blog: things you should check out

2009 Calendars! & Capsule book reviews

Hey what’s this?

It’s the 2009 Wondermark Calendar! These guys are made of twelve individual monthly cards, each 8.5″ x 5.5″, which sit in a heavy brass easel. Each month is adorned with an image and a bit of dark verse written by me. The calendars are hand-screenprinted by my wife Nikki in our home, and are strictly limited to 150 copies.

We didn’t have a chance to make a new video, but the process is exactly the same as last year, illustrated below (or at this link, for readers on feeds):

…With the sole exception that I am now a full year older than in that video. This year’s calendars are created by hand just like last year, and they are available with the easel (recommended!) or simply as a “refill” of just the cards if you still have an easel from last year. We are printing the 150 copies of the calendar now, and will start shipping them next week. You should order them right this second — our U.S. shipping deadline is nominally this Sunday, but we will continue shipping all packages (sans guarantee) right up ’til Christmas Day, at which point we will collapse from exhaustion. So your chances are reasonable to very good, and you should order now.

“But David,” you may say in a charming accent, “are you insane? Those of us in far-flung foreign countries with postal services that you justifiably distrust could never get these by Christmas!”

A-ha! I’ve got you covered, friend. I will do everything in my power to get these calendars out the door as soon as possible. BUT, should the vagaries of Fate stand between my California hovel and your palatial estate in Dublin or Johannesburg or Auckland or Oslo or Hong Kong, your sweetie for whom you have purchased this thoughtful gift will not be empty-handed come The Day. For you can give them this:

It is a Certificate asserting that you have, indeed, purchased a calendar and that it is on its way. Simply print it out on A4 paper (right-click to download PDF) and keep it as a backup in case your postman disappoints you. Your honeybunch will understand! And then you can have a Second Christmas when it finally arrives. (I think in the majority of cases this will not be necessary, but, you know, just in case.)

As I said, there will only be 150 of these calendars made. This is a bit of a gamble; we sold 100 last year, and I’ve decided to step it up one notch. But savvy pre-ordering customers have already purchased, as of this writing, 51 of the 150 — so only 99 remain! Go to it.

CAPSULE BOOK REVIEWS

Okay, time’s getting short, the holidays approacheth anon, you’ve still got a long list, let’s get to it. Books your clever friends & weird family will love:

The Affected Provincial’s Companion, by Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy.
This is a lot like a Wondermark book, except it’s written by a guy who actually rides a penny-farthing bicycle around town while wearing a plaid suit with a daisy in the lapel. Other books in the Wondermark vein (Victoriana played for parody): The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases • How to Make Friends and Oppress People: Classic Travel Advice for the Gentleman Adventurer (Seriously.)
Perfect for: Anyone who’s ever wistfully said, “Oh, I was born in the wrong century!”, but wasn’t mocking a nerd at the time

The Kris Straub Comedy Compendium (Starslip Crisis Volumes 1-2; Chainsawsuit: The Book), by Kris Straub
Kris is a funny guy and his comics read thrillingly well in serial form. The nuances of his space-opera story really unfold underneath the day-to-day gag strips, and his Chainsawsuit goofball thing is ideal for the can.
Perfect for: Anyone who owns Firefly or Doctor Who DVDs, especially if they won’t let you borrow them

Moruskine, by Dirk Schwieger
A book of comics illustrating the adventures of Dirk in Tokyo, chronicling the things that random people dared him to do around Japan. Read as much as you like on the Web and see if you’re not instantly fascinated.
Perfect for: Anyone who reads Lonely Planet books for fun (I do! They’re really entertaining)

Pugs: God’s Little Weirdos, by Dave Kellett
Dave has a serious affection for pugs, but he’s certainly aware that they’re lacking something critical in the skull that would make them more intelligent than a bumblebee in a special school. Pugs is a collection of Dave’s charming “Sheldon” comics about the crazy animals.
Perfect for: Your mom

I Am White Ninja and You are My Pickle Sidekick, by Scott Bevan & Kent Earle
“White Ninja” comics do indeed feature a white ninja. But no, they are not about anything really ninja-related. What “White Ninja” comics are becomes perfectly clear when I explain that these are schoolchums from Saskatchewan who began drawing comics in like the seventh grade.
Perfect for: Anyone who’s ever named something animate after something inanimate, such as a dog named “Toaster” or a baby named “Bagpipe”

Now go to it! And don’t forget to order a calendar!

