The commotion is that the flying man who always comes by has returned once again.

#1581; The Longest, Most Fruitless Search

  — January 23rd, 2026

[ Tags: , , , ]       Permalink: https://wondermark.com/c/1581/

Continued from Wondermark #024
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ANIMATION: Real True Actual Stories of America

Here’s something neat! I was contacted by Audible.co.uk and asked if I’d like to help promote the new book by historian and memoirist Bill Bryson, One Summer: America 1927. TURNS OUT it’s a really interesting book filled with factoids and stories about the personalities and social movements of the 1920s — Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Al Jolson, and many others whose names are less familiar to us now.

Audible allowed me to, uh, loosely interpret some of the moments in the book to create a series of six animated videos! The first casts Babe Ruth & Calvin Coolidge as odd-couple roommates. The second is about good ol’ Henry Ford.

I’ll post the others in the coming days. Check out the videos, I hope you like them! We had a lot of fun making them.

INTRODUCING A NEW WORD: /stemp/ (n)


Flickr photo by Kiana Wilson

I want to share an email that I received last week, from Marksman Geoff S., regarding Panel 3 from Comic #978:

Dearest Mr. Malki !,

Oh my, I thought I read the word, “STEMP” and I had this epiphany that that was the real name for a pumpkin stem (or perhaps that of any gourd), all woody and cut to look like a tree stump, and that somehow I had lived over 40 years of my life without knowing that piece of trivia and I was MAD at life for not knowing it sooner because it made SO MUCH FRICKIN SENSE HOW DID I NEVER KNOW THAT A PUMPKIN STEM WAS CALLED A STEMP?

Anyway, then my eyes caught up with the pixels and I saw the question mark.

Thought you’d like to know. Please keep up the terrific work.

Well, Geoff, this is the best email I’ve received in at least a week. I posted it on Twitter and received this reply:


I immediately agreed, and knew at once that I should enlist the aid of my friend Erin McKean at Wordnik, which is a site that tracks definitions, unusual words, neologisms, and the ongoing march of language.

Not an hour later, this existed.

It has no citations or formal definitions yet, because as descriptive linguists know, a word isn’t real until people use it. So go out and “stemp!” (Also: stemp is not a verb.)

Check out: ‘Help Fund My Robot Army’, a fiction anthology!

Multi-award-winning anthlology editor John Joseph Adams is putting together a fiction collection on Kickstarter about Kickstarter.

It’s called HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! & Other Improbable Kickstarters, and it’s all stories of fantastic and improbable crowdfunding projects — essentially, using the format of a Kickstarter project to create narratives, such as the short story the book is titled after: “Help Fund My Robot Army!!!”, by Keffy R.M. Kehrli (which you can read online for free):

The field of robotics is full of hacks, engineers with no creative impulse. Scientists who wouldn’t know ambition if it hit them in the face with a laser cannon. Well! I have spent the past twenty years designing my robot army—no machine out of place—to take over the world for my own nefarious purposes.

With this in mind, I am asking for $40,000,000,000 to pay for equipment, raw materials, rent for my secret lair, and a Playstation.

I have no doubt that you are wondering what I will do if—ah, though it is not “if” so much as “when”!—I surpass my initial funding goals. My stretch goals include a squad of “Steam Punk” robots, including gears, parasols, and gold inlay; a domed city to house survivors, surrounded by a moat complete with robot sharks to keep them safe; and a collection of plush versions of my most popular robot models…

The anthology is full of a great roster of talent, as well as me! I somehow snuck in there. I will be writing a story for the book! And John has posted a short interview with me today as well.

The Kickstarter campaign for the anthology ends on Thursday, so there’s a few days left if you’d like to pledge for a copy.

John’s video, I will also advise you, is full of kittens. The man knows how to get me!!

Three days left for EMERGENCY BEARD!

I’m pleased to announce that my Emergency Beard shirt has hit its funding goal, which means that it’ll be printed for sure! If you were hanging back, waiting to see if it would, in fact, become a real thing, I have good news: it will!

I’ve also made Bella ladies’ versions available. I didn’t at first because I couldn’t figure out how, but then I figured it out. So now you can get either a mens/unisex cut, or a relaxed ladies’ cut, or both, or ten of each. Maybe you have a team? I don’t judge.

The shirt will only be available through this Thursday afternoon, so if you’d like one, grab it now! UPDATE: It’s over, thanks everyone! We may add it to the regular TopatoCo store later, but if we do, it wouldn’t be until after the New Year at the earliest. And by then, beards may be outlawed :O


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