The Incomparable

The Incomparable's beloved collection of t-shirts is back on sale!

For this round at Cotton Bureau, we're selling the Mothership Zeppelin, a powerful Wizard (in black), our beloved Fauxtoro, and the Incomparable Alien.

Shirts are on sale until June 16.

If you’re reading this blog post, you may have noticed some changes around The Incomparable. It’s been a long process that began with wanting to create a new design for member pages for our annual membership drive. That design process made me realize we needed to address larger issues with our branding, and after years of delaying, I finally pulled the thread and let the entire tapestry unravel.

The member-page redesign was done by Ste Grainer (thanks to Casey Liss for the referral!). Ste started working on three new member pages with a deadline of early May. Easy enough, right? Well, let me tell you…

While Ste was working on those pages, I followed the thread of that unraveled tapestry to a big issue: The Incomparable, once a podcast, is now a podcast and a podcast network, and it’s a bit of a mess to explain where one ends, and the other begins. Add to that the fact that Antony Johnston (The Incomparable’s de facto volunteer art director) and I felt the old Incomparable logo and type had gotten quite tired. An overhaul was needed.

So we followed that thread. I decided that I would rechristen The Incomparable as The Incomparable Mothership—already an informal title we use to refer to the ol’ girl—and use our classic zeppelin logo to represent it. (Kudos to David Brasgalla and Iconfactory for all our logo illustrations, dating back to 2013!)

I went to David Dooley of Yo Kyoto!, who has done a lot of design work for Relay FM lately, and asked him to reimagine artwork for The Incomparable Mothership and its corresponding members-only Special Edition.

David’s designs blew me away—and he picked a new typeface that we loved, especially the NASA-worm-style “M”. We took this font back to Ste, who worked it into his web designs—which by then had expanded to include redesigning the entire Incomparable website.

In parallel, Antony was working on a new, subtler version of our network identifier “bug,” found in the bottom left corner of the show art. (It’s our robot mascot.) Along with deciding that the zeppelin would represent the Mothership podcast, I decided that our other bit of iconic art, the robot, would primarily represent the network.

With all this done, it came time to implement. As of this writing, we seem to have largely completed that process. There’s a new Topics page that lets you filter by category, though we have some work to do in going through our back catalog and categorizing topics! There are expanded people pages that show off more information about hosts and panelists. This blog has been brought back to life. And there are sure to be a few easter eggs here and there, too.

So thanks to Ste, Antony, David, and all the people who make The Incomparable run. And, of course, thanks to everyone who listens to our podcasts—whether or not you read our website.

—Jason Snell

May was “Member Month,” a concept we came up with as a way to let people know that we have a membership program without pushing it on them endlessly. The idea was to do a sort of public-television-style “pledge break” for a month and then cool it for a year. We haven’t done one since before the pandemic, but we got our acts together to do it this year.

We posted a lot of extra stuff this month just for members, mostly in our First Class podcast feed, just one of the many benefits of being part of The Incomparable.

Here’s what we posted:

• 12 different mini episodes about “Wynonna Earp” bonus content
• A commentary track for a very interesting episode of “Star Trek: Voyager”
• Monty and Rhias vs. the “Warcraft” feature film
• John Siracusa and Jason Snell play Inhuman Conditions, a game in which murderous robots pretend to be human beings
• A three-hour-long members-only Whitesparrow Total Party Kill adventure (also available as a video)
• An Agents of SMOOCH “sleepover movie” draft
• The first full-length episode of the new season of Incomparable Radio Theater
• A commentary track for “The Avengers” featuring the hosts of BIFF!
• The old-movie podcasters of Lions, Towers, and Shields get a little more contemporary while covering 1972’s “What’s Up, Doc?”
• Glenn Fleishman leads an international crew in eating sweets not found in their home regions (also available as a video)
• Jason and five guests who are not John Siracusa do a commentary track for “Real Genius”
• A bonus episode of A Complicated Profession covering some lesser-known Obi-Wan content
• Beginner’s Puck discussing an obscure hockey musical
• Scott and Jason of Vulcan Hello watching “Star Trek: The Motion Picture - The Director’s Edition”
• Lazy Doctor Who trivial pursuit
• Defocused watches “Shrek the Third”
• The crew of the USS Incomparable plays another game of the Star Trek RPG

There were also three video live streams just for members, where we played games and hung out.

Thanks to all our members for supporting us! And if you’re not a member… rectify that! There’s so much good stuff just for members.

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