As much as I said that I wanted every Artist on Strip Search season one, after my beloved Hurricane Erika bowed out I was really pulling for Maki Naro. Maybe it was his whole-hearted adoption of the pineapple motif, maybe it was his comic’s embrace of science, maybe it was the magnificent facial hair¹. His pitch in the finale for Sufficiently Remarkable, a nature show about humans in their natural habitat, just resonated with me, as did the knowledge that we have the same taste in dive bars.

As was entirely inevitable, Naro has launched the Kickstart to get Sufficiently Remarkable off the ground² and as was entirely inevitable cleared his goal in about 12 hours and is (as of this writing) about 160% of goal approaching the 24 hour mark. Applying the Fleen Fudge Factor³ to the Kicktraq prediction puts Sufficiently Remarkable in the US$42 – 84K range, but that doesn’t account for the pull of the higher stretch goals:

How cruel will Naro’s followers be? Hopefully, either US$95,099 or more than US$100,000 worth of cruel.

• Names are being added to the Official SDCC Webcomickers List, but to summarize them here:
  • Ryan North will be at the TopatoCo booth, 1229 & 1328, as well as signing This Is How You Die at the Hachette booth, 1116, on Friday 19 July from 11:00am to 12 noon.
  • Zach Weinersmith will be sharing space with Unshelved at booth 2300 in the Independent Press area.
  • Andrew Hussie will be across the street at the off-site area set up by ShiftyLook.

  In fact, let’s expand on that ShiftyLook off-site piece a little, because they’re going to have a mountain of webcomickers at the outdoor deck of the Gaslamp Hilton, including (in no particular order):

  Andrew Hussie
  Ryan North
  Christopher Hastings
  Scott Kurtz
  Kris Straub
  Zach Weinersmith

  There will also be the ShiftyLook freeplay arcade games, music at night, fun times for all, and some panels over in the convention center. Check out the ShiftyLook page for details (and the SDCC event schedule once it goes up).

• If you are going to SDCC and you skip the Sunday-night parties, or if you aren’t going to SDCC and are looking for something on TV on a Sunday night, FOX is giving Axe Cop a primetime preview:
  

  Tune in to the special primetime preview of ANIMATION DOMINATION HIGH-DEF, featuring AXE COP (9:30-9:45 PM ET/PT) and HIGH SCHOOL USA! (9:45-10:00 PM ET/PT), on Sunday, July 21. In the “Night Mission: Stealing Friends Back” episode of AXE COP, badass crime fighter AXE COP heads out on a special night mission with the help of his partner, FLUTE COP (Ken Marino), and sidekicks GREY DIAMOND (guest voice Rob Heubel), ARMY CHIHUAHUA (guest voice Giancarlo Esposito) and LIBORG (guest voice Tyler, the Creator), when fellow superhero BAT WARTHOG MAN’s (guest voice Vincent Kartheiser) friends go missing. Then, in the “Bullies” episode of HIGH SCHOOL USA!, upbeat and super-positive teen MARSH MERRIWETHER (Kartheiser) learns a valuable lesson when his best friend is accused of bullying. Meanwhile, CASSANDRA (Mandy Moore) gets ready for the “It Gets Better After High School” high school dance.

  Weirdly, nowhere in the entire press release is there so much as a mention of Nick Offerman as the voice of Axe Cop. Bizarre.

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¹ Everybody’s talking about the “beardwall”, but come on — dude’s got a ‘stache worthy of respect.

² Not to mention financially buffer his shift from “day job plus comics” to “leave the day job and make a go of it in comics”.

³ Look at the Kicktraq prediction somewhere around the 24- to 36-hour mark and the final tally will be between one-sixth to one-third of that prediction. But counterexamples abound!

Bow howdy, that is one big building [PDF]; fortunately, like previous years, there’s a pretty decent clustering of webcomics and their natural allies, so read on down into the sections below to figure out where the heck people are gonna be. Please note that all the information given is what I could confirm at press time, and as more information becomes available I will update or correct this page.

