THIS SUNDAY: Tune in live to my basement!

I’m doing a very simple one-day-only holiday promo – I’ve created a convention table at home, and you can visit it virtually!

It works like this:

  • Tune in anytime you like on Twitch between 11am–6pm Pacific time on Sunday. I’ll be working on comics in between chatting with “attendees.”

  • You can also pre-browse my current merch offerings on my site and on BackerKit to familiarize yourself with what’s available.

    (I’m leaving the pre-order store from the pins project open until the end of the year. After that, some – but not all – of the products will migrate back to my online store.)

  • To “approach the table,” join a one-on-one call by going to wondermark.com/bc. This will open a Google Meet that will let us have a face-to-face conversation!

    (Our call will be visible to the Twitch audience too, so you’ll be able to see whether I’m currently talking to anyone or not.)

  • While we chat, I’ll be happy to answer questions about any individual items you like; sign books or prints; and you can even commission a Roll-a-Sketch! Which I can probably draw right there while you watch!

  • You don’t need to buy anything to join and chat! But if you DO want to buy something, I’ll create an online payment link for you.

All U.S. orders will get FREE SHIPPING for any orders placed at BasementCon! You don’t even have to pay for parking or overpriced convention-center pizza!

Of course, you can also place regular store orders (at the links above, or over at TopatoCo, where they offer an overlapping but distinct set of fine Wondermark products) and we’ll get those out promptly to you as well, no conversation required.

For example: Multi-Purpose Greeting Card Sets were out of stock for a while, but they’re back, baby – I’ve reprinted both the holiday editions and the general-purpose versions.

Hope to see you on Sunday!!

Check out: Cabel Sasser’s amazing XOXO 2024 talk

A few months ago, I attended the final XOXO conference in Portland, Oregon.

XOXO is (was) an IRL gathering of “the good internet” — bloggers, hackers, artists, journalists, makers, all coming together to bounce off each other for a few days to see what happens.

Each annual installment was a place of learning, of inspiration, of friendly collegiality and of bonding over shared interests (and shared distress, sometimes — after all, the subject at hand is the internet, and what it does to people).

This year, XOXO returned for the first time since before the pandemic. It was billed as “Once more, with feelings.”

One of the themes that emerged from the talks, presentations, and conversations was the state of community on today’s internet.

Lots of people at XOXO, myself included, have spent the last few years reeling from the hyper-fragmentation and accelerating commodification of online spaces.

For example: Twitter used to be a place where I could reliably converse with and broadcast to a lot of like-minded people. Now, personally, I’m done with Twitter. I’ll never post there again.

That space has become toxic, and not merely toxic, but useless to me with respect to what I want out of a social network (conversation; reach; entertainment).

Bluesky…Threads…Mastodon…Private Discords and niche subreddits…Substack newsletters and Facebook groups just one spam DM away from being hacked…Everyone I know who works online has had to face the question, lately, of what is going to work now.

For now, I’ve personally shifted my focus to Bluesky – here is my personal profile, and here is one for Wondermark comics. I hope to see you there!

As for the video linked above…

All the XOXO speakers were great, and you can watch all their talks on YouTube (from this year and years past).

But I’ve chosen to highlight Cabel Sasser’s talk in this post for a few reasons:

  • It’s very entertaining. The entire audience was on the edge of our seats the whole time.
  • It’s on a topic I care deeply about: remembering, and cherishing, artwork from the past that can speak to us in the present in a new way.
  • It’s about taking time to save, and bring along with us, things we love that might otherwise be lost as we move from place to place, platform to platform, website to website.

Watch the whole talk, and then, visit the website Cabel set up in its aftermath. (No spoilers from me.)

[ Cabel Sasser describes how he discovered a forgotten artist – XOXO 2024 ]