They were five and got along with each other in the way that five year olds do, which is to say, sporadically. When they met again, it was tense, but somehow they’ve made it work for the past five years. Guys, in case I haven’t said it enough¹, Octopus Pie is terrific and I love it and Meredith Gran loves us in return, on account of she’s given us pre-Octopie character sketches to celebrate this, the five year anniversary of the strip (technically, it was on Monday).

I love how grumpy² proto-Eve looks in most of these, and how surprisingly complete Hanna is at this early stage– although there are echoes of Gran’s earlier, college-era art style³ and maybe some hints of Lilo & Stitch. It’s been a rollercoaster ride of friendship and growth for these two crazy kids and their ever-expanding circle of bros and maybe-bros, the sort that typify a heartwarming rom-com, if Hanna and Eve weren’t completely immune to that kind of shit. It’s some of the best independent comics work around, and it just keeps getting better.

On the off chance that you love webcomics and the people who make them, and you’re in the Easthampton, MA area, and you don’t already work at TopatoCo, there is an opening to work at TopatoCo. Applicants should be aware that although it is not specifically mentioned in the job posting, TopatoCo has a reputation as a work hard/play harder environment and those that cannot bring themselves to participate in irregularly-timed, spontaneously declared dance parties might not fit in with the corporate culture. Also, you may find yourself called upon to contribute to the fulfillment of special requests on packing slips, which just might overlap with the dance party thing, maybe, why not?

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¹ And I pretty much say it constantly, and it still might not be enough.

² Possibly grumptastic, and in at least one case, grumplicious.

³ Take five minutes and check out her thesis animation, Polar-oid, then come back.

They will show you what you need to see.

• Firstly, Colleen Doran, has long been second to none in her vigilance regarding creators rights issues, although she recently announced her retirement from an active role in such¹. A’course, she’ll continue to point us towards people that are continuing that fight, and did so today:
  

  I strongly advise you to read this article at The New York Law Journal, “Sounds Like a Broken Record: Analyzing legislative failure and the copyright doctrines of work for hire and termination”. It addresses the Jack Kirby case (which, I still believe, may be a lost one,) as well as other serious problems with the application of the work for hire doctrine and the “instance and expense test”.

  There are also very important words about independent musicians and self funded projects.

  Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer, but I found the article in question to be pretty readable with a bit of patience (and some back-and-forth to the footnotes, which start on page 4 — at least, on my browser with my font size). Much of it applies to creators interacting with large publishers, but the bit that may make readers of this page want to do some research is the second paragraph from the bottom of page 3 (or, if you prefer, the ‘graf between footnotes 38 and 39):

  Indeed, it is not just major corporations such as record labels that stand to be impacted by the Copyright Act’s present shortcoming, but start-up companies, young entrepreneurs and, in some instances, struggling artists themselves who have truly sought to commission a work for creation at their own risk and expense. Consider the case of an independent musician who tours or initiates a fundraising campaign via Kickstarter.com or simply waits tables to save money to record a studio album with no outside contribution from a record label or otherwise, an increasingly frequent scenario in today’s DIY-oriented music industry. Under the present formulation of the Copyright Act, such independent artists could stand to lose the copyright interest in their own commissioned recordings. If the recordings are not works for hire, then the session musicians, engineers and/or recording studio that the independent artist paid to help create the recordings may terminate their effective assignment of rights to the artist in 35 years. That works a great disadvantage to the self-funded musicians.

  There’s your homework assignment kids: read carefully, determine what constitutes “works made for hire”, and which end of that definition you may end up on with respect to your projects.

• Now that you’ve gone and edumacated yourself on the intricacies of intellectual property law, how about a quick demonstration from somebody who’s Doing It Right? America’s greatest living editorial cartoonist, Stan Kelly of Kelly’s Komix, has moved beyond seething disdain for modern things like the internet and recorded a video detailing his process. Creators, take note how communicating with your audience can help convey some of the nuances of your work so that your point of view isn’t accidentally lost beneath layers of meaning. Fire up the video in one window and the comic in another, and try to keep up.