Low Numbers
Let’s start over to the right side of the map, which is vaguely northish if you’re feeling all geospatial. It looks like this:

The Webcomics, Small Press, and Independent Press Pavilions are all reasonably accessible from the “B” lobby. Let’s break ’em down.

Webcomics Central
Centered roughly on booth #1332, you’ll find a majority of the webcomickers who will be at the show within about a 1.5 aisle radius; some are slightly outside the orange area, but unless there’s another Homestuck lineup stretching back to the 700 aisle¹ it shouldn’t be too difficult to get around.

Notes:

• Blank Label will be David Willis and others to be confirmed.
• Randy Milholland and Joel Watson will be with Blind Ferret.
• Dumbrella will include Andy Bell, Meredith Gran, Jon Rosenberg, Rich Stevens, Chris Yates, and me.
• Halfpixel will be a solo Dave Kellett.
• Monster Milk will include Evan Dahm, Tyler Hutchinson, and Zach Marcus, with the odd appearance by Becky & Frank.
• Penny Arcade will be in Australia for PAXAus and are letting other use their booth; I have confirmed that their booth plans were set months ago and although it would be awesome, there will not be a bunch of Strip Search Artists there, darnit.
• Kris Straub will be at the PvP booth.
• TopatoCo boothers will include Brandon Bird, Aaron Diaz², Christopher Hastings, Tyson Hesse, Sam Logan, David Malki ! and Ryan North.

Small Press
Right by the Webcomics section is Small Press. Here you should find:

From the Small Press section, you’re close by:

Notes:

• Gallery Nucleus/Bolt City will feature Becky & Frank, Kazu Kibuishi, Scott C, Olly Moss, and Mike Mitchell.

Their booth assignment has switched to #2743, location described two paragraphs below

Now head back toward the “B” Lobby into the Independent Press area and you’ll find Unshelved in Booth 2300 with special guest Zach Weinersmith. Head towards entrance B2 in particular and you’ll be right next to Axe Cop at Booth 1603.

For the other places of note, we’ll have to go back to that larger map of the northern half of the exhibit hall. Wedged in between the Marvel and Image megabooths you’ll find Keenspot in Booth 2635, and between Image and the back of the hall you’ll find BOOM! Gallery Nucleus/Bolt City See below at Booth 2743, where I imagine some of the many contributors to the Adventure Time, Bravest Warriors, and Regular Show will probably make an appearance or two. Confirmed appearing at the BOOM! booth are Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb.

Two last places to mention, and you’ve got a hike in front of you. Head down to the southern half of the hall:

Waaay down there, past all the art materials and vinyl toys and Copic markers, you’ll find Udon Entertainment (home of such worthies as Christopher Butcher and Jim Zub at Booth 4529 & 4628); it’s roughtly midway between 20th Century Fox and Yes Anime, on the main travel aisle. And if you go all the way down to the vicinity of Artists Alley, The Hero Initiative is in Booth 5003, near Big Wow! Art.

Offsite
Finally, head out the doors walk across the rail tracks to the Gaslamp Hilton terrace and see Andrew Hussie at the ShiftyLook Arcade for one autograph session per day.

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¹ I think that Con management learned their lesson last year when TopatoCo Supremo Jeffrey Rowland led a parade of Homestucks up to the autograph area to clear the enormous line that had built up on the floor. It was glorious to watch.

² If he ever combines his dinosaur scholarship and his Tolkien scholarship, I may die of pure nerdjoy.

The last 24 hours have been as much of a stress test of Twitter as ever I can remember, what with big items in the news provoking a lot of social media connections. Speaking as a guy with a day job, it’s tough to keep up with the backlog at times, although honestly, it’s mostly an embarrassment of riches.

