Featured Projects

2011 Calendar pre-order! Plus new cards and more.

Thank you kindly for the great advice regarding my plastics conundrum! I have been in touch with several kind individuals and I hope to have the situation well in hand forthwith.

I am also pleased to announce that the 2011 Wondermark Calendar is now available for pre-order!

2011 Wondermark Calendar

This will be the fourth year I’ve offered the calendar, and every year they sell out. The calendars are produced by hand and are individually signed and numbered! They’re mailed in the order that they were ordered, so the first buyer will get #1 (which is already gone!) and the last, #175. To get the lowest possible number, order now! Do the numbers matter? Not to me. But maybe to you???

Last year I wrote a very detailed explanation of how we create the calendars. I looked back through it today and I’m really pleased with how it reads! If you missed it last year, definitely take a look. I think it’s pretty interesting!

IN OTHER NEWS

Here are three brand-new Monocle Poppers™ holiday cards I’ve created just for you:

These add to my existing catalog of holiday cards to make nine designs total! Plus the various blank notecards, thank-you cards and the all-powerful Every Occasion Card. And remember that you get steep discounts for multiple cards! Basically what I am saying is that I got you covered. If you need cards, I am your man.

SPECIAL NOTE: The calendars will ship later in December, but I know you need holiday cards in-hand earlier so I’ll be sending all card orders out ASAP. Feel free to combine both in one order, and I’ll send the cards out right away even if the calendar has to follow later on.

(Non-US customers: Priority Mail is always your better bet in terms of expedient shipping. International First Class simply cannot be predicted nor guaranteed.)

FINALLY

Here is a new offering in the ol’ dry-goods concern: loose pages from old books for use in crafting, collage, or really anything you like (I won’t judge):

These are the lovely remnants after I have mined old volumes for their usable images! I am making them available in packs of about 100 pages each. See, I’m starting to fill box after box with these pages and I figure someone else can put them to better use than I can! They’d be great for all sorts of craft projects or just lining a drawer in that armoire you found on Craigslist.

Some covers are available too, for your journal or what-have-you! You do what you like. I’m just the enabler.

AND A BRIEF NOTE

Regarding Wondermark books, posters, shirts etc. from TopatoCo: that fine institution has posted its holiday ordering guidelines which I recommend taking a hearty peek at! However I will also mention that I do have one brand-new shirt in the TopatoCo pipeline which has yet to appear — hopefully that will show its face soon.

SO THAT’S WHAT I GOT

Machine of Death – Buy it October 26.

For some of you, this image is all you need to know.

You remember my call for submissions for this anthology, based on a Dinosaur Comic that postulated the idea of a machine that could predict how a person would die. You recall me talking about the 700 submissions we received, and how we whittled it down to 30. You’ve asked me at conventions for the last four years — “When’s Machine of Death coming out? What’s the story with that? I really want to read that book!”

The answer is: October 26. Tuesday.

For the unfamiliar, here’s a bit of the premise:

The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how they were going to die.

The problem with the machine is that nobody really knew how it worked, which wouldn’t actually have been that much of a problem if the machine worked as well as we wished it would. But the machine was frustratingly vague in its predictions: dark, and seemingly delighting in the ambiguities of language. OLD AGE, it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death — you can know how it’s going to happen, but you’ll still be surprised when it does.

There were now machines in every doctor’s office and in booths at the mall. You could pay someone or you could probably get it done for free, but the result was the same no matter what machine you went to. They were, at least, consistent.

The book contains 34 stories by folks such as me, Ryan North, Randall Munroe, Shaenon Garrity, Yahtzee Croshaw, Erin McKean, James Lafond Sutter and a bunch of other great people. The stories are illustrated by folks such as Kate Beaton, Kazu Kibuishi, Aaron Diaz, Karl Kerschl, Jeffrey Brown, Scott Campbell, Cameron Stewart, Adam Koford and just too many more people to list. (Although at that link we try.) We’re also doing an audiobook that’s narrated by folks I can’t even mention yet.

Here is the significance of October 26 specifically:

It only takes a few hundred sales in a short time to become a Number One bestseller on Amazon.com.

So even though the book is available for purchase now, we want to concentrate all the attention onto October 26. Blog about it, tweet about it, invite your friends to the Facebook event — just spread the word that October 26 is the day to buy Machine of Death on Amazon.

