Never doubt this: Robert Khoo knows how to build anticipation; with approximately three minutes of rough cut of Strip Search episode #1, I had a feel for the show, and the all-important contestants (or “The Artists”, as Strip Search dubs them) meeting each other scene (bright and early at 7:00am on a recent December morning in Seattle) about to start, Khoo stopped the playback of the video.

That’s all I can show you he said, his tone expressing deep regret while his facial expression showed that if he’d gotten my attention, he wasn’t really regretful at all¹.

Khoo invited me to meet with him and Penny Arcade designer (and Strip Search producer²) Erika Sadsad over the weekend to talk about the show; the screening was a surprise to me, and despite the fact that it was incomplete (graphics were all placeholders, the voiceover is still to be finalized), I was struck by how slick it looked. I’ve seen first episodes of reality programs that broadcast on actual TV channels that didn’t look as polished as the start of Strip Search did. So how much can you learn in three minutes?

• The twelve contestants got their smiling pose intros, singly and later in a group (with giant cutout standups of their self-drawn avatars)
• The house they were put up in is frikkin’ gorgeous
• At least one challenge might relate to being a webcomicker only tangentially, as there was about a half-second of footage at a go-cart track³
• As previously noted, there are tropes that show up in reality show after reality show because they work; watching Mike Krahulik solemnly intone, Yours is not the strip we’re searching for made it official: this is a real show, not playing at a show.

Quick aside: Sadsad noted that there had been some support for the much less serious Abandon strip! as the elimination catchphrase, but it was rejected as being too flip. Seeing what The Artists put on the line (both giving of their time and revealing themselves without knowing how they would be ultimately portrayed), it was decided that the production would have to treat them more respectfully than that. Khoo echoed this, noting especially how Krahulik hit a particular point where his respect for The Artists became a major influence on his participation. The dynamic between The Artists and The Creators (that would be Krahulik and Jerry Holkins) shifted from showrunners/showrunnees to something more peer-oriented; as Sadsad put it, That was when Strip Search went from playing house to being a house.

The nature of how people will be portrayed was a major theme of our conversation; as Khoo put it, The Artists have become very publicly friendly and respectful towards each other, but he noted that they haven’t seen the footage that’s being cut down for the episodes. Khoo stressed again the desire to not try to stretch The Artists into roles or create perceptions that weren’t true (and plenty of reality competitions have clearly tried to do exactly that; with creative editing, anybody can be made to look like a sociopath), that there wasn’t a team of writers trying to pigeonhole anybody into the tried-and-true roles of The Bitch, The Arrogant Dick, or The Antisocial Spoiler.

That’s an important distinction, given that “reality TV” has a reputation for constructing personal interactions and storylines out of whole cloth. Granted, some of these stories may be fictional (but boy do they have the ring of truth), but it’s absolutely true that the Writers Guild of America considers most reality TV work to count as constructing a story. Khoo stressed that the approach taken by Strip Search was at the documentary end of the spectrum that ran from Tell what happened to Get a bunch of footage and make shit up⁴. Nobody tried to adopt a villain role, so there wasn’t a push to create one in the production. Khoo also stated that while there will be no way to tell the entire story of what happened in the mansion, there was a natural narrative that emerged during filming.

Let’s expand on that thought a moment — there will be no way to tell the entire story because Sadsad reported there being a total of 62 days worth of footage, which will need to be cut down into approximately 36 episodes of about 15 minutes each. Nine hours total (which is actually on the order of what a season of a reality show would run) out of nearly 1500 means that all of the DVD extras in the world won’t capture the entirety of what happened. Still, Khoo opined that the entire process was Easier than PAX since once PAX starts, it has to stay in motion; Strip Search’s longer production timeframe allowed for changes to be made to make things adapt.

Asked about what kind of changes they would make to a (as yet, theoretical) second season, Khoo and Sadsad mentioned putting the various challenges closer to the mansion and building in break days in the production, as the filming was one continuous block. That was actually a telling detail because they hadn’t been willing to say how long production took in December; but combined with an earlier statement that challenges each resulted in one elimination, that there were no “no-elimination” challenges, that gives a lower duration of about two weeks production, assuming one challenge per day. A careful investigator might look at the twitter- and blogfeeds of the twelve Artists for the month of December, looking for when they stopped posting and taking that as corroboration⁵.

Other information of note:

• Consistent with his last interview with Fleen, Khoo would not say that there is or is not a winner picked for Strip Search at this time. He did ask that everybody keep in mind that given the winner will have a year in residence at Penny Arcade, so production of Strip Search could be considered to go for quite some time under any definition.
• “The Puck Situation” was avoided in the sense that Nobody put their hand in the peanut butter. Khoo spent months of due diligence, digging up entire electronic lives on The Artists⁶, but that it wasn’t really possible to know who they were until they’d arrived and were interacting in person.
• The challenges were designed to produce a winner with the ability to make a successful career of webcomics (and it was repeatedly stated that any of the twelve could have plausibly won the competition; there were no sacrificial Artists), but asked if the process had also been successful in choosing somebody that the Penny Arcade family could get along with for a year, 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.
• Strip Search will have a dedicated site, in large part constructed to eliminate what Sadsad finds annoying in the sites of other reality shows. There will be polls, bios, extra material (like the art created in each episode and a showcase for the Artists), but it will also be possible to visit without getting spoiled on the front page as to who won or lost a challenge. The material will be presented by episode, will a separate section for those who have seen it. The launch should be in the next week or so, at StripSearch.tv (it’s currently showing a placeholder).
• Strip Search will run twice a week, approximately 18 weeks, which I speculated means a three episodes per challenge structure: one to set up the challenge, one to show the work, one for judging and elimination. Add in some interview cutaways and reactions, that gives an even dozen challenges in 36 eps, neatly mirroring the Artist count. As expected, Khoo refused to confirm or deny this speculation, so I guess we’ll all have to watch to find out for sure.