My criteria for following people on Twitter (I don’t use other social networks) is twofold: smart and interesting gets you added, but the problem is that smart and interesting people tend to follow each other, which tends to lead to smart and interesting traffic that is exponentially greater than if all of my friends were strangers to each other. I wonder sometimes if MC Frontalot didn’t have the right idea¹ after all.

All of which is to say, I feel guilty that I don’t have time to keep up with all the people I want to; I held off for the longest time adding even three of the Strip Search Artists to my twitterfeed, on account of I just can’t manage the time to follow all twelve. The “hippie love commune” that developed during filming that gave Messers Krahulik and Holkins such difficulty means that these kids² communicate with a fervor and regularity and volume that I cannot keep up with. I had figured it might have tapered off a bit, seeing as how they all just met six months ago and those exciting new friend! tendencies fade after a while.

Nope, they still can’t get enough of each other, even though they all seem to be migrating to Seattle; soon they’ll all live within 10 km of each, meet daily at a coffeeshop, and still tweet to each other rather than call across the room.

All of which is even more to say, I love that photo of the Artists imitating their cardboard cut-out self-portrait stand-ups. Monica and Abby are adorable, Amy and Tavis are fierce, Katie’s pose cracks me the hell up, and Maki the pagan athiest science-guy is one haircut away from Jesus in da Vinci’s Last Supper. Damn them all, it’s been half a year, I should be able to stop talking about them.

Except they keep doing things. Case in point: Ms T Falcone let me know this morning about plans she’s got for the immediate future. Now that she’s safely ensconced in the Pacific Northwest, a new locale demands new projects. Cardigan Weather, her diary comic, will be ending to make room for a new comic to tell the things she wants to tell:

I don’t want to give away too much, but I can say this. Have you ever felt like logging on is like coming home?

Watch this space for further information regarding Untitled Amy T Falcone Project, her inevitably runaway-successful Kickstarter, and the rest of a career that is going to kick so many asses. Also watch this space for what will probably be regular announcements for everybody else involved in Strip Search; I suspect the answer to When can I stop writing about these darn kids? is Never.

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¹ For a considerable period of time, the esteemed Mr Alot had a policy of only following 50 people on Twitter to keep the information to a manageable level; to follow somebody new, somebody old had to go. It appears he’s relaxed his limit somewhat these days, but he’s still following considerably fewer than the 250 that I allow myself, and I have no idea how some of my friends follow 700, 800, 1000 or more people.

² I’m old, I can call ’em kids. Heck, Hurricane Erika just turned 30 yesterday, meaning that I was taking finals in high school while she was objecting to the new, bright, loud, cold world she found herself ejected into. Kids.

At 1:21pm EDT today, the longest day of the year (at least in the northerly climes), Abby Howard launched a Kickstart for The Last Halloween, seeking US$9000 to launch the once-weekly multi-page-updates spoooooky webcomic. At 1:39pm EDT — eighteen minutes later — 120 backers had cleared her funding goal as her totals began rolling over literally faster than I could refresh my browser.

Howard’s approaching this one smart: a lot of the rewards are non-physical, so she won’t spend months on fulfillment and shipping¹, she’s offered some high-price tiers that have attracted supporters². In this time it’s taken to write those two footnotes, she’s halfway to her first stretch goal (US$25,000) and there is no end in sight. As soon as I’m done with this sentence I’m backing this campaign (at a level sufficiently high to get a recipe for Sadness Brownies and a recording of Abby telling a scary story), and writing myself a note to be prepared to back the inevitable Kickstart for a print collection in a year or so.

I’m basically just killing time now, having worked out links and the title image and all, waiting to give you a number for the end of the first hour of funding, and here we go:

• Total Backers: 347
• Total Funding: US$18,387³

For reference, that’s nearly 25% more than the actual Strip Search cash prize, and the money keeps on a-comin’. Well done, Abby, and I can’t wait to see The Last Halloween.

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¹ Postal costs could be a killer, assuming she’s shipping from Montreal and many of her backers will be in the US.

