Out of context and mostly spoiler-free quotes from Strip Search’s first elimination:

• What is your favorite thing about Hitler?¹
• I know a lot of stuff is changing, are we still releasing the bats at the ten-minute mark?
• We just need you to wait in the car.

In all seriouslness, though, I was struck by how very, very good-natured Alex and Katie were throughout what must have been one of the more stressful times in their lives, and was sorry that there had to be a winner and a loser. Also by one piece that was very, very telling about how Creators Mike & Jerry are approaching the show and the Artists:

What’s interesting is … seeing you copy my mistakes.

That’s a critique that has a lot of sting, but also a tremendous amount of potential to help an Artist improve. It may be that the most interesting part of Strip Search is seeing how all twelve contestants have upped their game in a year or so.

A Girl And Her Fed creator (and Official Fleen Fave) K. Brooke “Otter” Spangler must have had a bit of a frantic month, what with the discovery of forthcoming TV pilot based on a yet-to-be-published YA novel that bear a resemblance to her own strip (and its spin-off digital novel). Lots of people are still contacting her urging Big Dramatic Gestures and Drawing Lines In The Sand and maybe even Cutting A Bitch.

Spangler, however, did the smart thing — talked to her lawyer, made sure to establish that her work has been the earlier instance of Federal agents with chips in their heads (and dick jokes; so, so many dick jokes), and is generally going about this situation the smart way. The TV show may or may not be picked up; the YA series may or may not see print next year; the time to Release The Metaphorical Hounds is not yet here, as she outlines in an interview at Altergamer on copyright and IP in the modern world. It’s a good set of questions/answers, and an even better example of how to be a grown-up in the age of the internet.

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¹ For anybody that ever gets asked that Hitler question? Your go-to answer should be He’s dead.

Don’t worry, the math is mostly philosophical in nature.

• So if you haven’t seen the newest¹ episode of Strip Search, be aware that winning a challenge carries with it a twist that made me suspect that Robert Khoo, et. al., had finally given into their supervillain destiny. At least, the ratio of Good:Evil is dropping somewhat precipitously

  In case I had any doubts, I saw the list of PAXEast Omeganuats and certain names jumped out at me from the list of 32 names:

  Casey Carper
  Norwood Carper
  …
  Harry Hayes
  Dylan Hayes
  …
  Caleb Thompson
  Amanda Thompson
  Chelsea Thompson

  Okay “Thompson” and even “Hayes” are reasonably common surnames, but “Carper”? Are the Omegathon gamemakers (why, that would also involve Mr Khoo) choosing family members to compete against each other? Better start looking for extinct volcanoes in Lair Monthly, Robert, you’ll need one for when you make the call to threaten the UN.

• Speaking of updates today, Evan Dahm’s Vattu hit 400 pages, and as near as I can tell, we’re still somewhere in Act I. Best guess, we are maybe twenty percent of the way through the story as a whole, which is taking as much time as it needs. Heck, for the past 100 pages or so, Vattu herself has been a supporting player in her own story as Junti and the mysterious Surin alchemist enclave and their even more mysterious “unweight” have been the recent focus.

  Not that I am complaining! I would read a thousand pages about Junti and her curiosity about unweight² and its ratio³ that leads to balance. She (and goodness, so many primary characters in Vattu are female, including seemingly all of the Surin) is possessed of that most dangerous of all qualities in a place dedicated to balance: curiosity. Combined with Vattu’s drive it could change face of Overside.

• No ratio (unless you’re counting alcohol by volume), but today’s Questionable Content made me snerk out loud, particularly the title. Also, let’s not overlook the fact that the word whisky is derived from the Gaelic for water of life which would be entirely appropriate as it appears that Claire is now a Reverend Mother. Honestly, no book could ever inspire more nerdery than Dune.

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¹ And longest, clocking in at more than 20 minutes. The earlier estimates of approximately 9 hours total running time may no longer be valid.

