As of this writing, STRIPPED is sitting at #2 on the iTunes Canada Documentary charts¹ which is good and all, but not good enough. Back and the end of the 18th century, political scientists figured the next nation to escalate to world domination would not be the United States; the 20th century, they declared, would be The Canadian Century. Alas, Canada did not come to dominate the world in that century, but there is still time in the 21st. Drive STRIPPED to #1 Canada! Then surpass your large, heavily-armed, somewhat rude southern neighbors and find a way to take STRIPPED to #0. That’ll show us!

And when you’ve done so, perhaps you’ll find some time to attend VanCAF, one of the newer crop of TCAF-emulating, modest-scale, community-involving, public-space-inhabiting, no-entry-fee comics festivals. As a bonus, VanCAF is the brainchild of onetime Tower of Babel² writer Shannon Campbell.

Only in its third year, VanCAF has attracted a wide swath of (mostly west of the Continental Divide) comics talent, including a decent chunk of Pacific Daylight webcomickers. One may, for example, find Special Guests like Natasha Allegri, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Tony Cliff, Ed Brisson, Aaron Diaz³, Madeleine Flores, Tyson Hesse, Jeph Jacques, and Kris Straub⁴.

Exhibitors (who are not necessarily special guests, but are still special in our hearts) include the likes of Kory Bing, Lars Brown, Erin Burt, Blue Delliquanti, Amy T Falcone⁶, Hazel & Bell, Kathleen Jacques⁷, Steve LeCouillard, Kel McDonald, David McGuire, Angela Melick, Alina Pete, Doug Savage, Katie & Steve Shanahan, and Anise Shaw.

Also some guy named Sam that just gets in because he’s sleeping with the showrunner. Scandal!

But apart from that lack of judgment, Campbell has done great things in only a few years, and from my mind two things stand out as the greatest:

1. VanCAF is in a reasonably-sized space, so floor maps and booth numbers aren’t needed to make sure you find your favorite creators (but there’s still one provided).
2. Every single one of those creators up there? Campbell clearly included a link to their website so I didn’t have to hunt them down. She’s gettin’ a high-five from me next time I see her.

We didn’t even mention the programming, or the fact that Campbell’s got a food cart coming to set up immediately off the showfloor. If you’re anywhere within reach of the northern Pacific ocean this weekend, VanCAF is the place to be.

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¹ DÉPOUILLÉ est assis à #2 sur les graphiques documentaires du iTunes Canada.

² That link will still be good for a while, then it will pass the way of all things.

³ Professional dapper gentleman, Tolkien scholar par excellence, and Latin Art-Throb.

⁴ Professional handsome man, I don’t know about his knowledge of Tolkien, and he ain’t Latin, but he’s dreamy. Like, Brad Guigar⁵ dreamy.

⁵ Ladies.

⁶ Twitter has it that Ms T Falcone’s fellow Strip Searchmonaut and roomie Abby Howard will be wandering the halls as an attendee.

⁷ No relation.

How’s everybody doing? I’m doing good, thanks for asking.

• STRIPPED comes to iTunes Canada tomorrow, and just like it made a run at #1 in Documentaries in the US last month, filmmakers Freddave Kellett-Schroeder are going to try to repeat the feat in the Great White North. If you live north of 49 and haven’t see the film yet, tomorrow’s a good day.
• Not to be confused with the Great White North, some time back a webcomicker by the name of Lars Brown did a two-volume story via Oni called North World and it was pretty great. I mention this because Brown has continued to make some not-your-typical sword-and-sorcery comics by the name of Penultimate Quest, and it’s time to get the second volume of PQ printed. Enter the requisite Kickstarter campaign, which has just under two weeks and just under 10% to go. Brown’s the real deal, making comics with heart, and realistic relationships, and frustrations at your lot in life, and swords. If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d like, please consider backing PQ2.
• Speaking of real deals that do swords and comics with heart, Jim Zub is launching a new creator-owned story (his first since Baldy and Shorty started kicking skulls in 2010; as Zub has stated, we’re on the next-to-last story arc of their adventures) in August, to be titled Wayward; if I may be permitted a moment of pure opinion, Zub’s stuff gets an automatic blind buy from me. Some of it may not turn out to be for me, but the man’s stellar hits-to-misses ratio means it’s worth plunking down four bucks to find out even if it doesn’t sound like my cup of tea.