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¹ Although I suspect this will only mean a retirement from actively trying to influence government and legislation; when she sees something particularly egregious or recognizes a situation parallel to her own experiences, I imagine we’ll get more of her finely considered opinion and instructive anecdotes.

At least half. Look, it’s got books in it, okay?

For instance, there’s a comic book that’s been making the twitterrounds with its Kickstarter the thing is, Tomorrow Jones looks like it’s got an interesting story hook, as Joey Softerworld pointed out:

The “updates” section on this comic kick-starter have some thoughtful posts about the depiction of women in the comic.

The section in question:

I was faced with the decision of how her universe was going to work. Would everyone, or at least most characters, also be less sexualized? I ultimately decided it would serve the story better if Tomorrow were unique amongst the heroes and heroines in her world. Her mother wears a revealing costume, most female heroes will. But Tomorrow doesn’t. Tomorrow is bucking tradition and trying to do things her own way. She will face pressure to conform and act like everyone else. That is going to be an active conflict in the series, but more so, it makes Tomorrow unique in her own story as well.

So, a strong (literally) female character that’s not a Strong Female Character — very laudable. But Tomorrow Jones is less than a week from closing, and (as of this writing) only at 31% of its (very modest) goal. It’s doing better than in March, when an extremely similar pitch closed unsuccessfully, and with less funding than the current attempt.

I can’t repeat this enough times — no matter how enticing the project sounds, unless it fulfills a need that nobody knew they needed before (there are numerous examples in the Design section of Kickstarter), the most clear indication of a successful fund-raise is going to be the built-in audience and credibility of the creator based on past work.

Brian Daniel seems like a perfectly capable creator, but for somebody to plunk down money on a perfectly capable creator that they don’t know, there needs to be more than a few art samples, a decent story description, and ten bucks burning a hole in their pocket. I’ll go so far as to say that the convenience that Kickstarter offers probably works against Mr Daniel here, as many, many people would fork over that ten bucks for a mini comic or sketch book of developmental work at a show, following a quick flip through something physical.

The end effect of operating at a distance from the creator, one that doesn’t have an existing audience, a pent-up demand, or a positive word of mouth from people who’ve actually seen the book (or all three), is that many perfectly worthy projects are going to be non-starters¹.

The only thing that might help an unknown in this situation is the recommendation of a trusted authority; for instance, I’ll wager a lot of people that haven’t heard of Ryan Pequin’s Three Word Phrase would be willing to splash out for his new book because it carries the TopatoCo Seal of Approval². And that’s where we have the classic Catch-22: Daniel needs the money to finish the book so the has something to show you that will convince you (or convince me to convince you) to fund the book, which doesn’t exist yet. I hope he raises the money because I suspect Tomorrow Jones would be a decent comic book. If my suspicion is enough to convince you, the Kickstarter page is thataway.

Other things:

• Oh sweet merciful dog, yes: the beginning of a crowdsourced topic index of Webcomics Weekly episodes. Can’t wait to rediscover exactly where Brad Guigar’s rant on “champing at the bit” was. For reference, the good part of Laugh Track starts at about five minutes and goes until Scott promises to burn down our technology-based society.
• Danielle Corsetto gave you a gift today — feeling under the weather and not wanting to half-ass a pivotal point in her current storyline, she elected to use a guest strip that was previously submitted during an open call; it’s quite good, but that’s not the gift I was referring to. The gift is Corsetto dropped all her other banked guest strips on you at once. One hundred and ten of them to be precise, in an act of generosity and optimism on account of she hasn’t left herself any to offset future sick-times. That sound you hear is productivity plummeting across the world.
• There’s a new Recipe Comix update over at Saveur; this time, Jennifer Weber drops some potato dumplings on you. This looks to be the simplest way to fancy up potatoes since Anthony Clark’s potato wedges which for the record are crazy delicious.
• Advanced notice: Great Showdowns, book, October, forward by Neil Patrick Harris. Hell, yes.

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¹ Not to mention the fact that the reward structure for Tomorrow Jones goes up to US$150 without actually including a copy of the comic. Ten bucks gets you a signed physical copy of Poorcraft, fifteen for a copy of Daisy Kutter, and US$20 for Sad Pictures for Children, each of which are actual book books in the hundreds of pages. The Kickstarter free money machine never existed except in myth, and you aren’t getting that free money now.