² We know it’s a refinement of a naturally-occurring substance, but why have no other people learned to distill it? It’s a luxury good for its coloration, its flavor, and possibly drug-like properties? Oh, yeah, and the fact that it defies gravity without violating the suspension of disbelief. Honestly, the Junti portions of Vattu remind me of nothing so much as H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and its story of a world where gunpowder was a semi-sacred, entirely secret concoction.

³ It’s at least 12:1, assuming that “weight” is a standard reference substance.

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.

If I may beg your indulgence, I’d like to do something rare and respond to a comment¹, in large part because it expresses something I’ve seen elsewhere in the past couple of days. To reduce the argument to its most basic form:

Strip Search’s first episode was boring, nothing happened.

Which I think is an unfair critique. True, over sixteen minutes there were no screaming matches, no competition, no disqualifications, and no overt drama. This is exactly what needed to happen, as we’re still in the scene-setting stage of the show. Yes, but reality shows have a well-established set of tropes that we’re all familiar with, so we can jump right into the meat in the first three minutes, right?

Well, not really. The shows that jump straight into competition are ones that have tens, dozens of seasons behind them, with a built-in audience that knows how things are going to go. But look back at those shows when were they new and trying to find that audience — you have to get people to care about the contestants before they can care about the competition, and that’s what Strip Search episode #1 did.

“But Strip Search has a built-in audience already” is the usual counterargument, but it doesn’t, not really. Robert Khoo, among other things, is an inveterate collector of data — he can tell you to two decimal places anything of significance about the statistically typical Penny Arcade reader. And one of the things that he’s alluded to over the years (and it’s borne out by how he’s led the company) is that Penny Arcade, despite outward appearances, isn’t really part of the webcomics sector of the entertainment industry. It’s part of videogames sector.

Khoo could tell you exactly what percentage of PA readers read webcomics widely, but I’m willing to be that the numbers are skewed towards those that read two or three other webcomics and only read Penny Arcade². Heck, I’m all about webcomics and I only knew three of the twelve Artists introduced in episode 1, which would give me little reason to care about 75% of the competition had the others not been introduced properly. Khoo’s also been open about hoping that people who don’t follow webcomics at all³ will hopefully find the competition intriguing.

“But why didn’t anything else happen?” is the other criticism I’m seeing. The answer to this one is even simpler: time. Having run many, many episodes of streaming video, one of the things that Khoo has hard numbers on is how long people will watch TV over the internet and those numbers are clear: fifteen minutes is pushing the outer limits of acceptable to their audience. Khoo’s been consistent in describing Strip Search as aiming for a 10-15 minute running time, which limits how much of a story you can tell without running out of time. Look at it this way: depending on whether the episodes run closer to 10 minutes or 15, that’s three or four episodes equaling the runtime of a broadcast show (once you take out commercials, you’ve got 44 – 46 minutes of content per hour).

We’re just now at the first commercial break; this is the exact time that the introductions should be wrapping up and setting up a sense of anticipation for what comes next⁴. We’re most likely going to see the show run a total of nine or so hours, broken up into approximately 36 episodes each in the vicinity of a quarter-hour. Eleven eliminations will take place across eleven competitions. Three episodes per elimination (setup — competition — judging/elimination/heartfelt goodbyes) gives us 33 epsiodes, with three left over for especially complex or story-rich bits to scatter throughout the season.

Not everything will happen in every episode, nor can it unless Khoo decides to broadcast in 45 minute chunks instead of 15 minute chunks. You aren’t watching episodes of a competition show as you’ve grown accustomed to watching them, you’ve watching segments between commercial breaks. On the one hand, that means there’s fewer commercial breaks per hour than you’d get on broadcast; on the other hand, the breaks are several days long. I’d advise viewers eager for big chunks of action to watch three or four episodes at a time and avoid the Spoilers section of the Strip Search site.