Gift ideas created by my friends!

Assuming you’ve already got copies of all my books — both my comic strip collections and my parody Victorian novels — and perhaps even a Wondermark T-shirt or two…well, you probably think I’ve got nothing more for you this holiday season! You, my close personal friend, are dead wrong.

First, I have a hearty “thank you!” from my warm, rent-paid-up household to yours. This is my job, thanks to kind folks like you. Hooray!

Second, I know for a fact that you don’t want to go to the mall, you don’t want to fight for parking…but neither do you want to just browse Amazon like a sluggard and hope you stumble across the perfect gift for all the weirdos on your shopping list. That’s where I can do you a favor, with the following fine list of Gift Recommendations that are Wonderfully Creative and Unique and also Help My Colleagues Not Starve. After all, you’re the one about whom everyone’s always saying, “Where do you find all these bizarre and wonderful gifts?” Don’t worry…your secret’s safe with me!

For the book lover who’s already got a framed print of this strip, the “Unshelved” book bag is hard to resist. Also check out their T-shirts — my wife’s got several and they always get appreciative bibliophile double-takes (or maybe that’s just my wife).

Poop sign. Great stocking stuffer? Probably won’t fit. Great everything-else stuffer? ‘Nuff said.

Jon Rosenberg’s “Goats” is soon to be a 3-book graphic novel series from Del Rey, and he’s offering some limited-edition, signed & numbered archival prints of artwork created for the first volume, Infinite Typewriters. Really lovely!

Indigo Kelleigh’s designed his own 8-bit tarot cards in a colorful, retro-Nintendo style. These cards are also printed in limited edition.

Next week: book reviews!

Check out: Radiolab

I love podcasts. I listen to them on trips, while working, in my sleep and at all times while gallavanting. It’s tricky, though — I like my podcasts to update regularly, of course, but I’ve had to unsubscribe to more than one for having too much content. I find it’s easy to get outnumbered by a backlog of un-listened-to episodes, feeling overwhelmed and buried and hemmed into a corner frantically trying to absorb it all, every waking minute, afraid of missing out. I have come to terms with the fact that sometimes I cannot fit everything in, and so, sadly, The Two-Hours-Of-New-Stuff-Every-Goldurn-Day Show just has no place in my life.

Once a week for an hour or less seems to be a pretty good schedule for a podcast, as far as my own listening schedule goes. So I really like Radiolab, a WNYC public radio program about science, perception, and the underlying mysteries of everything. But instead of pointing you to the show and saying “There, go;” I’d like to share two particularly great episodes with you.

The first is their War of the Worlds episode, in which they tackle the 1938 Orson Welles hoax broadcast and explore why people believed it was real — and continued to believe it was real each time it was re-broadcast. Fascinating stuff, especially for folks like me who’ve never heard the original (despite the 4GB of old Mercury Theatre archives on my iPod. Like I said, it’s hard to get around to it all).

Another is a short, off-season episode called Tell Me a Story. It’s a recording of co-host Robert Krulwich delivering this year’s commencement address at Cal Tech, in which he exhorts the graduating nerds to evangelize the world with the wonder and beauty of science and exploration. (He does a much better job delivering it than I do explaining it.) Only 27 minutes long, and you can listen online or download the MP3. Do yourself the favor.

Season 5 of Radiolab starts next week. You can subscribe to the podcast at WNYC.org.

Check out: Bellen! homage strip

Brian “Box” Brown has decided to have a little Halloween fun with the characters in his comic strip Bellen! — over the past week or so, he’s “dressed them up” in the art style of a number of other comic strips. Today, they go to Wondermark-land! Check out Bellen! dressed up like Wondermark here. (For the uninitiated, this is what Bellen! normally looks like.)