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.

Thanks very much Ryan North¹ I will never sleep again thanks to today’s Dinosaur Comics. As a quick hint, nobody wants to consider an afterlife full of parasites except for Kelly Weinersmith. Ick.

• Something weird happened today: Cyanide and Happiness appeared in the comics section of more than 650 newspapers worldwide, an occurrence which all reasonable persons would have figured to be damn near impossible. Okay, it’s just one panel, and it’s a pastiche by Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis, and covered by censor bars, but still — just imagine all the people that read newspaper comic strips deciding to do a Google search on Cyanide & Happiness because they figure it can’t be as bad as all that. I can hear the heads exploding from here.
• Well, that was fast — a few weeks back I mentioned that Digger² would be Kickstarting an omnibus edition, which went live after our update yesterday. Surprising absolutely nobody (except possibly Digger creator Ursula Vernon), it completely funded at approximately the thirteen hour mark, and is well on its way to (per the Fleen Rule of Kickstarter Projections) the US$100,000 — US$200,000 range. Yeah, got it, webcomics with built-in audiences overfund their Kickstarts all the time, what’s the big deal?

  The deal is that the Digger campaign may have the most unusual reward ever offered — hand-forged, wombat-sized pickaxes at the $US1000 (!) backer level. Yesterday I was wondering what could be cooler than Dante Shepherd’s mallets and I guess I have my answer, if only because the pickaxes will involve a forge and anvil and metalcrafting. However, somebody really should point John Scalzi toward’s Shepherd’s campaign, as I bet he’d love an even larger Mallet of Loving Correction.

• It’s been a good two months since Saveur has run any recipe comics, which means I guess I should be prodding people more to produce some of them things. I can put you in touch with their digital editor, and it’s my understanding that the checks she cuts for accepted comics cash without problems. In any event, Christopher Bird of Mighty God King (and the writerly half of the stellar Al’Rashad, which improbably keeps getting better) teamed up with Shelli Hay to present a family recipe on his own damn site.

  We’ve never met, but Bird’s always struck me as a reasonable man as well as being chock-full of good comics ideas (although probably the most intriguing comic idea he ever presented was a collaboration), but I have no doubt in my mind that he means it when he says in panel number eight that he will cut you for making unauthorized substitutions. Let the home cook beware.

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¹ Your status as Toronto Man-Mountain and one of the Three Ineffable Avatars of Webcomics (along with Shaenon Garrity and George Rohac) remains unimpeachable, but dang bro you brought the creepy today.

² I loves me some Digger.

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.

Just checking, on account of not matter how often I say that :01 Books are the best, it’s not often enough.

See, I got an envelope in the mail yesterday from :01, a thin one that made me think it was the catalog of upcoming releases ’cause they don’t do books that lack for heft. Instead, I found inside a early pair of excertps of Gene Luen Yang’s forthcoming books, Boxers and Saints, due in September. Together, the two books tell the story of the Boxer Rebellion from opposite viewpoints — the first from the POV young man looking to expel the foreign powers from China, the second from that of a young woman who converted to Catholicism and is much a target for death as any European.

Given the size of the two books (more than 500 pages total), I wasn’t expecting review copies; 16 pages of Boxers form one half of the flip booklet, 16 pages of Saints the other, each tells just enough of a scene to grab the reader and make them want to know more. Both stories are drenched in the supernatural, although it’s not possible to tell from the brief fractions of story how much of that may be metaphorical.

Bao and his fellow Boxers appear to transform themselves into literal gods to fight their enemies; Vibiana the convert has conversations with Joan of Arc¹ that are more detailed than she likely could have learned from the priest that lives in her community. Whatever degree to which these heavenly warriors actually involve themselves in this corner of China circa 1900, Vibiana and Bao believe it to be true.

And in a way, I suspect that what they perceive to be true is true enough; in this fight between nations, and expressions of national will, individual peasant and village folk must have viewed the conflict as being so much larger than themselves, something that could only be explained as a clash of two distinct heavens to determine for good and all who holds sway over China². Yang has melded his own Catholic faith with his Chinese heritage in past works³, so it will be interesting to see how he approaches each of those ancient traditions as warring opponents.

We’ll know soon enough, as it turns out that more than 500 pages in two volumes (plus a deluxe box set) is just slightly more complex than your standard graphic novel, so :01 Book are using the sampler as an early peek until they can send actual books out to their review list this summer. Many thanks to them in advance, and we’ll have more to say about Boxers and Saints when the full copies arrive.