_________________
¹ This is somewhat of a recurring theme when talking to Khoo; if you ever have the opportunity to interview him and you ask a question that is slightly leading and he replies … Sure. Why don’t we say ‘yes’?, please note that he has not actually answered in the affirmative. He is asking for reasons to not confirm whatever you are asking, and he is enjoying that bit of obfuscation immensely.

² Asked what “producer” meant, Sadsad noted that she had been logging events in the house, helping with the logistics of filming, and Put about 2000 miles on my truck ferrying The Artists to and fro. It was a series of 16 – 20 hour days for however long the production was going on in Seattle, a time frame that neither she nor Khoo would divulge.

I should also note that self-described Principal Beep Boop Engineer at Penny Arcade Kenneth Kuan was also present for what must have been a mind-numbingly boring hour and a half, as he hadn’t worked on Strip Search and professed a strong dislike for reality programming in general. Thanks for putting up with me, Kenneth.

³ Khoo also made a throwaway reference to pitching The Artists off a bungee tower, but I don’t think he was being serious.

⁴ Kuan had expressed that a considerable amount of his antipathy towards reality shows stemmed from a feeling that the shows
he had seen in the past forced an identity onto people rather than portraying them as they actually are.

⁵ The data-mining is left as an exercise for the reader, but should you start digging, consider this: Khoo was willing to discuss one item that he had previously decline to answer directly, namely that eliminated Artists were kept in town until production was done. The second house was dubbed The Afterlife, and when it was suggested that this residence was stocked with booze and hookers of various genders, Khoo found the notion amusing but did not directly deny it.

⁶ One should note that two of them — Lexxy Douglass and Erika Moen — have had prior professional interactions with Penny Arcade.

There are things that you want to get right, I mean really right. Like when Robert Khoo sits you down in front of a laptop and says I’m going to show you the beginning of the first episode of Strip Search, you want to make sure that your scribbled notes get bashed into something resembling actual coherence before they see the light of day. It’s just polite, and while I’m pretty sure that Khoo hasn’t ever had a blogger killed for badly mangling information, I also don’t want to be the test case. So Strip Search news tomorrow, and other things today.

• Firstly, Christopher Wright (of Help Desk and other computery comics) got down to some serious technical forensics over the weekend, looking at a latter-day webring/ad service called InkOUTBREAK and what appears to be a mechanism whereby they deliver ads that are not visible to the reader, to the webcomic that they’re running on, or anybody other than the mechanical code that counts up things like impressions. There’s no part of this that I can quote without lessening the impact that it should have, so go read the entire thing now, please.

  Wright’s key points, as I read them, are:

  • Ads that a webcomic creator cannot see, and did not agree to, are running without the knowledge of anybody outside of InkOUTBREAK
  • Since the creator can’t see them, if there’s a dangerous payload in one of those ads, they have no way of dealing with the issue, and will be the ones blamed by malware warnings when they can’t clear them out
  • Ads that aren’t visible but which appear to be counting towards impressions skate a line between “questionably ethical” and “fraudulent”

  Brian King of InkOUTBREAK responds to Wright’s analysis in the comments, and his argument boils down to Oops, old code, was supposed to be removed, sorry you encountered an old build. Given Wright’s conclusion that the code in question was designed to specifically hide the extra ads from any casual (or not so casual) inspection, you can decide for yourself how much King’s explanation is plausible. Whatever the truth of the matter is, InkOUTBREAK is going to have its code very closely examined by a large number of people in the future, I’d imagine.

• Scott Kurtz’s long-teased Table Titans launches today, and it is one handsome site. I’m still hunting around and finding new content, which includes gaming stories; creatures and gaming techniques from contributors to gaming systems; bloggings; and oh yeah — a longform story comic running Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s a heck of a lot more than I was expecting, and looks to be a labor of love that Kurtz will value at least as much as PvP. With the variety and volume of content (daily!), it’s less a “webcomic” and more a “full-service portal” and one that a lot of people I know will be watching very closely.
• Received in the mail over the weekend along with an unrelated book order: one Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff collector’s coin, such as one might find in the SBAHJ Hardcover extravaganza. The obverse has a three-quarters bust of Sweet Bro¹, and the reverse proclaims WINNER. It is the most pointlessly beautiful thing I have ever seen and will become an heirloom of my house, passed down the line of descent like even unto the Ring of Barahir².

_______________
¹ The spot where the artist’s signature or initials would normally appear on a coin reads “sign”. That’s with the quotes and everything.

² That one was for you, Aaron.

Sometimes you really have to wonder how we as a species have managed to get this far when it’s clear that we are all working at cross-purposes. Because I’m hopeful, I like to think that the average non-sociopath doesn’t wake up in the morning and wonder exactly what kind of jerkass behavior would be most fun today. Because I’m a realist, I know that while true sociopaths are rare, there are an awful lot of close approximations out there who just don’t care to make the effort to look any further than the tip of their noses in determining who might be affected by the actions they take in their daily lives.

Case in point: it made the rounds on Twitter yesterday that Sophie Goldstein had some of her artwork appropriated by a linkfarm site¹ without permission. Happens all the time, sadly, and as of this writing the offenders have had a full 23 hours to respond to Goldstein and have seemingly not done so. But wait — it gets better.

About an hour after Goldstein tweeted, I was forwarded an email conversation between the offending site (I don’t even want to name them, despite the fact that their logo is right there in the screencap, so I’m just going to call them Useless Jerkasses, LLC) and another creator², where they were asking to partner up³:

Hey [creator’s first name],

My name is [redacted because I’m a nice guy] and I am an account executive for [UJLLC]. I was just browsing your site and I think that it will actually be perfect for our network given its content.

