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A couple of months back I announced that Hermes Press—a specialist in comic strip reprints—was going to reprint Katherine Collins’s Neil the Horse comics in a richly deserved deluxe edition. Well for various reasons, this book is now being crowdfunded on Indiegogo.

We are already working on restoring the pages, but don’t have the money to print the book. Until we do, it’ll just be sitting on our desktops! By helping us fund this project, you will be saving an iconic series. Neil the Horse  will always be in comics history. But we want more for our horsey hero. Howabout letting him live again?

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Neil and his friends Soapy and Mam’selle Poupée are an always-struggling song-and-dance act. To gain success, they will go anywhere, do anything, and put up  with anything — like a trip to Hell, or captivity inside a video game, or a gang of  slap-happy aliens in a stunt-driving saucer. Oh, and a drunken and disorderly  back-up band of cats.


The campaign has a few weeks to go but a lot of money to make. It’s my hope that once the word spreads, the small but loyal Neil following will get the word out and get this funded.

I think the problem may be that no one has seen NEIL THE HORSE for 20 years, and aren’t familiar with its delights. It is safe to say that if this strip were to appear suddenly on tumblr, it would gather new fans in droves, and I don’t think that’s just my nostalgia talking. NEIL THE HORSE is wonderful, classic cartooning—okay the fashions stop 20 years ago but otherwise this could be an indie comics upstart fresh from CCS. The description—talking singing horses, dolls and cats—sounds kid-like and cute-core, and it is, but there’s an essential sadness and wisdom as the strip goes along that makes it so much more. Plus, like I said, it’s just wonderful retro cartooning.

As a reminder, the finished book will be a deluxe hardcover reprint, with all the Neil stories’ extra art, an introduction by Trina Robbins, and commentary by Neil’s creator, Katherine Collins.

Neil the Horse has been unseen for far too long. Let’s get this going, people!

4 COMMENTS

  1. I wish they’d done this before soliciting the book–I’d have been fine contributing then. But, as it is, I’m already on the hook for $95 to my local comic store if and when the deluxe edition comes out, and I can’t afford to give any more.

    They really should have had the book ready to print (or at least able to be paid by Diamond orders) before putting it in Previews is what I’m saying.

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