The webcomic Goats started out being about two drinking buddies, Jon and Philip, and a few unlikely talking animals and (in retrospect, rather quickly) evolved or de-volved into a multi-dimensional sci-fi-fantasy epic about the rush to save the Multiverse from shutting down due to a Y2K+12 bug in the software running all of existence (which was what happened when you had ancient Mayans with their limited calendar programming the automation of the uber-system). It all screeched to a halt last month when the artist/creator Jon Rosenberg took a long look at his real life and realized that, even with the third in a series of beautifully realized books of his oddball epic nearing publication, he still needed to do something more and/or else to make a reasonable living as a webcomicker.

That was a true Call to Arms for his fan base, who provided massive quantities of words of support and early sales of the aforementioned third volume of Goats-toons (I among them) while he worked on a second, less story-arc dependent but semi-related comic to fill the immediate financial gap and the long-term creative gap when the story (but not his entire fictional multiverse) inevitably ends in December of 2012. That strip, “Scenes from a Multiverse”, officially starts any second now.

UPDATE: IT’S ON. IT IS SO ON.
(more inside…)