Our network has grown to become one of the largest on the internet an we can promote your site to get you more visibility. Our price is $.04 per click, would that be something you would be interested in?

—
[redacted]
Account Executive
[address]
New York, NY, 10005
Direct: (646) [redacted]
Mobile: (646) [redacted]

E-mail: [redacted]@[ujllc].com
www: http://www.[ujllc].com

[UJLLC] – News and Entertainment Portal
Monthly Reach: Over 17 Million Unique Visitors

This transmission may contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, photocopying or distribution of these contents is unauthorized and prohibited. If you have received this in error, please notify the sender immediately and destroy all copies.

So, they have clearly got an understanding over at UJLLC, that creators have an interest in being associated with their creations that that interest is worth money; in Goldstein’s case, they simply don’t care. However, there is an outcome here that may reaffirm some of your faith in humanity, as Mr Account Guy at UJLLC received this reply:

Funny you should write. My friend Sophie was just pointing out that you are using her artwork (“come here”) illegally on this page: [link removed to not give them traffic] – how about you make this right and then we can talk.

That was 22 hours ago and they haven’t stopped being useless jerkasses (but what can you expect? It’s right there in the name); in some small way they’ve been told exactly what they are, and I’ll take that small slap as a first step towards a better world.

At least until Phil McAndrew tweeted three hours ago that another linkfarm had done essentially the same thing⁴, adding a stupid caption and omitting credit from one of his cartoons. If anybody gets approached by these entirely different jerkasses (or any one of the jerkass linkfarms out there), may I suggest that we all reply with a variation of the No, you’re a jerk email above?

It doesn’t even end there, as in the past 48 hours I’ve learned of the depressing extent to which two different creators (again, no names; again, prominent people) are getting jerked around not by content-appropriators, but by two different corporations that apparently believe the best way to deal with creators is to scream Dance for me, little monkey, dance!

I swear on whatever you find convincing, if you people elect me as benign dictator of the world, these production suits will be the first people up against the wall in a brief reign of terror that will be based on Golgafrincham Ark “B”.

Happily, not everything in webcomicdom involves creators getting jerked around. From various corners of the intertubes, we learned more today about Strip Search as Robert Khoo, Mike Krahulik, and Jerry Holkins sat down with Mashable. My two favorite quotes were from Krahulik, on the twelve contestants getting along:

We never had to call an ambulance to the house. And to me, that’s something we need to work on for season two.

… and from Holkins, on what was difficult about sitting in judgment of others:

[It] turns out that dashing people’s hopes is actually a very tough business if you are the sort of person that has hopes yourself. Like, I know exactly how they feel and what they’re up against, trying to lead a creative life. In one hand, I have the life that they want. In the other hand, I have a black sword. And it’s hard to have those two things.

And finally, BOOM! Studios⁵ made it known today that their latest licensed Cartoon Network tie-in comic to take talent from webcomics will be Regular Show, to be written by KC Green and drawn by Allison Strejlau. Disclaimer: I don’t watch Regular Show (not out of sense of dislike, I’ve just never seen it), but it’s my understanding that it’s built around exactly the sort of anarchic humor that one would find at Gunshow, or even Hugsown (but not, curiously, Hung Sow). Oh, and KC also wanted it made know far and wide that he is known on Twitter as BarfCaptain, at least this week.

_______________
¹ Ordinarily, I’d link to the original tweet from Goldstein, but I don’t want to do so because it contains a link to the offending site and I’m not interested in giving them traffic. Thus, the screenshot up top.

² I haven’t received explicit permission to use this creator’s name, so let’s just say that he is one of the successful ones, and you’d definitely recognize his name as a longtime pro webcomicker.

³ The letter is written such that I can’t tell if Useless Jerkasses, LLC is asking to use the webcomicker’s IP and pay him for the privilege, or if they’re offering to promote his content and charge him for the privilege. If it’s the latter, I have to say that their usual audience is absolutely useless to this creator.

⁴ Again, no link. I swear, it’s almost like all these linkfarms are just different aspects of one shell company, run out of some seedy office in Delaware, maintaining the fiction that they’re all different people. Jerkasses.

⁵ About whom some creators of long standing have vented on the web for being willing to pay criminally low rates for various aspects of comic book production. I have no direct confirmation of this from the people I know that work for them, but one must acknowledge elephants in the room even while hoping people you like aren’t getting glazed in elephant poo.

It’s an incremental kind of day today — additional details here and there, but nothing like the big news we got yesterday. Let’s run down the list.

• Meredith Gran, Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb¹, and the ghost of Ryan North got some recognition from media outlets that may pay no less attention to webcomics than we at Fleen, but it’s not their main focus. Specifically, Comics Alliance called out Gran’s Octopus Pie as one of the best comics of 2012 and The AV Club recognized Paroine, Lamb, and the late North’s work on Adventure Time in a similar fashion. Not much recognition of webcomickers elsewhere in those lists, but I see it less as token webcomics recognition and more of spectacularly talented creators hanging with the best that various comics media have to offer.
• Speaking of the best that various comics media have to offer, Jim Zub dropped some of his hard-earned wisdom (again!) at his blog, this time talking about why there are no overnight successes when dealing with big name comics properties². Highlighting his thesis for those that don’t want to read what’s clearly written:
  

  There’s no open spot waiting for you. You have to earn it. [boldface original]

  … which he highlighted with a quick rundown of a twelve-year process of getting to the point where 2012 could legitimately be called A Big Year For Zub (and 2013 potentially more so).

