Crowdfunding

Read “fashion comic” and it’s easy — it’s really easy — to visualise genteel elegance, perhaps (if you want to get nutty) with a side of razzle-dazzle. Dior, Chanel, the '50s-through-'70s girls’ comics with paper dolls and reader-designed costumes... What was once daring and new, liberating for the wearer, has become established, gender-restrictive, rote and retro. Things "for girls," or about us, are easy enough to dismiss without the added impression that comics, as an English-language industry, doesn't think girls want much more than the feminine or the shallow. We imagine "fashion comics" and see good clean fun — easily, we see compliance. Interrogating that reductive response is hard when we look around and see very little to contradict it, or to comfort our non-compliant selves with, as we explore what fashion and gender mean personally, to us. Fashion in Action, currently halfway through a healthy Kickstarter campaign, is something to cling onto: Fashion in Action is kind of grotty.

When you look at the sheer range and number of original stories being told in comics form today, it’s hard to imagine a better time to be a comics reader. Online and in print, from all around the world, artists and writers are telling stories with their own voices and styles, and there’s so much to choose from that it’s sometimes difficult to know what to read next. With Should I Be Reading… ?, ComicsAlliance hopes to offer you a guide to some of the best original ongoing comics being published today. There are a lot of impressive webcomics out there, but very few creators have the chutzpah to reboot an entire line of webcomics as one slice-of-life strip. That's how Dumbing of Age was born, and the result is some of the finest comics storytelling being published today.

Crowdfunding has become an important part of how comics get made, allowing creators to pitch their work directly to readers, and providing opportunities for comics that traditional publishers may not consider. With Back Pages, ComicsAlliance hopes to provide a spotlight for some of the best comics crowdfunding projects we can find. Created by Sean E. Williams and Saori Adams, Comicker Digital is offering a wide slate of digitla comics on a subscription model, with a focus on allowing creators to work to their own schedules. Now Comicker Digital is expanding into print, under the not entirely unexpected name of Comicker Press. To do this, the founders have turned to Kickstarter to help fund the books. ComicsAlliance spoke to co-founder Williams about the move, how the digital comics marketplace looks right now, and what readers can expect from the publisher in the future.

The Toronto Comics Anthology has been the jumping off point for scores of great new local talent for a couple of years now, and for many of the creators it gives them the first opportunity to have comics work printed and published for the world to see. After the success of last year’s second volume, the anthology is back to show off the best and brightest of the Toronto indie scene to the world.

At the beginning of last year, editor and publisher Janelle Asselin launched Rosy Press with the specific goal of publishing romance comics, a genre that most in the industry had long since given up on. With the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, the Rosy Press anthology title Fresh Romance had an acclaimed digital run, continuing today with the release of Issue #7. Now Asselin is running a second Kickstarter to bring a Fresh Romance collection to print, with the help of Oni Press. ComicsAlliance spoke to Asselin --- a former editor for this site --- about her recent successes and future goals for Rosy Press.

Crowdfunding has become an important part of how comics get made, allowing creators to pitch their work directly to readers, and providing opportunities for comics that traditional publishers may not consider. With Back Pages, ComicsAlliance hopes to provide a spotlight for some of the best comics crowdfunding projects we can find. With 1001 Knights, editors Annie Stoll and Kevin Jay Stanton are bringing a staggeringly colossal, magnificently giant work of titanically stonking proportions to Kickstarter. Made of three volumes each representing a noble trait of knighthood, the project sees a stunning array of artists, writers, poets, and artistic types gathered together to tell stories about a diverse range of knights. Starting life as a zine --- before rapidly racing off into a far grander project --- 1001 Knights has already flown past its funding target. ComicsAlliance spoke to Stoll and Stanton about the anthologies.

It's Black History Month! And what better way to celebrate than by looking at our past and using it to head into the future --- even if that future is lifetimes away from now. That's exactly what Greg Burnham and Marcus Williams' plan to capture in Tuskegee Heirs. The forthcoming graphic novel pays homage to the Tuskegee Airmen as it follows five talented pilots in their teenage years on their journey to defend the world --- eighty years from now. Oh, and there are big fighting robots involved too. Comic book fans have been buzzing with excitement for the upcoming new series which was funded over Kickstarter within days of its start in January. Now, with four days to go, the duo has raised over five times the amount of their original goal of $10,000, gaining them enough funding to create six issues and a mobile game app. But they're really eyeing a possible animated series --- and we can already imagine some exciting scenes. (We mentioned the big fighting robots right?) ComicsAlliance spoke with Burnham and Williams about the latest project, what scenes they're looking forward to animating, the history of the Tuskegee Airmen, and what readers can expect in the first graphic novel.

Mildred Louis' webcomic Agents of the Realm has recruited a growing legion of fans since it started almost two years ago. The story of five girls who have just started college, things start to get weird when ghostly monsters maraud the premises. Then magical brooches appear --- and wouldn't you know it? Before anybody can say a thing, the girls have formed a superteam ready to defend the planet. At heart a huge adventure series about magical girls, this is also a profoundly real story, with women who experience life in all its ups and downs. To find out more about how the series first came together, and about the current Kickstarter to bring the story to print, we spoke to Louis about all things Agents of the Realm.

With Morgan's Organs, the team of Daniel Brodie and Rob Jennex are taking a familiar concept and sending it off in a completely new direction. Set inside their lead character, the comic brings a group of organs to life and pits them off against one another, their squabbles and ambitions leading their human into new and confusing situations. But this isn't an all-ages comic --- rather, this is the "inside the body" comic that finally gives voice to a penis, and pits it as the main opponent to the brain. It's very silly, but it also makes some surprising and delightfully funny points about how humans function. To find out more, ComicsAlliance spoke to Brodie about the project.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that you're familiar with Alan Moore, so let's just skip straight to the details. Today, Avatar Press launched a Kickstarter to fund Cinema Purgatorio a new anthology series from Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, featuring new stories by Kieron Gillen and Ignacio Calero, Garth Ennis and Raulo Caceres, Christos Gage and Gabriel Andrade, and Max Brooks and Michael DiPascale, all built around the theme of recapturing the strange, violent, and somewhat disturbing world of 1970s cinema. And they did it by including what might be the single most Alan Moorest sentence that it is possible to write.