² As of this writing, 22 minutes in, she has support for:

• $850 I will design you a custom-made monster, AND you get a death scene in the actual comic. (1 of 2 left)
• $1150 Abby will put you on her “D-List”, a page on her website with a list of names (or aliases) of all those on her D-List accompanied by a sketch of that person (from a picture supplied by you) (Please do not send me a picture of your D). She will also send you a picture of her making a sexy face. Each sexy face will be unique. (9 of 10 left)
• $3200 Abby will tell you her deepest, darkest secret. (9 of 10 left) NB: This reward is accompanied by a sketch of Abby saying Nobody pick this reward okay. You are not allowed.

³ Also the US$850 tier is now sold out, but there’s still room on the D-List!

It all comes back to comics:

Sometimes I stop and think about the fact that Homestuck is the 4th longest work in the English language and just kinda nod. — George Rohac

• Know who’s been making himself damn near indispensable to comics as a whole, constructing what may well be the definitive filmic history of the art form? Freddave Kellett-Schroeder, the hive mind that’s been toiling for pert-near four years to bring STRIPPED to a big screen near you. Last night, Fred and Dave released the first five minutes of the film to backers of their Kickstarters, and my friends — it was glorious. Somewhat less than 5300 people have had the opportunity to see that tease, and with any luck the entire world will be able to see the entire thing soon. It’s gonna be great.
• Know who’s been making himself damn near indispensable to an entire community of webcomickers? Brad Guigar, editor and everything-in-chief of Webcomics Dot Com. And in case five years back is fading from your recollection, Guigar was one of the authors of How To Make Webcomics, which tells you exactly what it says on the cover. The thing is, as good as HTMW is, it covers a medium that changes rapidly, and five years is a near-eternity in internet terms.

  There have been many requests for a sequel over the past half-decade, and Guigar has leveraged his writing for WDC to make that sequel, The Webcomics Handbook, now available for pre-order on Kickstarter. This one’s a no-brainer, folks, especially considering that all backer tiers come with — quoting here — Guigar’s “undying friendship”. Remember, the sooner you pledge, the sooner you can book a weekend for him to help you move.

• Strip Search — let’s face it, season one of Strip Search — wrapped up its finale last night which means you’ve had 16 hours (as of this writing) to have seen it, and if you don’t want to be spoiled on it, look away. I was conflicted watching Katie Rice get named the winner: zero surprise, as she’d utterly dominated the back half of the game; elation because her work was so very, very good; crushed because Abby Howard and Maki Naro didn’t win¹.

  In the end, it came down to what comics almost always comes down to — personal preference. Jerry and Mike had to decide what they personally most wanted to see:

  • A longform, horror-based, immersive-world graphic novel² from Abby, and one where they liked her off-the-cuff work better than her planned work
  • An almost anthropological personality study from Maki, not so dependent on your traditional-type punchlines
  • A loose-continuity, every-strip-has-a-punchline story that was the most comic-strippy of the finalists from Katie, and one where as strong as her final competition entries were, her pitch material was even better, giving confidence about how strong a work with plenty of time could be

  From the beginning, they showed a clear preference for work in the vein of what Katie presented, and you know what? That’s okay. Their show, their judgment, and it’s not like giving the nod to Camp Weedonwantcha means that The Last Halloween or Sufficiently Remarkable are erased from our collective memories. I will be reading (and more importantly, buying) all three of those projects because they all hit different pleasure centers in my comics brain³.

  Everybody associated with Strip Search is bound up into a web of professional and personal connections that will last and pay off for decades (Maki had some really gracious thoughts along the same lines today). As was determined back in January:

  Khoo stressed the responsibility that PA had towards the winner. We will do them right. People put their necks out there and trusted us; we didn’t tell them shit. They didn’t know what the show would be like or how we would make them look. For taking that risk, Khoo is determined that the reward is as good as he can make it.

