Flickr photo by Nick Webb

Once every year, my crack team of ombudsfolk compiles a humiliating list of all the factual inaccuracies in the previous twelve months’ comics. With my apologies for any confusion or distress these errors may have caused, please find corrections below.

#696; The Chilling Case of Were-Cat
The prefix “were-”, as in werewolf, is Old English for ‘man’ — so something referred to as “were-cat” would in fact be expected to be some sort of man/cat creature, and not strictly a cat (or even a cat/cat).

#690; In which a Tag is Utterly Obscured
The action performed by the subject did not, in fact, make the situation ‘much better’.

#739; Hoppily Ever After
Howard never actually made an overt promise to sweep Etta off of her feet; it was just something she assumed in the heat of the marshy, froggy makeout session.

#742; In which is dug a Passage
The final word balloon contains a typographical error. It should instead read “Only of demon-simulated porn of you”. It should then have been followed by a second, smaller word balloon reading simply “Handsome”

#733; Big News
The Bugle actually initially misidentified Iowa governor Terry Branstad as “Terry Crews”.

#771; Accounting by Network
The guy on the left in Panel 1 is supposed to look even crazier.

#776; In which Toothpaste is made
A torque wrench is a tool to measure how much rotational force is being applied, for example to a bolt or nut. Its only utility in conjunction with a vise might be to measure in foot-pounds precisely how powerfully the vise handle is being tightened. This does not unilaterally rule out its usefulness in the toothpaste scenario, but if the aim is to apply as much force as possible to the vise handle, a simple hollow pipe, used to extend the handle’s leverage, might be of even greater use.

#763; In which an Infatuation shatters
Gax has not been impersonating Amanda from the very beginning, only for the last eleven years.

Wondermark regrets the errors.

Previously:
2008 Errata
2009 Errata

Happy holidays! Whether you celebrate Lightingmas, Double-Christmas, The Festival of Matzoh, Champion’s Pride, The Twelve Days of Solstice, Lord Kronog’s Bane, The Great All-Powerful Nothing at All or even something fake, I hope you spend the season happy, warm, and in the company of those you love.

Here are some of my favorite Wondermark holiday comics from years past:

#474; In which you better Watch Out
#582; In which George gets a Lute
#683; In which a Line of Questioning is halted
#476; In which Suffering was a Waste
#686; The Taylors leave a Shadow
#466; In which Everyone loves the Freak
#687; In which Santa appears at last
#363; In which Joy is mandated
#093; In which a Fortress is breached
#357; In which Mall Parking sucks
#141; In which the Son of God stands in queue
#081; In which a Confrontation occurs
#260; In which a Plan ends poorly
#069; In which the Canucks get a Pretty Good Idea
#475; In which Trouble is both avoided, and provoked

All copies of the 2012 Wondermark Calendar have been spoken for. Thanks so much! We’re busily printing all this week, and if all continues to go well I expect we will be mailing them out starting this Saturday.

I also noticed that TopatoCo is currently sold out of Engineering shirts in most guy sizes, and I do not expect them to restock before Christmas. Just to cover the gap, I’ve put a few up in my own store for the time being, just whatever I have on hand.

A few people have written to tell me that they saw a shirt with this same slogan in the Signals catalog, or on their website. They are right to think that it was done without my knowledge or approval — I’d never let a design this ugly go out:

This is a tricky situation — legally, you cannot copyright a short phrase or slogan. (That’s why you can see stupid slogans like “FBI: Female Body Inspector” on fifty million different T-shirts in fifty million different tourist shops.) A design is copyrightable, but in this case they only used the words. You can trademark a slogan, but that costs a fair amount of money, and I hadn’t done that. (Maybe I should.)

Anyway, Signals and similar catalog shops are in the business of being everything to all people. There is no philosophy; there is no creative point of view. There’s just “Ah! Someone might identify with this. Let’s put it on a shirt and see if we can sell a bunch.” Apparently someone thought that my shirt design was just another free-floating slogan ripe for appropriation.