• Yesterday’s Strip Search news has been edited to add the name of contestant of Tavis Maiden, who was initially overlooked. Also, news came from Loading Ready Run regarding their role in hosting and producing SS, as well as a peek behind the curtains around the judging/elimination process from Mike Krahulik. Underscoring Robert Khoo’s mention of how unexpectedly connected the judges got to some of the art, Krahulik remembered:
  

  We had some no bullshit fights while judging a few of these comics. I remember one night, Robert actually had us all step outside to cool off for a bit after things got especially heated. The winner of this show will get fifteen thousand dollars and the ability to come and work at the Penny Arcade office for one year. So I expected Strip Search would be a life changing experience for the contestants, but I didn’t expect it to be a life changing experience for me.

  Krahulik also mentioned something in passing that caught my eye:

  As mentioned over on the Loading Ready Run site, the bulk of the show has already been filmed.

  Khoo wouldn’t say definitively if the SS filming was complete, or if some number of finalists were still subject to competition — reading between the lines, it appears there may be some filming yet to take place. Could be a final final elimination, or a reunion show, but I imagine we’ll get the skinny soon enough. And despite Hurricane Erika getting to indulge in the greatest cliche of reality shows³, it appears that the selection process really did avoid The Puck Situation. Something tells me when we get down to the ultimate winner/runner-up decision, the runner-up is going to be genuinely happy for the winner.

_______________
¹ It occurs to me that I have not always given Paroline and Lamb their due in noting the success of Adventure Time, having sometimes focused too much on their late, lamented writer. Assuming that the now-exploded North left behind sufficient scripts for them to work on, they should be able to show their work to even greater effect in future issues.

² One ought to note that there may be seemingly meteoric rises in the world of indy/webcomics, but while working for yourself may compress the timeline a bit, you’re still looking at years of honing your craft before suddenly launching that upwards trajectory.

³ In an unused detail from the interview, Khoo noted that sometimes the presence of reality show tropes and cliches is because they work.

We’re less than eighteen hours into 2013 where I am, and already things are off to a fast start.

• Firstly, more news of Strip Search has come to light, including details I couldn’t get Robert Khoo to divulge if his (or, more likely, my) life depended on it. Maki [Edit to add: I’ve discovered that Maki is not uni-named, and is more fully known as Maki Naro; Fleen regrets the deviation from our usual naming conventions], from Sci-ənce dropped news that he was a participant, that production took place in December, and that the other eleven creators vying for the top prize were Lexxy Douglass, Amy Falcone, Ty Halley, Alex Hobbs, Abby Howard, Monica Ray, Katie Rice, Mackenzie Schubert, Nick Trujillo, and “Hurricane” Erika Moen.

  [Edit to add: Missed one! I took my list from Naro’s posting, and did not notice that there were only ten names listed rather than eleven; Naro initially omitted Tavis Maiden, and I missed his name on Lexxy Douglass’s post. Mr Maiden helpfully contacted me via Twitter to point out the oversight; Fleen regrets the error.]

  Best news: most of these creators aren’t known to me, so I can now get exposed to new talent. Even bester news: the three whose work I am familiar with are really damn good, which gives me confidence in the other nine. Specifically, I’ve had my eye on Douglass’s¹ art blog since she was featured on PA: The Series going through the hiring process; Rice has been tearing it up at Dumm Comics for going on five years, and Moen is basically an unstoppable force of nature. My already-high level of anticipation for SS just went through the roof.

  One last thought — I’m really hoping that Maki didn’t speak out of turn (it is mere days since Khoo wasn’t willing to tell when production took place or who was involved) and as he (Maki) rightly observes:

  Khoo is a very kind, friendly, and utterly terrifying man

  I kid, I kid, Douglass also disclosed her involvement today, but she didn’t make a show of terror so she doesn’t have as good a pull quote. Obviously, the NDA period is over — or Maki and Douglass are dangerously overconfident, not realizing that their doom is nigh.

• Speaking of fast starts, Ryan Estrada has launched the second iteration of The Whole Story (six months after the first), this time on Kickstarter. Since the launch at midnight EST, TWS: Winter 2013 has exceeded the extremely modest US$2500 goal, which had the entire purpose of reimbursing Estrada for the out-of-pocket costs that he fronted to creators and translators; everything that comes in from this point will be split among the creators (of which Estrada is one, meaning he gets a share, but not the entire total going forward).

  Moving TWS to Kickstarter from its earlier distribution site makes sense — it’s easiest to just set the “pay what you want” model to a minimum of a buck, and to add bonus content by exceeding the average amount paid in the prior incarnation, than it is to adjust those pricing structures on the fly. Having a set period of time for the campaign creates a scarcity that wouldn’t exist otherwise for electronic content.

  And holy jeeze, there’s a lot of previously-released and brand-new content available, including KC Green’s latest story comic at the pay-what-you-want level; the bonus level (a paltry thirteen American dollars) includes almost 200 pages of Ryan Andrews comics that bore themselves into your soul and don’t let go plus Green’s magnum opus, The Anime Club. At this point, just call The Whole Story the e-book equivalent of Benign Kingdom.

• Finishing up on the Kickstarter front, at the beginning of December we at Fleen mentioned a Kickstarter from longtime mystery man Eben Burgoon for a project called B-Squad, wherein characters will be killed off by the roll of a die and replaced by others waiting in the wings. Burgoon’s project is four days from completion, and I’m particularly interested in its progress, because it’s the first test of something I learned back in October.

  Some may recall how I shared some information from Kickstarter Director of Community Cindy Au, at the B9 panel at NYCC; specifically, the magic inflection point appears to be 1/3 of goal. If you reach 1/3, you’re extremely likely to succeed, and if you fail, you very likely didn’t approach even 1/3 of goal. As of this writing, Burgoon’s B-Squad is at 39% of goal, with four days to go.