  It’s pretty clear that the doing-right is extending to all the Artists; consider that Alex, who we didn’t get a chance to know, Alex has moved to Seattle, as has Amy, and also Monica (I half expect to hear that Ty and Nick are scoping out the U-Hauls). Add in the proximity of Mac and Erika, and it’s clear that whatever benefits accrue to Katie being in-office will spread fairly immediately to the others in the PNW, and only slightly later to those still scattered across the country. Being part of Strip Search surely helped the crowdfunding that Monica and Lexxy undertook to success, and Erika’s new comic, and the soon-to-be-announced Kickstarts from Maki and Abby. Also, is it a coincidence that since he was on the show, Tavis and his wife had a kid? Okay, yeah, probably, but you never know.

  Whatever else Strip Search achieved (and from everything that Khoo, Jerry Holkins, and Mike Krahulik have said, it wasn’t intended to achieve much beyond being entertaining), they’ve created a resonance cascade of skilled creators who are going to make each other better. Somewhere out there are people that either didn’t make the cut or want to be on a future iteration and are stepping up their own comics games; almost none of them will make it onto the show (whenever a new season might occur), but a nonzero number of them will share their comics with the world.

  Penny Arcade Industries has given us all far more than US$15,000 of comics that we will get to enjoy. Oh, and it’s entirely possible that they’ve created a competitor that will eventually challenge them for their position on the top of the webcomics heap, so it’s a good thing that they’ve still got Khoo on their side … for now.

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¹ Unlike virtually every reality competition ever, I was fully invested in all the finalists; there was no villain or obvious weak link there, meaning that it was guaranteed I would be happy and sad when it was all over.

² AKA, “filthy continuity”.

³ Although to be completely candid, of the three I think Sufficiently Remarkable spoke to me the most and I’m not sure if I can articulate why. In my perfect world, Sufficiently Remarkable has both “daily” and “Sunday” type strips, with the latter having the same feel as the first strip in Maki’s submission packet with Riti and her father.

A pretty deep swath of webcomics had their traffic interrupted yesterday because of malware warnings; the thing of it is, there was never any malware to begin with. Somebody, bored presumably, decided to toss some code into an ad frame whose sole purpose was to trigger Google’s malware detectors, leading to automated warnings and who knows how many reluctant readers. Known to be affected were comics associated with Hiveworks, Questionable Content, and The Devil’s Panties — none of which, it should be stressed again, are believed to have been an actual risk.

I’d almost be able to understand this behavior better if there had been some kind of reward in it; if there were some kind of equities market for webcomics and driving down readership for some high-traffic sites meant that somebody could make some money by shorting those comics, that I could understand (it would still be reprehensible and sociopathic, but at least there would be a motivation). This, though? Pointless.¹

• In entirely better news, the Digger Omnibus Kickstart is well over goal with three weeks still to go, and The AV Club has thrown a little love towards creator Ursula Vernon. Not that Vernon has necessarily noticed, what with being on her honeymoon in Alaska and contemplating interesting purchases which with the success of the Omnibus is probably surprisingly affordable.
• Today’s mandatory² viewing: Ryan North on what to do to optimize human history should you ever come into possession of a time machine: bone down on hotties invent the most crucial and challenging technology of all.

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¹ Congratulations, Expert Hacker, you annoyed a bunch of people that you will never meet, caused work for people that had other things to do, and it didn’t benefit you at all beyond the fact that you proved to yourself that you could. We all agree now: you exist, you matter, you’re just as important as you always suspected you were and you are so cool. No, really.

² You have to watch something while waiting for the Strip Search finale to air in … just under eight hours.

Every so often I get reminded of that time, when Randy Milholland got sick of people who bitched that the free entertainment he offered wasn’t on a regular enough schedule to suit them, and challenged them to put their money where their mouths were. I suspect that said schedule-bitchers never ponied up a dime, but enough people that did want to support Milholland did, which led Milholland to quit the day job and make free comics for our entertainment for a living.

