You can’t accuse Dave Kellett of burying the lede with respect to the new Kickstarter he’s launched to finish off STRIPPED; not ten seconds into the video the words appear on the screen:

Voice of Bill Watterson

Watterson, a man so reclusive¹ that last summer’s announcement that he’d agreed to provide written responses to Kellett’s questions for STRIPPED was rightly seen as a coup, has actually gone and recorded audio of his thoughts vis-à-vis comics for inclusion in the film. This is by far his most public appearance in the context of comics since wrapping Calvin and Hobbes more than seventeen years ago. Ignore everything else about STRIPPED², that right there is sufficient reason for this film to exist.

And to get things out of the way, yes, STRIPPED already had a Kickstarter that was very successful; as Kellett explains, this second campaign is being held not to finish the film, but to pay the fees (which are well into the five figures and could hit six) for the rights to include footage from other sources: brief clips of Peanuts specials and Johnny Carson interviewing Cathy Guisewite will cost nine grand, for example.

If you already contributed to the previous Kickstarter (and full disclosure: I did), you’ve already had a communications from Kellett and Schroeder that they are not asking prior backers to pony up again. They are specifically looking for people that missed the first campaign (or weren’t aware of Kickstarter at that time) to fund this push not to make the film, but to make it better. It’s a classy move, and I want to congratulate Kellett and Schroeder for not taking the easy route and hitting up people whose names they already have.

• Speaking of Kickstarter, Rob DenBleyker had some interesting news to share yesterday:
  

  The Cyanide & Happiness Show just became the most funded animation project on Kickstarter. Holy shit!

• Okay, so between the C&H show, the Machine of Death game, the Dresden Codak book, and the Schlock Mercenary challenge coins, the high-profile webcomics projects launched in February have collectively raised more than US$1,051,000. Yikes.
• It appears that Saveur magazine really needed submissions for their Recipe Comix again, as they sent Chicago artist Marnie Galloway to Marrakesh and she comicked the whole thing up but good. Galloway had a previous entry in the series, so I imagine that played a part in Saveur offering the trip.

  I’m not saying that if you submit a recipe to Recipe Comix, Saveur will necessarily send you business class to a foreign destination for luxury and gourmet foods, but I can say that if you never submit a recipe to them, they won’t know who the hell you are and thus definitely will not send you on an adventure. Look, they pay for your comics, you might get a fabulous reward down the line, and most importantly, I get more Recipe Comix. That’s a win-win-win, people.

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¹ By extreme coincidence, Ryan Estrada had a couple of tweets yesterday talking about Watterson’s seclusion and Kickstarter. Hell, there’s an entire other movie that’s been produced and now showing on the festival circuit that’s entirely about how the filmmaker couldn’t even get in contact with Watterson.

² Particularly the inclusion of a hack webcomics pseudojournalist on the interview list, inexplicably not buried at the very bottom in tiny type. Given the amount of footage that Kellett and partner Fred Schroeder recorded, if I make the final cut for more than eight frames, something more important is definitely getting shortchanged.

Everybody is either in transit to Seattle for EmCity or making final preparations before leaving tomorrow. I could mention that Dresden Codak’s Kickstarter is being reported as the fastest-funding initial 24 hours of any comics project and is already the #8 most-funded Comics project after approximately 40 hours, or that the Machine of Death card game Kickstarter has just unlocked something called — rather ominously — FATE BLITZ, but we’ve heard enough about those two projects of late, so I won’t.

Instead, two brief items:

• One, for the next while, Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya will be running Lucky Penny in lieu of their regular diary strips. For those that didn’t catch the announcement last year, Lucky Penny is an original graphic novel by Panagariya and Ota for Oni Press, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to have a release date just yet. The shift to LP will let Ota work on just one thing for a while, hopefully speeding the day when we see a print collection, new Benign Kingdom projects, and more.
• Two, I have on past occasions mentioned Christopher Bird and Davinder Brar’s Al’Rashad: City of Myths, a weekly longform comic of politics, religion, intrigue, and characters that tell you what you need to know about them by how they dress¹ and hold themselves when they speak. It’s terrific stuff.