The show may ultimately turn out to be uninteresting, or the personalities of the Artists lacking⁵, or the mechanics of the challenges uncompelling (although given Khoo’s penchant for planning for every possible contingency, I’d bet against it). However, it is way too damn early to declare that Strip Search is not good. Oh, and to answer a specific point in the comment that prompted much more than I’d originally intended to write, if Erika Moen wins, that’s when you’ll see a blog-gasm.

• If there’s any justice in the world, today’s blogging by Bad Machinery creator John Allison⁶ on the state of webcomics and the stressors that may construct post-webcomics will provoke many fertile discussions. I am particularly struck the the strain of human behavior that Allison identifies that seeks to enjoy the attention that comes from sharing creations with the world, but in the manner that is least likely to actually reflect back on the creator. Read it.
• Well played, Rich Burlew, well played. Not only have you come roaring back with eight updates of Order of the Stick in the less than two weeks since we noted your big plot twist, you’ve managed to turn said twist around 180 degrees and make a big surprise into a BIGGER SUPRISINGER⁷ [uh, spoilers]. It’s true, I got ahead of myself in my earlier reading, not waiting for the eyes to turn to little Xs, but you’ve covered that base today. Oh, and the pale skintone that crept in during the strip? Bravo.

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¹ Regular readers of this page will recall my oft-stated dictum to Never read the comments, but obviously I have to keep up on the conversation on my own site. Regular readers may also recall that it’s extremely unusual for me to respond to comments, so take this for what it is — a fleeting occurrence, like sighting an endangered bird in graceful, full-song flight, and treasure it. Or at least check off the box on your Internet Opinionmonger Bingo card.

² I’ve long since come to peace with the idea that I am not Penny Arcade’s target audience, and that they will rarely produce content that’s designed to appeal to me. I’ve never played an MMORPG. I haven’t owned a game console since I was a child and we had an original Atari deck. I buy maybe one game a year, and still haven’t gotten around to Portal 2.

³ There’s a reason that Khoo’s got people involved in Strip Search talking to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal instead of just hack webcomics pseudojournalists, and you can bet at least part of the show’s structure is designed for the people that those stories will bring in.

⁴ The alternative — jumping straight to eliminating people without getting to know them — is certainly possible, but would require a different show. Think about it for a moment: to jump directly into competition without getting to know the contestants, you’ve got no emotional involvement. Why bother getting to know contestant #7 if he’s going to be gone in the first 15 minutes, just give him the loser’s edit and bring on the screaming could work, except for the part where Khoo’s stated clearly that he didn’t staff the show with damaged people that could only bring drama, and the part where he states his clear desire to want to do right by the Artists.

⁵ Although I cannot imagine any circumstances so dire that I won’t stick around long enough to see the context in which Hurricane Erika decided to talk about butt virginity.

⁶ And goodness, are we really just weeks away from the release of Allison’s first proper Bad Machinery collection? I say “proper” because while you can have my copy of A Feral Flag Will Fly when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, I do long for a gloriously colorful presentation of The Case of the Team Spirit.

Also, I should note that March and April are going to be webcomicsarrific at Oni Press, as we will also see the next Penny Arcade collection and two (two!) collections of Double Fine Action Comics.

⁷ Shut up, it is too a word.

Weird how that worked out.

• Obviously, the big news is the premiere of Strip Search, with episode 1 gathering the dozen Artists and ending weeks of pure agony on my part. Take away the intro with Mike and Jerry that takes up 45 seconds or so at the beginning, start with the theme music and smiling Nick on a gorgeous lakeside setting — that was start of the footage that Robert Khoo showed me last month, which he cut just as the scene switched to the hotel about two minutes later. He is a cruel, cruel man.

