One last post about these calendars! I’m so happy with how they turned out. I took the above picture when I picked them up from the printer — the colors were so bright and vivid I lost my breath for a second. That sounds super dumb but it’s true. No better feeling than seeing something that used to not exist suddenly exist because sufficient force of will was applied. (Maybe there are some better feelings, but not this week, not for me.)

Over the last couple of days we had a lot of hand work assembling the full calendar kits. Here’s painter Max Shepard adding his signature to all 250+ covers:

And a whole crew came on board to collate and package each set:

In addition to the cards themselves, each calendar shipped with a backboard and set of hooks. I special-ordered the backboards, pre-cut to size, from a mill in Wisconsin. Here’s Max drilling pilot holes for the hooks (4 per board):

I borrowed the drill press from an eccentric dude who lives across the street! Good to get to know your neighbors. I also almost borrowed a belt sander (homemade from a washing machine motor) that he was storing in six inches of standing water in an oil drum, but ultimately decided against it.

So that’s it?

A few people have asked why, if the calendars have sold out but interest remains, why not just print more?

It’s a fair question — when the Hyperbolic Upgrade Stickers flew off the shelves earlier this year, I wasted no time rushing more into production.

I think the answer is threefold:

First, I want to be fair to folks who picked one up because they knew it was a limited edition.

Second, it would take time to do another printing — time to print the cards; order, sand, and drill more wood; collate and package everything. Not a big deal any other time of year, but it’s almost Christmas and I don’t think I should really try to squeeze in more projects right away.

And third, it’s a calendar. It has a shelf life by design. I don’t want to print a bunch more that I’d ultimately have to sit on, or try to clear out later at a discount — I think that would devalue them.

I have a weird problem with questions of waste and efficiency. I hate waste. Here are real things that I’ve done in an attempt to eliminate waste in my work:

• I’ve tried to conceive of new products strictly to take advantage of existing envelopes left over from a different project.

• I’ve had paid employees use scissors to cut out usable parts from scrap labels, despite the fact that just buying a pack of brand-new labels would probably be more cost efficient.

• I’ve packed — unpacked — re-packed — unpacked — and re-packed orders because I wasn’t sure which size shipping box would fit the order most precisely (despite the fact that the shipping cost would have been the same in any case).

Mentally, I think I would rather sell 250 calendars and have them all gone then print 250 more calendars and sell only 50-100 in a trickle over the course of the next three months. Besides, you would never hear me shut up about them as I tried to sell them all!

Again, this is because of the shelf life of a calendar-type item. I’ve got thousands of posters and stickers and books that I’ll move over the coming months and years, no problem. But calendars have an endpoint to their salability, and I couldn’t bear to have half a box of these beautiful things lingering here for years, unsold and growing dusty. It would break my heart.

I concede that that may be a strange point of view for a business owner to take, but well, here we are.

THAT BEING SAID

To rebut myself, I think there is probably an argument to be made that not every calendar has to have a shelf life. A collection of posters or jokes doesn’t necessarily grow less interesting because it also happens to have dates printed on part of it that have already passed. Also, of course, you can re-use calendars in future years, if you do the math right.

As a way of exploring this idea, and as a valuable public service, I’ve been using Tumblr to review old calendars that you can re-use in 2013. Here are two posts (so far) on the subject:

Vintage KELLOGG’S RICE KRISPIES 1985 Hanging Calendar Towel

Why do you need a calendar on a towel, or for that matter, a towel on a calendar? Most of the towels I use on a daily basis are either in the bathroom (where I quite frankly don’t care what day it is, as I have more, uh, pressing issues) or in the kitchen (where towels are usually crammed through the handle of an oven or fridge, thus rendering any calendar information that might be printed on it unreadable). A towel seems to me an unusual medium for conveying information to members of a household… (read more)

1985 Calendar of Jehovah’s Witnesses

At its worst, a wall calendar is just 12 nice pictures on whatever theme. You can look at the pictures and enjoy them, and ignore the people who ask you why you have an out-of-date calendar on your wall, like it’s some kind of CRIME. Why do they even CARE, it’s not their HOUSE. Unless it’s your wife in which case WHY CAN’T YOU REALIZE THAT MARRIAGE IS ABOUT COMPROMISE… (read more)

I…

I will be honest with you, I did not expect to become a person who was this opinionated about calendars

Here is Part 1, which details my thinking going into the making of this year’s Wondermark Calendar. I finally decided that I wanted to make another calendar this year, but began to think about how it could be done differently.