  The projects I’ve had my eyes on since I learned of Au’s thumb-rule haven’t hung around the 1/3 mark for more than a few minutes before racing ahead to success, so I’m curious to see what happens here — a big push to get support and a slide over the line before the campaign closes? Or a statistical outlier? Dare we, as Kickstarter attention-payers, turn Ms Au’s prediction on its head? That could cause the laws of Kickstarter physics to start to fail and create a tear in the fabric of crowdfunding-spacetime, the likes of which not even the ghost of Ryan North could navigate. I’m just saying, if Kickstarter eats itself, we only have ourselves to blame.

_______________
¹ That’s entirely too many “s”es.²

² So is that.³

³ And Guigar.

As a bitter, haggard wordbeast (thanks Jeffrey) of long standing, I love words (or hearing myself talk, opinion varies); if you want to know how I feel about them, read Henry’s cricket bat monologue from Act II of Stoppard’s The Real Thing (too-brief snippets of which may be found here). It’s a natural that I would be drawn to the wordamancy practiced regularly by Jerry Holkins, what with his punctuation and long words. But oddly enough, Holkins is only one of two master wordbenders at Penny Arcaded Industries.

In contrast to the playfulness of language that is the hallmark of Holkins, Robert Khoo is precise: he wields words like a mirror-bright Masamune blade, separating those that shade away from his intended meaning until only the exact information he wanted to convey remains. Alternately, the words are used to construct the perfect degree of opacity that he requires in the situation. So when I had the opportunity to talk about Strip Search, the webcomics reality-TV competition that will form the next season of PA: The Series, I could feel him choosing words with utmost care, answering and deferring questions so as to simultaneously share information and not give away more than necessary.

The continual peppering of his responses with You are free to infer that and I’m not saying that and Ahhh, I really want to tell you but I can’t right now formed a delicate process of invito, derobement, parry-riposte, esquive, and remise, and many lines must needs be read between. Some of what I have for you today is definite, some of it is conjecture, some of it is maddeningly vague; some dealt with the nature and logistics of a reality competition, some with creator’s rights, and some on how the project took on a life of its own. All of it was fascinating.

Let’s start with the purely factual elements, much of which matched my speculations from about six months ago: about 1000 people applied to be part of Strip Search, and found themselves in a process not unlike the Khoo–designed hiring gauntlet, which you ought to familiarize yourself with. The initial applicants were filtered down to about 300, then 100, then 40, 20, and finally 12 via a process of skill and personality tests, phone and video interviews, and background checks. The very thorough process had the dual purpose of finding contestants that would be able to have a successful webcomics career, and also to avoid what Khoo called The Puck Situation.

For the younger folks out there, round about the third season or so of MTV’s The Real World, a housemate named Puck made himself into a pain in the ass of such monumental proportions that he was thrown out by the other residents (who included a pre-fame Judd Winick and AIDS educator Pedro Zamora). This is reassuring, as it underscores that the purpose of Strip Search is to find the person most suited to a lasting career, not to manufacture drama out of interpersonal conflict. So if this is maybe the first reality show that hasn’t sought to fill 40% of its contestants with undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder cases, who are they?

Khoo described the final twelve as all having the ability to create very good content, and saw the purpose of the selection to find elements in the contestants that were unique. Ultimately, each person had those unique characteristics, but to find such via phone or video interviews is very challenging. Khoo summarized the process as First tier: Could you work with us? Second tier: Do you have ability to actually do the work, talent to do it, and can you do it without driving us crazy?.

The choice of twelve contestants was possibly the first place where the Strip Search concept evolved away from its original intention; the initial pitch called for ten contestants, but operational considerations dictated that twelve would be the minimum number that would actually work. By “operational considerations”, we mean “the mechanics that make a competition show work”, more on which in a moment.

Asked for details on the contestants, Khoo would divulge very little: they ran the gamut from definite fans of Penny Arcade to those who were indifferently aware of PA, but didn’t read it. Their own webcomics tended more towards humor than longform story-driven, not because Khoo, et al, felt it was more likely to succeed (in the show and as an ongoing career), but because it tended to fit the format of the show better. By coincidence, six men and six women made the cut. The youngest is 20 and the oldest 38. Having signed their contracts¹ and landed in Seattle, they surrendered all means of communications with the wider world and were locked in a giant mansion. While there would be outside trips for various challenges, they would not get away from the audio/video crews or each other for the duration².

Okay: challenges. With one exception everyone in the PA office watches a lot of reality TV, that exception being Khoo himself, who doesn’t watch TV. Fortunately, he had the able assistance of Josh Price, who watches an insane amount of reality TV and was able to educate Khoo on the rhythms and structure of competition entertainment. Khoo’s background in designing the the PAX Omegathon means that elimination competition is not new to him, and he was able to leverage that experience into the particular forms of televised competition. Khoo also credited his past running large projects as preparing him for showrunning duties, but says what was probably most helpful was the bachelor party³ that Khoo arranged for PA VP Mike Fehlauer.

Exactly what those challenges were, Khoo picked his words very carefully. He allowed that the majority of challenges had a purpose of relating to some skill that would make for a good webcartoonist, whether direct or indirect. He elaborated with two challenges that were not used in the show: asking the contestants to find the best travel deal for a convention would be a directly-relevant skill, while determining who could talk to a group of people and have them like (as on a panel at the convention) would be an indirect skill. Asked if there were any unique challenges or elements not previously seen in reality competitions, Khoo would only say to watch what they did at The end of every day.

Despite all the planning that went into designing the show, there was a significant amount of re-planning during production. Khoo said that they hadn’t anticipated How connected some us would become with the art that was created in the show, and it made us re-think the structure of the show while we were on it. He’s promised more thoughts on that once the show is running and the outside world is closer to seeing the time when the original plan was modified.

