (but mostly likely not limited to:

  Small Press

  Table 11 Jimbo Hillin and the Wire-Heads crüe.
  Table 48 Evan “Overside” Dahm and Kel “Sorcery 101and also some fairy tales” McDonald.
  Table 49 Kory Bing, who does many things, as does Sfé Monster, along with Dave Shabet who mostly does Dead Winter.
  Table 51 Party Tymez with Ananth and Yuko and Becky and Frank and maybe you.
  Table 53 Ben Costa, Dean of Iron Crotch studies at Iron Crotch University¹.

  Main Floor

  Booth 452 More keen-ness than you can handle with Keenspot.
  Booth 504 The closest thing to functional adults in our community, Professors Foglio.
  Booth 615 A man haunted by a house move which is still in progress², Dave Kellett.
  Booth 617 Did somebody call for handsome men? Kris Straub and David Malki ! heed your cry.
  Booth 716 The poster children for Kids, Don’t Do That, Danielle Corsetto and Randy Milholland; give ’em both a big ol’ kiss for me.

• Are you the sort that wonders where you can spend your hard-earned entertainment dollar in a month or so? Simple! You should give it to Jorge Cham, who in return will send you The PhD Movie either via stream or DVD! The countdown timer on the movie page is, even as we speak, ticking forward at a rate of one second per second, towards that golden day (15 April) when you can enact this transaction. Yay!

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¹ Since the Shi Long Pang books are published by Iron Crotch University Press, it follows that there would have to be an Iron Crotch University, right? I just want to know what their sports mascot is. I bet its nickname is “Rusty”.

² Prediction: if you ask him how the house move is going, he will likely be his answering with Buuuuhhhh.

Firstly, let me direct you to yesterday’s post, which has a correction; I carelessly misspelled Larry Holderfield’s name and didn’t notice until he was kind enough to post a comment. Mea culpa.

Secondly, this is making the rounds today, about the Canada Customs manga case from 2010. I last brought up the issue about nine months ago in response to Ryan Sohmer’s take on things. Long story short, the case has been dismissed, the accused is again a free man, albeit some US$45,000 poorer in making his defense.

The real reason I wanted to bring this up is because I didn’t want anybody to think Damn child molestin’ perverts gettin’ off on technicalities. The man at the center of the case, Ryan Matheson, got to tell his side of the story for the first time, and there were things in his statement that stopped me in my tracks:

I was charged with possession and importation of child pornography before I was ever even admitted into Canada. The police and the customs officers at the time didn’t know what the material was and called a police investigator to ask for help. The investigator, without being physically present and having no way of actually seeing the images in question, told the police that they were sure that it was child pornography.

To be detained on the word of somebody who can’t see the material in question? That’s … okay, I am going to be careful with my words as I have in the past traveled to Canada for work, and likely will again in the future, and have some experience with the customs and immigration inspectors. That part of Matheson’s account is entirely believable. I’ve been waved through the border within 45 seconds, and I’ve been held for more than an hour and told I can’t possibly be admitted¹.

In both of these cases, I was going to the same place (my employer’s local office) for the same purpose (teach a class) for the same reason (nobody in Canada qualified to do so, or we’d have saved the expense of shipping my ass up there) with the same credentials (a letter from my employer’s legal department stating the regs under which I was coming to Canada, the text of which had been run past the Canadian Consulate in New York). The only difference was the person I talked to, and how much of a bad day he or she had before I showed up. This is not a good basis for determining who to charge with felonies that carry mandatory imprisonment².

Then we got to this part of Matheson’s story:

I politely asked an officer at the police station if I could speak to the U.S. embassy, but she replied, “Are you serious? I don’t think we have that here,” and walked away. I was never able to talk to the embassy, and even when my brother arrived for my bail, he too was denied from seeing me at all.

Yeah, okay, I get it; thanks to the proliferation of American TV, people all around the world try to exercise Miranda rights, not realizing that’s a US thing. But this wasn’t Miranda, this was Matheson being denies his absolute right to consular access, which is guaranteed by treaty. The (shall we say) capricious nature of Customs Canada is lengthy and well-documented, but I’d have expected the police in the national capital (where, after all, the US Embassy is located) to not have tried this shit.

My bail conditions tightly restricted my use of computers and the Internet. My conditions had even specifically named a single company I could work for³, which prevented me from advancing my professional career.

For the record, the defense spent US$75,000 to get to the point that all criminal charges were dropped, and the one regulatory charge that Matheson plead guilty to was dismissed by the judge. The Crown must have spent much, much more than that, only to finally come to the realization that nothing was done wrong by Mr Matheson, no children were protected, society did not become safer. If I lived in Canada, I’d be outraged that my tax dollars were spent so fruitlessly to give the appearance that something was really being done, you bet.