As detailed here, previous years of the Wondermark Calendar were comprised of cards sitting in brass desk easels. And since I knew that lots of people already had those easels, which are reusable, I knew that whatever I made this year should be about the same size as the previous calendars (which consist of a stack of 8.5″ x 5.5″ cards, thusly.)

But I also wanted to make it a progressive calendar, one that kept up with the days and weeks, rather than jerking to a halting stop every month until restarted. There must be a better way. A scroll? No. A waterfall? That doesn’t even make sense. A book? That’s not a calendar at all. Some sort of plant or food? Unexportable. A living animal with a lifespan of exactly one year? If I could figure that out, I wouldn’t be a cartoonist.

This is what I landed on:

It would be a stack of cards, each half the height of the previous calendar cards (which covered a month each), but each only containing two weeks. There would be no gaps between months. And when you passed the date on the top card, you could simply move the bottom card to the top and reveal a new two-week period on the bottom!

IT WAS THE PERFECT PLAN.

BUT WOULD IT WORK????

It sure seems to!

I’m not totally sure how it’ll read over the course of the year — it’s possible that it may take some getting used to, but ALL GREAT THINGS REQUIRE EFFORT so I’m not too worried about that. Overall I’m pretty intrigued by this concept — it seems archaic, in a pleasant way. It is even guaranteed to work if the power goes out (visible light permitting).

As you can see in this picture, rather than the cards sitting loosely in the easel as before, now they’re suspended from hooks affixed to a rigid backboard, which then itself sits in the easel. I think this makes for a very distinctive approach, but it does require some small amount of preparation. I’ll include a little baggie of hooks with each backboard (unassembled, so it can all ship flat), and I’ll even drill pilot holes in all the boards — so when yours arrives, you can put it all together in moments. I want this thing to work for you instantly.

Presumably, if this design works well and I decide to do another one, you will be able to keep the boards and simply re-order a refill of cards in future years! BUT LET’S TAKE THIS ONE STEP AT A TIME.

NOW, WHAT TO PUT ON IT?

The obvious elements to include on this calendar are: Dates. Holidays (including our new holidays). Illustrations and text.

I like inventing details about Gaxian culture (as in the Ask a Gaxian columns), so after a few misstarts and dead ends, I landed on the title THE GAXIAN ALMANAC.

Doing the math revealed that the calendar would need twenty-seven distinct cards to cover the entirety of 2013, so I decided to adorn each card with a factoid about Gaxian culture, history, or biology.

Now, it would be easy enough to make a bunch of Gaxian collage-images in the usual style. But since, for the first time, this calendar was to be machine-printed rather than hand-printed, I really wanted to do it in full color. And doing the collages would mean working at least partially digitally, when I really wanted this thing to feel hand-made.

So I started to draw.

TO BE CONTINUED…IN PART 3!!

The full title of the calendar is The Gaxian Almanac for Earth-Year 2013: Containing Elements of Knowledge Familiar to All Gaxians — An Entertainment for Enthusiasts; A Memento for Expatriates; and a Primer for Converts. It is available for pre-order now. As of this writing, out of 200 copies, only 124 remain. (UPDATE: They’re all gone now.) Each copy will be individually signed and numbered!

Last December, at the end of a significant period of stress that I never wish to repeat, I said this:

These beauties [the 2012 calendars] are wending their way to 175 of you right now. I hope you like them! They were very difficult to make. I will not be making them again like this next year; five years is a good run.

But not to worry! I have…another idea. A different idea.

It will wait to be revealed, until then. Stay tuned!

That time, my friends, has come.

BUT FIRST

An obligatory reminder about the TopatoCo shipping deadlines! Here is their grid of dates and different types of shipping services. Today, December 7, we start to get into the scary zone. If you’d like to make an order and have it arrive for Christmas, please don’t delay.