  Wayward, for the record, sounds like the finest of green tea, whisked by a senior geisha in a formal ceremony:

  Rori Lane is an outsider by nature, but moving to Tokyo to live with her single Mom has only exacerbated her weirdness. She’s feeling out of sorts, worried about fitting in and, as if that wasn’t enough, strange things are beginning to happen. Glowing symbols and patterns are starting to appear before her eyes… and she’s the only one who seems to notice.

  “Wayward is a coming of age story filled with mystery and emotion. It’s also an ass-kicking joy ride with teenagers beating the hell out of Japanese mythological monsters,” said Zub. “Steve and I built this series from the ground up to play to both our strengths. I can’t wait for people to see what we have planned.”

  In WAYWARD a group of teens living in Tokyo find a common bond in manifesting strange, supernatural abilities. As they begin to unravel the mystery behind their powers and their common source they’re drawn into a war with the vestiges of Japan’s monstrous mythic past.

  Buffy meets Spirited Away, anybody? You can bet that I’ll be finding Zub at SDCC in July and dragging as much info out of him as I can.

• Speaking of Zub, even if I weren’t blind-buying all his work I’d still pick up the next Schlock Mercenary collection (featuring a short story by Zub), which is now up for pre-order. The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse story arc set up much of late-period Schlock’s story development, was nominated for a Hugo Award, and is available in standard (US$20) and sketch (US$30) editions. For that you’ll get 160 pages of full-color mayhem, the bonus Zub-penned story, and a deep sense of personal peace and tranquility¹.

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¹ They say that the grave is very tranquil.

Something made me think about Kickstarters, and the actual duration of a project.

We’ve established many a time that the end of the fundraising campaign is just the beginning of a successful crowdfunding¹; depending on how many backers you have looking for rewards, it may be a long process to get all of them happy. On the off chance that it’s going to be a long fulfillment, I recommend frequent updates and something like Rich Burlew’s Workometer, which shows after a mighty effort (and honestly, too much work for one man, even one without a half-severed thumb) he has only two pieces of fulfillment and some personalizations yet to go. Actually, let’s make that another rule of crowdfunding — it’s awesome for your backers to get caught up in the frenzy, but don’t let it happen to you without a lot of helpers.

Point being, it’s almost a given these days that a Kickstart will blow deadlines on fulfillment — whether due to scope, number of people available, injuries, postal rates changing between fundraising and actually sending things, the tax man taking a chunk on a campaign ending in Q4 but stuff not going out until the next year, or a boat nearly claimed by Poseidon’s watery grasp², the best intentions mean exactly squat. But even in the case of the heavens aligning and everything going well, there will still be bits you have to attend to.

Case in point: Ryan North has updated his To Be Or Not To Be funding campaign for the 68th time:

Everyone should have their everything

By now everyone should have their everything! We sometimes get the occasional email saying “oh hey by the way did the book come out?” and that turns me into a SAD PANDA. I wanted you to read it by now! I wanted you to be chuckling LITERALLY MONTHS AGO. So if you have not gotten your stuff, let us know directly!

At the same time, we’ve discovered that Kickstarter messages/comments aren’t the best way to do customer service (some replies were getting lost). So if you’ve sent a Kickstarter message and haven’t gotten a response, email support@breadpig.com and we’ll sort it out!

We’ve done a check of the existing Kickstarter messages recently to make sure nothing got lost and everything is settled, but I’d rather be safe than sorry (and rather you have your books than be sorry too!)

As it turns out, even North still has one bit of fulfillment to do, although not one that any particular backer is expecting to be delivered to an address, postal or physical:

I still owe you a pizza shaped like Hamlet!

YES. One final reward still outstanding. It’ll be awesome and tasty and I’m actually a little intimidated by it. The longer we wait the better it has to be. So this pizza is gonna be OFF THE HOOK.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind if Ryan North never quite got around to eating a pizza shaped like Hamlet, except that I’d feel bad for him having had one less tasty pizza in his life. But he made a commitment and he’s going to stick to it, dammit. And you know what? When Romeo and/or Juliet is done (a stretch goal of TBONTB), that commitment that North made — and went to heroic lengths to make good on, even to the point of literally exploding — will mean that his next campaign may well surpass what is still the most-funded publishing project in Kickstarter history³.

And the one after that? Bigger still.

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¹ And naturally, everything here applies equally to Indiegogo and other similar platforms; Kickstarter, like Kleenex, has reached the point of the specific term also being the generic.