So I wrote them an email. The reason I’m sharing this story — when I usually don’t bother to bring up situations like this, and give attention to entities that deserve to die in obscurity — is because I thought my approach might be instructive.

The knee-jerk response is “Cease and desist! Sue! Call a lawyer!” This implies that (a) the issue cannot be solved through more amicable means, and (b) I have a lot of time and money to throw at this kind of problem. The latter is not true, and I like to at least allow for the chance that the former isn’t either. There’s a lot of double negatives in that sequence, so I’ll restate: Being aggressive puts people on the defensive. Being friendly gets people to help you.

Also, always give the party in the wrong the ability to back off gracefully.

Learning this is one of the biggest things that has helped me in life: avoid putting people on the defensive. Sometimes it is necessary to be firm, or to express dissatisfaction, or to press for remedy of a situation. But I have never found yelling and shouting to be the easiest way to that end — at least, not as an opener.

Here’s the email I wrote, in part:

Hello! I was referred to this email address by Signals customer support. Please let me know if I have the right place!

I’m the creator of the comic strip “Wondermark” and the originator of the slogan: “Engineering: Like Math, But Louder.” I first published it in a comic strip in June 2010: http://wondermark.com/634/

I also sell a T-shirt with the slogan: http://topatoco.com/wondermark/engineering

A reader brought your “Engineering T-Shirt” to my attention: [link]. And I see you also sell a similar sweatshirt.

I double-checked with my licensing department and we have no record of any paperwork or payment from Signals for use of the slogan on a T-shirt. If this is an oversight, I would be pleased to send an invoice for the licensing. Otherwise, I must insist that your shirt be removed from sale.

I’m sure it was an honest mistake and I’m happy to assist in setting things right. Thanks very much, and please contact me with any questions! I look forward to hearing from you by October 28.

Best,

David Malki !
[email address, phone number]

I was forwarded up the chain to somebody with authority. This person eventually said, in essence, “We’re within our rights to make our version. But you know what? Yours is a much better design. We’d like to license yours instead.”

Always leave them a graceful out. So, the spring Signals catalog will feature my version of the Engineering design.

Should you all rush out and buy the shirt when it becomes available? No, absolutely not. Their royalties are horrible — like, beyond horrible and into the realm of insulting. But considering that all I wanted was for them to stop selling the ugly version, any royalty at all is a nice bonus. And considering that someone may have submitted that slogan to them and thus stood to earn their own royalties on sales of the knockoffs…that’s not right.

I’m pleased that this situation ended (more or less) amicably. Of course, your mileage may vary, but I am living proof that it is possible to assert your rights without being rude or making enemies.

ALSO: Thank you very much for bringing this sort of thing to my attention. You are my eyes and ears. A quick email or tweet whenever you see something like this is very appreciated. I will reward you…with e-smiles

(A barnwood desk from Woodland Creek Furniture)

I thought I would take a moment to address a question that’s come up before, but has been asked again recently upon the announcement of my Hendrick’s Artist Box — whether I really do cut up old books and magazines, and whether such a thing is proper. Marksman Gemmel D. wrote me today:

Dear Mr. Malki,

I discovered your web comic a few months ago, and it has made me laugh countless times. You are a truly creative person, with a sense of humour I can appreciate.

That being said, I fear I must admit to being appalled at the way you decorated your box for the Hendrick’s Gin Curate a Box project.

I understand that you make collages of 19th century images to create your pieces, but I naively assumed that you made copies, not that you actually cut up these publications.

I must say I am a little upset. Old books, magazines and newspapers are important artifacts; They tell us things about our history and our society that the history books can’t. In fact, they are a priceless resource for historians and genealogists, sociologists and anthropologists.

If it can be avoided, they shouldn’t be destroyed, even to make art.

Please don’t think I’m being pushy or overbearing, but Is there any way you could make or use copies of these texts, and preserve the originals for future posterity? You must have a large collection of fine pieces – the pages used for the Hendrick’s box were from Scientific American and Punch magazine. I don’t need to tell you that Punch was one the first satirical magazines, and great writers like William Makepeace Thackeray wrote for it.