I’m reminded of it this time because tomorrow marks nine years since Uncle Randy walked away from a crappy job and into that free, no-pants paradise that is modern webcomickry¹. Happy Nineiversary, Randy, and thanks for not murdering any of the schedule-bitchers² because incarceration would really mess up your update schedule.

• Today’s really awesome Kickstarter launch is by Evan Dahm, who is funding the first book of his third Overside saga, Vattu: The Name and The Mark. Clocking in at 270 pages, V:TNaTM forms a nicely self-contained story while still forming just the beginning of a much larger story (I’d estimate that by the time it’s done, Vattu will run 1500 – 2000 pages in all, so maybe six to eight collections this size?). In the five hours since launch (as this is being written), Dahm’s at some 97% of goal, which means he’s going to hit the only stretch goal announced so far:
  

  If it makes goal within the first day (by 10 am EST Tuesday), I will include a Kickstarter-exclusive small print with all physical rewards.

  Evan? You might want to think up some more stretch goals, on account of you’ve still got … 20 days and 19 hours, more or less, and I think you might go just a bit over goal.

• Are you a fan of awesome things? One would hope so, as that’s pretty much the focus we at Fleen have. Hope Larson, in addition to creating some of the finest [web]comics of the past decade or so, has over the past year dipped her toes into film-making, and her first efforts are now available for you to sample. Bitter Orange, Larson’s screenwriting and directorial debut, is now streaming, and it comes with an endorsement from no less than the finest writer on movies presently working in the English language.

  I speak, naturally, of Film Crit Hulk, whose observations on film are always a delight, and who gets Larson’s work like few others. Seriously, every time I write about one of Larson’s new books, I know that I won’t be a fraction as insightful or erudite as Hulk.³ But honestly? The best part of Bitter Orange comes at the very end of the credits; no easter eggs here, just a line that says:

  COPYRIGHT © MMXIII HOPE LARSON

  She thought up a story, she found a way to make it in her medium of choice, and now she owns it. In the wake of a damn-near internet-wide fight about whether or not large corporations can farm out their IP to movie-makers that may or may not understand what makes characters special, having a creator in charge of their vision is always worth celebrating.

• On Friday I speculated as to whether or not the Strip Search finalists knew who had won yet. Today, I noticed a tweet from Abby Howard in advance of tomorrow night’s finale screening/streaming:
  

  This is going to be my first non-stressful flight to Seattle! There’s no mystery or fear or uncertainty awaiting ONLY FRIENDSHIP #FRIENDSHIP

  Interpret how you will, and be ready to watch the whole thing come to a crescendo at 7:30pm PDT tomorrow, 18 June 2013.

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¹ Note to casual readers: no part of comicking is entirely paradisiacal, but the no-pants thing is frequently true.

² That we know of, and if you were tried by a jury of your actual, no-pants peers, not only would they not convict, they’d send you home with a medal.

³ To say nothing of my pathetic, puny smashing skills.

David Malki ! of Wondermark¹ has provided a button underneath his strip that says This comic in a blog-friendly format which, when clicked, reformats his strip as 2×2 panels in a pop-up. Heck, if he’s gonna provide it, I’m gonna click it. Neat.

• If you haven’t seen the first part of the Strip Search season one finale, what the crap-hell are you waiting for? Katie, Abby, and Maki each brought a fully-fleshed pitch for Mike and Jerry to pore over, and regardless of who wins I want to see all three of these as a part of my regular rotation. Be sure to look over their submissions after watching the episode, because there’s some marvelous work in there².

  Spoiler #1: It’s a three-way showdown for the top prize, as the Artists are given four hours to produce three strips that fit into their new comic concepts.
  Spoiler #2: Holy crap with less than two and a half hours left Katie asks to abandon her Cintiq and start over on paper. Credits roll just as she starts to put pencil to paper, so we all have to wait until 7:30pm PDT (GMT-7) on Tuesday, 18 June to see how it turns out.

