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 ]

More Wall Buddies available – now with 8 different designs!

A little while ago I posted about Wall Buddies, our new line of classy, laser-cut wall hangings. I had a handful of them left over from a limited run we made for convention season, and many of you snapped them up!

Well, now we’re making more — a bunch more. We’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign that’s collecting orders now! Update: The campaign is over! Thanks everyone!

Wall Buddies! Framed Artwork of the Inventive Virtues

The “Inventive Virtues” are explained more in our pitch video (which I’m really proud of and hope you watch!). In essence, we’ve selected eight iconic images that stand alone as pieces of art, but also can represent specific virtues worth cultivating for creative individuals.

In the campaign, you can order any single Wall Buddy (of the 8 designs available), or, you can get multiples — however many you pledge for, we’ll ask you once the campaign is over which specific design(s) we should make for you.

We’re making them all in-house in our workshop in Los Angeles. Here’s my partner in this venture, Jason Lioi, putting one together:

We plan to run the campaign for the month of November, then have a special order of frames manufactured in a custom style by a frame factory. We’ll spend the first few months of 2018 making Wall Buddies, and begin shipping them to backers as soon as the frames come in.

It’s a simple campaign without a lot of complex stuff going on, this time — it’ll be hard enough keeping everyone’s orders of all 8 designs straight, so I don’t want to complicate matters!

Though, as the campaign progresses, some upgrades and alternate versions may become available… We have some ideas for stretch goals. But it’ll depend on how much interest there is overall!

Meanwhile, just to let you know what to expect, the Wondermark Calendar will go on sale and ship as usual in December. That project will overlap with this campaign a little — the calendar will ship out before any Wall Buddies will — but I trust you to understand the order that things have to happen.

Jason and I have been talking about making Wall Buddies for months, and as I mentioned in the previous post, we took some samples to Comic-Con and Gen Con this year to gauge interest. When you see a Wall Buddy in person, the texture of the material is really striking, and people loved them at the shows!

So, we made a bunch more, and now you can get them! Hope you like these — I’ll talk much more about them in the month to come, surely. And if nothing else, be sure to watch the video!

Wall Buddies! Framed Artwork of the Inventive Virtues

Introducing Wall Buddies – framed wall art!

For Anime Expo/Comic-Con/Gen Con this year, my buddy Jason and I made a bunch of these framed wall hangings.

Our convention season is over for the year, but we have some stock left!

They’re 12 x 12″ (the size of a record album), and each piece comes framed & ready to hang.

Because of the way we make them, there are a bunch of different color patterns. (Basically, we cut the same design out of various colors of material, and then mix & match all the pieces.)

To be clear, they come framed.

The two basic designs we’ve made so far are all the different D20s you see in the picture, and some floppy disks (of which there are a couple more variants than are pictured). UPDATE: The floppies all sold out for the time being! We’ll make more soon enough! We’ve named each different colorway after a D&D character or a classic file extension.

We have a large variety but not a large inventory — there’s no more than 4 of any given color pattern, and for several, only 1.

Critical hit not included

This is a bit of a test! We will likely make more of these if they prove popular (in a less expansive set of different colorways), but for now, we wanted to make our convention inventory available for folks who couldn’t make it to a show.

They are available in my store right now, or, just scroll down! (Patreon pals got the link yesterday, and a few are already gone!)

ALSO NOTE: The shipping cost is what it is, but I will ship any additional pieces after the first for no extra cost!

In other words, the shipping fee is flat no matter how many pieces you get. (Within the U.S. only, unfortunately.)

Recipe Comic: My Dad’s Salad

Today’s comic originally ran on SAVEUR Magazine, as part of their series of “Recipe Comics”.

I’ve posted about my dad before, a few times. Here he is in a 1959 San Bernardino newspaper; here is a painting Carly did of him; here is the thing I mention most often, an essay about how and why I learned to fly airplanes.

The recipe comic is about him too. He’s on my mind a lot. It was just my first Father’s Day as a dad myself, and it colors my memories of him somewhat, changes my perspective.

A ‘Postmortem’ about the ‘Ghost Post’

About a year ago, reader Sara Thacher (of the above tweet), who works at Disney Imagineering R&D, contacted me for help on a Haunted Mansion-themed subscription box project called the “Ghost Post”.

It was a mystery, a sort of alternate reality game that involved people getting weird things in the mail and using them, plus interactive experiences in the park, to tell a story.

Here’s one of the mystery-solvers receiving and examining his first batch of “Ghost Post” artifacts:

(There are a bunch of unboxing and walkthrough videos of all three boxes on YouTube, for the curious.)

All the artifacts in each box — such as a reflective teacup; a papercraft “radio” with a magnetic dial that interacts with an app on your phone; a music box; Haunted Mansion tarot cards; a bunch of different things each month — were exquisitely designed by Sara and her team at Imagineering R&D.

And they have now won a Thea Award (stands for the Themed Entertainment Association) for the project as a whole, honoring their outstanding achievement! Congratulations to them all.

And to…me??????

All three Ghost Post boxes included an issue of the Grim Gazette, a newspaper for spooks that chronicled the unfolding mystery and offered clues. Sara tapped Cory Doctorow to provide the text for each issue, and had me put it all together with an old-timey design aesthetic.

I did the layout for the papers and created Wondermark-style illustrations and advertisements. (In the video above, the subscriber pulls out the newspaper at around 3:35.) Here’s another subscriber’s pictures of the contents of the first, second, and third box if you want to see more of the cool stuff!

I’m honored to have offered a small contribution to the whole project. Many kudos to the team at Imagineering R&D on a fantastic job, and thanks for thinking of me to be a part of it!