At this writing, there's fewer than 23 hours left to preorder/pledge for Shortpacked! Book 4!   If you want to make sure you get a sketched-in book or a chance at some unique swag, this is your last chance.  Don't miss out!

Also, I've just put in for an Artist Alley table at BotCon this summer.  So look for me there!  At least, look for me there when there's not an interesting panel or it's lunch or something.  I'll be bringing Dinobot posters and some other interesting new goodies.

HEY DUDES! Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the best webcomic you are or are not reading, now has a book!  You may remember SMBC as the fantastic webcomic that pulled off this amazing feat, re: gayness.   As for its book, you should totally get one.  And then put it right next to your eventual SP! Book 4, like they're making out.

That's right. Both our books are dudes.

I kinda dropped the ball on building up to this con this week, what with the double-whammy of the Ethan statue preorders and my SP! book 4 fundraising blitz, but I'm gonna be in San Francisco this weekend for Wondercon!

I'll be there with Kel McDonald (Sorcery 101), and we'll be in the Small Press area, at table SP-29, I believe.  I'll have books and prints and some new posters!  One of my old prints, you see, has just graduated into a new poster.  I keep selling out of my 8"x10? Dinobot "HONOR" print at every convention, so I decided, okay, this is a sign, and I did it up as a 11"x17" poster on glossy cardstock.  I redrew the art for the bigger size, since the original graphic was kind of iffy at the smaller size already, and the final product is friggin' spiffy, if I may say so.  If you aren't gonna be in SanFran this weekend, you can also find the poster in the store.

It's my first convention in the city where Shortpacked! takes place!  I'm excited!  It's also my birthday this weekend.  On Sunday I turn 32.  If you're there, feel free to drop me some extra booze money.

Instead of doing the whole Paypal thing this go-round, everyone else I knew in webcomics were extolling the many virtues of using Kickstarter to raise funds.  These virtues sounded even better once it was realized that Paypal can throw an enterprise-ending conniption fit if you raise too much money too fast.  Let's, uh, avoid that, shall we?

Kickstarter does work a bit differently.  You pledge money instead of giving it outright, and these pledges are only acted on if the required amount of money is pledged.  If I don't reach the $8000 I need to make everything, nobody gets charged nuffin'.  If I make more, that's gravy!  To facilitate pledging, Kickstarter loooooves tiered rewards.  For example, putting in enough money to cover the cost of a book and shipping is fine and good, but there's also things you can get if you put in less than that or more.  If you only put in $5, you don't get a book, but you still get to help make it happen and you get your name printed inside the book along with the rest of everyone who helped out.  And if you pledge more, depending on how much more, you can get a pile of original Shortpacked! lineart and/or a cameo in the strip itself.  Sounds fun?  New and different?

Also new and different is that I'm making the book thicker this go-round.  The previous books were 136 pages, and this new one's gonna be 200.  Full disclosure, the cost of printing's going up, and apparently I've been undercharging all this time anyway.  Joel Watson laughs at me every time he sells his books for $20 and I sell my comparably-sized book for $15.  (That bastard.)  But I didn't just want to raise prices, I wanted to give something back for that extra $5.  So books are thicker now.  You get 60 more pages of content.  Good deal?

Another thing I need to address.  Last year, I tried to raise funds for a Book 1 reprint.  This preorder was not popular.  And I still have a lot of your money for it, and it's still not printed, what with the lack of preorders and such.  I've been waffling on and off for the longest time, and I was just about to just give up and move on, but, again, webcomics folks extoll the virtues of Kickstarter to me.  So here's what we're gonna do.  After Book 4 is dealt with, let's try the preorder-book-1-reprint process again, but with Kickstarter.  If that doesn't work, I will give up forever.  If you don't want to wait that long and you've had enough, let me know.  Send me an email (wiigii at gmail).  I will make it up to you.

Here's the text I wrote up for Kickstarter's site, if you want some flavor:

Of all the book collections of webcomics about folks who work in a toy store and tell jokes about Batman, this will be the greatest.

Sure, there were some pretty great book collections about folks who work in a toy store and tell jokes about Batman before, but this will far surpass them all.  It's not that the previous collections weren't great.  They are.  They remain great!  I mean, there was the strip-by-strip commentary and the additional content and the smattering of Toy News International strips and whatnot, but there was one tragic flaw.

They were only 136 pages long.

Well, screw that!  Let's crank this up to 11.  And by "11," I mean 200 pages.  More comics!  More commentary!  And for the first time ever, excerpts from both the Tome of the Ages and the Gospel of Faz.

Within these 200 pages, you'll read some of the best stories from Shortpacked!'s six-year run.  There's Conquest's hiring and her various ill-fated sex-backed sales attempts.  There's Robin's plot to seduce Ethan via "found" videos of her and Conquest making out in the back room.  There's the first real appearances of Leslie, the love of Robin's life.  There's Galasso's unveiling of the Tome of the Ages, Ethan's subsequent firing and rehiring, and Amber's faith-fueled battle with Ninja Rick.  Plus, a talking car arrives, mayhaps?

