Beginning today, projecting through Friday and culminating on Monday, we will offer you one page "treatments" of three comics which differ radically from our usual output. Next week, we'll get a poll up to determine which one you'd like to see us investigate further. Then, later this summer - during the San Diego Comic Con would be my guess - we'll upload a storyline based on what the metamind has chosen.

The second concept is Automata, nineteen-twenties crime fiction which unfolds in a time where "machine intellect" has been outlawed. It wasn't always, certainly, and the problem of what to do with the existing "stock" of fully sentient, mechanical citizens endures. Detective Regal and his stenophone Carl Swangee traverse the margin where these worlds overlap.

Also, no matter what you picked, you can't actually lose: we'll try to come back to all of these eventually. We aren't foolish enough to commit to a timeline, but there's a reason we put them in front of you. Eventually, we won't be able to resist.

Many people wanted to know who won in the contest between Lookouts and Automata, and in the end, it was much too close - and evidence of scripting on both sides made us even more wary. So, both comics won, after a fashion. But making that actually happen took some doing.

Gabriel and I will create and run Automata, which will be "broadcast" during the San Diego Comic Con. Beginning Wednesday, and I do mean this very Wednesday, Lookouts will begin its run - completing the story set forth in the pitch, and created by friends of Penny Arcade Becky Dreistadt and Oliver Grigsby. This way everybody wins, and nobody loses, and then shortly thereafter everybody wins again.

I feel like I've got the hang of it now though and I can even imagine a world were we have the time to make a proper graphic novel.