² To mention just a few things that beset campaigns that I have personally backed. But on the plus side, I’ve only had one totally finished Kickstart that completely pooched fulfillment of stuff that I expected to receive (no names). I’ve also told a couple of creators “send mine last”, especially when there’s a lot of customization.

Oh, and one that’s mostly done, I got the part I really wanted, but it isn’t reasonable to expect final fulfillment yet: some day, I will have a copy of the book-of-the-film for STRIPPED. It’s only now that the film is done that Kellett and Schroeder would have time to breathe, much less bash together a coffee table book. It’s cool if they ship the poster with that book whenever it’s done, too.

³ Look, I love Planet Money, but a) screw squirrels, seriously, screw them, and b) their campaign was an act of journalism, not book publishing. So Ryan’s still number one as far as I’m concerned.

Work informed me yesterday afternoon that I have to be in San Francisco next week, and I’m running around all crazylike doing a million things that need to be done (including figuring out how to get home from the airport after a redeye, as I just saw that the Port Authority will be shutting down the rail link that I use while I’m gone … until July). So all that, and yeah, next week’s posts will be on a Pacific Time schedule.

I do, however, have time to mention two things:

• Today marks eleven years of Wondermark, which would be remarkable enough even if David Malki ! weren’t doing a zillion other things in the meantime, like guerrilla interview films at comic conventions, short films about henchmen, two massive works of anthology fiction, one incredibly complex card game, inventing a new means of animation motion-capture, inventing a new means of teleprompting, engaging in a Bookwar with Ryan North, and making a feral cat into an international superstar. For the best possible simulation of what it’s like in Malki !’s head, open all those Vines in separate tabs and listen to them all play at the same time.
• And I’ll remind you all that — as was noted before in accordance with prophecy — tomorrow night at 7:00pm PDT/10:00pm EDT, the people behind STRIPPED will be hitting play on the movie and livetweeting the experience. Feel free to follow along at hashtag #strippedfilm.

Okay, back to frantic arrangements. See y’all on the left coast.

Where to start, where to start? Let’s grab a random story and … go!

• Readers of this page may recall that I stand second to nobody in my admiration of Minna Sundberg’s Stand Still, Stay Silent, and may also recall that immediately after discovering and devouring SSSS, I also archive-binged on Sundberg’s earlier story, A Red Tail’s Dream¹. Before SSSS launched, Sundberg had a very successful crowdfunding campaign to print ARTD, and the books left over from fulfillment are now up for grabs:
  

  First, without further ado, here’s the link to the simple little store that I opened (at Storenvy) for those of you who simply want to grab a copy right naoow: Linkity-link go here!

  I’ll keep the store open for two weeks, which means I’ll close it before the month is over and go back to Finland and start shipping out the orders.

  Okay, first, I have to start rearranging my bookshelves to make room for this, because it looks gorgeous on screen, and I imagine even better on paper. Second, I hope that Sundberg can find a way to keep it in print in future, because I’d hate to think that somebody discovering her work next month would get frozen out. If you’re interested, now’s the time to buy.

  Third, somebody with a distribution business on this side of the Atlantic, please contact Sundberg and get a bulk purchase in place, because international shipping on one copy (unsigned, un-arted) puts the price on the book at ninety dollars. Granted, it’s a great big huge hardcover, and there’s only a $15 differential between people getting the book within Finland/everywhere else, but I can’t help but wonder what US media mail rates would be.

• Homestuck! Canon! From different creators! Let’s just let Andrew Hussie explain this one himself:
  

  A young reader stands in a webcomic.
  April 13, 2014 by Andrew Hussie

  A brand new webcomic, to be exact. One that has launched on the 5th anniversary of Homestuck’s first page. If the thirteenth of April holds a magical place in your heart, then chances are, you are on pins and needles waiting for me to post the end of the story. It will still be quite some time before that happens. I’ve had too much else going on to be able to attack the remaining content with the ferocity that has been characteristic of my update schedule over the years. It is nothing short of The Greatest Tragedy that a beloved story is held hostage to the ability of a single artist to continue creating it. Which brings us to the website called Paradox Space, and the chapter it will represent in Homestuck’s extended life cycle.

  Those who like HS are extremely fond of the characters, yet those characters are trapped – “stuck” if you will – inside a very particular narrative, which itself has been at the mercy of my ability to produce it. So when I think about the future of Homestuck, I envision projects which liberate the things people love about it from the story itself, and most importantly, from my intensive personal effort.