  From my recollection, very little has changed from the rough cut — a more subdued narration is the thing that I really noticed — which makes me think that the production was more polished a month ago than I figured it would be. Naturally, questions abound in my brain at this time and spoilers ahoy if you haven’t seen it yet:

  • Were the Artists permitted to speak during the drive from hotel to house?
  • What kind of looping, circuitous route was taken to help lend a sense of distance from the real world?
  • How much of the booze on the counter was consumed by the end of the first day?
  • What does that yellow note by the front door say?
  • Can the producers confirm or deny that there were, in fact, traps in the house?¹

  There will be a no-doubt thriving discussion of the show over at the Strip Search site, and I’ll do my best to overdose you here. In the interests of full disclosure with respect to my future writings about Strip Search, I consider Erika Moen a personal friend and I am totally rooting for her, but I’m also convinced that it’s anybody’s competition to win.

• Let’s stay in the Penny Arcade milieu for a moment, as I point you towards a video from NPR’s Science Friday featuring the PA Rapper Laureate MC Frontalot. In fact, you can hear Mr Alot in the first hour of today’s broadcast of Science Friday (check for your local NPR affiliate and tune in 2:00-4:00pm EST), or via the SciFri website at your convenience after the feed has gone out.
• Hey, know where Penny Arcade is headquartered? Seattle. Know what else is happening in Seattle? EmCity kicks off in about four hours, but also David Malki ! waited until he got there before recording the latest Machine of Death card game Kickstarter video update. But there is a SCANDAL regarding this campaign that I must reveal.

  Note the background in the video, and the fact that Malki ! has apparently injured a finger on his right had which he has covered with with an adhesive bandage. Note the state of beard grooming and the shirt he’s wearing as well:
  

  Now in that video he finally tells us about the mysterious Kickstarter stretch goal known as FATE BLITZ, which turns out to be a series of videos that were recorded with Kris Straub prior to the Kickstarter launching in anticipation of various outcomes — raising $100, raising $200, sneaking through to meet the goal with less than a day left, etc. You can watch the first Fate Blitz video here, which was recorded in Los Angeles last Fall.

  But! Note the background, the injured finger, the shirt, and the state of beard grooming!
  
  They are identical to the Seattle video. There is, sadly, only one conclusion to this remarkable visual match between videos made yesterday in Seattle and months ago in LA, and that is David Malki ! is lying to you. The “Seattle” video was clearly recorded months ago and the entire Kickstarter campaign since has been an elaborate Potemkin village constructed for show. In fact, no stretch goals have been met, no prototypes have been produced, and David Malki ! is not in Seattle but rather absconding towards the Mexican border with Kris Straub and all their ill-gotten Kickstarter gains in bags stuffed full of money. The “David Malki !” or “Kris Straub” that you may encounter this weekend at the EmCity show are imposters, duplicates to throw you off the scent; should you meet them at the show, be sure to tell them you’re onto their little game and they won’t get away with it².

• After all that deception and chicanery, you’ll no doubt want to cleanse your mental palette. Allow me to point you towards an extended Achewood test clip, featuring Chris Onstad in the role of Roast Beef. The comments³ seem to consistently contain complaints that the characters don’t sound right, with the general exception that Onstad’s voicing of Beef is pretty okay.

  Of course the voices don’t sound like they do in your head; they don’t sound like they do in my head either, but since Onstad was involved in the production, it’s pretty clear that they sound like the voices as he imagined them, and that’s pretty much as close to definitively correct as you can get. I can’t wait until we get a clip with Todd voiced and people complain that he doesn’t sound like they think a tweaking, multiply-dead squirrel should sound.

  Actually, no, I can completely wait for that. What I can’t wait for is to see Achewood get picked up in an Adult Swim-like presentation, 11 minute episodes, with the season climax being a hour-long spectacular adaptation of The Great Outdoor Fight. I will commit to buying that sumbitch at whatever inflated price Onstad wants, right now. In the meantime, I am obsessively running a non-stop loop of Ray exlaiming, Kiss my ass, bitch! I’ll be at Duane’s! with an occasional interruption of You wanna go on a little mini-vacation to Paradise? Come look in my toilet, dude. just for variety.

• Finally, not quite video, but close enough: check out the latest Octopus Pie if you haven’t already. Either Hanna’s upping the octane in her snacks or something weird is going on; at this point, I wouldn’t rule out either possibility.