  But please note that I said “need to know”, as for a great deal of time I have wanted to know a great deal more about these characters and the world they inhabit; my guess is perhaps 10% of what Bird has world-built in his head will ever see the page. And wonder of wonders, Bird has answered my silent plea with a character page chock full of biographical and geopolitical nuggets that make my heart sing. I am so happy that I’m not even going to engage in the privilege of every comics reader and kvetch about the obvious contradiction between biography and previously established story and clearly Bird doesn’t care about continuity like true fans would and … [Editor's note: At this point Gary was dragged away and had some manners slapped into him; we apologize for the fuss.]

  Ahem. As I was saying, please enjoy Al’Rashad, updates Mondays, and please overlook both my misplaced enthusiasm as well as my inexplicable omission of Al’Rashad from the recommended comics list over there to the right. Get to reading.

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¹ I particularly note that the Caliph of Al’Rashad dresses very plainly, which reveals great deal of his character.

The annual scramble for San Diego Comic Con hotel rooms started at 12:00 noon EST and by 12:02 I was done with a promise of an email with my assignment. Here’s hoping.

Oh, and since this is going to be a Kickstarter-heavy post,let’s get something non-Kickstarter out of the way up front — I have of late been enjoying the crap out of Help Us! Greatest Warrior, which appears at a Tumblr near you The title character is bean-like, more than a little dude-crazy and will utterly kick your ass if she can be bothered. Creator Madéleine Flores has been killing it, and you should hit the (very brief) archives right now.

• Is this new? I think this is new. David Malki ! posted in an update for the Machine of Death card game Kickstarter that he will use the powers of technology to add a special reward for backers that also back a different, unrelated game. This is, I believe, the first Kickstarter crossover:
  

  Story War is a little bit similar to Machine of Death in its broad strokes (“combine random elements to accomplish a wacky objective”), but varies in the particulars.

  If you pledge to both games (physical versions), we’re gonna compare our backer lists and each send you an exclusive bonus card: a Machine of Death card that references Story War, and a Story War card that references Machine of Death! We’ll also send you a PDF with a set of suggested CROSSOVER RULES for combining both cards in HIGH STAKES INTERLEAGUE PLAY. [emphasis and SHOUTING original]

  I can’t wait to see what other cross-pollinations this might lead to. In this case, it’s a match of equals (both Story War and Machine of Death are well over their goals, so neither is trying to gain success by drafting off the other), but I could see especially successful projects being approached by struggling projects, trying to succeed via cross promotion that mostly goes one way. Secondary market, anyone?

• Speaking of secondary markets, about ten days back we mentioned a new service from TopatoCo called Make That Thing with some speculation about how MTT might be structured and a promise of more details soon. That was supposed to have been last weekend via an interview with TopatoCo VP Holly Rowland, but weather systems (and now EmCity) got in the way, so we’ll be talking with Holly next week.

  In the meantime, Make That Thing had a public unveiling last night, and we’re able to see some of how MTT is going to operate. In addition to shipping and fulfillment services, MTT will be offering promotional services, and will also be able to offer certain kinds of production:

  Because each campaign involves a high amount of personal attention and attention to detail, we only take on a handful of projects at a time, and only those that we think match up well with the kinds of things we know how to make – primarily comics, books, and games.

  We don’t know how to make USB toasters or solar-powered flashlights, so we simply won’t take on Hardware, Design, Video Game, or Fashion projects. Other people are better at that than we are. However, the rewards for your project are heavily weighed toward the following:

  • Printed materials (books, comics, posters)
  • Printed or embroidered apparel items (T-shirts, polos, neckties, aprons)
  • Novelties and baubles (stickers, patches, bookmarks, foam swords)
  • Other things that don’t involve inventing a new type of manufacturing apparatus

  Then we might be a good fit.

  They’re in closed beta right now, and as MTT finds its feet, I suspect they’ll be taking on projects primarily from the existing roster of TopatoCo clients. However, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if future clients found an MTT campaign as being similar to an audition for joining up with TopatoCo as an ongoing client. More when I get to chance to talk to Rowland, where I’ll be sure to ask who thought it was a good idea to leave a forklift with the TopatoCo Funployees.