Any library or University would probably love to have your collection in later years. Your collection could be invaluable for future generations, but not if it is cut to bits.

If you read all the way to the end of this e-mail, I thank you for hearing me out. I’m not trying to tell you how to do your work; I know nothing about art, and can’t even draw a straight line properly. I’ll even understand if you’re angry at me. But I do feel that we should preserve as much of our past as we possibly can.

This is a serious issue, and one that I want to clarify for the record. Here’s the response I wrote:

Thanks for the note. I agree that old things have value, and should be preserved. That’s part of why I love doing Wondermark — I get to take things that very few people get to see nowadays, and reinvent them and share them with a wider audience.

To make my regular comics, I work entirely from digital scans of the original work. I have a large library that is not depleted in any way by the work I do.

But to make the Hendrick’s box, I wanted to do something different. I perhaps did not make clear enough that the work I cut up for the box was all, essentially, trash — the Punch pages were from a volume that was rotting and falling apart; the Dickens covers were received in a dusty box that was basically just a heap of paper. I have made a habit of accepting, and deliberately acquiring, material like this that otherwise would just go in the garbage. I buy books on eBay with tobacco stains, children’s crayon marks and missing covers that collectors and historians have no want nor need of. The life I give them, in the main, is life they otherwise would not have.

I have not made that as clear as I perhaps could have, for folks who are less familiar with my process than I myself am. I hope that sets your mind at ease somewhat.

It would be a tragedy to tear down a barn simply to make a desk. But I believe it is an art to take the planks from a barn that has already been condemned, and make a lovely desk from them. Thanks for the email, Gemmel.

More than one person has written in asking about the bike-rider character from Comic #684! Well, his name is Malfidactus O’Rourke and he is originally from Duluth. He has a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and he plays racquetball when he can find a partner who likes to go early on weekdays. He lives in a two-bedroom townhouse just outside of Chicago and he recently had a terrible, terrible hunting accident.

It is high praise for a question-poser indeed when a totally independent third party is provoked to write over 1600 words in response to all facets of the question — all of it interesting and civil.

Such is the case today. Mr. Ryan O’Connell, a winemaker in France, has taken my exploration of the Oenophile’s Quandary and explored it even further:

If optimal stopping applies to the oenophile’s quandary, it’s because the oenophile must settle on a date to consume each bottle. In that sense, each bottle has a stopping problem where the oenophile must decide to wait for a better occasion to drink the wine. So really, you’re not choosing wines. You’re choosing dates. And the quality of the wine has very little to do with the enjoyment. It’s more the context in which you consume the wine. In this sense, the quality of improvement over time is less relevant and the oenophile’s quandary is reduced to an expression of optimal stopping. Is quality of improvement over time a necessary condition? No. You can lose quality of improvment over time and you’ll still have a basic stopping problem because some days will be better than others for drinking that special bottle.

YOU TOOK THE BAIT RYAN AHA HA HA seriously I love it when folks do this.

ALSO: A commenter points us in the direction of the actual paper in which Dr. Dixit used Elaine (from Seinfeld)’s critical contraceptive-sponge shortage to determine the numbers alluded to in my previous post. Here it is! (PDF)

In last week’s comic #654, my characters discuss a philosophical question known as the Oenophile’s Quandary — when to enjoy something that is being saved for a special occasion, and which in fact even improves with time. Of course, I made up the Oenophile’s Quandary, as I do every plausible-sounding fact that somehow worms its way into Wondermark (including this fact stating that fact), but a few kind readers followed up with me with additional information on the topic.

In a tweet, @flyingpawn pointed me to an economist’s answer to essentially this exact question:

Dear Economist,
I have inherited six bottles of excellent wine, which I plan to consume, over time, on special occasions. But how do I know when to open a bottle when I don’t know what occasions lie ahead? I don’t want to use up all the bottles within a few months on mediocre occasions, but neither do I still want to be hoarding them until I die.

