TODAY, FRIDAY, is the last day to receive a free ebook by forwarding us your Machine of Death order confirmation from Amazon or TopatoCo. If you’ve purchased a print edition, you can get a Kindle, ePub, or rich text version for free simply by sending your confirmation to info at machineofdeath dot net! Or, you can buy the ebooks directly for ten dollars, that’s fine too. Or of course just download the PDF for nuthin!

SUNDAY is the last day to order Artist Edition Wondermark books, which are books that feature original sketches perhaps similar or perhaps wildly divergent from the example above. This is the only Holiday Offering — I won’t be doing any more Artist Editions until next spring.

Some folks have asked about COMBINING THESE EFFORTS and commissioning a Machine of Death Artist Edition. This is a bit like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, and so I’m disinclined simply for safety reasons, but rest assured that we have lots of interesting MOD stuff coming down the pike and there will be no shortage of delights in the future.

Now after all those deadlines, here’s one splendid aliveline:

SATURDAY at the New England Webcomics Weekend, I’ll be doing a live performance of Tweet Me Harder with my handsome friend Kris Straub! We’ll be streaming the show online at tweetmeharder.com — just head over there a little before 10:30 AM Pacific / 1:30 PM Eastern to tune into the live program. It is guaranteed to be astonishing.

Now I am off to attend a Final Fantasy-themed wedding. Jealous?

A fun sketch I did at the Long Beach Comic-Con last weekend! YOU could get some sketches just like this or slightly different or even better with a purchase of Artist Edition books (available only through November 8)!

Twice a year, I offer my books in “Artist Edition” — I create a custom unique sketch in every book, for those that desire it. Patrons of the most recent offering are well familiar with my fixation on “flying fish,” by which I mean strange hybrids of fish and aircraft (or fish and armored vechicles, or insects and aircraft, or land mammals and construction equipment). Here are some examples from this spring’s series of Artist Editions:

I will be honest with you: I have harbored furtive dreams of turning this particular subject into an oeuvre, of creating larger and ever-more-complex tableaux of sea creatures/aircraft, engaged in all sorts of aerial hijinks in glorious, full-painted color. (The sketch at the top of this post was an expression of this urge to refine and develop the theme.)

Well, thanks to diligent reader and frequent correspondent Kevin S., I have learned that apparently someone else had the same idea — Roland Tamayo:

I HEREBY DECLARE TAMAYO MY NEMESIS

…although I should point out that my inspiration, and perhaps Tamayo’s as well, was and is the surrealist vehicular work of Stan Mott:

I believe this more comprehensive collection may be Stan’s official site, but with respect, it’s miserable to navigate. However, if you have a little patience you’ll find the charming “History of Tanks” illustration series there, which I’m sure is why 90% of the sketches I’ve done at conventions in the past year have featured tanks in some fashion (usually attached to African wildlife).

Finally, consider this your official warning that the fall Artist Edition series will become available very soon! Before the moon is full! October is going to be a big month, I’m just brimming with exciting news. ALL IN GOOD TIME.

A little while back I asked your opinion about what I should do with my sketches, works-in-progress and various miscellany. I am pleased to introduce Malki-In-Progress !

In flagrant disregard of public opinion, I have set up a Tumblr microblog which I hope to populate with all manner of strange nonsense. I decided to do it this way because I have come to regard the Wondermark site with a certain measure of reverence — it’s like a brightly-lit gallery for work I am beaming with pride to share, while the new site will be a more of a garage workshop where I can tinker with stupid things not fearing that the slightest absurd scribble will trigger ten thousand Feedburner emails to folks who subscribed expecting comics.

The new site has its own RSS, and all the site content will cross-post to Twitter @wondermarkfeed (which also posts the updates from this main site). Expect to see drawings, Wondermark comic in-progress shots and detail views, behind-the-scenes info on other major projects, and maybe — if I have the gumption — pages of a new book as I write them. Nothing will change or decrease here at Wondermark; everything on MiP! will be new, additional content. I’ll occasionally post highlights here so you don’t miss anything I think is particularly cool, but I won’t overload you with duplicate posts. (Or you can just cast an occasional eye over on the right-hand sidebar to see thumbnails of recent posts.) The main idea is just to give me a little playground to mess around in — I’m deliberately not setting a schedule or standardized format for the MiP! posts, and in fact will probably soon abandon the MiP! moniker as it’s starting to strike me as ridiculous.

ANYWAY HERE IT IS ENJOY

When my friend and yours Carly Monardo said “Hey folks who wants to donate some original art to be auctioned off for charity to benefit the Colbert Nation Gulf of America Fund,” I said “Well shucks I’d love to, except that my work doesn’t involve the creation of any original art!” To her credit, Carly was going to take that as an acceptable answer (and I was gonna make an exclusive print or something instead), but then I said “Dang-blast it, I wanna draw something.” So I did! And the result (that you see above) is up for auction right now as part of Carly’s Webcomics Auction For the Gulf series, which also includes many other pieces by many of my favorite people!

ANYWAY ENOUGH ABOUT THOSE PEOPLE HERE IS MY DRAWING which could very easily become your drawing (wink wink)! Edit: it’s sold! Thanks!

At any given time, I’m working on a half-dozen different projects: making comics, of course; designing books; hashing out ideas for prints or posters or shirts or what-have-you; and often, creating logos and layouts for stuff that may not see the light of day for months, if ever. Sometimes I get a little antsy and post previews or sneak-peeks on my Twitter, but that’s very limited in its scope, and I’d like to share more, and in different ways.

However, I am also very sensitive to the fact that you come here to read comics (with the occasional other nonsense), and you may not want half-complete junk-in-progress, or long chunks of prose, or stuff wholly unrelated to Wondermark in your feed reader or email inbox. Personally, I’m in favor of littering this site with everything I do, but this site doesn’t just belong to me anymore; it belongs to you too. So I’d like to ask your opinion — where should I put miscellaneous stuff? We’re talking half-finished comics. We’re talking chapters from novels, potentially. We’re talking sketches and designs and journal-type entries and probably stuff related to Tweet Me Harder and other projects. I figure there are three options:

Keep it at Wondermark. I’m a big believer in not fragmenting one’s online presence more than necessary, and Wondermark is potentially a broad enough umbrella to encompass everything I do. Besides, you could just ignore the stuff you don’t want to read.

Move it offsite. I’d probably start a Tumblr and start posting over there. That has an advantage in that I wouldn’t feel self-conscious about posting non-comics-related stuff there, but I’d hate for that to be so separate from Wondermark that nobody bothered to visit.

Move it offsite, but post a weekly digest on Wondermark. I’d put all the nonsense on the other site, but on Wondermark there’d be one post a week (if that) listing the highlights. So you’d still stay abreast of any cool stuff over there, but if you were only subscribed to Wondermark it wouldn’t be tons of posts in your feed reader or email.

Here’s a poll!