Breadpig has two dear friends named Zach. One is Zach Weiner, the esteemed and often unclothed author of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and one of our main cash cows collaborators. The other is Zach Anner, the comedian who took the world by storm first online, and now on TV with his show Rollin’ With Zach. And because we like getting confused in conference calls, we decided to bring the two of them together to provide a great night of entertainment, rare videos, comedy, and other Zachtivities JUST FOR YOU.

Oh, and of course, our cut of proceeds from the door will be donated to DonorsChoose.org classrooms in Austin.

So if you live in or near Austin, block off the night of the 26th! Tickets are on sale now through the Alamo Drafthouse website.

PS This badass event poster was made by Andrea Tsurumi, an illustrator who excels at drawing PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING. Also, big thanks to our friends at Amplifier for helping make this happen!

Last month, Reddit attempted to break a world record for the World’s Largest Global Secret Santa; an effort to facilitate anonymous (but good-hearted!) gift exchanges between total strangers over the internet. Pioneered by the redditors over at /r/secretsanta, the massive gift exchange saw over 35,000 participants from 115 countries giving out (to name a few!) hand-knitted scarves, comic books, sonic screwdrivers, mix CDs, video games…

…and cookies!

Breadpig teamed up with The Bread Project to offer official reddit gingerbread cookies, lovingly adorned with the face of reddit’s mascot, Snoo. Each package of these hearty, spicy cookies was lovingly baked, perfectly piped, and beautifully packaged by students from The Bread Project, a great non-profit that provides self-sufficiency to individuals with low-income by providing them with culinary training and job referrals.

Chef Mark shows off an early prototype

The unofficial motto of /r/secretsanta is ‘It’s all about the giving!’, and being secret santa veterans ourselves, team Breadpig took that to heart, giving a whopping 100% of proceeds back to The Bread Project. So, santas who gifted these sweet packages of gingery goodness were warming their match’s stomachs AND hearts with cayenne and warm-fuzzies, respectively! In all, Breadpig sold $650 worth of cookies on behalf of the Bread Project!

The cookies were extremely well-received (and devoured!) by redditors all over the United States. As far as we can tell from redditor bboe’s reaction to the Snoo Cookies, these spicy delights are best paired with (not-surprisingly!) a cool glass of milk…or whiskey! Remember, if you liked the cookies, consider using the Bread Project’s catering services, or contact them to get your own custom logo cookies.

Even the packaging was well-loved!

Big thanks to Jena at Reddit for helping us out with licensing the Snoo image, and to Alicia and everyone else at the Bread Project for being so enthusiastic and fun to work with. If you have a nonprofit that could benefit by connecting with Reddit or other geek communities, contact us and we’ll help you brainstorm!

Update: we made an anigif of bboe’s photos. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

OM NOM NOM

Zach Weiner is good at high5s

1. Be funny (useful) or die

Webcomic artists can’t delude themselves like we can about our latest tech innovation. Millions of dollars are invested in little more than ideas, whereas finding success as an artist comes down to making a comic people want to read. Simple as that. They’re competing with every cute animal photo for attention.

Take Perry Bible Fellowship, by Nicholas Gurewitch, who hardly spends any time hustling his comic, yet it’s one of the most popular online. Don’t waste time networking or fundraising when you could be building stuff people want.

2. Never forget who pays your bills

Ever seen Randall Munroe or Zach Weiner at a book signing? I have. (We publish their books, which you can buy here!).

Randy & Zach, like many of your favorite webcomic artists, are relentless about making their fans happy. I’ve seen signings go well past midnight because no attendee was going leave without a personalized drawing, signature, and chat with the artist. You can’t take the time to respond to some feedback emails? Try meeting & greeting from a booth for consecutive days at Comic-Con.

3. Know yourself and own it

Describe xkcd as if you were explaining it to someone for the first time. OK, now Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Chances are, even though they’re both geeky webcomics, you had no trouble distinguishing the two brands. Zach’s lustrous ginger mane probably didn’t hurt, either. What does your brand represent and how would a fan describe it to a stranger? If you haven’t nailed this down yourself, how can one of your fans?

Once you’ve figured it out, make sure it oozes out of everything you do. Whether it’s the mouseover text or the big red button, do unique things to define you. I drew hundreds of custom reddit logos because it was 120x40px worth of reasons to check the site — to this day, people still tell me about them and now there are thousands of user-created logos crowning various subreddits.

Seems like only yesterday when we were throwing Zach Weiner a party to celebrate his first-ever English book, but the prolific genius has already wrapped up his second compilation. The Most Dangerous Game is another 74 full-color pages of Zach’s finest work, supplemented with the second installment of the Choose Your Own Adventure from the first book. Also, all of Breadpig’s non-sustainable proceeds from the book are going straight to the fine folks at Khan Academy so they can keep turning the traditional education system on its head.

We will have a limited stock of these books at the SMBC booth at NYCC (#1724) on Saturday and Sunday, so come by early and get them signed by Zach! If you won’t be in town, you can also pre-order them off of our online store.

In case you’re concerned, this is more of a Rocky II than a Matrix 2 kind of sequel. I mean, just look at the polar bears.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

Introducing…the Gentleman’s Single-Use Unlubricated Monocle

Many moons ago, there was a SMBC comic about a monocle in a condom wrapper. We love turning the bizarre into reality, so when Zach approached us with the idea of making these, we said yes immediately. Now, with the help of engineer-and-occasional-curler Ben Peters and the artistic touch of steampunk god David Malki!, we’re proud to debut these beauties at NYCC on Saturday.