P.S. I stumbled across an overlooked box of limited-edition Machine of Death hardcovers! My eyes goggled out of my head when I realized what it was. They’re up now in my TopatoCo store.

My in-house store, selling holiday cards, stickers, books, and yes, calendars, will be shipping products through December 18. I can’t control the Post Office, and I don’t ship as much stuff as TopatoCo so I’m not as comfortable making predictions about arrival dates, and so I can’t make any guarantees — but most orders are going out within 24 hours, and will continue to do so until the 18th. (The calendars should start shipping by the end of next week.)

NOW THEN.

Six years ago, when I first conceived of the idea of making hand-printed calendars (as detailed here), it was because I had access to a Print Gocco screenprinting press. Popular in the eighties, and revived more recently by crafters and DIY fans, it’s a cool, compact printing device from Japan that uses expendable supplies such as bulbs, screens, and ink.

Unfortunately, the Gocco was discontinued by the manufacturer in 2005, and the number of supplies in their warehouses (and on retail shelves worldwide) began to dwindle. Fans of the Gocco’s simplicity and versatility have tried to come up with aftermarket workarounds, with some success; for the last couple of years, I was able to combine OEM and aftermarket supplies in strange ratios to get the calendars done.

But last year was the toughest: some of the third-party inks I found were difficult to work with, and all in all it became a much more complicated endeavor than I had anticipated. I still enjoyed the creativity and the craftsmanship involved, but the logistical hassles were proving increasingly significant.

A New Way Forward

The simplest solution would be to completely abandon the idea of doing calendars. Making calendars in general is a little scary, because you have a deadline to get them done (the end of the year, or more practically speaking, Christmas), and of course they have no shelf life, so you try to only make as many as you have demand for. I’ve been very fortunate that the calendars have proven popular, and I’m very grateful for your support — so I wanted to keep making something fun, for the challenge of it and to have something for those of you who ask after the new calendar year after year. But I didn’t want to run myself through a woodchipper to do it.

The first concession to the process was clear: future calendars had to be professionally printed. That was glaringly obvious. After investigating alternative hand-printing techniques such as letterpress, I realized that (at least for now), I’d rather leave the actual printing to professionals. This year’s calendars are being printed here in Los Angeles by DSJ Printing — the same company that makes my greeting cards, our Machine of Death cards, my MaxFunCon booklets, and any other strange thing I need done. These dudes are pros.

But I still wanted the product to have a lot of hand craftsmanship, to make it special. And I was curious if I could do something different with the format — to change the way a typical calendar operates.

What I don’t like about most monthly calendars is that all this:

…is just wasted space! Those are ACTUAL DAYS that get repeated on each page of the calendar, but are blanked out on the “wrong” page, just for the sake of breaking the pages into individual months. Additionally, when you’re on this day:

…you can’t look forward to the next week without flipping the page over and losing the current day. Your current day will show up as a blank square at best, or off the top of the page at worst, on the next month’s page.

This is all pretty petty complaining, but I’ve always preferred full-week calendars like this one I made for my own office:

…because looking at the weeks and months all smooshed together back-to-back, AKA the way we actually experience time, just makes more practical sense. If today’s the 28th, which do I care more about: the month that’s gone, or the next few weeks ahead? EXACTLY.

To adapt this idea into a desk-friendly format, I came up with the idea for a a 27-page biweekly calendar, two pages of which are displayed at any given time. This way, no matter the current date, you always have at least two weeks ahead of you visible.

But how could it work? What would it look like? And how would it capture the traditional Wondermark-calendar charm?

THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS…TOMORROW!

Flickr photo by liezlwashere

A few weeks ago, at the fourth annual MaxFunCon, I had the great fun of leading a hands-on seminar: “Victorian Portraiture The Easy Way.” I brought scissors and tape and let people make their own Victorian-style collage portraits!

Like this (click for bigger):

Out of this:

Another example! FROM THIS:

To the inarguably superior THIS:

I’ve posted a Flickr set of a bunch more of these, if you’d like to take a look!

The official MaxFunCon photographer also took a bunch of pictures, starting here.

This was a ton of fun! Thanks to Nick White and Jesse Thorn for inviting me to MaxFunCon this year. Now I have a seminar I can lead…ANYWHERE

Following up from last week’s Classy Comic Recreations, here are some of the other entries in the Classy Photo Contest!

