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I’m writing a guest story on Dave Kellett’s DRIVE!

For the next few months, I’m writing (and Kris Straub is illustrating) a guest story for Dave Kellet’s sci-fi comic DRIVE.

The first page of our story starts here — three pages have been posted so far, alternating each week with Dave’s ongoing storyline.

If you’re not familiar, DRIVE is a space-opera humor comic following the adventures of a spaceship crew in an interstellar Second Spanish Empire.

Kris’ and my story, “The First Ship that Fell”, will flesh out some of the details surrounding a mysterious event in the empire’s past, only hinted at in Dave’s story so far.

Which is to say, it’ll make more sense if you know the overall story. If you haven’t read it, it’s well worth starting at the beginning! By the time you catch up, more pages of my story will likely have been posted, and you will be able to savor all the delightful nuances. (Note: none of the characters in our side story so far have ever been seen in DRIVE before.)

Dave has been very kind to open the doors of his universe to guest authors telling side stories, and I’m thrilled to have the chance to add to his mythos, and also to collaborate with Kris once again! Check in as we continue telling this 14-part (!) story.

WALL BUDDIES UPDATE:

It’s the final week to place a pledge for one of our laser-cut Wall Buddies! Update: The campaign’s over! Thanks everyone!

In our latest project update, we announced a stretch goal: MINI BUDDIES!

Mini Buddies are tiny fridge-magnet versions of our Wall Buddy designs. Anyone who pledges for Wall Buddies can now add Mini Buddies to their order too!

At present, these specific Mini Buddies are ONLY available with a Wall Buddies pledge. And as a reminder, all orders from this Kickstarter campaign will ship in early 2018. So plan ahead for NEXT holiday season! You always want to get ahead of the game so you don’t have to scramble last-minute again. TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY.

The campaign ends this Friday, and then I’ll shut up about it and start talking about the new Wondermark Calendar instead!

GIRD YOUR EYEBALLS!

[ WALL BUDDIES on KICKSTARTER ]

Wondermark Q+A: Pose your questions!

Embed from Getty Images

Let’s pull back the curtain a bit! I’d like to do a mailbag style post where I try to answer any BURNING QUESTIONS you might have, about Wondermark, or my other work, or anything else you might be interested in.

For maximum visibility, I’d prefer you leave your question on the Wondermark Facebook page, but if you don’t have Facebook or prefer not to post there, you can also comment here on this post and I’ll see it.

I’ll do a question & answer roundup in a future blog post!

And if you see someone else posting a question you’re interested in, like it (in the FB comments) or upvote it (in this post’s comments).

(Note: a few years ago I also did a brief AMA on Reddit. But maybe my answers to those questions have changed since then, WHO KNOWS??)

Happy Thanksgiving weekend, Americans! I’m thankful for ALL OF YOU. I mean it sincerely!

Wall Buddies Chessboard Upgrades!

Here’s a little update on our Chessboard Wall Buddies! (Just one of the eight different designs available in our Kickstarter project.) Update: The campaign is over! Thanks everyone!

Thanks to a suggestion by my good friend Joey Comeau, for a small extra charge we can now CUSTOMIZE the position of the pieces to your preference:

So, if you want to commemorate a famous or personally significant game, or would like to construct a mate puzzle, or just want to make some weird arrangement, we can now make that for you!

Otherwise, if one orders the Chess Buddy without specifying, we’ll send the 1.e4 position pictured at top.

To specify a custom position, pledge for any tier and add $10.02 to whatever your pledge amount would otherwise be. The ten dollars covers the extra work for customization and the .02 is a way to help us tell at a glance which orders should be the custom ones. We will send an email asking about the custom instructions before we ship the order!

Some possible custom positions might be:

  • a final position from a famous game, such as the IMMORTAL GAME or the EVERGREEN GAME;
  • a surprising position worth contemplating and marveling over, such as one from Fischer-Spassky 1972;
  • Humanity’s Last Stand — a position before Kasparov’s first loss to Deep Blue;
  • a dramatic position in which EVERY PAWN has been promoted, to inspire heart attacks in viewers;
  • a diagrammatic representation of a real-life conflict such as the Battle of Agincourt, in which a series of knights face off against many pawns;
  • a bucolic peacetime scene, in which pawns keep patrol around scattered rooks;
  • a diorama of the G20 summit, full of intermingled kings and queens;
  • a monastery crammed with 64 bishops;
  • your sweetie’s initials spelled out in rooks;
  • or, of course, The Proletariat Revolution Reaches The Stables:

Any legal or illegal position or combination of pieces is possible. $10.02 added to any base pledge amount lets us know you’d like a custom layout! (And for more than one custom chessboard, add the extra $10.02 for each, natch).

[ WALL BUDDIES – Funding now through November 30 ]

Check out: My interview with the WALLET INSPECTORS

Recently I had the pleasure of being interrogated by the Aussie podcastketeers of THE WALLET INSPECTORS.

It’s a short-ish (around half an hour) discussion in which they make me describe and explain the contents of my wallet, which happens to look like this:

Find out how and why I STOLE this “wallet” from the Hyatt Regency in Denver, on the WALLET INSPECTORS podcast!

Listen online at their site here, or on Overcast here.

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WALL BUDDIES UPDATE: We’re trucking along over on Kickstarter! We’re offering eight different pieces of laser-cut wall art, including this design:

Pre-orders are open all November, for an estimated spring 2018 delivery! Update: The campaign is over! Thanks everyone!

More Wall Buddies available – now with 8 different designs!

A little while ago I posted about Wall Buddies, our new line of classy, laser-cut wall hangings. I had a handful of them left over from a limited run we made for convention season, and many of you snapped them up!

Well, now we’re making more — a bunch more. We’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign that’s collecting orders now! Update: The campaign is over! Thanks everyone!

Wall Buddies! Framed Artwork of the Inventive Virtues

The “Inventive Virtues” are explained more in our pitch video (which I’m really proud of and hope you watch!). In essence, we’ve selected eight iconic images that stand alone as pieces of art, but also can represent specific virtues worth cultivating for creative individuals.

In the campaign, you can order any single Wall Buddy (of the 8 designs available), or, you can get multiples — however many you pledge for, we’ll ask you once the campaign is over which specific design(s) we should make for you.

We’re making them all in-house in our workshop in Los Angeles. Here’s my partner in this venture, Jason Lioi, putting one together:

We plan to run the campaign for the month of November, then have a special order of frames manufactured in a custom style by a frame factory. We’ll spend the first few months of 2018 making Wall Buddies, and begin shipping them to backers as soon as the frames come in.

It’s a simple campaign without a lot of complex stuff going on, this time — it’ll be hard enough keeping everyone’s orders of all 8 designs straight, so I don’t want to complicate matters!

Though, as the campaign progresses, some upgrades and alternate versions may become available… We have some ideas for stretch goals. But it’ll depend on how much interest there is overall!

Meanwhile, just to let you know what to expect, the Wondermark Calendar will go on sale and ship as usual in December. That project will overlap with this campaign a little — the calendar will ship out before any Wall Buddies will — but I trust you to understand the order that things have to happen.

Jason and I have been talking about making Wall Buddies for months, and as I mentioned in the previous post, we took some samples to Comic-Con and Gen Con this year to gauge interest. When you see a Wall Buddy in person, the texture of the material is really striking, and people loved them at the shows!

So, we made a bunch more, and now you can get them! Hope you like these — I’ll talk much more about them in the month to come, surely. And if nothing else, be sure to watch the video!

Wall Buddies! Framed Artwork of the Inventive Virtues