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Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, kickstarter, The Stars Our Destination
The Stars Our Destination: Kickstarting A Comic Is A Full-Time Job
Asphodel: A Mythic Space Opera Gale Galligan, artist and letterer. Alex Kane, writer. On Kickstarter until August 12, 2015, at 5:00 a.m. CDT. Estimated date of publication: November 10, 2015.
by Alex Kane
Asphodel is the tale of a soldier reborn as a peacekeeper, a cyborg demigoddess, and the desperate souls wandering our solar system's ruins in the wake of a mysterious event that granted most of the human race passage to a digital afterlife known as the Otherworld. A myth about strength in its varied forms, and what happens to humanity when the specter of physical death is little else than a memory, it's a new kind of space opera for an age when our idea of the capital-f Future is not at all simple, much less guaranteed.
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The amount of love that's gone into the Asphodel Kickstarter can't be measured; certainly not by all the time and money we have invested in this book, which I lost track of completely weeks ago. Suffice it to say, it's considerable. The thing about crowdfunding, though? It's a full-time job. You go to the website for Kickstarter or Indiegogo, click "Discover," and navigate to the Comics section, what you see is years of passion and hard work distilled into a single, thirty-day campaign to win over the hearts and minds of complete strangers.
With somewhere between 160 and 220 live comic book projects to choose from, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that a lot of really great work is going to go unseen and, ultimately, unfunded. Just last night, one of the coolest Kickstarter projects I've seen sent out an email informing backers: Funding Unsuccessful. It broke my heart. And they only hit something like 10 percent of their goal, which makes it all the more criminal.
(There, just now—yet another amazing comic I'd backed failed to get funded in time.)
I think it takes great courage to really put something out into the world and open yourself up to criticism, to let your art truly be seen, and now more than I ever I understand the value of community and the kind of world Kickstarter and similar platforms have created. In a way, crowdfunding is a natural evolution in the way digital media is democratizing everything. It's a new way for creators to make things that wouldn't have been possible before the Internet and what we call social media today. But it's also a tremendous amount of work!
A lot of folks probably assume that a good comic sells itself—even in the case of a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign. That really couldn't be further than the truth. So many great books, or games, or film projects—all kinds of really great ideas from talented artists—just don't manage to get the word out to people. It's hard work breaking through the noise of the net, with its constant high tide, low tide cycle of content. Getting eyeballs on your campaign video and traffic to your page is a herculean task, and you're going to need help.
Here are some tips, based on the first twenty-seven days of the most challenging, emotionally trying endeavor I've ever undertaken:
- If you don't know other creators in the comics biz, and you don't have a community or writers' group supporting you and your work, maybe take a year or two to get to know your peers and their work before you attempt a Kickstarter. This sounds like a bummer, but if I didn't have Neil "Sandman" Gaiman backing my project, and if I wasn't already friends with some of the most talented (and supportive) writers in the world, it's possible my project might've just gotten lost in the noise like so many other great books.
- Hire a publicist! You're going to need all the help you can get, especially if you're a cartoonist working alone, doing all the art and writing as well as managing the campaign. You need somebody who's got your back a little bit, who can help you get the word out with press releases and land a few guest-blogging spots, interviews, etc.
- Prepare to work your butt off. This is the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. Writing a twenty-two-page script is easy, coming up with a universe and a story is harder—but nothing compares to the managing of a Kickstarter campaign. If you don't have a Pulitzer prize or an Emmy Award on your shelf, it's going to take work to get noticed.
- You have to spend money to make money. Pay your artist, pay your publicist, pay for advertising. If you want to be successful with a crowdfunding project, treat it like what it is: a business.
- All moaning and groaning aside, you should try to love every minute of it. If you want to make the kind of comic nobody's ever seen before, and take a shot at doing what you love in a way that's sustainable, make every effort to get used to the jack-of-all-trades mentality it takes to run a campaign and engage with backers (and would-be readers) about your work. If all goes well, that work's not going away any time soon. You owe it to your characters, your story, and the giants on whose shoulders you stand, to do the work. Crack your knuckles and make the most of the opportunity.
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If Bleeding Cool readers can help us hit $12,000—yet another herculean task, I'm afraid—we'll unlock the stretch goal for a second issue, and every single backer on the project (from one dollar to a thousand, doesn't matter) will get a digital copy of Asphodel #2. And we'll be off and running with an exciting new space opera series unlike anything you've ever seen; trust me, you're going to want to read the whole graphic novel–sized story, so please consider supporting the first couple issues. Also: thanks for reading, and a big thanks to Bleeding Cool for having us!
Gale Galligan is a story artist–slash–cartoony person with a BFA in animation from NYU. Her comics have been published in the Game Boss and Transitions anthologies, and she is excited to be contributing to the forthcoming Horizon 2. Gale has also been credited as a production assistant for the excellent graphic novels Teen Boat!, Astronaut Academy: Re-Entry, andDrama. Gale is currently in the second year of her MFA in Sequential Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design; when she isn't making comics (such as her mostly-autobiographical webcomic of nearly five years, Patbird & Galesaur), Gale enjoys knitting, reading, and spending time with her cuddly roomie, Garrus the hedgehog.
galesaur.com • Twitter: @robochai
Alex Kane is the managing editor of The Critical Press, a publisher of books on film and culture, as well as an executive producer of the Star Wars documentary The Prequels Strike Back. He also serves as a first reader for Uncanny Magazine and works full-time as a freelance copyeditor. A graduate of the 2013 Clarion West Writers Workshop, his fiction has appeared in more than a dozen venues, including the Exigencies anthology from Curbside Splendor's Dark House imprint, edited by Richard Thomas. His reviews and criticism have been published in Foundation, The New York Review of Science Fiction, SF Signal, and Omni, among other places. He lives in west-central Illinois.
alexkanefiction.com • Twitter: @alexjkane
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