Official Wondermark beard correspondent Pat Race writes in to share this stirring highlight video his team shot at the 2009 World Beard & Moustache Championships in Anchorage, Alaska. If you would like to see three minutes of amazing beard after amazing beard after amazing moustache after amazing moustache, are you ever in luck.
He’s also got a longer video account of his and his cohorts’ trip to the WBMC up at his blog. Thanks for sharing, Pat!
(Flickr photo by MagnusApollo)
I had such a good time at the New England Webcomics Weekend! Ryan and I had a new printing of Machine of Death on our table and they were going like hotcakes that had been printed on and bound like books. Also we were pleased to see folks bringing in their Amazon copies to be signed by the many, many contributors in attendance! Hooray! More pictures of the event on Flickr.
Next on the schedule is SteamCon, in Seattle, next weekend! I’m going to be giving two presentations: one where I make a Wondermark comic before your very eyes, and another entitled “True Stuff from Old Books” where I’ll be showing off some of the exciting things I’ve unearthed in strange old volumes over the last seven years or so. I’m quite excited for this show as it means I get to wear my bowler cap! I mean I guess I could wear the bowler every day but it starts to weigh heavy on my ears.
P.S. Check out J.J. McCullough’s great caricatures of some of the artists attending NEWW!
P.P.S. This novel product has been listed as something that people buy on Amazon after looking at Machine of Death. (Check out customer-submitted images and reviews for full effect.)
I’m pleased to announce that as of this week, classic Wondermark episodes will be running in The Onion’s A.V. Club every Monday and Thursday! Many of you know that Wondermark ran in the print edition of The Onion for several years and it took a global economic collapse to defeat my talon-like hold on that paper. Now, after patiently waiting across the street and pretending to read a magazine since 2008, I’ve managed to sneak into the A.V. Club through an unattended back door and will be frantically hacking some HTML onto their site twice a week until they notice. Check out my curated selection of favorite episodes from Wondermark’s 7+ year history, twice a week at the A.V. Club!
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?
So thrilled to announce this! Machine of Death is now available in a variety of digital formats. Here’s the full rundown but I’ll just hit the highlights:
• FREE DOWNLOADABLE PDF. You hear that? Grab the whole book for free. We even got two versions of it, depending on the dimensions you prefer. We want you to have it. As we say on the site:
Why are we doing this? Aren’t we worried about hurting our book sales?
In a word: no. You have proven time and again that you are willing to pay for content that you find valuable. You have shown that you are driven to share material that you fall in love with. And we are committed to ensuring that you can experience our work whether you can afford to buy a book or not; whether you live in a country that Amazon ships to or not; whether you have space in your life for a stack of paper or not.
Please, download, read, share and enjoy!
• KINDLE VERSION. Instantly downloadable from Amazon, worldwide. Only $9.99 and available right this second.
• EPUB VERSION. Instantly downloadable via a link here, same price.
• NOOK/iBOOKS versions are in the works; not ready quite yet.
(And remember! You can get a free ebook version — meaning Kindle, ePub, or rich-text — just by forwarding us your order confirmation from a print version! The order can be from Amazon or TopatoCo, it doesn’t matter which. But you have to send it to info at machineofdeath dot net by midnight this Friday! The free-ebook offer will end after Friday.)
• PODCAST. That’s right! We’re recording audio versions of every story in the book and will be releasing them as a free podcast, about once a week. That means you have around thirty-four weeks of free entertainment to look forward to! Many of the stories are read by their authors, while others are read by generous and talented friends and colleagues. The first episode is available now and it’s great.
You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking here: http://www.itunes.com/podcast?id=402077546
Or here’s the direct feed address if you want to pop it into a non-iTunes podcatcher. For iTunes subscriptions, though, please use the link above — that way the subscription goes through iTunes’ servers and lets them know that folks are listening.
I also spoke briefly with American Public Media’s John Moe — one of my favorite radio hosts — on today’s Marketplace Tech Report about our campaign of loading you up with all this free stuff! (The segment with me starts about 3:30 in.)
Thank you for all your support! We couldn’t be more amazingly thrilled and proud of the book itself and everything that’s happened — and continuing to happen — around it. We hope you love it too!