I am pleased to announce that the question is answered definitively in the article, with numbers, the answer attributed to economist Avinash Dixit. There are some base assumptions made in the calculation, so it may not apply to every unique situation, but at least someone’s taken a stab at it and for most people it’s just nice to have someone else tell them an answer that sounds pretty authoritative.

In trying to track down the actual calculations done by Dr. Dixit, or any substantiation at all of the answer, I learned that the Oenophile’s Quandary may not be a question of philosophy but rather of mathematics — in particular, the theory of “optimal stopping” as applied in statistics or economics. An article in American Scientist puts it this way:

A decision maker observes a process evolving in time that involves some randomness. Based only on what is known, he or she must make a decision on how to maximize reward or minimize cost. In some cases, little is known about what’s coming. In other cases, information is abundant. In either scenario, no one predicts the future with full certainty. Fortunately, the powers of probability sometimes improve the odds of making a good choice.

Economists put equations to these questions, assuming that each variable has some hard quantifiable element to it. For Oenophile’s Quandary questions to rest in the realm of philosophy, then, they must deal with purely subjective issues. May the quality of aging wine be measured objectively?

A tweet from @OldMiner pointed me to this article about the aging of wine:

MYTH: Old wine tastes better than new wine.
REALITY: Although all wines change with age, very few wines noticeably improve beyond a few months and wine maturity does have its limits.
MY CONTENTIONS: Part of the problem is that some wine increases in monetary value as it gets older. The public fails to grasp that the value only rises because of the wine’s increasing rarity, not its increasing quality.

So where does this leave us? Wine may still be good (as in the question at the top of this post) without necessarily improving with age. Is the quality of improvement over time a necessary condition of the Oenophile’s Quandary? Is the question of enjoyment one that can be answered with economics, or should it be left to philosophy? What occasions have caused you to crack open a special bottle of whatever? Leave a comment and let us know!

Movies in which couples overcome various misunderstandings to eventually hug and kiss as the credits roll ask us to believe that their characters will be together forever.

So I got to thinking: assuming that the couples who get together at the end of movies stay together into the foreseeable future, what must they look like now? Surely they are still together, making coffee in the mornings, shuffling children off to this activity or that, taking trips to see plays and figuring out new digital cameras on the occasional Alaskan cruise.

I present the following as aids to your imagination, helping you to picture the lives of these fictional characters extended out ten, twenty, thirty years until the strange story of their first, accidental meeting is family legend retold every Thanksgiving to the grandchildren: “You know I used to fly Tomcats in the Navy — well, one day, Grandma waltzed into my classroom at Miramar, and I about flipped my lid. I told her about a MiG I’d seen recently, and she tried to freeze me out. And then I played volleyball for a while with Uncle Iceman.”

Frank Frazetta died the other day. He was well-known as a the cover artist for innumerable Conan and Edgar Rice Burroughs books, but in truth, Frank was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, working in oil paint or ink with equal facility. The excellent if rather showy retrospective documentary Painting With Fire is highly recommended, or for a more calculated explanation of why Frank was the best, here’s a neat blog post. My own experience with Frank’s work was very personal, and very formative.

For most of high school and my first year of college, I spent Wednesday afternoons after school with three other friends in an art studio in the San Bernardino mountains, taking lessons from a wonderfully talented illustrator named John Arthur. John was a classically-trained artist who drilled the basics of life drawing, line quality, and the importance of sketching into our still-mushy teenage minds, and I credit those Wednesdays with John with developing my creative instincts from childlike fumbling into something of value.

Every week, each of us would show John (and the others) any sketches or drawings we’d done throughout the week, but John also delighted in reading our stories, poems, comics or anything else we’d made — my friend Stephen was a prolific poet, I was working on a novel, both of us had occasional short stories to present as well, and John was always encouraging, always enthusiastic to see it all.

