Coinciding with this storyline in 2007 was the arrival of the Jinxlet plushes. 1,000 were made, and over the next three years, 1,000 were sold, never to be made again. In 2011, I found a handful of Jinxlets and again put them on sale. They ran out almost immediately. I had believed that was the end of that. However, weeks ago, at my parents’ house, my mother found 18 more Jinxlets and their adoption papers safely stored in a suitcase.

On eBay right now, I am offering 7 of these last 18 Jinxlets. These auctions end Saturday, December 1, 2012 at 1AM. Each of the 7 auctions includes:

• One (1) 10″ Jinxlet collectible plush from the long-running sci-fi webcomic Starslip.
• One (1) Jinxlet Adoption Certificate specifying the name of the Jinxlet
• One (1) Care and Feeding Instruction Sheet from Ganymede Zoological Society
• One (1) letter from Memnon Vanderbeam
• Two (2) out-of-print Jinxlet Valentine cards
• One (1) copy of How The Jinxlets Saved The Space Zoo, a 34-page B&W coloring book

Good luck! Here are the 7 auctions:

• Tinklehug
• Buttersnotch
• Boop-Boop Tickleface
• Snugglehuff
• Clicky
• Dr. Thoraxible
• Wigglesby

Hello old friend! How is life? It’s been a while since I’ve written you.

It’s odd — after Starslip ended, in the days that followed, I found myself re-reading the very last strip again and again. Not the last one on the website, but the epilogue I did for the fifth book, the one that showed what happened to everybody. I read it over and over as if to tell myself you were okay, that everyone was okay.

And then a couple months after that, I caught myself thinking that I should write to you. Not like some creative exercise, but that you were a friend I hadn’t heard from in a while. That you had suddenly stopped communicating with me. Which is what happened really — you spoke very clearly to me on a daily basis for seven years. When the story ended, you stopped talking to me because I didn’t need you to anymore. There was nothing left to talk about.

But! I’m doing fine here. I’ve been a little nervous to start my next series. Chainsawsuit is doing well, but I have a need to tell stories.

The first strip of my new series, Broodhollow, will go up October 8th. Set in the 1930s, Broodhollow is a cosmic horror adventure — imagine if Tintin went to Innsmouth. It’ll be full-color double-size strips, three times a week, updating Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Broodhollow is a sister city of Ichor Falls, the haunted town setting of my horror fiction, as well as the site that gave rise to Candle Cove. I thought about actually setting the new series in Ichor Falls itself, but I think that would have bound me too much to its established oppressive tone. There will be a little crossover, although Broodhollow is a different city altogether, very bright and inviting at first glance. There’s a reason to want to be there. But the scary parts will hopefully be genuinely unsettling in the style of H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Stephen King, all the writers I appreciate. Never gory or slasher-y, but a sense of building dread that accompanies the unknown.

I also am working on it in terms of “chapters,” which can really be considered books. The first book will be between 60 and 80 strips, and it’ll tell a finished story. Enough to print as a stand-alone book. If there’s excitement about it, then I’ll do a second book. I told the story in Starslip very soap-opera, very seat-of-my-pants. I want everything in this series to cohere, to fit, to have been planned from the beginning.

Because let’s face it, I cut a few corners on you and your art, and some of your characterization. I feel bad about it, but things were pretty hectic for a while. Sorry about that! It all turned out pretty okay in the end!

Anyway — it was good to get in touch with you. I’d ask you to read Broodhollow and get your opinion on it, but where you are there’s no internet yet. Say hello to the family for me.

Your friend,
Kris

So some of my Tumblr-using friends have been on the side of me returning to Tumblr. I have been very critical of Tumblr, on Tumblr itself and elsewhere. Nothing boils my blood more than to see a piece of work shared and reshared with all sourcing and credit either removed, or worse, manipulated. I deleted all my posts (well, moved them to my own blog at krisstraub.com) in a big huff a couple months back.

I feel like the attribution problems are a huge part of Tumblr’s culture, probably unintentionally so. If you subtract the original content producers, the artists and writers — and I’m including the people doing fanart or even meme-like presentations of ideas among those artists and writers — if you subtract them, what you end up with is tens of thousands of curated blogs. It’s people assembling fragments of culture that they like, want to share, want to keep track of. It is true curation, a personal stylebook. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their Tumblr and seeing what they want to be associated with, what they identify with.

I think somewhere down the line, in our quest to exalt personal identity, we have blurred the line between curation and creation. And I think this is the fundamental reason why sources get changed or left off. Because over time, the value is in the spread of one’s own curation — there is inherent value in being observed as a tastemaker.