  Spoilery speculation: It’s been months since the three-way showdown, which means one of two things is true: either our finalists have been waiting all this time to find out who wins (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not knowing), or they know and haven’t been allowed to say for all this time (they must be on the verge of going crazy from the strain of not talking). Here’s to Tuesday when we can all find out what the hell is going on.

• Intriguing Kickstarter of the Day: Darren Gendron has launched a campaign behind a fantasy (specifically, faerie) themed card deck, and recruited some of the best in webcomics artists to do designs. Gendron’s pretty noted for projects with relatively low goals, fast turnarounds, and low cost of basic (physical) rewards as well as pushing into spaces where webcomics don’t usually go (board books, board games, etc.). In this case, if you’re a fan of Obsidian Abnormal, Evan Dahm, Lar deSouza, Yan Gagné and Mary Garren, K Lynn Smith, LJ Lockhart, Sarah Ellerton, or Jamie Noguchi, you could do worse than popping eight or nine bucks to get a small representation of their artwork on a deck of cards that can also be used to fleece your friends at poker.

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¹ And Machine of Death and TopatoCo and a lot more besides.

² Particularly Katie’s, whose children-in-peril story has a Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends vibe that’s making me feel joy in my black, cynical heart.

I’d like to start off today with a correction, or a clarification, or whatever’s appropriate when you specualte out loud and it turns out you were totally off base, but since it involves spoilery information I’ma stick it down at the bottom of the page and we can start with something else.

Books! New books! Second volumes, in fact, the both of them!

• There may be no single [web]comics character of the past few years that is as disturbing as Cornelius Snarlington, Business Deer (although whatever the hell that is menacing Wadsworth Zane in today’s Broodhollow is rapidly heading for the top spot). In case his mayhem-related office activities (or office-related mayhem activities) aren’t enough to piece your very soul, he also stares at you dead-eyed, menacingly, from the cover of the new collection of Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse, Business Animals, which has just gone up for pre-order.

  Usual disclaimer: Jon got me started in this blog-based opinion-having racket and also he owns my soul. But none of that changes the fact that regardless of whatever bias I might be injecting into this discussion, PZ Frickin’ Myers wrote the foreword, and you can’t do much better than that.

• In a neat bit of self-wanging, Zach Weinersmith managed to hose up his own site by crosslinking SMBC and the Kickstarter campaign for his newest original book, Trial of the Clone 2: Wrath of the Pacifist. Like the original Trial of the Clone, ToTC 2:WotP is a choosable-path comedic story, wherein your character from ToTC has failed upward to being in charge of the galaxy and now must rule; near the end of the first book’s Kickstarter campaign Weinersmith asked if the sequel should follow the protagonist on a Good path or an Evil one, and the consensus was Good.

  While Evil often looks to be more fun, you can’t deny that there’s nothing funnier than to watch somebody attempt to do Good and screw it up (and since the “hero” of ToTC is easily the most inept being in all of time and space, there should be plenty of room for up-screwing).

  In the hours since the book-kick launched, ToTC 2: WotP has cleared 75% of its US$20,000 goal, and reached the first four stretch goals (Weinersmith having pioneered the art of setting goals below the funding goal, building excitement while guaranteeing some outcomes). So far the stretches have all been related to getting more illustrations (by Weinersmith’s longtime collaborator, Chris Jones), but I imagine that there are some interesting goals in store once goal has been met in … oh, I’d say about two hours from now.

Okay, here’s that correction and remember: spoilers ahoy.

• Four days ago I laid out a timeline for the remainder of the season of Strip Search:
  

  Okay, looking at the calendar we’ve got the Maki/Lexxy elimination tomorrow, then four more episodes on 7, 11, 14, and 18 June. I had speculated early that there might be a final three approach (there’s ample precedent in the reality competition genre), but given the setup of the Strip Search Thunderdome, it make sense that all eliminations will be two Artists head-to-head, and this schedule reinforces that thought Consider: that gives us time for a social challenge among three competitors (7 June), a competitive challenge for immunity (11 June), an elimination to get us down to two (14 June), and the Big Ready-Set-Art on 18 June.