In return, John would teach us from the masters — as we drew in his studio, he’d read to us from Ray Bradbury or Robert Henri; as we listened, we sketched from life or copied (as best we could) from Michaelangelo, N.C. Wyeth, Bernie Wrightson or Frazetta.

Frank was John’s touchstone: to explain how light could turn a three-dimensional form into black and white lines, he’d pull out his old portfolio of Frazetta lithographs. He’d put an anatomy book next to one of Frank’s paintings to explain how to portray torsion in a muscle in an interesting and dynamic way, and compare and contrast Frank’s work with the schlocky Image comics we’d bring in for show-and-tell. And as we were packing up from the day’s lesson, John would tell the story of how Frank once goofed off playing baseball rather than working on a book-cover assignment, until the night before the painting was due to the publisher. That night, when he finally sat down to work, he discovered he didn’t have any canvas in the house — so he pried a piece of Masonite off the floor and painted monsters on it:

As wonderful as Frank’s paintings were and are, it was those lithos from John’s portfolio that always struck me the most. Mostly ink drawings from Tarzan books, they clearly showed Frank’s absolute mastery over the brush. The lines are lively, fluid, and variable in a way that John continually explored with us — they dance teasingly with negative space, volume, and texture. Frank’s linework is what’s playing in my brain every time I clumsily put pen (or brush) to paper today:

Having a variable quality of line was one of the lessons that John drummed into our drawing hands every single session. I admire cartoonists who can get evocative images out of Micron pens or thin strokes, but that came to bore me in my own art. Seeing what life Frank could breathe with his brush continues to inspire me today, and insofar as I’m anywhere, I wouldn’t be here without John, those Wednesdays, and Frank.

Frazetta, 1975

Me, 1996

Frazetta, 1969

Me, 1999

Thanks, Frank.

UPDATE: One more thing! During the time I was taking lessons from John, Frank suffered a stroke (what would be the first of many). John relayed the news to us gravely, and suggested that we call the family to wish them well. Next thing I knew, we were on the phone with Frank’s wife Ellie, each of us taking a moment to pass on our well wishes. I don’t know how John had the number — maybe they were listed in the phone book, or maybe he called the museum that Ellie had founded on their property. But it was a powerful moment in connecting with one’s heroes, remembering that for all their accomplishments, they’re people too.

After the stroke, Frank began to experience tremors and a loss of strength in his right hand. So what did he do? Taught himself to paint with his left. In his 70s. I just got done explaining how Frank was merely human, but dang if Frank didn’t try his best to make me a liar.

Ink-drawing images from Golden Age Comic Book Stories. Paintings from The Unofficial Frazetta Gallery Page.

Recommended reading:
Icon: A Retrospective by the Grand Master of Fantastic Art
Legacy: Paintings and Drawings by Frank Frazetta
Testament: The Life and Art of Frank Frazetta
Spectrum Presents: Frank Frazetta: Rough Work

During our year-end review, we have discovered a number of factual errors in comics published in 2009. Please find our corrections below.

#567; O Selfless Saviors
It is an overstatement to say that no children have ever been poisoned by Halloween treats. In 1964, a woman handed out pellets of ant poison masquerading as treats; in 1974 a father gave his son a candy straw filled with cyanide. However, the man was using Halloween as a cover to kill his child, and the woman’s treats were clearly labeled and intended as a dark comment on the treat tradition. Thus, the point stands.

#526; In which it Hardly Matters
International Crossword Standards & Practices Union rules prohibit this pattern of blank squares from appearing in a regulation puzzle.

#523; In which Vince achieves Victory
Vince’s minor repair job did not actually require a wrench. It could have been accomplished with pliers.

#510; In which Rob tries to read
Rob also reads to earn fundraising pledges in his school’s Read-A-Thon.

#509; In which a Horn is overt
Sebastian did, in fact, take a lil’ blow. Just to see what would happen.

#485; The Australian Butler
Dinner was not actually ready.

Wondermark regrets the errors.

See also: 2008 Errata