• Speaking of Make That Thing, we knew that the Machine of Death card game was going to use MTT on account of that was sort of their soft launch. Now we know that their second client will be the Dresden Codak book which is well into holy shit territory with nearly US$120,000 raised in the first 15 hours. Aaron Diaz¹ has been hard at work since launch trying to come up with stretch goals that he hadn’t anticipated needing for a week or more. Even if you don’t read Dresden Codak, go check out the campaign just for video, then ask yourself honestly how fancy your pants are.

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¹ The Tolkien and Dinosaur Scholar Par Excellence. Oh my glob, Aaron, you need to draw the main players of The Silmarillion as maniraptors.

So Howard Tayler’s Kickstarter is running at some 3000% of goal and counting, and he’s got a really important update that you should read. Certainly, read it if you’re a backer, but also read it if you’ve ever considered running a Kickstarter yourself because he talks about how your plans can get completely pooched not just from failing at a Kickstarter, but from succeeding too well¹.

The original scope for this project was as follows:

• Fund the creation of up to five different coins, at volumes which allow me to sell them at conventions, and keep stock on hand.
• Fund at somewhere between $10k and $20k after thirty days.
• Ship all the coins in mid-April

For reference, Tayler is just shy of US$55,000 as of this writing. Between Tayler’s experience and other runaway successes we’ve seen where the delivery of rewards becomes a serious burden², I’m starting to wonder if creators should make much more liberal use of limited rewards. Expecting to see no more than X to Y and a proportional number of backers, and you’ve arranged your schedule for the next few months around those assumptions? Limit the rewards so if you get a blowout success in the opening hours, you aren’t obligated to do more than you’re capable of.

If there’s pent-up demand, you can always say, I’m gratified so many of you want in on this, I’ll whip up some new rewards tiers and let the rest of you give me money while making the appropriate shifts to your schedule. And hey, nothing drives up interest like initial scarcity. If you’ve got a relatively straightforward set of rewards with a predictable production schedule, reliable supply chain, and scalable delivery operations, feel free to leave everything unlimited. In all other cases, some hard-nosed realistic self-assessment will probably be what stands between you and madness.

• Speaking of Kickstarters, Zach Weinersmith wrapped up his this morning, raising US$341,667 towards his newest book. If my math is correct, the number of backers he’s gotten at the various tiers means he’ll be signing his name approximately 4194 times in the various books that get signatures. Although many of those signatures will come from earlier books, which means Weinersmith may already have them signed and his hand won’t fall off the week after the big pallets arrive at his house.
• Nobody does data-sharing like Dorothy Gambrell³, and it was gratifying to see that her latest way to envision information is blowing up all over the damn place in the last couple of days. You won’t find it on her website, though, as it was made for Psychology Today’ February 2013 issue. In case you don’t subscribe, the editors have made her infographic of where missed connections occur by state available. If you’re a Scientologist, it’s all over Tumblr without attribution, which totally sucks.
• More EmCity participant notifications have come in, meaning I’ll have to go back to my earlier post and update the lists and maps. In the meantime, please consider yourselves notified that John Troutman and Ryan Smith will be at table Q-19 in Artists Alley.

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¹ Paging Rich Burlew, who gets all the slack in the world for an unpredictable injury that forced him to stop work for months, but who also wound up in the situation of having to create 25 separate product categories and try to keep nearly 15,000 backers happy while being just one person. That’s the sort of situation that sends sensible, grounded people on benders that take Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas as a to-do list.

² Above and beyond the simple shipping aspect, regarding which I will have more to say next week; the real work is in the design and production of everything you promise.

³ Except maybe Randall Munroe. If Gambrell and Munroe ever collaborated, my brain would explode from sheer enjoyment.

First, a quick update on yesterday’s Webcomics Folks and Where to Find Them at EmCity posting: Kel McDonald was kind enough to let us know that her booth (number 1008, for those playing at home) will, in addition to herself, Kory Bing, and Magnolia Porter, also be hosting Meredith McClaren, David Willis, and Tyler Crook. Keep the updates coming, people.

Okay. To my knowledge, the greatest overfunding of a webcomic-related Kickstarter on a percentage basis is not Homestuck (which achieved a relatively modest 355% of goal), Smut Peddler (415%), Diesel Sweeties (2006%, now we’re talking), or even the vaunted Order of the Stick (2171%), but Darren Gendron’s Monster Alphabet board book, which scored a funding rate of 5015%. Granted, the goal was only US$500, but a fifty times overfunding is pretty damn impressive.

