Kick-Watcher: Frogman, The Whole Story and Inkd

FROGMAN is a not-so-super superhero who kicks, punches and shags his way through his rubbish life, sort of fighting crime and sort of saving the day. It’s got action, romance, jokes, puns, nerd-references and scenes of hardcore sex and violence. What more could you want?

“Web comics are okay, but real, hold-it-in-your-hands comics are better,” says the writer Mark Lewis and artist Matt Fitch.  Fitch and Lewis are asking for £1,000 ($1,319.70 USD)    for a “medium sized run” and they will use the remaining funds for FROGMAN 2. Now American comics can stop complaining about the cost of print and gas. £25 ($32.99) gets you a pdf, your name in the book as an official contributor and a signed copy of the comic.  If a half-man-half-frog isn’t your thing,  the background noise in their promotional video should persuade you as it’s “c.r.e.m.e”.

The spiel: This is an interesting project to say the least. Here’s a chance to make webcomics more accessible to the smart phone junkies.

Justin Salsburey calls this project the iBooks for web comics.  The idea is a bit overdue and it’s baffling that we haven’t had something like this before. According to Benict Jones in the video, “others have burned the authors because they have stolen their content with out their permission.”  If you’re an aspiring comic creator and you’re reading this, here’s a piece of advice, you’re going to get burned. It’s apart of the initiation process.

• Joe Deagnon & Kirby Stasyna – Chicken Outfit
• Josh Bauman – Caffeinated Toothpaste
• Ray Frende
• PJ Perez – The Utopian: Foundation
• Ryan Klassan – City Folk
• Laura Tryon – Static Skies
• Marcus Kwame & Leonard Faierman – Snow Daze
• Denny Riccelli – Cousin Harold
• Nich Angell – Cat & Meringue
• Michael Damboldt – Gem of Atlantis
• Wes Molebash – Insert IMG
• Thomas Gorence – Time Samplers
• Kevin Coulston – Stale Bacon
• Darrel Troxel – That Comic Thing

What makes this project so interesting is all the incentives are the webcomic comic creator’s books or artwork.  The best incentive is involving Denny Riccelli’s $60 pledge, you get a signed and number Harold & Fester print.

Our newest pay-what-you-want collection of complete, creator-owned, DRM-free digital comics.

Now that’s a payment model I can get behind.  That’s a serious gamble and it most certainly paid off as Estrada is currently sitting at 757% at goal.  I really enjoy Kickstarter because I get to find out about new comics I would never ever seen otherwise.  This project looks like storyboards for an animation series. Has that Adventure Time and Regular show vibe that all ages can enjoy.

Our books are bundled together in pay-what-you-want collections, and every book we bring you is a complete, stand-alone story. No cliffhangers that force you to pay more to find out what happens next! You can choose between Retina-resolution PDFs (for the highest quality), Web-resolution PDFs (for easy storage), or CBZs (in both resolutions, for use in comic-reading apps), all of which are DRM-free so you can download and keep them forever.

Even though it’s pay what you want, $26 is more then reasonable to pledge.  For those of you that have successful projects, you know how important it is to ensure that every amount pledged after fees, taxes, production and shipping costs are accounted for.  I trust you will all do the right thing.

I have noticed that there are fewer comic book projects on Kickstarter lately.  Usually there are over a hundred projects and a couple of the industry’s best “taking all the spot light” from the little guys.  So this is either good for projects that normally wouldn’t get the attention or extremely bad.