Is an expression of taste, through others’ works, creation in and of itself? I don’t know. The artist in me wants to say “no,” but there are a lot of ways to make art. I guess… if the important part was the expression of taste, then there would be no need to obscure the sources. When sources and accreditation are considered unimportant, I don’t see it as sharing anymore: it becomes co-opting.

I would argue that any one of the blogs I’m critical of, that reposts without credit, that believes credit is boring and unimportant, would be furious if I created a much popular Tumblr that was a duplicate of their own tastes and reblogs, except with my name on it. Why would I want to return to a community that does little to discourage that?

And yet I keep returning to Tumblr to read, passively, what the people I like are doing. They are creating, they are actively involved in the production of content I enjoy. I want to share it, for their sake! I just want to make sure that, in the act of sharing it, someone down the line doesn’t see fit to scrape their name off and pretend like they found it in some secret garden on the internet that they are the gatekeeper of.

So my reason for not posting to Tumblr anymore is that I felt the use of the service innately supported an infrastructure that codified and celebrated mis- or non-attribution. But my options are:

1) to continue to just read and never post anything, except for the occasional vitriolic reblog of another artist’s plea for credit, or

2) to actively contribution and try to make this corner of Tumblr, which I like, nicer.

Maybe I’ll try a little more of (2) and see what it does.

Hey guys, I’ve written this entry about three times and I just need to get it out there. There’s no way I can talk about PAX without making it sound like I’m buying my own hype, which is the exact opposite of what I want to express.

I I I me me my my my. There’s no way to talk about the weekend I had in Seattle without talking about me. That’s why I’ve avoided posting this; in school, they teach you to write essays objectively, and I guess I still feel like I should be writing through that lens. (Even when it’s appropriate for you to show up in your own essay, they force you to say “the author.” As if even the idea of you having written your essay is already the zenith of hubris.) The Kris character you often encounter is a persona I enjoy wearing; he has a lot in common with me, except that when he has to talk about himself, he makes no apologies. Here, without him, I get self-conscious and hesitate.

I don’t go to as many conventions as I used to. A lot of them feel the same, handle the same: you load a dozen fifty-pound boxes in by hand, you wonder why there’s no chair behind the booth, you find out you have to pay $75 extra for a place to sit. You hope your phone battery will last through the whole show, because an electrical drop is another $150 a day. You fight for the attention of an indifferent crowd, a lot of the time. Then you load out Sunday and kick yourself for having brought too much product, again.

PAX is not that show, by definition — first of all, it’s not a comic convention, of which there are many. That alone sets it apart. Cartoonists don’t get to put in for space at PAX, so the fact that I get to be there is a miracle I’m grateful for every day I’m behind that booth.

But it’s not just that it’s not a comic convention that sets it apart. PAX has such an amazing sense of community — I know I sound like a shill right now, but you have to experience it to feel it. In 2009 I studied up on PAX to act as its media ambassador, and I thought, “fine, that’s good, I like having a title.” But I read about it, and I saw the footage of it, and it got in there. It got under my skin.

It’s three years later, and at this point I only do conventions I like; ones that are good to me. So I hope this doesn’t read as a slight to other cons I favor. But I’m not a celebrity at other shows, like I get to be at PAX. I have a line there. I do well-attended panels there. And the audience knows what Scott and I do onstage and lets us do it, without trying to dress it up in the guise of a podcast or issues panel. It’s not apologized for; it’s expected. Demanded, even. It’s like everyone is dead set on pulling together and having the best convention possible. Everyone at this show knows what they are doing and where they fit. Everyone at PAX is performing at the top level.

PAX has spoiled me.

This past Prime was the best one yet. I did the Acquisitions Incorporated intro and spot animations (which should officially appear online soon), and it was so great to stand backstage and listen to the crowd laugh at the right parts. And we did the Scott and Kris Show Live twice, on Thursday and Sunday, and both were so well-received (largely in part to Liz). I got to see a lot of friends and make some new ones.

If you have to be left with any component of me or mine from this, then let it be my gratitude, my genuine, actual thankfulness at being able to continue to do this for a living. Both PAXes — and now, perhaps a third?! — figure heavily into whether or not I’ve had a good year.

2012 has been wonderful to me so far. See you at PAX East.

Incredible! Two full hours of the Kris and Scott’s Scott and Kris Show Live in Seattle, Thursday night before PAX. Thanks for filming it, td6sarah!