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¹ Who herself had conversations with people that weren’t entirely there.

² If there’s ever an audiobook, Daniel Day-Lewis needs to narrate.

³ Particularly in American Born Chinese, which managed to intersect Journey to the West with the Nativity of Jesus.

Reduxes? Reduxi? Judging from my recollections of mathy terms, I’d most likely go with Reducies. In any event we’ve got two blasts from the past.

• Firstly, since the start of 2007, Shaenon Garrity¹ has been re-running Narbonic with director’s commentary, which process will end in about two days time, as she’s running out of strips to re-run. I’m not sure that she could find enough new to say for a double re-run but I hope that the end of the story doesn’t mean the end of daily Narbonic updates, as I consider it to be as essential to webcomics as I Love Lucy is to TV. Hold on, this is going to be slightly lengthy².

  Back in my college days it was well known that about three weeks into junior year was when the math majors would all become major grumpy-pusses, because they were told it was now their turn to Prove that the multiplicative identity is unique. In other words, they were asked to prove that one (1) is one (1), which always struck everybody who wasn’t a math type to be a waste of several hours of mental effort. What possible purpose could it serve? It was eventually explained to me that this was a sort of votive sacrifice, that if math majors didn’t repeat the ritual every year, math would cease to work.

  From that starting point, I derived the theory that I Love Lucy, having been re-run so very many times, has integrated itself into the very fabric and nature of television to the extent that if — at any moment in time — an episode of I Love Lucy is not being broadcast somewhere in the world, TV will stop working. Now we find ourselves at the end of the second presentation of Narbonic, and I hope that Garrity can whip up a script that will update once a day in perpetuity. The existence of the internet as we know it depends on it.

  Oh, and come Saturday night, make yourself a drink with lots of rum, ice, fruit juices, decorate a a glass with a face on it with a little umbrella or some flowers, and drink it in the general direction of Berkeley, California in Garrity’s honor. I have some good recipes if you need a starting place, but you’re on your own for the umbrella and face-glass.

• Secondly, Little Dee by Christopher Baldwin³ has likewise been running with commentary since it wrapped up a little more more than three years ago (the reruns started three years ago tomorrow). Although Little Dee was reprinted in your choice of four rather spiffy volumes or two rather spiffier anthologies, and despite the fact that the story came to a definite end, Baldwin’s apparently had a hankering to return to the cave and visit with Dee, Ted, Vachel, and Blake. Cue the big announcement:
  

  There will be more Little Dee.

  Penguin/Dial books will be publishing my comic strip “Little Dee” as a 120 page full graphic novel of all new material! I’ll be writing, drawing, and coloring it, and it’s due out in about a year or so. I’m very excited about this, what fun! [large text original]

  Certain things jumped out at me from the announcement, color and all new material being the ones that have me excited, and about a year or so making me all frowny because I want it yesterday. As for what I want plotwise, I see there are roughly three possibilities:

  1. The six year run of Little Dee gets recapped as one continuous story
  2. A particular story (possibly one that was previously untold) from the time Dee spent in the forest gets the book-length treatment
  3. Dee and the Gang reunite, having been apart for the past x years

  With a lesser writer, any of the three could come off poorly — #1 could be rushed (or too familiar to past readers), #2 could come off like trying to recapture the magic of a story that’s over and done, and #3 could read like the epilogue to the last Harry Potter book.

  However, Baldwin spent so long with the characters (and just as importantly, has spent time away from them), and spent so much time establishing them as organic characters who interacted the way they did because of who they were, I have no doubts that he could turn any of the possibilities into one of my favorite books of 2014. Everybody be very patient and calm so that we don’t disturb him and he can get this done quickly, yes? Thank you, and please close the door quietly as you leave.

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¹ High Commissioner Of Tiki In All Its Forms.

² Quelle surprise.

³ May I note that Little Dee is about as polar an opposite of Baldwin’s current-although-approaching-its-finish webcomic Sapcetrawler? Yes, yes I may.

So round about 3:00am¹ today my EMS pager went off (holiday duty, y’all) and I realized while getting ready to head out lights-and-sirens on a chest pain call that I’d been dreaming about Erika Moen choreographing her fellow Strip Search Artists into an (interpretive, classy, educational, and definitely PG-13 rated) pole dance routine designed to teach the lessons imparted in Oh Joy, Sex Toy. This indicates either I am dangerously insane, or I may have discovered the greatest side project for webcomics creators ever. Don’t tell me if it’s the insane one.