The task at hand was to “take a classy photo featuring yourself (or other humans or animals) along with any item(s) from the Wondermark Goodsery. Define ‘classy’ however you want — it doesn’t necessarily have to mean ‘wearing a top hat’ although that is probably fine.” Judging is based on:

20% Classiness
30% Quality of photography
50% Creativity
+10% Extra credit for description

So here we go! Thanks to all who submitted. Selected favorites ahoy:

Classy Reading

My brother reading Beards of Our Forefathers by an old cannon in a South Dakota city park, of all places. It was tricky to photograph him because he wanted to look at a specific page (I can’t remember which, though) and he kept moving his nose so his and the book’s wouldn’t line up well.

And yes, that is a top hat.

This appears to be the same brother as in the dinosaur picture from the last post! The tried-and-true “use the book as a beard mask” is a strong move. SCORES:

Classiness: Child, in top hat, near cannon. Yes. 13/20
Quality of photography: Crisp, colorful. Would have liked to see more cannon maybe? 15/30
Creativity: The beard-face has been done before, but this gains some creative points from using what appears to be a library book. 20/50
Description: Straightforward but nothing fancy. +5/10

TOTAL SCORE: 53/100

RulesMicon

We use The CSBCM Rules to build our Infernal Devices.

This nicely framed copy of the Tinkerer’s Rules appears to be adorning something large and terrifying! Those are my two favorite adjectives, so well done. SCORES:

Classiness: Goggles are a plus. 12/20
Quality of photography: I would like to see more of the large and terrifying thing! 10/30
Creativity: This is a fairly straightforward snapshot, but I appreciate seeing the poster in the wild regardless. 12/50
Description: What is this terrifying thing? Tell me more about everything in this picture! +2/10

TOTAL SCORE: 36/100

In Which Security Camera Footage from the Art Gallery Comes Into Play

“Goodness, no!” said Foppish Bear, “That isn’t me perpetrating the most classy of crimes, the Art Heist. What, do all foppish bears look the same to you? That, my good man, is quite Racist.”

Nicely done! And quite a handsome wall of Wondermark comic prints you have there as well. SCORES:

Classiness: Art gallery theft is inherently classy. 12/20
Quality of photography: Grainy but clearly on purpose. It’s obvious what’s going on, and that’s what’s important. 18/30
Creativity: I am definitely on the watch for thieving bears after seeing this picture. 35/50
Description: Totally fine. +8/10

TOTAL SCORE: 73/100

A Traveling Wondermark Dispensary

Get you Wondermarks here! Cheapest Wondermarks on the eastern seaboard!

Alex here appears to have one of pretty much everything I’ve ever made. I like this Alex fellow. If you see him try to sell you something out of his trunk, at least flip through the books a little. They might not be too bad. SCORES:

Classiness: A serape is always a nice touch. 12/20
Quality of photography: Clear and bright. 15/30
Creativity: I am having fun imagining the trials and tribulations of a bootleg Wondermark vendor. 30/50
Description: Says what it does, does what it says. +5/10

TOTAL SCORE: 62/100

From a Perpendicular Universe

Our subject from a nearby perpendicular universe is caught at his leisure.

Another entry from Alex, featuring my book Clever Tricks to Stave Off Death! I do not know if this strange sideways-world is one native to himself or one that he has entered strictly for the sake of the photograph, but either way I appreciate the view of it. SCORES:

Classiness: Sitting on steps is somewhat classy, I suppose? 8/20
Quality of photography: Colorful and interestingly angled. 18/30
Creativity: I will assign this value capriciously. 20/50
Description: Straightforward. +5/10

TOTAL SCORE: 50/100

Foppish Bear and Piranhamoose™ Brand Slab’o'Meat Product

Foppish Bear only eats the finest meats: Piranhamoose™ Brand Slab’o'Meat Product, made from the finest elk, caribou and small game, with just a hint of man-flesh. Piranhamoose Slab’o'Meat Product — Sometimes you just want a slab of meat.