² Oddly enough for a company that regularly deals with the Better Business Burro, there are no comics documenting the existence of a Seal of Approval up in TopatoCo World Domination Headquarters, and I for one think that’s a damn shame.

Regardless, ol’ Bobcat’s got a heck of an opinion piece in VICE, of all places, talking about making things which every creator that wants to like what they do should be reading. Key thoughts from same:

Youth is not necessarily an excuse for dumb career decisions, but I’m just trying to put it in some kind of perspective for you. Think about the shit decisions you made at 21. Now imagine that a giant check was involved, and think about how much worse everything would have been….

Quitting is how my life changed. After years of going to auditions and pitching and writing scripts for shit commercial hits, I came to a realization. I realized that I would never watch any of the fucking things I was doing. So I quit….

I wrote a very noncommercial screenplay about honesty, unconditional love, and bestiality. My manager at the time read it and told me that he was not going to send it out because he was afraid of what people would think about my mental health. (I fired that asshole a week later.) … We did it really just for the sake of doing it. It was almost like a dare to see if we could.

My point is this—if you want to be happy in showbiz (or any creative field), listen to that voice inside you. Even if it says “Fuck it” sometimes. Work with your friends. Avoid chasing fame or money. Just do what you want to do, when and how you want to do it. And if it’s not making you happy, quit. Quit hard, and quit often. Eventually you’ll end up somewhere that you never want to leave. [emphasis mine]

In other news, meet Mike Dowden, the greatest, most self-defeating asshole ever created by Randy Milholland, who knows a thing or two about damaged characters. He eventually learned to empathize for others, to mend fences, to become a father. It’s been a struggle, but he’s made himself into someone worth forgiving, someone that doesn’t need to self-aggrandize, and can inspire others to be better. He’s come full circle, and Milholland did it without resetting, rebooting, reimagining, personality-resetting³ or doing anything other that having Mike grow a little at a time in the most plausible of ways.

It’s been a long game that he’s played, our Uncle Randy, more than 10 years from that first strip to the most recent, and to have changed the character like that in any less time would have been cheating because it would have come across as false. I’ve said before that nobody writes redemption like Milholland, but I’m going to expand on that; nobody writes people — in all their messy, flawed, imperfect, struggles — than Randy Milholland does. And he makes it look goddamn easy; well done, sir.

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¹ True story: my college buddy John² was more proud of his hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan because Curtis ‘Booger’ Armstrong was also from there than for any other reason. Also true: John was more fun drunk than any other human being I’ve ever known.

Later, he was entrusted with the care and (non-splody) maintenance of a nuclear reactor by the United States Navy, which surprised the hell out of everybody that had ever seen him throw up on the floor of a Hardee’s fast-food restaurant at two in the morning because there’s not much else to do in Terre Haute, Indiana. He was also once offered the opportunity to buy a dried lizard for the purposes of “man sex power”.

² Also known as ‘Thrice’, for reasons we need not go into here.

³ Presumably in the time-honored Flintstones manner of a bowling ball to the head.

They’re back, and with more broken spines strong characterization per panel than any other comic strip or book, Susan B Assthony, Georgia O’Queefe, and Queen Elizatits are kicking every head, fighting every evildoer, and wearing all the sunglasses. I honestly spent 20 minutes trying to decide which excerpt from The Strong Female Characters: Action Punch Role Model Strength Bomb to post, because the entire thing is inspiring. Ultimately the decision was made because Poop Yogurt is inherently funny. For those few of you that aren’t familiar with the SFCs, you can begin your education in the eradication of sexism here.

Events! Things are happening in and around the New York branch of webcomickry in the immediate future!

