pear cider and cigarettes

Back in 2012, Robert Valley launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of a second volume of Pear Cider and Cigarettes, an autobiographical graphic novel about trying to save a friend in desperate need of a new liver. It's about a lot more than that too, as Chris Sebela put it in his interview with the animator/artist himself, "Instead of meditations on relationships and jobs, Pear Cider is a whirlwind journey full of drugs, blood, sex, disease and international travel." Both volumes of the book were a success, but now Valley is returning to Kickstarter with Pear Cider and Cigarettes once more, only this time he's hoping to turn the story into a 30-minute animated short. Even back when the crowdfunding for the second volume began, Robert Valley had an animated version of the story in mind. As he does most of his solo animating through Photoshop already, the book would serve as storyboards for the short film. It's taken four more years, but Valley's completely animated the story from start to finish. This latest Kickstarter venture is merely to help secure funding for post-production.

Some people take a rigid, hardline view of success. In this hierarchical thinking, once you've achieved greatness in a difficult field, the idea of stepping back to something deemed less challenging and with fewer eyes on it could be considered a retreat...