  So this website is the first major step in that direction. Here is the idea:

  Paradox Space will feature many short comic stories involving literally any characters and settings from Homestuck. Any point in canon could be visited and elaborated on, whether it’s backstory, some scenes that were skipped over or alluded to, funny hypothetical scenarios which have nothing to do with canon events, or exploring things that could have happened in canon through the “doomed timeline” mechanic that is a defining trait of Homestuck’s multiverse-continuum known as “paradox space”. There is a WHOLE LOT of fun stuff we can do here; and we will!

  The idea is also to get a lot of different artists and writers involved. It’s going to be a major team effort. Occasionally I will write some comic scripts, particularly at the onset to help get this off the ground. But I’d like that to be the exception rather than the rule. I think it will be exciting to see how a talented pool of creators can work within the HS universe, and what they will bring to these characters.

  Never let it be said that Hussie doesn’t know how to keep his fans coming back for more.

  It’s a true group effort, too with Rachel Rocklin and Kory Bing listed as the managing editors, and updates scheduled daily (today was skipped so that yesterday’s anniversary launch could happen; next update is tomorrow). That sound you just heard was a thousand Homestucks polishing up their fanfic and desperately trying to find an established creator to partner with them.

• Now this sounds like a lot of fun:
  

  April 26! We’re live-tweeting @strippedfilm: Everyone hits “play” @ 7PM PST/10PM EST for Q&A, behind-the-scenes stories & more #strippedfilm

  Time to clear my schedule for the 26th.

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¹ No big, just 556 pages in both English and Finnish, which Sundberg created as a practice run to sharpen her skills before launching SSSS. Like you do.

Hecka. Yeah. Now all I need is the limited-edition poster and the book of the film and I’ll be as set as you possibly can be. Freddave, thanks so much for this. Oh, and if you’d like to see STRIPPED on the big screen, there are at least three screenings coming up. Only thing is, the big screen don’t get you director’s commentary, which is on the DVD, so maybe grab that?

• Y’know, Professoressa and Professor Foglio have been doing this comics thing for a long damn time, and they must surely know by now that their fans are going to buy their books, but it’s still got to make you feel good when Girl Genius book 13 clears 100% of funding in something like 16 hours. As always, putting the Foglios on video is a treat and a half.
• Also a treat and a half — quite possibly two treats, if we’re being honest — is the news of a new comic from Steve Wolfhard. Forg the Winter Frog is short, but it’s making me smile like a maniac; here’s hoping that Wolfhard gifts us with more Forg in the future.
• Hey! Do you make comics? Are you in the New York City area? Thomas Crowell, author of a legal reference for filmmakers and a soon-to-be similar reference for comic book creators, will be the guest of the Media Law Collaborative of NYU’s law school on Monday, 14 April. He’ll be speaking on the topic of representing comics creators, from 4:00pm to 6:00pm with a cocktail reception to follow.

  Now it appears that the event is by invite only, which may possibly be garnered via this form. I’m not saying that a bunch of cartoonists can just show up and listen to the law guy and then get free booze, but none of us will know unless some of you try. More likely, you cartoonists will have to point it out to your lawyer or business guy or agent, but somebody you know should be going. If you can’t convince somebody to go, be sure to mention the free booze part.

Little by little; we climb a little higher, we make things a little better, we learn a little more, we progress by increments.

• So like I promised, the final word on how STRIPPED did in its debut — throughout the day, it crept steadily higher, finally hitting the #1 documentary slot around 11:00pm EDT, which also meant a #27 overall placement. It continued to rise for some time, cracking the Top 25 overall a little after midnight. As of this writing (a little before 10:30am EDT on 2 April), STRIPPED retains the #1 documentary slot on iTunes, and #24 overall, sitting above the likes of a major animation franchise, the Coen brothers, Woody Allen, and some of the greatest musicians in history.

  What’s keeping STRIPPED from getting higher? Oh, just little obscure films like Thor 2, Gravity, and Veronica Mars, that’s all. Not bad for two dudes with bear[d]s¹, no studio, a shoestring budget, a couple of Kickstarts, and a whole bunch of people that love putting words and pictures together.

• Speaking of long-running stories here at Fleen, Jeff Smith’s Tüki Save the Humans is back in the news. From the announcement that Smith would be jumping into webcomics, to the launch last year, to the news that Tüki had garnered an NCS award nomination², it’s been fun to watch develop and mostly fun to read.