One of several entries featuring the Foppish Bear and a complete Piranhamoose™ line of questionable nutriments, this one struck my fancy for featuring what appears to be an entirely genuine mound of raw meat. SCORES:

Classiness: Meat is classy. Moustaches are classy. Knives — need I say more? 17/20
Quality of photography: A bit flash-heavy and flat. 6/30
Creativity: This couple appears to have spent an entire evening taking pictures in a moustache and a bear suit, and I have to respect that level of commitment. 40/50
Description: Just what we need. +10/10

TOTAL SCORE: 73/100

In which Señor Gamberro wrestles with literacy

Not wanting to be perceived as lacking the wit befitting a gentleman of his standing, the good luchador had taken to engaging in various forms of popular humorous scholarship.

This photo from Paolo fulfills a lifelong dream of mine, which is, of course, to see my work being read by a person in a luchador mask and suspenders.

Classiness: Aforementioned luchador mask and suspenders. 16/20
Quality of photography: The angle and setting could use some imagination. 13/30
Creativity: Where’s the action? I get that this is a bookish luchador, but that ain’t the event I bought tickets for. 18/50
Description: Clear enough! +5/10

TOTAL SCORE: 52/100

In which Alex only has as many books as she could carry.

(pictured: a puddle of books) It’s impossible, really, to carry such a sea of books as she owns. Others don’t understand how she could need so many books in the first place, but she breathes the stuff. She is, without a doubt, a bibliophibian. Also, she has a nice hat.

Alex models the Bibliophibian shirt to nice effect. Past the point of no return, she feels the ink in her lungs, and she smiles. SCORES:

Classiness: She does have a nice hat. 12/20
Quality of photography: Sufficiently moody. 20/30
Creativity: I must ask again, as I did with the other Alex: is this a pose or just a natural state of being? 30/50
Description: Nicely done. +9/10

TOTAL SCORE: 71/100

In which Herschel waxes intellectual about petty concerns

The Alderman had the singular ability to derive rather stunning insights from the most trivial reading material.

Another from Paolo. I’ve looked at this photo a dozen times now and I only just realized that those weren’t his real eyes.

Classiness: The celebrated disguise is class personified. 14/20
Quality of photography: A bit flat but fine. 13/30
Creativity: I have a feeling Paolo just looked around for things he could wear to make the photo interesting. STILL: I am game enough to expand my lifelong dream (above) to include any kind of vaguely creepy mask, so this counts. 25/50
Description: Does its job. (But “trivial”??) +5/10

TOTAL SCORE: 61/100

Bibliophibian

Instead of spending all the money on her book collection, she should have spent a few dollars on a life vest too. She was too invested in reading to notice that she was drowning in it too. Maybe with all the knowledge from her books, she can grow gills and become a bibliophibian.

Another from Alex II, same as above. Clearly this photo was taken earlier in the evolution/conversion/assimilation process. SCORES:

Classiness: I don’t even know how to define this anymore. 10/20
Quality of photography: Strongly dramatic, highly evocative. Would like to have seen the shirt a little better maybe? 28/30
Creativity: Again, is this just Alex’s daily life? Still, a nice pose and a nice shot. 38/50
Description: A cautionary tale for the ages. +8/10

TOTAL SCORE: 84/100

Megan and Helena being extraordinarily classy whilst perusing the wondrous Wondermark anthologies.

There was going to be a third in this photo, but our canine counterpart was being less than cooperative. Thus, the third top hat is being worn by none other than the Classy Chair.

If classy can be defined as “wearing a top hat”, how do we define *3* top hats?

Very strong entry. The sepia filter is a bit of a cheat but it’s one I’m certainly not above using myself. High marks for the full costumes (and of course, the full complement of books.) SCORES:

Classiness: It is impossible to get classier than this. 20/20
Quality of photography: A bit staid but nicely evocative. 25/30
Creativity: The question remains! Is this simply a regular day in their life?? 36/50
Description: Does the job but makes me miss that dog! +7/10

TOTAL SCORE: 88/100

NOW. Before announcing all the winners and prizes, let’s turn our attention back to the Recreate-a-Panel photos (which are all so super wonderful). You voted for your favorites from that set, and the results, as of this writing are:

So the winner of that category is Diny the Stegosaurus and friend:

Which is awful hard to beat. Congrats, team! You win one of anything you like from either Wondermark store (either my own or TopatoCo).