• As previously noted, the Teen Boat!¹ book launch takes place on an actual boat tomorrow night, 11 May 2012, at 7:00pm. The venue is the Waterfront Barge Museum at Pier 25 in Manhattan (on the scenic Hudson River, a couple of blocks below Canal). On the off chance that you’re in the neighborhood and don’t like teens, boats, or books, it looks like the pier has mini-golf, so that’s all right. Look for creators John Green & Dave Roman to be signing, sketching, and singing sea chanties all night long. Rumor has it that Raina Telgemeier will be there, and while she would never want to take anything away from Dave & John’s night, if you happened to tell her how awesome you thought SMILE was or how much you’re looking forward to DRAMA, I bet she’d say thank you.
• Same webcomics-time, same webcomics-city, but a different borough: Scott C opens his solo show, Tender Times, at Cotton Candy Machine in Brooklyn. For those of you that can’t make it to 235 1st Street (roughly at the meeting point of Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and Boerum Hill, and mere steps from the Union Street subway stop on the D/N/R lines), Cotton Candy Machine will be having a pre-sale of Mr C’s art in their store from 3:00 to 5:00pm. For those of you than can make it, these gallery openings traditionally feature fun times and booze.

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¹ Once again, our safety warning: Teen Boat!, the lighthearted, all-ages comic/graphic novel does not, repeat, NOT have anything to do with the most obvious web address that one might assume referred to said boat. If you try to browse to teenboat.com [no link], you will come across something particularly NSFW, and on the off chance it’s safe for your work, please shower thoroughly and get on a regimen of industrial antibiotics before coming within ten meters of me. Thank you. Especially don’t do an image search on “teen boat”. You’re welcome.

How about some revisits to things from the deeps of time? Or at least 2004.

• See, 2004 is when Kazu Kibuishi did a little comic miniseries called Daisy Kutter, which ran four issues and was collected in a nice book and immediately went out of print. It’s got an Old West + mecha sensibility, a palette and overall design that are similar to the much-heralded Tale of Sand, and even a primer on Texas Hold ‘Em before poker was on everybody’s minds and half of the basic cable lineup. It is, in short, beautiful, and all but unobtainable, except at usurious prices.

  Kibuishi is about to ruin the day of those hawking used copies for nearly forty bucks, because Daisy Kutter is, briefly, returning via Kickstarter, with an almost haiku-like reward structure¹. Four reward tiers, all of which get you the book, at price points that dominate in the low- to mid-range, with one pie-in-the-sky reward featuring original art from Kibuishi. Once the Kickstart runs its course, the books will be available briefly in the physical market, then once more it’ll be hard to find.

  The only reason I haven’t plunked down money for this one already is I have to check my bookshelves and home and verify that my copy is still there. It’s possibly that I lent it to somebody but if so I probably never got it back because who would want to part with comics this good? Only crazy people, that’s who.

• Speaking of Tale of Sand (from a lost screenplay by Jim Henson, may his pointy felt collar always be green), the adaptation by Ramón Peréz² is up for a slew of awards this season, including multiple Eisners and Cartoonist / Créateur at the just-announced Joe Shuster Awards. The Shusters, celebrating comics from the Great Northern and Bountiful Canadian Empire, have always had a wide-ranging slate of nominees, putting superhero work against indy creators if it makes sense to do so.

  Please note as well the variety and breadth of topics and formats in the Webcomics Creator / Créateur de Bandes Dessinées Web category, where I’m rooting for Emily Carroll, rightly recognized for her multiple outstanding comics stories last year. The award ceremony will be held in September at Comiccon de Montr&ecute;al / Montreal Comic-Con.

• Finally, seemingly everybody in webcomics and their dog is getting in on a 30th anniversary tribute to Dig Dug being put together by NAMCO IP aftermarket conversion shop ShiftyLook. And by “everybody”, I mean including (and possibly more because dang that list of names is lengthy): Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik, Scott Kurtz, David Malki !, Matt Melvin, Randy Milholland, Krishna Sadasivam, Kris Straub, Zach Weiner, the nearly-omnipresent Jim Zub and, of course, Ryan North³.

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¹ Short, but entirely complete in its aims.

² Whose whimsical, wonderful Kukuburi is much missed, but you can’t blame a guy for taking paying jobs first.

³ After all, that was Ryan’s dog, and they kind of come as a package deal.

(Ah-ha-ha.)

