Kick It New School: a quick look at kickstarter for cartoonists

Once my darling ex-cartoonist friend Anders made a Kickstarter page to fund his first album I had to take a second look at this Kickstarter thing.  As I write this, his request has been up for one day and already he’s half-way to his goal.  That’s $400 just out of the blue, which completely blows my mind.  Could it be that Anders is very popular and has many rich friends?  Well, not exactly.

Kickstarter is an internet infant, having only been around since April 2009.  If its existence is news to you, I suggest that you read this excellent Publisher’s Weekly article from Terri Heard that illuminates some of the service’s history.  Most interesting to me was that its origins lay in the effort to keep Arrested Development on the air.  Oh, how I wish it had succeeded!

This month’s Wired Magazine also featured Kickstarter in its award-winning Start section.  It reminded me of specific Kickstarter success stories like the Calvin & Hobbes documentary Dear Mr. Watterson which is still openly accepting donations and generating mad cash.  In fact, it’s almost doubled its goal amount through Kickstarter donations.

I’ve lived a number of impulse purchase success stories, including the time I bought an orange coat I totally didn’t need but always receive compliments for wearing.  Basically, I’ve been a big fan of this model even before it existed.  The fact that it’s here now is so remarkable and unbelievable, I hardly appreciated it was real until someone I know well got involved.

Then I remembered an old friend from far away, Box Brown, had already made the Kickstarter system work for him.  Boxy makes the webcomic Bellen! and self-published minis until he won the Xeric to print his graphic novel Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing.  He recently ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that earned him $3,279 to print issues one and two of a new comic series Everything Dies.  We talked over email regarding his experience as a Kickstarter success story.

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Interview: Graham Annable Pt. 1 [of 4]

I jumped at the opportunity to interview Graham Annable, upon being asked by his new publisher, Dark Horse. We haven’t heard much from Annable on the printed front since the publishing schedule at Alternative Comics slowed to what might be generously referred to as a crawl. In fact, the latest issue of the Annable-helmed Hickee anthology, published in 2008, is the most recent book listed on the publisher’s site, still carrying a big, red “NEW” graphic, atop the homepage.

After a moment, however, something occurred to me—thing is, we’ve never really heard all that much from Graham Annable in this area. He is that rare beast in the world of cartooning—an artist with a really good day job. In fact, he’s had a string of them, having worked in the animation and gaming fields for more than a decade and a half, working for Chuck Jones, LucasArts, and TellTale Games at various points in his career.

Annable is currently employed by Laika Animation—the former Will Vinton Studios, now funded by Nike founder Phil Knight. The cartoonist storyboarded the studio’s first feature—the nearly universally beloved Coraline. Nice work if you can get it, certainly, but its easy to also lament what such successes have meant for us comics readers: fewer Grickle books.

Of course Annable has been doing plenty of peripherally related work in his free time, from his YouTube Grickle Channel to his weekly TellTale strip, Dunk/Dank. Still, it’s hard not to find oneself hoping that any success that might arise from the coming release of Dark Horse’s The Book of Grickle will inspire a whole new spate of Grickle material.

As the author of the book’s introduction, Jeff Smith, will happily attest, there’s something magical in these strips—perfect little snapshots of tragicomedy, drawn deceptively simply by an artist who could clearly craft something more grandiose, given a little more time. But to do so would strip them of some of their immense charm.

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Interview: Jim Rugg Pt. 4 [of 4]

In this final part of our interview with the Afrodisiac artist, we discuss the influence of vintage books, the power of homage, and the importance of context.

[Part One][Part Two][Part Three]

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Interview: James Sturm Pt. 4 [of 4]

In this final part of our interview with the Market Day artist, we discuss the fine line between real life and fiction in Sturm’s most recent book.

[Part One][Part Two][Part Three]

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Interview: Jim Rugg Pt. 3

“I found a lot of common ground between superhero comics and blacksploitation,” Jim Rugg explains. “That was another thing that I connected pretty early on.” The sign of a well made piece of post-modern pop art is the ability to connect the dots between seemingly divergent cultural milestones.