The winner of the photos on this page is Megan & Helena with their extra-classy shot! Megan & Helena win one of anything they like from either Wondermark store. Congrats & thanks for the picture!

An honorable mention goes to Alex the Bibliophibian as well, just because I really like that shot of her reaching out of the books. Alex, let me give you one of my books to add to that stack, if there are any of my own that you’re missing.

And finally…my discretionary award for BEST IN SHOW goes to…

Just because I want to look at this picture and nothing else for the rest of my life. I will take to the grave the fact that I made people do this. Simply wonderful.

I should also mention that this photo is brought to you by the team that also contributed the Stove cat photo, the Leopold photo, and the photos above featuring Foppish Bear. So this is a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award as well. Nice work! You win $100 cash!

Winners please email me to claim your prizes: dave at wondermark dot com. Thanks everyone!

I’m super-pleased to announce some neat new things for the holidays! Quick links:

1. General Holiday Shipping Notes
    
2. New Greeting Cards!
      Description below / Store link
    
3. Artist Editions now available!
      Description below / Store link
    
4. New book: The Compleat Dispatches from Wondermark Manor!
      Description below / Store link

(more…)

I wrote a song! It has been running through my mind for a long time, and I finally said “You know what? It is time to FINISH THIS. Time to lay it down. Time to make it the PARTY HIT OF THE SUMMER.”

Boom! And a Bear Comes Out from David Malki ! on Vimeo.

(Download the MP3)

I hope you like it!

If you also have a nagging “cool thing” that you need an excuse to finish, why not submit something to the Machine of Death Talent Show? We’ve pushed back the submission deadline to April 20, and we will accept video performances from remote participants (although if you’re in the Los Angeles area, we’d love to physically put you on the stage)!

More info here. If you can’t submit something, we hope you’ll at least watch the show on the evening of April 26, either live in Los Angeles or livestreamed at MachineofDeath.net. Here’s the Facebook event!

I will tease you with this as well: everyone who’s able to attend the show in person will go home with a very special item that we’ll be unveiling the evening of.

Admission will be free, so if you can’t make it, send your Los Angeleno friends!

Thank you kindly for the great advice regarding my plastics conundrum! I have been in touch with several kind individuals and I hope to have the situation well in hand forthwith.

I am also pleased to announce that the 2011 Wondermark Calendar is now available for pre-order!

This will be the fourth year I’ve offered the calendar, and every year they sell out. The calendars are produced by hand and are individually signed and numbered! They’re mailed in the order that they were ordered, so the first buyer will get #1 (which is already gone!) and the last, #175. To get the lowest possible number, order now! Do the numbers matter? Not to me. But maybe to you???

Last year I wrote a very detailed explanation of how we create the calendars. I looked back through it today and I’m really pleased with how it reads! If you missed it last year, definitely take a look. I think it’s pretty interesting!

IN OTHER NEWS

Here are three brand-new Monocle Poppers™ holiday cards I’ve created just for you:

These add to my existing catalog of holiday cards to make nine designs total! Plus the various blank notecards, thank-you cards and the all-powerful Every Occasion Card. And remember that you get steep discounts for multiple cards! Basically what I am saying is that I got you covered. If you need cards, I am your man.

SPECIAL NOTE: The calendars will ship later in December, but I know you need holiday cards in-hand earlier so I’ll be sending all card orders out ASAP. Feel free to combine both in one order, and I’ll send the cards out right away even if the calendar has to follow later on.

(Non-US customers: Priority Mail is always your better bet in terms of expedient shipping. International First Class simply cannot be predicted nor guaranteed.)

FINALLY

Here is a new offering in the ol’ dry-goods concern: loose pages from old books for use in crafting, collage, or really anything you like (I won’t judge):

These are the lovely remnants after I have mined old volumes for their usable images! I am making them available in packs of about 100 pages each. See, I’m starting to fill box after box with these pages and I figure someone else can put them to better use than I can! They’d be great for all sorts of craft projects or just lining a drawer in that armoire you found on Craigslist.

Some covers are available too, for your journal or what-have-you! You do what you like. I’m just the enabler.