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¹ My theory is that at some point near the end of production, Mike and Jerry will tell the Artists that The Trap was their feelings for each other. Group hug, awwww.

² Please don’t actually do that.

³ Never read the comments, especially not at YouTube.

I ain’t Elisabeth Kübler-Ross but I do know something about the stages of grief, such as when Achewood (the once-unstoppable behemoth of absurdist-realist philosophizing) sputters to a near-halt¹. As noted previously, Chris Onstad is not my bitch and however he may find joy in producing aspects of Achewood that I may then consume, it’s all good. I get to share that particular creation that he lets loose on the world whether it’s once a day or twice a year, and however much I may miss it, I cannot complain too much about not getting free entertainment on a my desired schedule rather than that which Onstad can accommodate given the shape of his life.

So it is with a mixture of excitement and don’t-get-too-excited-yet that I noted his first Achewood-related bloggance in more than a year:

Hi. I’m back. I have some good news for you. It’s been a long time coming. A lot has changed since I fell off the face of the earth.

First and foremost: I’ve been working with a team of artists, engineers, and producers to bring Achewood to life. To give it the voices, richness, and opportunities it never had as a comic strip.

I’m flying to Los Angeles today to begin a week of network pitch meetings. If things go well, we’ll find a home for our show. Please cross your fingers for us, send us your good energy. And please, share this clip with your world. I’m very proud of what we’ve done.

There are many other things I want to share with you. About Achewood, about this, about all the loose ends, and about my plans for it going forward. This is the tip and the bulk of the iceberg, but there is much more. It’s been a very busy couple years, full of life-size tragedies, manifold germinations of happiness, and surprising rebirths—just like Achewood.

The pitch meetings mentioned are to explore the possibility of an Achewood-related animated series? special? film? project of some sort, the teaser of which makes me smile. Because I’m totally in the tank for Achewood, I’ve been parsing through those 19 seconds of sound and motion² for any clues they might offer³. Because I’m a realist, I know that even properties with a constituency within an entertainment company can be optioned, paid for, and spend years or decades in development without ever coming to fruition. At this time, possibilities exist — which is more than was true last week.

• Poorcraft 2, on the topic of traveling on the cheap, is well in production and on Saturday Poorcraft bookrunner Spike dropped some news on it. While P2 will see Diana Nock returning for art duties, Spike herself will be stepping back from writing duties as Ryan Estrada — webcomics own Marco Polo — handles the script. Or handled, as the book is well into the gettin’ drawed stage, meaning that Estrada’s work is largely done. Can’t wait to see how Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here turns out.
• Updating our EmCity seating information, news comes this morning that a fairly substantial chunk of Artists Alley island F will be given over to Benign Kingdom. The official exhibitor’s list mentions B9 occupying seat F-16, which is also listed as the home of Johnny Wander. However, word is that B9 will actually occupy seats F12-F16, of which three seats are listed as occupied, and two not listed, which tells me that Grand Vizier George is probably planning to have people rotate into the space seats throughout the show, as well as giving the usual occupants a little more breathing room than is normally found in Artists Alley.
• Given that various Strip Search parties have said that the show will be launching this month, and that the Strip Search site lists the show as running Tuesdays and Fridays, and there’s only one of those weekdays left in the month, Im’a keep a browser window refreshing tomorrow. If nothing else, I’ve been very impressed with the Artist interviews that have run, and how well the Strip Search producers (possibly Khoo) are at stirring up shit in such a blatant fashion. If there’s a reunion show, we may see murder yet.

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¹ To wit: five strips in all of 2011, twelve in the first six months of 2012, and zero since.

² As opposed to Sound and Motion.

³ Such as the 0:11 mark, where it appears that Teodor has been retired in favor of Roast Beef as Ray tests his Whiskey á la Mood sampler. It also appears that Ray is the centerpiece of this teaser, which makes me wonder if he still sounds the same as when Onstad voiced him.

