Gordon McAlpin's Blog: Updates from Multiplex: Deleted Scenes, page 9

First Patreon milestone goal reached! And a word about Book 2!

The first milestone goal in the Patreon project has been reached!

Because funds are collected at the beginning of the month, the leaderboard ad will be disappearing for the month of February… and hopefully for every month thereafter (assuming nobody cancels, of course)! In the meantime, of course, more patrons are welcome. I’m totally excited that we’re raising as many as we are, and I’d be perfectly happy if we don’t raise much more than what we have right now — but would love for the site to be completely ad-free!

In the patrons-only Activity Stream, so far there are a handful of comics that only Book 2 (Kickstarter/PayPal) backers and Patreon patrons can read, with Jason reviewing a handful of movies. There will be more stuff soon, too — sketches, more review comics, and the first Google Hangout!

Thank you VERY MUCH to everybody who has signed on to support the strip so far!

Speaking of Book 2, I understand that the Multiplex: There and Back Again shipment will be arriving sooner than I had expected, and I will get the pre-orders for the book opened up in the next few weeks. I want to get the Kickstarter books and rewards out the door before I can add to my to-do pile, because it has already been so delayed. (Sorry! And thank you again, for your patience!)

Jason explains the Patreon project

I meant to delay the publication of that last post until I was finished with this video, but I messed up. Oops.

So, sorry for another post on this so soon, but here is Jason with the skinny on the Patreon project. He has enthusiasm issues, as you’ll see…

Visit the Patreon page for more information about supporting the project. You can also go back and read the “What’s a Patreon?” post or just ask me questions below!

What’s a Patreon — and how can it make Multiplex even better?

I’ve just launched a new Patreon project. (“What’s Patreon?” you ask? Well, you can either just click through that last link, or I’ll get to that in a second.) It’s kind of a soft launch at this point — I don’t have a video made for it yet, because I was busy drawing the actual comic instead. I’ll add one soon. But I wanted to post about it today, so here’s a wall of text of me rambling about what Patreon is:

So I’ve been making Multiplex for about eight years now, supporting the production of the strip mainly through advertising.

Multiplex has had a small but passionate audience for most of that time. The comic barely makes a profit from ads every month — but that’s before factoring in the time I spend working on the comic.

Once you factor that in, Multiplex is a money-losing business. And that’s fine — Multiplex is a labor of love. It’s a story I want to tell and share with the world. But when you add up all the costs it is also a fairly expensive hobby: hosting costs, Amazon S3/Cloudfront fees, domain registrations, Creative Cloud subscriptions and other software, iOS Developer Program subscription (for the free iOS app), the new laptop I got this fall (upgrading from a five year old machine!), etc. As a grad student now, these costs are less easy to absorb.

To make money, some websites just throw in more and more ads — an approach that has ruined many of the websites I visit. They’re annoying. The slow down the page load times, and compromise your personal data. And even if you block the ads, they still take up valuable space that could be filled with — you know, actual content.

Ads are killing the Web, and there has to be a better way.

That’s where Patreon comes in.

Patreon is a crowdfunding platform — like an ongoing Kickstarter project, but instead of paying for the printing of two books, it’s paying for the ongoing production of the comic strip. Or kind of like PBS, I guess. I’d heard of it a while back, but it wasn’t until Zach Weinersmith launched a hugely successful (so far) Patreon project that I thought, “Hey, maybe this is viable.”

Just like Kickstarter and PBS, you should only give if you’re able and willing to. Some of you are more casual readers of the strip, and that’s totally cool! No hard sell. If we only raise a few bucks a month, great. It will supplement the ad revenue, and make my life a little easier. If we raise a few hundred a month, I can get rid of the ads — awesome. That’s really my wildest dream for it. My readership is the teeniest, tiniest fraction of the size of Zach’s; I hardly expect to raise as much as he is. (SMBC is great, read it.)

Multiplex updates twice a week (sometimes more), which is equivalent to a quarterly, 24-page comic book. Basically, a graphic novel a year.

I wish I could put out the print books that fast! But in print-comics terms, that averages out to around $2 a month. If three hundred of you chipped that much in, I’d be able to chuck the Google AdSense crap. If six hundred of you did, I could chuck all the ads and redesign the site a bit to make the strip images even bigger.

Again, just like Kickstarter and PBS, you’re not just making a “donation,” you’re getting something in return. First and foremost, for $1 a month or more, you get access to a Patrons-only “Activity Stream.” Those of you who supported the two Kickstarter projects will know what kinds of content to expect in there: bonus comics, sketches, illustrations, and other behind-the-scenes type of stuff. And I’d like to do even more: Adobe Illustrator tutorials, Q&A Google Hangouts, comic strip movie reviews with Jason or Kurt, and other early or exclusive content. So tell me what you want to see!

Higher levels include other incentives, of course, too, so check out the various reward levels at the bottom of the Patreon page!

I hope you consider continuing to support Multiplex — and, as always, thank you for reading!

“How did feathers evolve?” by Carl Zimmer and Armella Leung

This terrific animated short from TED-Ed looks at the evolution of modern bird feathers using narration by Carl Zimmer and some lovely animation by Armella Leung. Beautifully done.