I mention all this because Howard Tayler¹ launched a Kickstarter for a collectible last night at 10:00pm EST and had funded less than four minutes later. As of this writing (just over 13 hours into a 30 day campaign), Tayler sits at just under US$40,000 on a US$1800 goal, putting him at 2214% of goal, putting him past Order of the Stick and coming up on halfway to Gendron’s achievement.

Again, low funding goals make overfunding percentages easy to hit², but take a look at the projection on Tayler’s project, which is on track for an unreal 34,286%. Yes, yes, I know — Kicktraq projections never come true, or Ryan North would have cleared US$1.7 million and Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck more ten times that. But! Look at the initial Kicktraq projected values vs actual funding and take them as a ratio and you’ll get a fairly narrow range³:

• Homestuck: 5.75
• Smut Peddler: 5.17
• Diesel Sweeties: insufficient data (only last four days shown)
• Monster Alphabet: insufficient data (dates don’t correlate with campaign)
• Hamlet: 2.92

Across a wide range of initial goals (US$500 to US$700,000) and a wide range of overfundings (355% to 5015%), the ratio of initial projection to final funding runs between about 3:1 to 6:1. If these are representative, Tayler can expect to take in somewhere in the range of US$100,000 to US$200,000 (as of today, since the projection has gone up since yesterday, probably because it launched so late in the day), with a percentage funding of somewhere between 5500% and 11,100%. Of course, my sample size is so small as to make predictions laughably inaccurate, thus the very wide ranges given.

And you know what’s weird? That’s not even the oddest thing about this campaign. The oddest thing (apart from the fact that Tayler, who’s self-funded all his rather pricey books, is Kickstarting at all, especially for such a low-total item) is that Tayler opted to make something that has such a tenuous connection to his core IP.

The challenge coin (or “coins”, thanks to stretch goals being obliterated almost immediately) has never appeared in Schlock Mercenary. He had to explain what challenge coins are in the opening paragraphs of his Kickstarter description, and yet he’s hit upon something that his readership simply cannot live without.

Furthermore, this I didn’t know about these things existed but it must be mine is priced above the usual impulse buy for an unknown quantity⁴. The challenge coins are related to Schlock Mercenary (two of them, at least; the stretch goal “Not my circus, not my monkey” coin is Howard trying to import a Polish aphorism) but not as directly as a book, and they’re an unfamiliar type of item.

That’s the key takeaway today — your fans may not know what they want and a sufficiently unique item (don’t bother with challenge coins, that’s been done now) may just take off into the stratosphere. If you’ve got an item that can be produced in a wide range of quantities at decent margins to yourself, Kickstarter means there’s no reason not to try.

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¹ My evil twin. Happy eleven-and-a-quarterth Birthday next week, Howard.

² As in so many things, Rich Burlew’s Kickstarter was an anomaly, being both massively overfunded on a percentage basis and having a very high initial goal of nearly US$58,000. To a lesser degree, Ryan North’s Choose Your Own Hamlet is also a trendbreaker, with a higher-than-normal goal of US$20,000 and an achievement of more than 2900%.

³ Again, Order of the Stick is an anomaly, as the initial projected total wound up less than the actual total, giving a ratio of 0.718 which just doesn’t ever happen in nature.

⁴ I’m basing that statement on Jon Rosenberg’ Quantum Theory of Money which states that fans at a show are willing to part with up to twenty bucks without too much hestiation.

However! From my many hours assisting at booths at various conventions, I can tell you that quantum unit holds for something that fans recognize, like a t-shirt. I know what a t-shirt is, and it features a design related to something I like is the situation that leads to that twenty changing hands.

Odder items are more likely to follow the rules for impulse purchases, whereby somebody that isn’t a fan is willing to drop money on something they don’t know, or actual fans are willing to drop on something that isn’t represented in whatever they’re a fan of.

