At this year’s Image Expo one of the most buzzworthy announcements was the Creators for Creators Grant, and submissions have just opened up and run until November 1st. The grant will give $30,000 to a single creator writer/artist duo “in order to support the creation of a new and original work of a length between sixty-four and one hundred pages over the course of a single year. The recipient will be selected by committee according to rigorous criteria.”
Submissions require:
• A signed release agreement for each applicant.
• Bio: A written description of yourself, your work history, and your experience with comics (no more than 500 words).
• Proposal: A rough description of your proposed story, including the conclusion (no more than two pages).
• Sequential Art: At least five consecutive pages of finished sequential art from your story to demonstrate your storytelling.
This is definitely a grant aimed at newer creators as the work cannot have been previously submitted to a publisher and applicants cannot have been published via a third party publisher, although self-published and anthologies are allowed: “any non-anthology industry publication is unacceptable.” The application form has been rocketing around the internet, and the panel of anonymous judges will doubtless have a huge stack of proposals to go through in November.
The grant is basically a Xeric Grant on steroids, as befits a more expensive, more competitive media landscape. (The Xerics were funded by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Peter Laird and presented publishing funds for already completed projects; typical grants were a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.) The grant was founded (and one guesses at least partially funded) by Charlie Adlard, Jordie Bellaire, David Brothers, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Nick Dragotta, Leila del Duca, Matt Fraction, Kieron Gillen, Jonathan Hickman, Joe Keatinge, Robert Kirkman, Jamie McKelvie, Rick Remender, Declan Shalvey, Fiona Staples, Eric Stephenson, C. Spike Trotman, and Brian K. Vaughan.