The Importance of Being Earnest excerpt

Some of you seem to be curious about what I do with my time when I’m not working on Multiplex, so here’s an example of what I’ve been working on in grad school. For my Digital Illustration and Animation class, I took an excerpt from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and animated it as a way to learn how to animate with Flash. (Yeah, I know, it’s weird they’re still teaching this, but it’s been useful.) I created these shots in Flash and edited it together with Final Cut Pro.

The dialogue is from the 1986 BBC TV production of the play starring Rupert Frazer and Paul McGann. The music is from Night Music of the Streets of Madrid (Opus 30 No. 6 (G. 324)) by Luigi Boccherini, as peformed by Cuarteto Casals and Eckart Runge).  My favorite version of this piece was used prominently in one of my favorite adventure movies, Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World, incidentally.

(And because this happens every time I post anything like this: please don’t “critique” it. I’m not interested. I know it’s rough around the edges.)

Monday’s strip will be late…

Longtime readers know how loathe I am to miss an update, particularly because of anything so silly as being sick, but I’ve been largely bedridden since Friday night — feverish, intermittently nauseous, and sundry other funtimes. (Thank God for my iPad, or I would have had to live without the Internet.)

I’m on the mend, but not yet 100%. Or even 75%, for that matter.

Anyway, so Monday’s strip will be posted late Monday night, most likely, if not Tuesday. Sorry!

Multiplex Workplace Poster series

In honor of Labor Day here in the US of A, I wanted to share with you guys something I’ve been working on. Multiplex Book Two backers and those of you who follow me on Twitter or the Multiplex Facebook page will have seen earlier versions of a few of these, but they’re Multiplex-themed movie theater/workplace posters featuring the main Multiplex cast. I came up with Jason’s poster for one of the Book 2 Kickstarter rewards and liked the idea enough to keep making more.

An 18″x24″ version of Jason’s poster will be available in the coming weeks from the Multiplex Store; they’re being printed this week, so if you want one, stay tuned for that! I’m also planning to make the full set of five posters available as 11″x17″ mini-posters (most likely for $20 for the set). I will need to do a pre-order in order to finance the printing for the set, though, since, y’know, I’m a grad student. We’ll see.

If these sell well, I’ll make more! Feel free to suggest themes for what they could touch on in the comments — though keep in mind, they’re meant to double as half-serious PSA’s, not just be snarky posters.

I’ve got a (late) comic to finish, so without further ado, here are the posters!

Jelly & Bean #40: Kirk Didn’t Really Seem That Smart

I filled in for Bean, one of the co-hosts of the Jelly and Bean podcast, so if you want to hear me talk about Multiplex, Macs, Steve Ballmer, bad movie logic, and more with Jelly (a.k.a. Daniel Farrelly, the programmer of the Multiplex iOS app), click on over to the Jelly and Bean website and check this shit out!

Spoiler Warning: Jelly is from Australia, so he sounds funny!

I hired a bunch of crappy T-shirt models. (Also, I need more.)

I decided to get all Busted Tees up in the Multiplex Store’s newly re-opened T-shirt section, so if you’re feeling a little bit bored and want to see some catalog-style drawings of the Multiplex gang (not just the girls), go window shop for shirts.

I tried my best to make the shirts actually look like the real shirts (color-wise, length of sleeves, size of the imprint, etc.), but obviously they’re not going to be spot-on.

In light of that, I would like to get some real product photos of the shirts, so if you order a shirt and e-mail me a photo of yourself wearing it, I’ll give you a $2 coupon code for the Multiplex Store* — whether I can use it or not! (It should be as large as possible, so I can crop it down to an image about 600 pixels square. Half-way decent lighting is kinda important.)

If you already have a Multiplex shirt, yes, it does need to be a NEW order (this week), because I need them to be from the current printer.

This offer stands at least September 13th or I have enough photos, whichever comes later. Limit one coupon per customer.

* With Multiplex: There and Back Again (Book Two) coming out in a few short months, I’m sure you can think of something to use that coupon code on.

T-shirts are back in the Multiplex Store!

Those of you who have visted the Multiplex Store recently may have noticed a distinct lack of T-shirts in them. Mostly, this was because my old DTG shirt printer went out of business. Partly, this was because I’m lazy swamped with work this summer. But now that I’ve signed up with a new printer and have the new (responsive!) store design, they are back.

There are currently five classic/old designs — the ever-popular Michael Bay is the Devil shirts (Transformers G1 and TMNT flavors), Rosebud Was My Dick, I Believe in George Romero and the Sarcastic T-shirt shirt that Jason has worn a few times.

But wait! There’s more! There’s also one new design, featuring actual characters from the comic! I call it the Clerks shirt:

All of the shirt shirts are priced from $17.99 — for now. 2XL and larger sizes are a little higher. Men’s shirts are available from XS/Youth Large up to 5XL; ladies shirts come in XS and go up to 2XL. (I’m just passing the additional wholesale costs of the shirts on for those, sorry. I’m offering every size my printer keeps in stock, as well, so I’m sorry if you want a larger size than that.)

Shipping is $5 per shirt (in the US) until I can afford a better shipping estimator plug-in for the shop.

ALSO, you can now register or log into the Multiplex Store using your Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts. For you people (like me) who are too lazy to fill out forms and/or too dumb to remember yet another password.

Once again, the Store has been completely rebuilt recently, so please let me know if you spot any bugs!