Impulse buys max out at five bucks. Anything more and you can see the gears turning in their heads — I don’t know this thing, so I’m not willing to risk a great deal of money against the possibility that I may not derive as much utility or enjoyment from it in the future as I suspect I might at this very moment. I really have to stop listening to the Freakonomics podcast, it’s rubbing off on me.

Yesterday, Chris Yates put up images of the last Baffler!s in Webcomics Fortnight Deux, meaning since we last mentioned them there have been contributions from Evan Dahm, David Willis, Rebecca Clements (that one astonishes me; I simply can’t believe that Yates and Assistant Emily the Lion were able to translate such a complex image into wood and paint), Andy Bell, and Danielle Corsetto. Mr Yates has been busy posting the Baffler!s to eBay, where as of this writing 13 of the 16 puzzles are available for bidding.

Guys, they start at fifty bucks, which is criminally cheap¹. As much as I’d love to grab up the Fat Pony, Tigerbuttah, Beartato and Friends Pizza Party, and Year in Japan [no link yet] for a grand total of US$200, we all know that ain’t gonna happen, and nor should it.

Yates and Assistant Emily deserve as much money as possible for the hard work they’ve put in, and the individual creators who contributed designs likewise should be fairly compensated for coming up with such wonderful designs. The auctions run for five days each; go crazy, outbid me, and have fun reassembling them.

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¹ As of this writing, none of the bids have cracked US$65, plus shipping. And don’t go complaining about the shipping charges, Yates packs his stuff to the point that tactical nuclear weapons couldn’t damage it in transit, which is exactly what you want if you care about your puzzle arriving with all of its pieces present.

I realize that I’ve been looking at Kickstarter wrongly with respect to a fairly fundamental question: When does it reach steady state? When does it happen that the high-profile projects slow down, hit a nice, predictable rate, and my budget for supporting such things stops getting busted? Answer: It doesn’t.

Case in point: the promised Kickstarter campaign for the the Machine of Death game hit yesterday afternoon, achieved its US$23,000 goal in about twelve hours, and is plugging away for another month. The sheer creativity that this game will demand of its players¹ (not to mention the track records of the principals) virtually guarantees the that stretch goals (and there will be many, many stretch goals) are likewise sticky and attractive. I’m guessing somewhere between US$150-200K by the time it’s all done.

And yet, the most intriguing part has little to do with the game itself. About two thirds of the way down the project page is a paragraph that I can only call a soft launch announcement for what could be the most exciting Kickstarter-related thing of 2013:

I’ll also be working with TopatoCo’s new subsidiary, Make That Thing, which is a dedicated fulfillment agency specifically for campaigns like this. TopatoCo has a warehouse full of people who do nothing but receive pallets and ship packages all day long for over fifty of the internet’s top artists (including me, Kris, and Ryan). So they and I will be working together to ensure that all the products and rewards from this campaign will be produced and shipped to you as quickly and efficiently as possible. [emphasis original]

One of the perennial complaints about Kickstarter campaigns (and by no means is this limited to the [web]comics sphere) is the sometimes very long time it takes to fulfill pledge rewards, even once the project in question has been actually produced. A very successful project can overwhelm a creator with shipping and fulfillment for literally months, and now TopatoCo are stepping into that niche.

Nothing is known outside the walls of either current or future TopatoCo World Headquarters about Make That Thing, so I’ll be sitting down next weekend with TopatoCo VP of Asskicking Holly Rowland to ask her about it. TopatoCo has been extraordinarily careful about picking clients and not growing their business past the point that they can handle the work, but if Make That Thing is truly a subsidiary, with its own systems, procedures, and staff, and if they decide to make their services available to Kickstarter projects outside of the TopatoCo stable? Game changer. Now we know why they needed that whole damn building for themselves² — they’re on their way to become the Amazon of one-off projects.

And that was going to be all I wrote until the four jolly lads at Cyanide and Happiness took the only logical step after turning down TV money for a C&H show last month — they launched their Kickstarter about ten hours ago and are already past 25% of their base goal of US$250,000. I’m very curious how much money will be necessary to achieve their top stretch goal (it’s presently masked), which is:

The C&H guys will 4-way joust to the death

Presumably, the last survivor will get to keep the money. No bets on this one, I can think up completely plausible reasons why each of the four would be the winner of that particular deathmatch. I hope they stream it.