The hosting for Strip Search hasn’t been announced, but Khoo says that It will make sense. Likewise, judges aren’t being divulged, but he did say that judges were drawn from both inside and outside the PA offices, and that the judges were Always contextually appropriate to the challenges. Mike and Jerry have a role in the show, but not as a Tim Gunn-type mentor (asked if there was a Tim Gunn role on the show, Khoo said Not 100%).

With a few hojillion hours of footage, the task of cutting down into episodes (not to mention crafting a coherent story arc, a new challenge for PA:TS) was most likely considerable, as Khoo says the final number of episodes isn’t yet finalized. While the episode run time of 10 to 12 minutes (possibly as long as 15 if necessary) is pretty set, the season could run 26 to 35 episodes. It would be very difficult to frame an entire challenge in so short a runtime, and Khoo confirmed that there will not be an elimination in each episode. Curiously, he also was careful not to say that episodes would run weekly, leaving the possibility of multiple updates per week. He did say that Strip Search will launch in Q1, wrapping up by the middle of the summer⁴.

Naturally, that prompts the question of whether there will be another season of Strip Search; Khoo says that there hasn’t been a decision about further seasons yet, and I would speculate it wouldn’t make sense to have another until about the time that the first winner was finishing up the in-house year. If there will be further seasons (and Khoo’s excitement at all that was accomplished with the first season indicated more seasons would be just as exciting), I’d expect them to be interspersed with full seasons of “regular” PA:TS.

The thing about Penny Arcade is, somebody there will have an idea and what might have been a one-off project blows up huge. It doesn’t become an ongoing project because the staff wanted to make it bigger and better; they find ways to make it bigger and better because the project has already taken on its own life: a simple meet and greet has become an intercontinental series of gaming expos; a reaction to a shock jock’s denigration of gamers has become a multi-million dollar charity. Judging from Khoo’s carefully chosen words (both spoken and unspoken), Strip Search grew in the making, and the showrunners may have had as much of an unexpected ride as the participants.

Or maybe not — you can never tell with that guy.

_______________
¹ Regarding the contracts, Khoo would only say that Strip Search is, to his knowledge, the only creative-based reality show explicitly avoiding any claim on what the contestants/winner create. We don’t own anything they make; the contract grants us a license to use the art on the show, but nothing further. They explicitly own 100% of their work, that was very important to us. Although Khoo would say nothing further, we may surmise that there is a very strong NDA component.

² Khoo would not say how long the contestants were locked in that mansion, whether eliminated contestants were released to go home or kept with the production, or even if the competition is entirely finished. There is precedent in the creative end of competition TV for finalists to be sent home for a period of time to work up a portfolio for final judgment, which may or may not be happening with Strip Search.

³ Go watch those episodes to give yourself a feel for the sort of challenges that Khoo may have dreamed up, because he wouldn’t give even the barest hints on any of them. Also note that Holkins refers to Khoo as “a depraved madman”.

⁴ Khoo was emphatic that Strip Search will not intersect in any way with their other mid-summer event, PAXAus, as the logistics of trying to tie them together would be — and this is a quote — “crazy”.

The thing about Rich Stevens is, even when he’s just tossing ideas around on Twitter with little to no intention of following up, it’s a hoot and a half to read. As agile as he runs his business¹ (and he’s nothing if not agile), his mind is running faster still, bouncing from brilliant idea to brilliant idea, mining only the barest minority of them and turning them into something beautiful.

Case in point: A rude ashtray begets temporary tattoos and possibly sweatpants. Case in other point: speculation about existing media properties that aren’t making comics leads to genius ideas that would make a million billion dollars. Or maybe “Gumby” is just as fun to say as “smock”: Gumby, Gumby, Gumby, smock.

So as we approach the end of the year, looking forward to our long crawl back into a season of growing things and new possibilities, know that the closest thing to an actual Spark or mad genius is in Western Massachusetts, mainlining robot juice and dreaming up crazy things to do purely because they’ll amuse you and also him. Mostly him². We should all be so lucky.

From the Charity Front:

• Some year, Child’s Play will not raise more money than the previous year … that will not be this year, seeing as how they’re now up over US$3.3 million with plenty of time to clear the US$3.512 million achieved in 2011. To put this in perspective, this will mean that 2012’s total will be more than the cumulative amount raised in Child’s Play’s first five years, and will likely clear US$16 million over the ten year history of the project. Well done Ms Lindsay, Ms Dillon, Messers Holkins, Krahulik, Khoo, and everybody that’s made this possible.
• Far less organized, but no less impactful: Kiva’s Team Webcomics (founded by Ryan North and Zach Weinersmith, who just so happen to have written two of the most successful choosable–path books in history) has lent more than US$321,000 to micro-entrepreneurs around the world, contributing to the bettering of the lives of entire families and villages.
• Somehow we missed checking in on Worldbuilders, the Patrick Rothfuss-run charity that benefits Heifer International, in 2011. That’s a shame, as there’s usually some primo webcomics creators contributing fabulous prizes to be won via the Worldbuilders auctions, lottery, and store.

  Just announced: a slew of webcomicabilia from the recently-held Webcomics Rampage in Austin, plus jam art, books, plushes, prints, and more. Jacques! Watson! Willis! The aforementioned Weinersmith! DenBleyker! Sohmer & DeSouza! Weaver! Corsetto! Melick! Krahulik & Holkins! Casalino! Foglio & Foglio! And introducing Randy Milholland as Chewbacca’s Family.

_______________
¹ And the thing about agility is, you can’t keep it going forever — patterns get engraved, The Right Way of Doing Things becomes The Only Way, and you stop reinventing yourself. Stevens, by contrast, has been a blur of motion for more than a decade because he doesn’t know what he can’t do, therefore he does it.