AND A BRIEF NOTE

Regarding Wondermark books, posters, shirts etc. from TopatoCo: that fine institution has posted its holiday ordering guidelines which I recommend taking a hearty peek at! However I will also mention that I do have one brand-new shirt in the TopatoCo pipeline which has yet to appear — hopefully that will show its face soon.

SO THAT’S WHAT I GOT

For some of you, this image is all you need to know.

You remember my call for submissions for this anthology, based on a Dinosaur Comic that postulated the idea of a machine that could predict how a person would die. You recall me talking about the 700 submissions we received, and how we whittled it down to 30. You’ve asked me at conventions for the last four years — “When’s Machine of Death coming out? What’s the story with that? I really want to read that book!”

The answer is: October 26. Tuesday.

For the unfamiliar, here’s a bit of the premise:

The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how they were going to die.

The problem with the machine is that nobody really knew how it worked, which wouldn’t actually have been that much of a problem if the machine worked as well as we wished it would. But the machine was frustratingly vague in its predictions: dark, and seemingly delighting in the ambiguities of language. OLD AGE, it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death — you can know how it’s going to happen, but you’ll still be surprised when it does.

There were now machines in every doctor’s office and in booths at the mall. You could pay someone or you could probably get it done for free, but the result was the same no matter what machine you went to. They were, at least, consistent.

The book contains 34 stories by folks such as me, Ryan North, Randall Munroe, Shaenon Garrity, Yahtzee Croshaw, Erin McKean, James Lafond Sutter and a bunch of other great people. The stories are illustrated by folks such as Kate Beaton, Kazu Kibuishi, Aaron Diaz, Karl Kerschl, Jeffrey Brown, Scott Campbell, Cameron Stewart, Adam Koford and just too many more people to list. (Although at that link we try.) We’re also doing an audiobook that’s narrated by folks I can’t even mention yet.

Here is the significance of October 26 specifically:

It only takes a few hundred sales in a short time to become a Number One bestseller on Amazon.com.

So even though the book is available for purchase now, we want to concentrate all the attention onto October 26. Blog about it, tweet about it, invite your friends to the Facebook event — just spread the word that October 26 is the day to buy Machine of Death on Amazon.

We talk about the whole deal some more at the official Machine of Death site:

The simple truth is that we probably can’t compete on the shelves at Barnes & Noble alongside every other book in the world. The agents and the publishers are right; it might not work for a mass market. That’s okay. We don’t need to sell it to everyone. We don’t need to sell 100,000 copies; we don’t have the rent on a New York office to pay for.

We only need to sell it to you.

On October 26, we want to send a message that a little project dragged kicking and screaming from “crazy idea” past “it’ll never work” all the way to “By God, they actually did it” can make a big splash. We’re internet people; you are too. We want to prove to all the people who said “this will never sell” that internet people make things happen.

Here’s the link to that post explaining everything: http://machineofdeath.net/a/mod-day

Here’s the book on Amazon — tack your own affiliate link on there and make a few bucks, we don’t mind: http://machineofdeath.net/oct26/

Here’s the Facebook event.

Here’s our faces when everybody pitches in and we take the world by storm:

Buy it on October 26! Spread the word! And thank you!

I hope you’ve been listening to my weekly comedy podcast, Tweet Me Harder! If you haven’t, there’s absolutely no better time to start — the latest episode that’s been posted, Episode 30, may be our best yet. I’m super-pleased with how the show’s been progressing and developing over the last few months, and if you like the voice and temperament behind Wondermark, I’m confident recommending TMH to you as well.

In fact HERE IS THE EPISODE IN QUESTION for your listening pleasure:

(direct MP3 link)

We’re engaged in a concerted campaign right now to get noticed by the folks at iTunes who decide on the “staff picks,” which are podcasts that are given special precedence in the iTunes directory. If you’re an iTunes user, and you enjoy the show, there are two things you can do to help:

- You can subscribe to the podcast using this direct iTunes link, which is what determines our popularity ranking;
- You can rate and/or comment on the show in iTunes!

And, of course, there is one thing that you can always do, iTunes user or not, TMH fan or not… you can give yourself a big ol’ hug. Why not? (Unless you are spiky)