• It started here, as Joel Watson noted that it’s been both four years of making Hijinks Ensue his job, and just about five years of the strip in general. Yay, anniversaries. But then it got deeper:
  

  Now here’s the rub. HE used to have a very strong character element along with the humor. I started looking back at old comics and thinking back to the comments I used to get an conventions and the emails I would receive and the number one positive remark I would get is that the “characters are just like me and my friends,” or “I love Josh because he reminds me of my friend,” etc. Then all of a sudden these comments stopped. What changed? I reread my old comics again and realized that as I started traveling more and my daughter got older (requiring more and more time for her extracurricular activities), I started seeing the real life Josh and Eli less and less. In fact, I probably haven’t seen either of them more than once or twice in 2012. Our social realities just don’t align that well any more. It’s a fact of life and a bi-product of having children. I don’t love them any less, and I don’t believe we have grown apart as friends. The time to just fuck around and be silly with each other just isn’t there nearly as often as it used to be.

  The result of this decreased exposure to the inspiration for my characters was that I lost my crutch. I had never been forced to create personalities for the characters since I would just observe the real people behind them and exaggerate their actions and reactions. Sometime around the middle to end of 2011 I really started writing in a singular voice. Every character was interchangeable and while I think the joke writing got MUCH tighter as time went by, the character development essentially vanished. This was never more evident than in the fact that NO ONE ever seemed to know the names of the characters. As one of my peers, who I respect greatly, told me, “Your characters are interchangeable. People love our characters and that’s why they love the comic.” I used to say, “The characters in HE are just there to service the joke,” as if it was one of the selling points of the comic. If that was the case, why would I keep drawing the same guys over and over? I didn’t realize I was admitting a shortcoming of the strip and disguising it as a feature. [emphasis original]

  That couldn’t have been easy to write. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a creator be so self-analytical in public¹, and Watson’s conclusion is that he needs to shake things up — shake himself up² — in lieu of the pure pop-culture commentary that has been his stock in trade:

  I am going to start devoting more time in HijiNKS ENSUE to getting to know the characters. Not necessarily their jobs, relationship or other sitcom type stuff (which still doesn’t interest me), but more their characteristics, quirks and view points. I want to teach myself (by doing) how to write in a voice that is not my own. I want to recapture that individuality the HE characters had in the early years before they became prisoners of my own head and parrots for my own point of view.

  Good on you, Mr Watson.

• Now, let’s go back even further into the mists of time, as one of the most (weirdly) beautiful and (justly) beloved webcomics of the prior decade went on hiatus. To be specific, A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible has been quiet since 23 May, 2006. Fast forward to the present day, and one of the longest hiatuses³ of webcomics history is nearing an end, per co-creator/art half David Hellman:
  

  Yesterday [co-creator/writing half] @DaleBeran and I started on a new episode. So far, just a one-off. Here’s a sketch. More to come. #ALILBTDII pic.twitter.com/Ff9lehZd

  May I suggest that you spend in the intervening hours between now and Update catching up on the ALILBTDII archives?

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¹ In private, sure, all the time, although that has a definite tendency towards “artistic self-loathing” with a soupçon of meltdown.

² Not to mention adding what Jerry Holkins has for a decade or more referred to as dreaded continuity.

³ Hiati?

I can always tell how good a convention/festival I don’t attend is doing by how sparse the updates in my Twitterfeed are during show hours. And boy howdy, by that measure, TCAF ’12 was the greatest show ever, because I didn’t see anything while it was running.

If you want to know how the show went (consensus: Best show ever), check out the #tcaf hashtag over the past few days, or let the participants get home and put up the inevitable, glowing con reports.

One feature of the show is the annual presentation of the Doug Wright Awards, which honor the best in Canadian (English language) cartooning, and which are mercifully brief, featuring a total of three (3) categories: Best Book (self explanatory), Doug Wright Spotlight Award (for emerging talent), and The Pigskin Peters Award (for avant-garde or nontraditional work).

This year, surprising upwards of two people, Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant took the Best Book award, bookending her 2009 win for Best Emerging Talent¹. Given the (frankly, inexplicable) absence of Hark! A Vagrant from the Eisners, that leaves the Shuster, the Harvey, and the Ignatz as potential future wins, in addition to the many, many accolades it has received outside the comics-specific community. As always, the praise is well-deserved.