² In my less-rational moments, I imagine that when Frank Zappa died, his Dada-anarcho tendencies wandered the world until deciding that Stevens was an appropriate host body.

I was going to be enjoying a lazy, no-pants day but some people had to go and do significant things so fine, I’m writing. Still no pants, though.

• Ursula Vernon became the first person not named Foglio to take a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, for Digger (presumably for volume six, which released last year following the wrapping-up of the story). At press time, Ms Vernon was reportedly in an alleyway delivering a vicious beating to Neil Gaiman. So much for her plan to lose with dignity.

  Lord knows that I’ve written a lot about how much I dig¹ Vernon’s work, so I’m utterly thrilled for her and feel it’s recognition well deserved. At the same time, let us take a moment to acknowledge Howard Tayler, who is one of only two creators² to be nominated in the Best Graphic Story category a mind-bending four times. There is the matter of going 0-for-4 but hey, could be worse³, right?, Along those lines, I have already decided what to get Tayler for his birthday the next time it comes around in 2016.

• Meanwhile, about 2050 miles west of Chicago and the Hugos, news was coming out of PAX Prime during the Q&A with Mike and Jerry (helpfully streamed live to the world) that PAX is going abroad as PAX Prime, PAX Dev, and PAX East are joined by PAX Very South. For those of you that can’t travel to the Far Antipodes, 2013 will also see the launch of a new Scott Kurtz comic, of which details are presently thin on the ground.
• Okay, time to get serious, as one more thing smacked webcomics well in the face over the weekend — the sites hosted by Blind Ferret Entertainment, which include Looking for Group, Least I Could Do, Girls With Slingshots, Something*Positive, Reptilis Rex, Goblins, and PvP [no links, about which more momentarily] were hit by somebody with nothing better to do than to distribute malware. It’s been a long weekend of repairing both damage and reputations (malware warnings are likely to persist from Google and Firefox for some time), and as of this writing, the various sites remain down.

  Combine that with a story that’s been percolating around the tech sphere for the past week that the Java language has a critical flaw that’s been zero-day exploited, and the ultra-rare out-of-sequence patch issued by Oracle has not fixed the problem.

  I’ve written before about my general level of paranoia in browsing — how I do not enable JavaScript on a global basis, and only individually-trusted sites get it enabled; I’ve now turned off all Java plug-in functionality in every browser within my control, and I’m seriously considering removing Java entirely from my computers. I will lose some functionality (fancier presentations, comment ability, etc) in my day-to-day computer use, but maybe it’s not on me to be paranoid.

  Hate to say it, guys, but maybe we don’t need as elaborate, feature-rich layouts for our comics. Trimmed down, more simply-presented sites could be easier to build, faster to load, and generally more secure. It’s going to make some things more complex (including, most likely, the easy slotting-in of ads), but it’s time to start thinking in that direction. I know that nobody’s going to rebuild their websites overnight (and most of you aren’t going to change your browser settings either), but if you should happen to do a redesign, maybe security/reader safety needs to become more of a criterion that it has been in the past.

_______________
¹ I’m so very, very sorry. I blame it on my ever-worsening Guigar Syndrome.

² Technically, a creator team: the writer/artist combo of Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham have been nominated for the current Fables collection four times; various other artists have been on the nominations, but only the *inghams have been on all four ballots.

³ Much worse.

If you were lucky enough to hang around the Dumbrella booth at San Diego Comic Con last month, scrollsaw-wielding madman Chris Yates might have shown you something very interesting indeed — a prerelease version of the new Baffler! for iPad app, which released today. Developer Twenty Sided Planet’s been at work for a year on this, and having played with it some, I can say it was time well spent. The grab-a-piece-and-spin-it-around functionality is crisp and smooth, and the timer counting up how long it takes you to solve a puzzle is maddening in its insistence at ticking along at a rate of one second per second.

Best of all, consider what you get — fifteen Chris Yates original puzzles, the digital versions scanned from actual physical puzzles, the prices of which would range from the dozens of American Cash Dollars to multiple hundreds. To obtain fifteen Baffler! originals would be out of the reach of all but the most devoted (and wealthy) collector, but Yates and Twenty Sided Planet are letting you have this for a measly three bucks (with future expansion packs undoubtedly at a similar pricepoint). Take a look at the launch video (there’s some nice quick shots of multi-level Baffler!s around the 1:10 mark) and then we can all sit here and wait to see how long it takes Apple to make The Baffler! for iPad an official demo app in their stores. ‘Cause man, this thing is addictive.

• With the country going all excited for Bobak Ferdowsi¹, would this be a good time to point out that Jorge Cham’s new video series, Ph.Detours, talked to him last week? Yes, yes it would. Ferdowsi’s about halfway through the video (with mohawk but without coloration), but the real stars of the show are JPL program engineer Chaz Morantz and the full-size Curiosity test model.

  As long as we’re talking PhD Comics, we should also mention that their Two Minute Thesis Contest is up to the voting stage — grad students give a brief pitch about what they’re working on, you can listen in and get smarter in your spare time, and the thesis with the most votes will be the first to be illustrated for a new web series, along with other fabulous prizes.

  Me, I’m leaning towards Rescue Times Need[ed] By Fire Services At The Critical Structure Fire by Thomas Lindemann, Rescue Engineering, Cologne University of Applied Sciences because come on — how many other candidates have to do their research inside burning buildings?

• Called it: Khoo putting together Strip Search entry guidelines based on Penny Arcade hiring practice.
• Okay, we all knew that B9.5 was going to crush its goal, we just didn’t know the final number. As it turns out, the final number was slightly over US$140,000, meaning that the Benign Kingdom project as a whole has taken in just over 200 grand. On behalf of everybody that pledged early and kept seeing new stuff added to our rewards packages, I’d like to thank the incredible upsurge in backers that brought in more than US$50K in the last six days of the campaign. Seriously, you just don’t see the curve of the projected total go up all that often on Kickstarts. Now the only question is what the Benign Ones do to top this.

