Crowdfunding

Not to get all trippy on you, but Wisconsin Public Radio is producing a six-part radio series and a comic book on understanding understanding. It's called Meet Your Mind: A User’s Guide to the Science of Consciousness. The comic is by Jim Ottaviani and Natalie Nourigat. Ottaviani is well-known for his comics unpacking science, so this sounds like a winner. To pay for the comic, WPR is using, what else, Kickstarter. Since Kickstarter is really one big pledge drive, it all makes sense.

Although ICV2 is reporting that Kickstarter has banned retailer rewards—selling a bundle of copies of your product at a discount—this is not entirely true.  I wrote about the phenomenon of getting retailers in the loop for crowdfunding projects over at Publisher's Weekly last year, so I did a little digging.  

It looks like Top Cow turned their Cyber Force Kickstarter campaign on the evening of the 17th. I discussed the campaign during Comicon, but the short version is that Top Cow is trying to raise $75K and distribute free copies of the first five issues/first story arc of a new ongoing Cyber Force comic in a manner similar to Free Comic Book Day. It's an interesting idea.

There's a new Kickstarter on the block—well it will be on August 1st that is. Jamal Igle, artist on more DC books that you can shake a stick at, is starting a campaign for Molly Danger, a four book, hardcover graphic album all-ages action adventure series which he describes as "Astroboy meets the Powerpuff Girls". The project comes with a big price-tag— $45,000. More details:

J.T. Yost writes to alert us to a successful Kickstarter for a great sounding project called DIGESTATE, a food-theme anthology:

Lea Hernandez's Kickstarter for The Garlicks is ending today and it doesn't look like it's going to make it— it's currently only $15000 in to a $40K goal. We're not Kickstarter experts by any stretch of the imagination but in this case, it is a clear case that just being good isn't enough to get funded, because this was clearly a great-looking project.

The Oatmeal is a well known webcomic that crosses over into mainstream coverage with some regularity. And that's happened again. The short version is: some time ago, The Oatmeal had a dust up with a website called "FunnyJunk" over a bunch of The Oatmeals comics having been appearing on that site without authorization. Roughly a year later, FunnyJunk has sent a letter from a lawyer wanting $20K for defamation to avoid a lawsuit. Suffice it to say, The Oatmeal is a bit incredulous.

Notorious typewriter and fax guy Dave Sim is taking advantage of the internet's crowdfunding abilities to run a Kickstarter to reprint High Society, one of the best story lines from CEREBUS. The project met its $6000 goal within hours of starting. In case you are coming in fresh, Sim is the author of one of the great feats of the indie comics age: his 300-issue run on CEREBUS, a genre-defying melange of slapstick, fantasy and social commentary. The more the book had of the first two, the better it was; the more of the latter and...well...best not discussed.

Some holiday weekend tidbits, including Game of Thrones, Derek Kirk Kim's Mythomania looks to Kickstarter to fund it's 2nd season, a first look at The Walking Dead's Michonne, along with a whole lotta Kickass 2 news.

Well here's a new Kickstarter campaign for a comics memoir by former DC staffer Scott Young which promises some first-class lid ripping including the legendary comics scandal known as "Compgate":

Lea Hernandez, a pioneering cartoonist in the American manga hybrid style of storytelling, is back with a Kickstarter campaign. Target is $40K. Based on the art alone, this should be a success.

Is Kickstarter the next big comics distribution outlet? Some would say it already is. Mark Andrew Smith issues a call to action.