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¹ Machine of Death: The Game of Creative Assasination is going to reward those who are quick with their wits and able to jump from idea to idea with ease. The description of the project is going to act as a filter for those who will not be temperamentally inclined to excel at or enjoy this game, as it is full of dancing language, leaping from place to place in a dizzying fashion. In other words, I have to plunk down money on this sumbitch.

² And if they do become a fulfillment house for major Kickstarter projects, they’ll need to start looking for another, larger building pretty damn soon. Maybe just head back to Eastworks and take over the whole thing?

The big news in webcomics has to be the PR maelstrom surrounding the fact that the fabulously talented Kazu Kibuishi has been selected to produce new covers for the US trade paperbacks of the Harry Potter novels:

The stunning art for the new editions is by critically acclaimed artist Kazu Kibuishi, best known for his #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel series, Amulet. Kibuishi is a longtime Harry Potter fan who called this opportunity, “more than a little surreal.” Each of the seven new covers will depict a distinctive and memorable moment from the respective book. The collection, which will also be released in September as a boxed set, will offer new readers just reaching the age to begin the series a glimpse of J.K. Rowling’s magical world and the epic story they are about to enter.

“The Harry Potter covers by Mary GrandPré are so fantastic and iconic,” said Kibuishi. “When I was asked to submit samples, I initially hesitated because I didn’t want to see them reinterpreted! However, I felt that if I were to handle the project, I could bring something to it that many other designers and illustrators probably couldn’t, and that was that I was also a writer of my own series of middle grade fiction. As an author myself, I tried to answer the question, ‘If I were the author of the books – and they were like my own children – how would I want them to be seen years from now?’

Even if Kibuishi wasn’t in the Scholastic family¹, there could hardly have been a better choice than Kibuishi, given his feel for the balance point between the fantastical and mundane, his appeal to YA readers, and his ability to convey flight better than anybody this side of Miyazaki².

We shouls also Note the fact that Kibuishi apparently serves as his own Secret-Keeper — some of his closest colleagues and friends are deep into Potter fandom and they didn’t know. One entirely plausible reading of a tweet would indicate that his wife didn’t know. Well done, Kazu, and I think I speak for all of us when I say I can’t wait to see the rest of the covers. Also, congratulations for finding the rarest of all things: a work for hire job that actually does provide high-profile exposure benefits for a career.

• Speaking of gorgeous pictures, it was actually a bit of a tough decision to put that Kibuishi piece up top, given that there’s also an Anthony Clark-designed Baffler! to share with you. Can there ever be anything as wonderful as Beartato with a pizza for Reginald and Harrison? No, there cannot, unless you maybe consider Conscience Cat riding a corgi by Sam Logan.
• It appears that Federal agents with chips in their heads that can see into the electromagnetic spectrum are now a thing, but answer me this: will the (as yet unpublished) YA novel or the TV series it’s inspired feature the ghost of Ben Franklin? Or a hyperintelligent, Machiavellian, and thoroughly chlamydia-ridden koala? Or a plethora of dick jokes? Stick with the original, and consider that this may have an upside: AGAHF creator K. Brooke “Otter” Spangler has commented that this will prod her to speed up the timetable for completing her spinoff novel, Digital Divide, the first three quarters of which is really good, you guys.

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¹ They publish the Amulet series [warning: potential time-suck once you discover how to make the characters conga the day away].

² I remain firm in my belief that the only reason that Kibuishi is not the living reincarnation of Miyazaki is that Miyazaki is still alive.

We at Fleen have long followed the career of Ryan North, the Toronto Man-Mountain of legend. Even his tragic death from sploding could not stop his relentless march towards ever greater creative endeavours, a march which is somewhat simpler today thanks to his recent re-embodiment.

Alert readers may recall that North took the precaution of constructing a mathematical representation of his physical body such that even the icy talons of death would not long grip him. After arcane rituals that are best left undescribed, a sacramental libation was poured into a representation of North’s skull, his ineffable life-force came rushing back in, bursting the vessel with his mighty essence and causing his physical being to spontaneously reconstruct from nothing, a process which was thankfully caught on video.