We talk about the whole deal some more at the official Machine of Death site:

The simple truth is that we probably can’t compete on the shelves at Barnes & Noble alongside every other book in the world. The agents and the publishers are right; it might not work for a mass market. That’s okay. We don’t need to sell it to everyone. We don’t need to sell 100,000 copies; we don’t have the rent on a New York office to pay for.

We only need to sell it to you.

On October 26, we want to send a message that a little project dragged kicking and screaming from “crazy idea” past “it’ll never work” all the way to “By God, they actually did it” can make a big splash. We’re internet people; you are too. We want to prove to all the people who said “this will never sell” that internet people make things happen.

Here’s the link to that post explaining everything: http://machineofdeath.net/a/mod-day

Here’s the book on Amazon — tack your own affiliate link on there and make a few bucks, we don’t mind: http://machineofdeath.net/oct26/

Here’s the Facebook event.

Here’s our faces when everybody pitches in and we take the world by storm: 😀

Buy it on October 26! Spread the word! And thank you!

Tweet Me Harder LANDMARK EPISODE 30

I hope you’ve been listening to my weekly comedy podcast, Tweet Me Harder! If you haven’t, there’s absolutely no better time to start — the latest episode that’s been posted, Episode 30, may be our best yet. I’m super-pleased with how the show’s been progressing and developing over the last few months, and if you like the voice and temperament behind Wondermark, I’m confident recommending TMH to you as well.

In fact HERE IS THE EPISODE IN QUESTION for your listening pleasure:

(direct MP3 link)

We’re engaged in a concerted campaign right now to get noticed by the folks at iTunes who decide on the “staff picks,” which are podcasts that are given special precedence in the iTunes directory. If you’re an iTunes user, and you enjoy the show, there are two things you can do to help:

– You can subscribe to the podcast using this direct iTunes link, which is what determines our popularity ranking;
– You can rate and/or comment on the show in iTunes!

And, of course, there is one thing that you can always do, iTunes user or not, TMH fan or not… you can give yourself a big ol’ hug. Why not? (Unless you are spiky)

How to Make a Calendar, Part 5

Now Put A Bow On It

Continued from Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

Although the printing is complete, and the room no longer smells like denatured alcohol & paint thinner (except for the splash I’ve added to my coffee for a little pick-me-up), there’s a bit more to be done before the calendars are Formally Finished. Once the covers are signed and numbered, all the cards are collated into sets and double-checked to make sure nobody’s getting two Augusts or getting shorted a February. Although I do want to sow a sense of existential ennui among the populace at large, we now have too many external calendar systems for any minor rebellion here to be tremendously effective, and I will save my efforts in that realm for more grandiose schemes.

Last year, we collated the cards by setting the stacks around a table and then continually circling the table over and over, picking up a card from each successive stack like it was the world’s most obsessive comic-convention freebie table. That was a very dizzy way to do things. This year we just kinda put them in a long row and then walked down the row a bunch of times.

With the cards collated, they’re then SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION into little capsule units that can be thrust headlong into our shipping workflow:

And these, along with the easels if desired, are what customers get! We spent the full day yesterday packaging and shipping, and I’m pleased to announce both that: all pending pre-orders have been sent, and all new orders are shipping out immediately. As of this writing, less than two dozen copies remain. Please, if you’ve been on the fence about ordering, don’t delay — I’d hate for you to miss out. UPDATE: You guys are too much. They are all gone!

(I will also be a little sheepish here and say that if they sell out while I’m asleep tonight, and I’m unable to update the store in time, please forgive me if I have to write an apologetic email. Hopefully this won’t happen.) ack

That buzzkill aside! I am so tremendously pleased with how this whole process has gone that I can hardly tell you. (Though you cannot fault me for trying.) Whether you buy a calendar or not, whether this has inspired you to make anything creative of your own or not, whether you’re even the least bit interested in this process or not, I hope you take one key thing away from this entire, long-winded story. I’ll put it on its own line and bold it so you’re sure not to miss it:

You can make something from nothing.

Let me repeat that. You can make something from nothing. The Wondermark Calendar is not a model kit that we assembled from directions. It’s not a box of LEGO® brand interlocking building blocks that we dumped onto the floor and then very precisely made into a spaceship. The LEGO® brand interlocking building blocks that we used were paper and ink. Any meaning that they have been given is meaning that we have fabricated.