Rugg found kindred spirits in the low budget films and pulp comics of the 70s, tying the genres together in a new way. It’s something that has come to define much of Rugg’s work in the medium, from Street Angel, to Afrodisiac, to the title’s the artist is currently readying for release.

[Part One][Part Two]

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Interview: James Sturm Pt. 3

“Every time you go to the drawing board,” James Sturm tells me, “it’s fraught with peril.” It’s the sort of sentiment that’s likely simultaneously encouraging and depressing for the students of The Center for Cartoon Studies, the school that Sturm founded in 2005, in his home of White River Junction Vermont.

It’s not that making comics is no longer Sturm’s passion, of course, it’s just that, well, all of these years and graphic novels later, the process is still challenging for the Market Day artist.

In this third part of our interview, we discuss just how difficult that can be while opening a school and raising a small family.

[Part One][Part Two]

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Interview: Jim Rugg Pt. 2

If there’s one thing even more clear in Afrodisiac than Jim Rugg’s love for 70s blacksploitation flicks, it’s his passion for the highs–and lows–of books from that same decade. In this second part of our interview with the artist, we discover that the book, recently published as a single-volume graphic novel by Adhouse, was originally pitched as a 40 issue series, one that mimicked the storytelling rollercoaster ride that is an on-going comics series.

[Part One]

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Interview: James Sturm Pt. 2

In this second part of our interview with the Market Day author, we discuss the factors that brought Sturm, then fresh out of SVA’s graduate program, to Seattle. While in the Emerald City, the artist helped co-found the alternative weekly, The Stranger, alongside Tim Keck, one of the founders of The Onion. Sturm now has another prominent cartooning-centric day job, as the founder of the Center for Cartooning Studies in his current home of White River Junction, Vermont.

We discuss the importance of such labors of love on the life and career of an artist, and whether or not its worth giving it all for a She-Hulk mini-series.

[Part One]

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Interview: Jim Rugg Pt. 1

Pittsburgh-based cartoonist Jim Rugg has been making his rounds in the industry for a number of years, producing books for the likes of Dark Horse, Image, SLG, and DC’s short lived YA imprint, Minx. It’s Rugg’s latest book, Afrodiasiac, co-written with Brian Maruca for Adhouse, however, that truly finds the artist coming into his own.

The book explores the rich fictional history of the titular character first seen in Rugg’s five-part Street Angel series. The book is a lovingly rendered homage to a seemingly endless parade of pop culture touchstones from the 1970s, most notably the eras Marvel books and blacksploitation titles.

It’s a scrapbook devoted to appearances of an imaginary hero from a series that never existed. It faithful captures the decade’s diverse aesthetics with the manner of chameleon-like draughtsmanship rarely seen outside of an issue of Eightball or Schizo.

And while Rugg and Maruca certainly play fast and loose with the form, the work rarely enters the realm of parody. It’s clear that the people who created the book are fans, first and foremost.

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Interview: James Sturm Pt. 1

Arriving in spring of this year, Market Day marks James Sturm’s first major solo work since founding the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT. Though set in a turn-of-the-century Eastern European market, it doesn’t take too much digging to surmise that the book is as much a comment on life as an artist in modern America as anything that might have affected the lives of artisans 100 years ago and half a world away.

Sturm, now a father of two, clearly invested much of his own life into the story of a rug weaver forced to make a choice between his art and his growing family. Happily, however, the author seems to have largely avoided such forced choices. In 2001, Sturm moved his young family to Vermont. Three years later, CCS was opened in an abandoned department store in downtown White River.

All the while, Sturm has been steadily releasing titles, including 2007’s children’s book, Saitchel Page: Striking Out Jim Crow, and last year’s Adventures in Cartooning, a how-to book co-authored by two CCS students.

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