  I say mostly because of one thing that I was not alone in noticing — the website navigation for Tüki was not great. Rather than clicking from day-to-day, there were placeholder images that you clicked on to get actual pages, then you had to navigate back to the placeholder before moving to the next day. It was awkward at best.

  And I imagine nobody realized that more than Smith and the rest of the Cartoon Books crew, as they spent time since Tüki’s launch actively soliciting feedback and design expertise, and they’ve relaunched the site with ease of reading in mind. It’s better than Smiley Bone’s description — Now, instead of looking like it’s from 1996, it looks like it’s from 2006! — and it’s just in time to archive-binge before the scheduled return of Chapter Two later this month.

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¹ Follow the link and check out the hovertext.

² Although I will say that it’s perhaps early in Tüki’s run for this — with only 24 pages released so far, and not all of those in 2013, and the story just starting, I would have preferred to see that recognition come after another chapter or two. Not that I think that Smith will deliver anything less than a stellar story, there’s more than ample evidence to believe that he will; it’s just that his co-nominees have been telling much larger stories and produced much more work in 2013.

Guys, this is the last time I’m going to mention STRIPPED for the immediate future, except to update you as to how they’re doing in their goal to become #1 on iTunes today. As of this writing, they’re sitting at #5 in Documentaries and #59 overall; considering some of the biggest and most acclaimed films of last year are newly released and sitting in the #1 and 2 slots overall, it’s going to be some tough sledding. I’m confident, however, that they can surpass that Belieber “documentary” with your help..

Honestly, it’s a masterpiece, it’s out on iTunes today, it’s out lots of places tomorrow, and if you love comics you owe it to yourself to watch it. I’ve watched it through multiple times now, I keep noticing new things and I know there’s more there still (for example, the credits acknowledge the kind permission received to include an Oglaf [NWFNearlyEveryW¹] strip, and I haven’t spotted it yet. I wonder which one such goodly-hearted young men as Freddave could possibly have used.

In other news, happy strippiversaries this week to Christopher B Wright and K Brooke Otter Spangler who this week are celebrating, respectively, 18 and 8 years² in the webcomics mines³. After you’re done with STRIPPED, spend some time with their archives.

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¹ If you’re at work and it’s okay for you to click that link to Oglaf, I want to know if you’re hiring.

² Brooke, please have permalinkable blogpostings some day. For those wondering, the two links in that image go here.

³ Coincidentally, both of them are also making serious inroads in the world of e-books.

Despite what it may look like, today is not merely an excuse for me to tell an amusing college anecdote. That’s just the bonus.

• On a long-ago episode of Webcomics Weekly (I don’t recall which one, so have fun searching), the strapping four lads agreed (that was what stuck in my mind — all four of them agreeing on something) that you can’t really put out a professional quality webcomic without engaging in some degree of commercialization and money making. If you were that degree of professional in the making and content of your comic, the argument went, it was inevitable that you would be making some amount of money from it.

  I always thought that was too reductive a world view, considering that people like David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc) exist who have produce pro-level webcomics with no desire to make a living (or even pocket money) from them. The comic is its own reward, regardless of desire to follow a comics career¹.

  I bring this up because I’ve been thinking a lot about a piece written earlier this week by Liz Greenfield (creator of the much-missed Stuff Sucks, now lost to time) on the value of non-profit comics:

  Over the past seven weeks I’ve been in Bristol, working closely with a dozen amazing individuals to write a graphic novel. We did it in record time and the resulting manuscript is impressive. It’s full of true stories and fantastic lies and imagination. It’s the most exciting and bravest work I have been involved in yet and I can’t wait to share it with you, but I will have to draw it first.

  It’s safe to say the past eight weeks of workshops and the process of writing using physical theatre exercises, improvisation techniques, group workshopping etc. has altered my practice forever. One thing that emerged was the advantages of non-commercial work – this project is being supported by the Arts Council of England and the Arnolfini in Bristol – over work whose end goal is to satisfy sales targets and generate profit for the writer, artist, publisher.

  I’m aware that most of my colleagues in comic books aren’t familiar with this model of creating, as these opportunities are still fairly new and far between (outside of France and Belgium, who subsidise comics as any other art form with generous grants, residencies, prizes, awards).

  If you’re in the same boat as me, maybe the reason you haven’t made a change is you’re waiting for someone to swoop in and bind it and put in on the shelves of a library/bookshop. My advice is: don’t. Don’t give way to a fantasy and let it stunt you growth. Don’t labour robotically under the illusion that someone will recognise your determination and see through all the levels of artifice you guard it with. This work should be made of doubts and hope and insecurities and love, or not at all. If you’re going to hate your job, at least find one that pays properly.