• Over the weekend the National Cartoonists Society had their big weekend o’ fun and for the second year recognized excellence in the field of online comics. Although Jon Rosenberg will always be the first person to receive an NCS division award for an online comic, this year the award was split in two, so two more creators can say that they were the first ever honored by the NCS for (respectively) the Long Form and Short Form online comic.

  Long Form went to Vince Dorse for Untold Tales of Bigfoot, which I’ve enjoyed reading since the nominations were announced back in March. Somebody more clever than me described UToB as “Bone-esque” which is pretty high praise, and I’m happy to say that any of the three nominees could have been found a deserving winner, although I was totally pulling for Meredith Gran² ³.

  Over on the Short Form side, Graham Harrop’s Ten Cats won over Jonathan Lemon’s Rabbits Against Magic and Michael McParlane’s Mac; there was some dissatisfaction expressed back in March that these three strips are all associated with GoComics, not independent in the sense of the other six nominees for Online Comics have been over two years, and not representative of that not-really-definable “webcomic aesthetic”. And I’ve been thinking about that.

  The thing is, if (as webcomics boosters have said, and we at Fleen are no exception to this) webcomics should be allowed to compete against whatever you can define (if anything, at the point) not-webcomics, without distinction to medium of distribution, then the three nominees in Short Form make sense — they were chosen for consideration by the NCS jury without consideration to where they came from, and may well be seen as representing a step towards not having “online” as a separate category of the NCS awards.

  Would I prefer to see Girl Genius or The Abominable Charles Christopher up against, say, Fables, Johnny Wander or Girls With Slingshots up against Pearls Before Swine⁴, and Becky Dreistadt dominating the Book Illustration category? Absolutely, and I’ll be certain to get right on that as soon as I’m in charge of the world. In the meantime, progress.

• Speaking of Becky Dreistadt⁵, I confess myself surprised to see that she’s involved in some book Kickstarters that look like they’re going to make goal, but aren’t seeing the big multipliers that history would have indicated. Firstly, the original four B9 Kingdom creators are nine days out from their three themed books collection, Midnight Monsters closing; while they’re on track to make goal, they aren’t going to do the three-to-nine times overfunding that B9 has managed in the past. Similarly, the second volume of The Bear is verging in on goal with eight days to go but won’t hit the nearly five times overfunding of volume one.

  I can’t figure out what the slowness in support is down to. Midnight Monsters is actually a pick-your-favorite collection of three books rather than a single project, and I thought that structure might have driven more support to the project by allowing a super-fan of (say) Evan Dahm who isn’t that fond of (say) KC Green (not that I think any such people actually exist) to back one creator economically rather than decided to forgo because money would have gone to another and made support too expensive. Additionally, the lack of stretch goals may be removing some of the “game” aspect from this campaign.

  But then, The Bear 2 has stretch goals, and two reasonably rabid fan bases behind it (the other supplied by Ryan Sohmer), and it looks like it will make the first stretch but won’t be achieving one after another like the first time out. I wonder if having the two projects are cannibalizing each other by running at the same time rather than being separated by a couple of months? Have we just reached market saturation on gorgeous, high-quality art books?

  In any event, this is neither the time for complacency nor for despair, as I want my damn Midnight Monsters and The Bear 2 books, so kindly go sell some plasma or tell your grandkids that plenty of people get by without insulin for a week and pledge, dadnugget.

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¹ Coincidentally about the same time that the latest episode of Strip Search went live.

² Not that that’s much help; I was also totally pulling for Erika Moen in Strip Search; in my heart, they are both winners.

³ I shouldn’t neglect to note that Pat Lewis was the third nominee, for Muscles Diablo in Where Terror Lurks, which is also terrific.

⁴ And hoo boy, Stephan Pastis may as well start signing himself Susan Lucci, having been nominated six years running for the top NCS award — the eponymous Reuben — and this year losing out to both other nominees in a tie.

⁵ And before I forget, happy belated birthday, Becky.

As national holidays go, Memorial Day is a good one, usually attended by decent weather and cookouts. For those of you celebrating on Monday, I hope it’s fun time for you, and let’s get you into the weekend as quickly as possible.

