blog: things you should check out

I thought this video was tremendous.

(via Boing Boing)

First, a quick Boston-n-Austin update: Thanks very much, kind Austinites, for your notes and emails — I think I’ll be covered! I’ll be writing back to you in the next day or two to follow up. And Bostonians: I’m looking forward to meeting you at The Asgard tonight! It might be a bit crowded, but please consider this your official permission to not be shy. I insist you come right up and say hello. Hope to see you there!

NOW THEN. The Devastator (pictured above) is a brand-new quarterly comedy anthology! The brainiacs behind the whole thing are my friends Amanda Meadows and Geoffrey Golden. Here’s a recent interview with The Apiary in which they talk about it. And guess what: I have an original Wondermark story in the book! It features Inspector Gadget. Yes. A Wondermark Inspector Gadget. He was so fun to make. It’s a fun little tale of a man with a thousand pounds of clockworks stuffed in his body. The small stories are the most universal.

Amanda and Geoffrey are funding the first issue using Kickstarter, meaning that in order to actually put the thing to print and pay all the contributors, they’re essentially doing pre-orders for the final book in the form of pledges. Pledge a little, and you’ll get a PDF or a hardcopy of the book; pledge more, and you can get all sorts of nifty limited-edition swag as well. But here’s how Kickstarter works: if the total amount isn’t pledged, then nobody pays anything — and the book doesn’t get made. But it’s so close right now! There’s about a week left in the pledge period, and at the time of this writing, it only needs about another $500. UPDATE: You are the best. That seems to me like a highly surmountable obstacle, so won’t you please check it out?

Oh and here is a video too!

IT’S DEVASTATOR TIME!! Thanks for your support!

I did not make the above illustration! Marksman Brian G. kindly forwarded me this article at Futility Closet, which reprints a 1910 magazine feature entitled “If Insects Were Bigger”:

What a terrible calamity, what a stupefying circumstance, if mosquitoes were the size of camels, and a herd of wild slugs the size of elephants invaded our gardens and had to be shot with rifles!

Basically, someone beat me to Wondermark by 100 years or so (and this even predates Max Ernst by a few decades). The full article is well worth a read. Thanks, Brian!

Several kind readers brought to my attention the “Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage” exhibit, showing through May 9 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Here’s a great description from an article in the CS Monitor:

William Henry Fox Talbot introduced photography to England in 1839. Due to the cumbersome equipment and time and expense required, photographs were the exclusive purview of the wealthy. In the 1850s, however, commercial cartes-de-visite with photographic portraits (the size of business cards today) became, as [curator Malcolm] Daniel says, “wildly, wildly popular – a worldwide phenomenon.” Collecting and displaying these pictures fueled a fad called “cartomania.” When Queen Victoria had her portrait made in the 1860s, 3 million to 4 million copies were made and sold. […]

This accessibility and democratizing effect posed a problem for the “upper ten thousand” of high-society England. Wishing to re-establish the display of photographs as an elite activity, amateur artists adopted a cut-and-paste technique that required ample leisure not available to the masses. The female album creators collaged images of family, friends, and celebrities, mixing fact (photographs) and fancy (the sometimes irreverent settings they drew).

Finally, Mike H. sends along this collection of drunken mugshots from 1904. Need more be said?