  It’s worth a read, and Greenfield invites her fellow art bastards to add their opinions on personal and not-for-profit projects.

• Speaking of (very) personal and (potentially) not-for-profit projects, one of those comes to a fairly big denouement in a few hours, as Dave Kellett and Fred Schroeder have a public unveiling:
  

  Try to spot the guy who’s a nervous little nellie for his premiere tonight.

  STRIPPED has its public gala premiere in about six and a half hours (as I write this), and if you cock your ears in about eight hours towards LA, I’m pretty sure you’ll hear sustained applause, as well as four years of tension and stress suddenly releasing in Messrs Schroeder and Kellett. If your ears are especially good, you might make out some of the questions and answers that follow, but as I’ll be on EMS duty I won’t be able to relay them to you. Anybody attending the premiere want to share the experience? Drop me a line.

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¹ Perhaps analogous to the experience of a visiting professor of history when I was in college. Being an engineering school, we only had one professor of history and when he went to Japan for a year on a fellowship a replacement was found from a large state university a few hours away. Halfway through fall term he stopped suddenly in the middle of class (War, Revolution & Society 1789 — Present; being the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, he was playing it for all it was worth) and said I just realized something. You guys are all engineers and scientists, but you’re doing the same work that I would give to history majors and you’re all doing well. You’re doing as much reading in a ten-week quarter as they would in a 15-week semester. He paused, then continued, What the hell?

We explained that although none of us would be historians or use what we learned in our careers, we just enjoyed it; taking a 400-level history class (or literature, or psychology, or whatever) was like a hobby for us, since it would be the one class that term without math.

Also, it gave us an opportunity to write papers, which allowed for some serious pranking possibilities. Having nothing better to do one night, my buddy Thrice² and I wrote up a fake first page for a paper on All Quiet On The Western Front that used outrageously out-of-context and artificially conflated quotes to prove that Remarque was a bloodthirsty, warmongering proto-Fascist who regarded life in the trenches as one long, drug- and booze-fueled, dude-on-dude sex party. The real paper started on page two.

² AKA John Costain Knight III. Not very much later, he was serving on board an aircraft carrier ensuring that the nuclear reactor didn’t unexpectedly go boom!, which is exactly the sort of responsibility you want to give to a guy that you’ve seen drunkenly throw up after midnight in a booth at Hardee’s. On the other hand, the John C Stennis never went boom!, so I guess it all worked out okay.

It’s nearly time for Emerald City Comic Con in the city with the needle that reaches to space. Half of webcomics will be there, what with TopatoCo throwing down a challenge to all and sundry:

We are outgunned and outnumbered but we believe we might win. Maybe. We have street smarts and gumption and all that. We will have STUFF. We will have THINGS. We will have surprises. We will have the WILL TO SURVIVE. But most importantly, we will have friendship. And street smarts.

Also the power of Emily Horne & Joey Comeau (badass tattoos), Aaron Diaz (once beat up a gang), Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson, Tyson Hesse, Jeph Jacques, Kate Leth, Sam Logan (demolitions expert). David Malki !, Ryan North, Dante Shepherd, and Chris Yates (uses power tools like, all the time).

Opposing them will be the combined forces of David Willis, Joel Watson, the C&H crew, with various assists from Jennie Breeden and her stompy boots, Angela Melick and her 3D printer, Periscope Studios and special asskickers Amy T Falcone & Abby Howard, and the Guigar/Kurtz Axis of Awesome.

Trying to stay above the fray and avoid casualties, one may find vision-impaired mustelids, representatives of the local mad genius, Blerch control, and library communities, a strange attractor of fantrolls, and makers of potentially-killer robots from an isolated lair.

Wondering why they’re surrounded by weirdos, Evan Dahm, Kory Bing, and Magnolia Porter will seek to keep a sense of normality in a 10 meter radius of their booth, which will surely fail due to the proximity of Human Beard Randy Milholland and his handler/convention wife, Danielle Corsetto. Plus whoever I missed.

Don’t even get me started on the programming, where you’ll find Dean Trippe talking about Something Terrible, as well as many of the aforementioned exhibitors. Oh, and that Dave Kellett will be at the Unshelved booth, with STRIPPED DVDs for sale.

Me, I’ll be home in New Jersey, wishing such a great show with so many great people weren’t a continent away. Dang.