You can do this too. I’m not saying you should necessarily make a calendar, or start hunting eBay for a GOCCO, or anything so specific — I’m saying that the tools and the effort and the materials and the sweat that went into our project are nothing my wife and I have a monopoly on. They are not hard to fathom nor out of reach. It just takes work: exposing yourself to ideas, swishing them around with other ideas and original notions, being a bit of a perfectionist at times, and just working at it. I know I’m never so satisfied with my job as when I sit down and make things that used to not exist.

(click)

I’m going to stop there; you can run with that ball anywhere you like, or leave it be, as you prefer. I just think it’s neat that there was nothing and then I had some cockamamie idea and figured out where to buy paper and stuff and then, a bunch of man-hours and problem-solving later, there is something. This is a thing we wrestled into existence. If you buy one of our things, you will be getting a tidy little package made of paper, ink, brass, and force of will.

If this calendar stays in your house, in the most quiet stillness of an afternoon when everything is at an ebb — if you get very close, close enough to see the fibers and detect the thin mounding of the ink over the paper — and if you hold your breath and if your refrigerator isn’t on and if the pets are all napping and nobody’s trying to email you right then —

— If the rest of the world is silent, and if the light catches it just perfectly right, I do believe you will see this thing’s heartbeat.

Thanks very much for all your kind attention this week, and for your wonderfully flattering patronage. While I was writing this, I went back and checked and it looks like one more has sold. I am serious. Get one now, if ever. UPDATE: They are gone, compadre. Wowsers.

That being said, I understand that this isn’t for everyone, and to those folks, sorry for hammering on this point all week. Thank you, regardless — I will make other things, on other days, for free most of the time, and presumably you will be able to share in those. It’s been a fun week but it ain’t over yet so now I am going to go to bed.

How to Make a Calendar, Part 4

Printing Pluperfect

Continued from Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

With screens prepared and supplies obtained, it’s time to print! Each screen is inked (above), affixed to the GOCCO, and THE PRINTING BEGIIIIIINS

One new challenge we had this year with the thermofax screens was the concept of cleaning and re-using the plastic frames. At the end of a run, the screens typically end up looking like this:

With the help of magical chemicals, we scrape and clean the ink off each frame, the mesh screen itself gracefully retired with the dignity due a hero whose job has been completed with honor (i.e., it’s tossed into the trash). Then, using several flavors of tape and tape-like compounds, a new screen is affixed to each frame! THE CYCLE BEGINS ANEW.

To be quite honest, this is a messy, time-consuming and smelly part of the process, and for those considering doing a similar project, definitely consider having all your screens mounted on separate frames ahead of time. It might be a much smarter use of time and energy than cleaning all these ridiculous little frames and running out to get more double-sided tape and cursing the heavens because a screen was adhered slightly crooked because you are not as good at doing this as someone who has set up a business doing it and has likely done it many more times more than you have. Takeaway business advice: Delegate, delegate, delegate.

Still, time-consuming or no, the method does work! Using just those six frames, we successfully printed 38 screens’ worth of designs onto over two thousand individual cards.

Now comes the fun part!

Every single calendar is individually signed and numbered. And they’re sent out in order, so the later you buy, the higher number you’ll get in the series. Do people care about getting low numbers? I’m not sure. Anyway, if you do, time’s a-wastin’! As of this writing (Thursday morning), over half of the run of 150 have been sold, which means that the very lowest numbers are already gone — but there are still calendars available, which there won’t always be, and they’ll be shipping out as quickly as possible all the rest of this week with love and kindness included at no extra charge.

Most places charge extra for that! Or they bury the kindness cost in suspicious “handling fees”. We guarantee all our kindness is certified organic and hormone-free. It will absolutely not gum up the inside of the shipping envelope. (We have learned our lesson about that.) Seriously, it is good.

If you haven’t ordered yet, won’t you consider it? We have been working hard all month on something that you can enjoy all next year!

And to those who have ordered: thank you so very much! SHIPPING BEGINS TO-FREAKING-DAY

Anyway there is still ONE MORE PART TO GO!
Tomorrow: Part 5: Putting It All Together