_______________
¹ I’ve mentioned previously that despite my childhood daydreams, I know I never could make it as an astronaut, but if I had been born 20 or 25 years earlier, I would have fought like hell to earn a chair in NASA mission control, so indulge me as I take a moment to recognize that not only has Bobak Ferdowsi got great hair and style out the wazoo, he’s a Flight Director.

Less than ten years out of college, and he’s calling the shots for all the flight controllers in that mission control center. That’s how it works when you’ve got the headsets on — a year or two out of school you’re saving an Apollo mission from an unnecessary abort, and if you stick with it by the time you’re 30 you’re very possibly sitting in Gene Kranz’s chair.

Think I exaggerate? John Aaron (EECOM) and Steve Bales (GUIDO) were twenty four years old when they called (respectively) “SCE to Aux”, and “We’re Go on that program alarm”. Every single person that’s ever plugged into a flight controller’s loop and called, “Go, Flight” is a goddamn hero and if you don’t know their names and stories, shame on you.

Who says that service outages are always a bad thing?

So I’ve been thinking about the possibilities for the Penny Arcade Strip Search Reality TV Series Thing since before I knew it was A Thing. Robert and Brian teased the crap out of it to me, never quite getting around to exactly what you might call details (and now that I reflect, it was probably one of the shoes waiting to drop that were left hanging back in Las Vegas). Since discovering it was A Thing (and Robert getting to see the look on my face, as he said he wanted to), I’ve been wondering where it could go.

Certainly, this is the sort of winnowing process that Robert Khoo lives for; many have commented that the hiring process for Penny Arcade is convoluted and demanding, bordering on insane¹, but I think most people who criticize have likely not been involved in personnel matters before. I’ve just wrapped up a four year stint as the Membership Trustee for my volunteer EMS agency, and I can tell you that Khoo is precisely correct that what makes for a bad hire is not a lack of skills, it’s a lack of fit (personally, culturally) in both directions. It’s the sort of thing that can kill a small business (or volunteer organization) if it’s not handled with extreme care, and more so when those environments are characterized as high-energy, high-pressure, or high-performance. If unpaid volunteers would have willingly subjected themselves to the multi-stage process that Khoo designed, I would have adopted it in a heartbeat.²

Since it’s a competition that needs to be visually interesting, I trust that Khoo will also be up to his usual standard in devising challenges (I’m pretty sure that Robert likes planning things like bachelor parties and reality competitions so that he — like a photographer that hates to be photographed — doesn’t end up participating in them). The demand will certainly be there, and the rewards certainly won’t be just for the eventually winner; the audience that could be built up by being followed for a season of PATV (some 30 episodes, I’d presume) and making it to the final three or four could be enough to launch a career, even without the year-long in-house association with PA’s experts.

I think that the ultimate success or failure of this project will hinge on two items: the breadth of work that gets in and stays in for the duration, and how well the contestants are nurtured.

In the case of the first, Mike and Jerry are terrific about pointing their readers to creators whose work is marvelously divergent from their own; can you think of any webcomicker less like Penny Arcade than, say, Erika Moen? Having an Erika-type, or analogues to the breadth of topic & style found in your Beckys, Kates, Merediths, Toms, Evans, or Jams in the contest, people whose work is nothing like Penny Arcade will, I think, be a prime determinator of the quality of competition.

This isn’t entirely up to the producer end of the equation — I do think that Mike, Jerry, Robert, and the others are fair-minded enough to want to showcase the best work with the most potential (after all, they’re on the hook to give a sort of imprimatur and don’t want to sully their own brand), but if the contestants self-select and you don’t get applications from as wide a pool of creators with as wide a range of artistic styles (and personal experiences), the show won’t live up to its potential with respect to (as Anton Ego put it) the discovery and defense of the new.

The second item is more within the control of the showrunner. TV does reality/competition shows on a range from generally classy (cf: The Amazing Race or Iron Chef America) to trainwreck (cf: Housewives, Shores, anything centered around a job that isn’t Ace of Cakes ’cause dammit, those people like each other and have fun at work), and even the shows on the ability counts more than narcissistic personality disorder end of the spectrum can drop the ball badly (cf: Mondo was robbed, and where is the goddamn owl).³ Put bluntly, will Strip Search have a Tim Gunn to encourage, critique, mentor (and, when needed, lay the smack down)? Note that unless the Tim Gunn role is fulfilled by Khoo, the local substitute will not be as good a dresser as Tim Gunn. Heck, just see if Tim wants to come out to Seattle for a couple of months.

So that’s where my head’s at. The rest we’ll see when the final numbers on the Kickstarter are in (as of this writing, we’re about US$1500 away from Jerry having to cosplay something suitably humiliating at PAXes Prime and East), but the projection makes Strip Search a virtual certainty at this point. Contestant screening, format, challenges, guest judges⁴ are all to be seen. There remains an incredible amount of work to execute on all the potential, but if there’s one thing the Penny Arcade crew (all of them, even the ones whose names you don’t see in the credits) know how to do, it’s execute on potential.

_______________
¹ Let’s make this clear: you or I could not get hired by Robert Khoo. We wouldn’t make it past the laundry question, much less to the phone interviews.

² Not that we ever had 5000 applicants for a single open EMT slot.

³ Confidential to Scott Kurtz: Project Runway has started again, so you might want to not pay attention to my tweets on Thursday nights for the next coupla’ months.

⁴ I could be available for a weekend, just sayin’.