• I am less concerned about how gruntled Phil Foglio appears in his new, official, pancake-on-the-head portrait than I am about what appears to be a tentacle trying to escape from an Erlenmeyer flask on the windowsill behind him. Oh, and the ghostly image of Kaja Foglio, trapped between dimensions behind him, that’s pretty concerning too. But mostly this just reminds me that you can’t go wrong with a pancake.
• Cranking out the strips until the inevitable cease & desist notice: Park Slope Family Circus by Erin Bradley. Read it while you still can.
• Waaay back in January I mentioned that everybody’s favorite professor, Dante Shepherd, would be launching a new strip this year; Dr Shepherd is on writing duties, Joan Cooke does the pretty pictures, and together they’re telling the stories of graduate students studying cryptozoology in a world with actual monsters and things.

  For months now I’ve been wanting to share with you the art that Shepherd teased me with, of a hapless grad student running from a dragon-creature wearing what by all appearances is an enormous sports bikini. PhD Unknown is now live, will be updating weekly (at least to start), and may strike a more familiar chord in your local doctoral candidate than they’ve ever let on before. Highly recommended.

• Hey, you! Want to get a few zillion comics for almost nothing? To be more specific, more than 1200 The Book of Biff spread across ten collections, and more than 500 Maximumble strips in four collections? Chris Hallbeck is offering all his books as DRM-free PDFs at a price you name yourself, so long as it’s at least a dollar a book. Fourteen books, fourteen bucks (if you’re cheap) comes to nearly 125 comics per dollar, or 0.8 cents per laugh-chuckle.

  If you read one cartoon per day, you’d be at it for four years and nine months before exhausting these strips, meaning it’s the bargain of the (admittedly, still young) century. So how about this: kick in one lousy dollar, get either the Biff or Maximumble book #1, and if you like it (you’ll like it), adjust your purchase price upwards for subsequent volumes to two bucks? Or even three? Have a little pride, you’re not some bizarre cheap-o.

Having picked up a copy at my local comic shop over the weekend, I was going to tell you what I thought of We Can Fix It today, but then I made the mistake of reading The AV Club and saw that Noel Murray said everything I wanted to, only better:

A clever, poignant twist on the autobio comics format, Jess Fink’s We Can Fix It!: A Time Travel Memoir (Top Shelf) ponders what would happen if the author went back in time to warn her younger selves not to make so many dumb mistakes, whether it be trusting the wrong boy, taking the wrong drug, or acting rudely toward her mother. [...] The result is a book in which Fink treats her own life as a series of loosely connected vignettes, open to different interpretations depending on who she’s become by the time she looks back at them. This isn’t just an effective way to handle autobiography, it’s one with a touching take on the interconnectedness of people’s best and worst moments.

That’s much better than what I was able to come up, which isn’t really a surprise given that Murray is a nationally-regarded culture critic and all. In any event, I’m more than happy to point you towards words that may convince you to read We Can Fix It, as I think it’s something everybody should do. It’s smart and funny and sweet and wise and full of joy and hurt and sexy, sexy time-travel jumpsuits. Give it to the person in your life that needs to be reassured that none of us has all the answers, but that’s okay.

• Hail to our new overlords protectors, I meant protectors. Wes Citti and Tony Wilson, previously best known for making some amazing soup, have decided to branch out into technology and are Kickstarting the entire process. I must say, their campaign to build an orbital death ray is going to throw off my Kickstarter models, what with having backer tiers up to the US$100,000,000,000 level and a total goal that could be expressed as approximately 4% of US GDP.

  Going by the Fleen Fudge Factor for Kickstart predictions¹, Wes and Tony are on track for reaching their second stretch goal. On the other hand, I expect the usual delays in delivering on the promised rewards, so don’t hold your breath that the world will be destroyed until at least six months after the predicted doomsday.

• Readers of this page should be well familiar with Zahra’s Paradise from :01 Books, which launched back in 2010 and saw print eighteen months later; for those who are new around here, it’s the work of semi-anonymous political exiles commenting on life in Iran since the discredited elections of 2009. When the state has taken your child and you’ve finally retrieved his body, what more is there to fight for?

  The thing about elections, even in places where only the vestiges of democracy exist, is that they come around again. Zahra may not be a real person (although her experiences mirror those of far, far too many people in Iran), but that hasn’t stopped her from taking a stand in this election cycle. Vote4Zahra chronicles the story since “the end” as Zahra declares herself a candidate for President and speaks truth to the clerics that hold power in a country made up predominantly of youth eager to engage with the world. Here’s hoping her message makes its way to where it can encourage those who need encouragement.

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¹ Look at the Kicktraq prediction afer two days of funding, and at the trend prediction; most projects will hit somewhere between 1/3 and 1/6 of the prediction.