Oh, right.  And "Funky CancerCancer."  It's in here.

So what is this Kickstarter thing trying to do?  Well, obviously, printing books costs money, and I don't have enough sitting around to fund an entire book run.  So I'm trying to raise the amount I need to print the books, plus hopefully enough left over to actually ship these things to those who paid in enough to earn their own copy.

You'll notice some tiered rewards on the right.  Read them carefully!

Let's do this thing.

The day is here!  With Mike, Amber, and Robin now completed and out of the way, it was time for Patch Together to get to Shortpacked!'s main man, Ethan Siegal.  And after a few months of back and forth between me and the sculptors, he's finished and ready for prime time.

He's seven inches tall, intended to be in scale with the other figures, and he's $45.  The number of statues produced will depend on the number that are preordered.  There may be some left over, but, like Mike's statue which is forever sold out, the remainder will be very small in number.

This is our number one Shortpacked! guy!  Don't miss out on him.

(And if you still need Amber or Robin, there are only 5 and 12 statues left of them, respectively.)

Today was a good a day as any, I suppose, to address what some folks had been pestering me about for the past few months.  They wanted access to old Joyce & Walky! subscription-only months.  But I took down that access way back when because it felt wrong to accumulate subscriptions while the project was on hiatus.  That storyline has kind of burnt a hole in my brain and so I've avoided finishing off the last few strips.

But days and months have gone by and no progress, so I figgered, oh, fine, what the hell, I'll let folks buy old months again.  So those are up in the store.  You can get either the first half, the second half, or the complete(ish) series.  Maybe the influx of interest might jostle me into finishing it up.  Subscription numbers had so dwindled in the end that it felt like I was sorta sending them off into the void.  That's why I prefer the free comic strip model.  It's open to everyone, and so there's more of a tangible sense that folks are enjoying things.  The more feedback, the more of a sense of accountability there is.

Procrastinators like me need a sense of accountability.  With Shortpacked! reaching six years old today, I thank you folks for, unwittingly, keeping my balls to the fire.

Robin is by far the best sculpt Patch Together has done for me so far, but there is just one thing about it that bothers me.  She's not on a base!  She doesn't really need one, individually, since she has that big cloud of Road Runner Dust, but it does cause my brain problems when she's displayed next to the other two statues.  See, without the vertical height down there, she looks short, or like she's standing in a hole or something.

Here I've set her on top of the lid for our Batman (of course) cup coaster container, but since then I've bought a little wooden stand from a hobby shop for her to use later.  After I paint it black, that is.  Cost me 60 whole cents!  I'll update you when it's done.

Oh, and I should probably remind you that the design for Ethan is still up for voting.

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Yay, FedEx brought me my Robin statues!  I heard through the grapevine (Twitter, that is) that Robin required some assembly.  This is sometimes required for Patch Together statues, depending on their shape, but my designs had mostly avoided it thus far.  We have a Monica statue from Wapsi Square that had to have its head glued on.  And Amber needed her corn popper put together and fit through her fists.  But no gluing yet!  Certainly not this much.

Anyway, fun story.  Because my life is a Wile E Coyote cartoon, I took one of her hands and her torso put two drops of glue on her wrist, and held the ends together for about five minutes.  After that five minutes I checked to see if the glue had held.  The parts came right apart, but my fingers, of course, were glued together.  Grar.

There's a handful still available!  Get her while she lasts.

And I've got things for you.

First of all, the Robin statues are shipping!  I haven't gotten mine yet, but reports are coming in and credit cards are getting charged.  Watch for yours!

Way back in 2005, I did a comic for 24 Hour Comic Day, and created a self-contained out-of-continuity 24-page story about the Head Alien and Monkey Master from It's Walky!.  That story's seen the Internet, but never print!  UNTIL TODAY.

It's been repackaged as an in-universe artifact from Dumbing of Age, my other webcomic where the Head Alien and Monkey Master only exist as fictional characters from a popular cable network cartoon.  All 24 pages are represented in this black-and-white comic book, as well as a "letters page" in the front that delves into the history of the "Dexter & Monkey Master" franchise in the Dumbing of Age universe.  Also, there's a spot on the inside cover for me to sign and/or doodle on if you ever see me in person!  Find it in the store.

Also, woo, now that I'm home, I can get back to some outstanding orders from the store.  Hooray!

I've finally got off my ass and finished my design for an Ethan statue.  Go vote for him!  Once he gets enough votes, Patch Together will start sculpting him and then we can begin preorders.

Robin, meanwhile, should be getting close to shipping out to everyone who bought one!