Doubters may feel that this account of North Re-Risen is implausible, and cling to the cover story that North never died in the first place, but merely exploded a model of his head. To those doubters I ask: If this is the case, why is the newly reborn North seen in the video at the 0:40 mark in a dry, clean set of clothes despite the slushy weather? Not so much as a waterspot or splash upon his person, or even his shoes!

Clearly, it can only be because he did not exist in that slushy alleyway, manifesting not only a new body but also pristine raiment appropriate to the climate. Clapping his hands to show appreciation to those that helped in this resurrection, one can almost hear his jovial thoughts: Good work everybody; thanks for helping me return from the Lands Beyond Living on account of my spectral form was freaking out Chompsky.

In any event, we at Fleen welcome North¹ back to the world of the living and will await with bated breath the wisdom that he brings. Not to mention the fact that having a physical body again will make it much easier to finish copy-editing TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST, which appears to be well situated for an on-time release in May.

As long as we’re on a Ryan North kick today, we would be remiss if we didn’t note one of his other major projects², the Machine of Death anthology which is due in July to coincide with San Diego Comic Con.

North’s co-editor, David Malki !³, dropped some MoD news on us this morning with the announcement that the MoD structured card game (distinguishing it from the previously-available MoD cards which could be adapted to many play styles or just freaking out your friends) has been finalized and will be available via the obligatory Kickstart later this week. The Kris Straub-designed cards look like they perfectly straddle the line between amusing and morbid, which is no surprise to anybody that’s been reading Straub’s Broodhollow. Keep your eyes peeled for the KS announcement, and be ready to hop on this one.

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¹ All hail.

² You know, besides the all-time top-funded publishing project on Kickstarter and defeating Death Itself.

³ Who himself was named yesterday to the presentation staff at this year’s MaxFunCon

One of my favorite creators in any medium is Richard Thompson¹ and I’ve just heard a really great interview with him on New York’s public radio station, WNYC, with the always-entertaining Leonard Lopate. Lenny (as those who listen to him invariably refer to him) asked Thompson early in the interview about the nature of creativity.

When asked if he could describe the creative process, Thompson wryly noted that he’d … never heard anybody do that successfully. I just write stories. and when that prompted a question if he particularly approached songwriting by doing lyrics first, he said he will … do it both ways, start with music, start with lyrics, the hard thing is starting the process.

Then came the question that made me go back and transcribe a lengthy answer, and the reason I wanted to point out the interview to you in the first place. Noting Thompson’s prolific and lengthy career², Lenny asked if he ever gets writer’s block. The answer:

Today? Yesterday? The day before yesterday? Yes, I do. What I do to try to overcome it is to have something half-finished that I can be working on so there’s always 30 or 40 songs that are just one-verses and I can go in and think “I can just touch that up” … I just try to keep ticking over.

Want to create something? Keep moving, don’t pause, don’t wait for divine inspiration to strike. While it’s tempting to think that 1952 Vincent Black Lightning sprung from Thompson’s forehead fully formed, it sat around half-finished and embryonic same as everything else that is now complete and whole and wonderfully executed. And if you aren’t familiar with Richard Thompson’s work, for glob’s sake go listen to some (may I suggest you start with the Song-o-matic?), because he might be 63 years old and look like your grandfather, but he’s still got the nimblest fingers that ever saw a fretboard.

• Chris “Super” Yates³ has some more webcomicker Baffler!s up for your consideration, this time by KC Green. They’re tasty.
• Reminder! You still have two days to get in on the comment-enters-you contest for a free! copy of the not-yet-available-for-purchase Johnny Wander volume 3.

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¹ This time I’m not talking about Richard Thompson the cartoonist, but Richard Thompson the musician, although it occurs to me they have some similarities. Both of them excel at bringing unusually clear personal vision and POV to their work, and fly under the radar in popular consciousness. But if you ask a cartoonist who their favorite cartoonist is or a guitarist who their favorite guitarist is, all of a sudden the name Richard Thompson becomes a lot more prominent.

² His newest disk, Electric, was released yesterday, and was recorded in its entirety in four days, giving it a raw immediacy and energy that artists half his age can scarcely manage (cf: his cover of Oops I Did It Again). It might be his best since Rumour and Sigh

³ Not to be confused with “super yachts” unless, of course, you can’t spell.