  So, yeah, my guess was wrong; as seen in today’s episode of Strip Search, none of that is happening. I should have stuck with my original speculations, since it turns out that by defeating Lexxy on Tuesday, Maki advanced to the Strip Search equivalent of Fashion Week: he and Abby and Katie face no more challenges in the house, are sent home to work up a final challenge for two months, then return to make their pitches.

  The original strips that they develop over eight weeks must include a name, three character bios, six sample strips¹ and a t-shirt design. Judging will be shown in a two-part finale, next Friday (14 June) and the following Tuesday (18 June), which per Robert Khoo will have some live component.

  There is at this point no way to tell which of the three finalists has the edge — each of the three could (and deserves) to win the prize, who wins almost doesn’t matter. While US$15,000 and a year’s embed in the Penny Arcade machine are nothing to sneeze at, the attention that the Artists have garnered, the audience that each of their new comics will have right from the beginning, and the support system that they’ve forged among themselves² means that they’re all winners³. Abby, Katie, Maki, it’s been a hell of a ride that you’ve given us and I just want to thank you for it.

Updated to add: Tickets for the Strip Search finale just went on sale. Tuesday, 18 June at 6:30pm PDT (GMT-7) at the Meydenbauer Center in Seattle. The final three episodes will be played in the theater, with the final episode released to the world at 7:30pm. Oh and on an unrelated note, kudos to the Meydenbauer for keeping ticketing fees to an entirely-reasonable US$1.52; I just bought tickets for Alton Brown’s Tour O’ Fun and I got socked for ten bucks a ticket. Screw you, Ticketmaster.

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¹ It’s gotta be the best six strips I’ve ever written — Abby.

² Everything that the nominal winner learns from their year in the PA offices will absolutely filter out to the other Artists. There’s a precedent for this kind of very fast, very thorough knowledge diffusion, and it’s within Mission Control during the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. As Gene Kranz observed, it wasn’t necessary for one flight controller group (or crew) to experience everything themselves, because they worked under the model of What any one of us learns, we all learn and build on.

³ There’s no lose in this. — Maki.

Who’s in the mood for brief items? I sure am!

• Anniversaries can be tricky things. For example, today’s SMBC bears the number 3000, which is an official Big Damn Round Number in the Fleen ordinal system of mathematics. However, Zach Weinersmith has actually done a good deal more than 3000 comics, if you consider his archive.

  For starters, today’s strip is the 2955th of the current series, but then there are 132 comics in the so-called “Classic” SMBC collection (black and white, strip-style comics with actual characters and things) and another five dozen or so that appeared sporadically during the modern age (some during a hiatus in 2003 and 2004, some alongside regular SMBC from 2005 to 2007).

  But what the hell, since at least 2005 it appears that the strip numbers have been going up monotonically, and that makes today as good a day as any to recognize Weinersmith for reaching 3000 strips so everybody feel good for Zach.

• Following up on Erika Moen’s win in the Magic: The Gathering challenge on Strip Search, there was a question at the time as to whether or not Wizards of the Coast would actually be producing said deck, and you may recall that Robert Khoo was unable to comment at the time. Well, wonder no more, as Hurricane Erika shared the news on twitter that the deck is being produced:
  

  We went back to the winner, Erika Moen, and had her finish out her design without the time pressure on the show and finalized an awesome design for a skateboard deck. Now we are excited to announce that attendees to the event can enter for a chance to win a skate deck featuring Erika’s final design by Hooligan!

  More precisely, four decks¹ are being made for the giveaway, and dang do they look sharp². Congrats again to Moen, and thanks to all involved for letting us know how things ultimately turned out.

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¹ I’m guessing at least one of them makes its way to Ebay.

² You can compare Moen’s original design against the final design; it’s pretty impressive how close the colors are given that the original was done with marker rather than computer color-matching against a Pantone standard.