This is why we need the CBLDF/CLLDF. Without their support, Matheson may well have been forced to plead guilty to criminal charges, been imprisoned, lost his means of support, and been tagged a sexual offender for life in at least one country.

Open question then, for Ryan Sohmer and others who have dismissed the work of the CBLDF on these cases where things are murky: any change in your opinion? Do you feel your children/society are less safe, or was this a waste of effort on the part of the Crown? Do you still believe that [E]ven within the comic book industry, there are plenty of other people who need defending to the exclusion of Mr Matheson? Anything you want to say, I’ll run it here, unchanged. Let’s get a dialogue going.

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¹ Which later turned into a a berating lecture on what a huge favor the inspector was doing me by not immediately putting me on a plane back to the States, which eventually turned into Yeah, okay, come on in.

² That would be Matheson’s case again, not mine.

³ What in the actual fuck?

I don’t know about where you are, but it is absolutely gorgeous out today, and I’m almost over my plague. Let’s concentrate on happy stories today.

• There is nothing that warms the cockles of my black heart more than seeing an example of extreme customer service. This could be as simple as acknowledging a mistake and making good; it could be going out of your way to deal with a customer that’s determined to be a jerk¹. Sometimes you didn’t even make a mistake and instead, found a way to do something better; the old way was good, people that you dealt with then were dealt with fairly, but you want to give ’em a little something anyway. That’s where customer service enters the heroic realm², which I saw an example of today.

  Back up a couple of years, and Penny Arcade sold some polo shirts that their more office-job-type fans could wear to work. Nice, understated game controller logo stitched on the left breast, breathable cotton, decent color selection. They sold well. But the PA people weren’t 100% satisfied with them, so after they sold out they went away for about a year for retooling:

  When asked for comment about the improvements made in v2.0, Penny Arcade’s President of Operations and Business Development Robert Khoo addressed the issues seen in v1.0, stating the “the v1.0s had really specific care instructions, because the materials we selected weren’t treated to be preshrunk. Well… it turns out folks hated the idea of dealing with care instructions, so for the v2.0s we switched to a higher quality cotton that shrinks less and is quite a bit softer.”

  So far, so good; product improvement ought to be everybody’s goal. But now that the second iteration of the shirts are coming online, Penny Arcade decided to do something extraordinary: they’ve decided that everybody that bought one of the first version of the shirt is entitled to a free shirt upgrade [PDF]. Short version: cut out the logo on the 1.0 version of the shirt, include it with your name and address on a form, and bam! New shirt.

  No fee, no shipping on domestic orders (US$10 flat for international), and you’ve got until 30 June to take advantage. The new shirts aren’t up at the PA store just yet, but as far as loss leaders go, I can’t think of a better demonstration to your customer base to convey the idea We will take care of you³.

• As I told many, many people⁴ on many, many occasions, I loves me some Digger, concluded or no. Of course, just because Ursula Vernon is out of the regular webcomickin’ game doesn’t mean that she’s off my radar — I follow creators I love into their other, not-webcomicky projects, be those comic books or gallery shows or animation or whatever. The POV and voice of the creator is the important part, not the particular medium they choose to work in today. Anyway: Ursula Vernon.

  She’s the subject of a retrospective in April, on the campus of Lamar University’s Dishman Art Museum in scenic Beaumont, Texas (which I’m reliably informed is about 90 minutes east of Houston or four hours west of New Orleans). Show runs from 4 — 26 April, with a reception⁵ on the 6th, from 7:00 to 9:00pm.

  The show, which is co-curated by Larry “mckenzee” Holderfield[see below], will incorporate local signings, previews of Vernon’s latest Dragonbreath book, and a single-page comic contest for the kids. Details on the flyer (front, back), which somehow neglect to include what might be the show’s centerpiece: a brief history of the Biting Pear. Now all I need to do is get my job to send me to Texas next month.

Edit to add: I inexcusably truncated Larry Holderfield’s name in the original posting; we at Fleen apologize for the mistake.

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¹ May I recommend to you the Nerd of Advice podcast on this very topic?

² And I’m going to acknowledge up front that almost nobody smaller than a mid-sized corporation has the resources to engage in this kind of customer service. That alone doesn’t explain its rarity, as those that do have the resources typically don’t.

³ Where the “we” probably refers mostly to Brian Sunter, who is seemingly everywhere that merchandise and fulfillment occur on PA’s behalf. He’s like a magical shipping ghost made out of Khoo’s sentient shadow.

⁴ That one’s for you, Ivy.

⁵ Read: “Food and booze”.