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¹ Which appears to be the former name of the Doug Wright Spotlight Award, but the DWA website isn’t clear on this.

In the short term, you’ve got this year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival, kicking off tomorrow at the Toronto Research Library. In the somewhat longer term, you’ve got Marceline and the Scream Queens, set for monthly release starting in July. The common thread? The supremely talented Meredith Gran, who took time out from drawing Octopus Pie and packing for the trip to TCAF to talk to us about Adventure Time, her own comics, and the importance of having a dog in the house.

Time prevented me from talking with other creators extensively, but even brief conversations are fun.

• For example, Box Brown’s been working much of the past six months on Retrofit Comics, which is now down to a familiar process. The back catalog is pretty much sold out, and the project will run its course as planned; Brown may or may not keep the “Retrofit Comics” name for future projects.

  The project most consuming his time would be his comics biography of Andrá Roussimoff, professional giant and haver of posses. Brown has gone so far as to communicate with Mr The Giant’s brother¹, and expects to work the rest of the year on what may well be the definitive biography of André. Oh, yes, and he’s also doing webcomics again, you know, in his free time.

• Magnolia Porter, meanwhile, is splitting her time, with the first project being the ongoing Monster Pulse, which mixes a quirky visual style with lots of heart². Speaking of visual style, I finally figured up what it is that makes Guuzy so appealing, despite that fact that he may be the most dangerous of the monsters, what with being an acid-filled stomach monster and all. It’s the way that his forelegs are so much shorter than his hindlegs, giving him the same posture as a dog that’s got a tail wagging high and a head down low and eyes that say Play, play, play time to play!

  That same instinct for creating appeal in non-human characters carries over to the human characters as well; Bina and the other players we’ve met all act like whole, real people; their anger, their exhaustion, their bewilderment and denial all come from an organic place and make you want to know them more.

  It’s something that Porter has had a lot of practice with, what with years of Bobwhite under her belt — Marlene, Ivy, and Cleo lived and breathed and influenced each other, and shortly their story will be collected into print. That would be the other thing that Porter is working on, and I can only believe that Bobwhite will read beautifully as a continuous story. Personally, I’m holding out for a bonus story that reveals more of the main cast’s feelings for Ben Bailey.

• Shifting gears for a moment, all those books will surely require some Kickstarting, which put me in mind of a conversation that took place on the Armory steps. It started with some catching-up with Rick Marshall³, and we were by chance joined by a passing Johanna Draper Carlson and Heidi MacDonald. Kickstarter discussion about sweet spots, Smut Peddler’s ultimate total (I’m putting it in the range of US$55-60K), and Shaenon Garrity’s clever use of unlocked rewards on the Skin Horse 3 campaign.

  I tried laying out some of my (very early) analysis and desire for a Grand Unified Theory of Kickstarter, but so far my attention has been on the numbers and not the words to describe it. I should have just waited a few days more and I could have pointed them towards yesterday’s Penny Arcade, because (as usual) Jerry’s words do the trick:

  You’ve seen Stretch Goals before, if you’ve ever watched one of these things succeed: mechanisms to maintain funding momentum after success, with whispered promises of more…. Goodies you can add a la carte, independent of your pledge level. They’ve essentially developed an RPG, where your money is the XP. [emphasis added]

  There it is, maybe the key element I’ve been grasping for. Kickstarter reward design isn’t just a min-max problem for the creator, it’s one for the supporter as well. We’ve established that you need an audience that’s crying out for whatever you’re offering, and you have to give them a compelling reason to back you. Those things are still true.

  But now, shift the perspective: instead of trying to manage the money you take in, you should be setting up a structure where your backers will seek on their own to maximize the money they can possibly contribute. There’s a weird mixture of industrial-grade psychology and probability math at the heart of it, which is to say — it’s a game. Don’t try to play it yourself, try to make the most appealing set of rules.

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¹ Or at least attempt to; a letter has been written to an address in France that reportedly once belonged to the surviving Mr Roussimoff. He hopes for a reply, but acknowledges the odds are long.

² I’m so, so sorry.

³ Will, and Holly.