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?

Oh my goodness, so many things today.

• The final word on the place of webcomics in the larger comics world was offered by TopatoCo VP of Asskicking Holly Rowland:
  

  TopatoCo is between Oni and Dark Horse at ECCC. If there’s anyone still talking about the legitimacy of webcomics, I will pants them.

  Please, somebody, call her bluff. I’m begging you. Everybody else, have video cameras ready.

• Today marks ten years of Emily Horne and Joey Comeau making A Softer World; ten years and 931 instances of breathtakingly beautiful photos and profoundly arresting captions. In all of webcomickry, I can’t think of another example that simultaneously pulls in two so very different directions and expresses two so very different voices so very, very well.
• Once upon a time there was a simple acknowledgment of fact: any collection of webcomickers, impromptu or organized, was incomplete without at least one Ryan in the immediate vicinity. While Ryans Estrada and North have been publicly very busy of late¹, Ryan Sias of Silent Kimbly fame pulled back a bit, did some children’s books and storyboarding, and wasn’t so much with the webcomicking.

  Until today, that is, when Sias announced the return of the no longer silent Kimbly with new weekly adventures. One quick note: you get to The Kimbly Chronicles by using the address http://www.kimblychronicales.com/, with an extra “a” in the middle there. Just bookmark it and you’ll be fine.

• The countdown to Strip Search kicked into a quicker tempo yesterday with the launch of StripSearch.tv. Obviously no episodes yet, but you can meet the Artists, learn about the show, and puzzle your way through some rather odd numbers associated with the production. I don’t know what the whole pineapples thing is about², but I’m intensely curious. Hit the RSS feed and you won’t miss any Tuesday/Friday episodes when they start later this month.

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¹ Respectively involved in global trekking, single-person animation, and Korean comic translating (Estrada), and totally math comic book writing, Kickstarter record breaking choose your own Shakespeare adventure creating, and beloved movie novelization close reading (North).

² My own fault, I suppose. When Robert Khoo asked if I had any more questions, I specifically did not ask if any edible bromeliads featured prominently in the show. Mea culpa.

Strip Search appears to be on the verge of going live, having graduated from a parking page to a test pattern. I’m not a betting man¹, but I’d wager that we’ll see the site live in the next day or two. Then it’s just a matter of how long Robert Khoo feels like teasing us before the first episodes start streaming.

• Webcomic? Check. Crossovers? Check. Print collection? Check. Original print series? Check. Card game? Check. TV show? Check. What’s left of Malachai and Ethan Nicolle to conquer? Judging from the photos tweeted by MTV² Geek, the answer would be toys. Weirdly, searching for “Axe Cop” at the website of Mezco Toys brings up a couple of Thundercats figures, so I guess they’re really early in the preview cycle for now. There’s a reference to Axe Cop in Mezco’s exhibitor profile for next week’s New York Toy Fair so I’d say wait for the summer’s big shows to see these generally available.
• To paraphrase James³ and Marque, Being broke sucks, and now Jerzy Drozd is the latest creative type to try to make it suck less. Tomorrow will see the Comics Are Great! show will do an on-air Google+ hangout, with special guests Laurianne Uy and Poorcraft scribe C Spike Trotman on the topic of smart frugality. If you can’t make the Hangout, tomorrow at 12:30pm EST (GMT-5), it’ll be up at the Comics Are Great! YouTube channel sooner rather than later. It’s a live event, so warm up your questions on how to make do with less for fun and profit.
• Surprisingly, nobody is in the running for a free copy of Johnny Wander volume 3, as per the contest announced last Friday. It’s not even in the store yet, people! You can only get this is you were in the Kickstarter! Free book, people!

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¹ It’s that whole “pretty good at math” thing.

² Who’re still on my list for the shameful way they treated Rick Marshall Willenholly, so you best watch yourself, Viacom!

³ History’s greatest villain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other information of note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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