How the Webcomic Publishing Sausage Gets Made (Panel, Saturday at 8:45 PM in Room 1A23)

An entire Breadpig vertical (Zach Weiner from SMBC, Alexis and Christina from Breadpig, and Jef and Joel from Amplifier) will show you a webcomics’ long odyssey as it goes from its home on the internet to a publisher, a warehouse, and finally into the hands of its loving fans. Our panel will feature funny anecdotes from behind-the-scenes of a publisher and pro-tips for making the shiniest, most profitable product. Think of it as the first stop on…

The Epic Webcomic Bar Crawl (Tentative start time of 10 PM, around the Penn Station area)

Jon Brence and Zach after a few too many last time we did this.

Breadpig and SMBC are teaming up with Cyanide and Happiness and the Oatmeal for the most epic bar crawl of all time. It’ll be like San Diego, but with many more bars. What happens when you get webcomic artists drunk? How many penises will be drawn? WHAT THE HELL IS WEINERJUICE?? Follow us on Twitter and find out.

Here’s the back-story:

Not long after moving to New York, breadpig decided to try an experiment — we’d start a Hack Club where geeks could geek out for the sake of, well, geekery. We even encrypted the location of the event to make sure only geeks could get in. An awesome partner approached us with an offer to sponsor the event with a massive donation: LEGO!

They donated over fifteen thousand dollars worth of LEGO Mindstorm kits that attendees used to build sumo battlebots and were donated after the event to Halls of Learning, an organization in Jamaica to teach kids about engineering & design.

The hackathon itself was a massive success.

Afterward, Christina published a tutorial for how to roll your own Hack Club. That’s just how we roll.

Google was the first group of geeks to step forward and run their own Hack Club, this time in Austin at SXSW!

And now there’s a giant LEGO breadpig in my living room! Huzzah!

The morning started off with an Authors@Google talk, where Zach gave a brief talk about the exciting possibilities for independent creators today to create whatever the hell they want; in his case, “single-use” monocles in condom wrappers which will debut at NYCC (sold by yours truly!). He then launched into a Q&A about his many projects, which was deemed good enough for Google to feed us afterwards.

Zach and our host, Colin McMillen (AKA Lord Inglip) of Google

We then headed over to MIT, where we were stunned by the turnout at the LSC-hosted talk. Even though we had finalized the details for the event only last Thursday, the 150-seat lecture hall was packed to the gills by eager students. Zach didn’t disappoint, giving them over an hour of Q&A that revealed everything from the existence of the webcomics illuminati to how many shirts he wears while drawing (answer: 0.5 on average).

Professor Weinersmith answers questions.

Professor Weinersmith draws a diagram

After the Q&A, a loving crowd threw money at us and demanded that Zach sign everything from books to 2x4s. Cambridge, you really outdid yourself this time. Thanks for the love, and we’ll be sure to bring Zach back very soon!

Okay, 4W.

More pictures here.

* That’s right, San Francisco, we went there.

However, Hurricane Irene does not have a book signing at MIT. You’ll be able to grab a copy of Save Yourself, Mammal and a signature (possibly with doodle) from Zach Weiner after he does a brief talk and Q&A.

August 29 at 4:00 pm in 6-120

Admission is free. And every time someone buys a copy of Save Yourself, Mammal!, we donate our publisher profits to DonorsChoose.org projects that help turn innocent children into nerds!

Your move, Irene.

This is an actual mural from a dorm at MIT

Breadpig would like to give a big thanks to our awesome partners, Room to Read, for turning our donation into sustainable educational institutions for communities that will enjoy them AND for sending us such amazing write-ups!

The Preschool: Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka

Students at the new XKCD preschool in Sri Lanka

Nuwara Eliya is located in the center of Sri Lanka, and ranks second out of the nine provinces in Sri Lanka for absolute poverty. It is also the only district in the country where Indian Tamils form the majority of the population. Although I could not visit Nuwara Eliya on my trip, I was fortunate enough to witness some other preschools in action in Bibile and saw what a great impact these institutions have on education and the community at large. The XKCD preschool in Nuwara Eliya is a cheerful 1000 sqft building that currently serves 43 students (16 females, 27 males) under the supervision of two teachers.

Best of all, in a supplement to our donation, the community itself donated 12% of the resources needed for the school, including the land, the construction materials and tools, and skilled and volunteer labor. For a detailed breakdown, please see the report Room to Read prepared: Tharumal Singhithi Preschool (Nuwara Eliya).

The best excerpt from the report? A description of the playground:

A two-seated swing, a math-themed slide, a four-seated see-saw, and a four-seated merry-go-round.

The opening ceremony

Breaking ground during the rainy season: no easy labor!

The dedication plaque

The Library: Bardiya, Nepal

Students studying at the library

Bardiya is a province of Nepal located in the Western Terai, the lowlands on the Indian border. It is famous for its national parks, which are home to royal bengal tigers, elephants, and rhinos. Its majority ethnic group is the Tharu, a tribe of people considered the direct descendants of the Buddha.

I was lucky enough to visit Shree Yuvak secondary school on my trip to Nepal, where I was treated to a spectacular opening ceremony for the library full of traditional Tharu dancing and lots of flowers: many pictures here. The secondary school is grades kindergarten through 10 and houses more than 1500 students and 25 teachers. In addition to constructing a reading room for the crowded school, Room to Read also has a Girls Education Program there which is truly remarkable; many of the girls involved had previously been sold into slavery as “kamlaris” who were moving past their difficult childhoods through education.

Breadpig all wreathed up

Girls Education Program scholars at Shree Yuvak Secondary School

Thanks to the new library, students now have access to books during their leisure time before and after school, as well as dedicated “library periods” of at least 45 minutes of uninterrupted reading time. The community is incredibly excited to have this resource: they provided the doors, windows, locks, lighting, flooring, and paint for the building. The report is here: Shree Yuvak Secondary School CRR CR and more pictures below!