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New Wondermark holiday card for 2017!

There’s a new Wondermark holiday card this year! It is based on comic #779, “The Breakthrough”.

(Click for a closer look.)

It joins the many other Wondermark holiday cards currently up in my store, which you can order in sets large and small:

Also available are stickers, wooden magnets, and puzzles!

Finally, while I have no pictures or information yet available about the 2018 Wondermark limited-edition calendar, it is now available for pre-order, if you already know you want it.

Over at my TopatoCo store, I have a lot of T-shirts, books, and other nonsense! Did you know you can also order a large, handsome print of any Wondermark comic? It sounds impossible, but it’s true, thanks to TECHNOLOGY.

The time to order from TopatoCo is now; they are always busy as heck this time of year. Here is their list of ordering deadlines for guaranteed by-Christmas delivery.

We have one day remaining over on Kickstarter for the Wall Buddies project! It’s not mentioned on the project page, but I’m confirming it here: if you back the project, it will ship with a Wondermark Cast Card that commemorates that campaign in particular. Update: The funding period has ended, hooray! Soon, we’ll get to work making Wall Buddies!

Finally, over on Patreon I’ve written a third installment for my Archive Dive series, declaiming at ridiculous navel-gazing length about individual Wondermark comics from the archives. This one’s called Five Wondermarks that Foresaw the Future and it’s a real roller coaster of emotions! (This particular post is free to read for everyone, not just patrons.)

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!