Creators For Creators

The weekend is here! Take a look back at what’s happened in the past seven days. New comics, new stories, new podcasts, new art being made — it’s all part of the ComicsAlliance Weekender!

At last year's Image Expo, Image Comics and C. Spike Trotman's Iron Circus Comics announced a fund called Creators For Creators that would provide a grant for talented and undiscovered creators, allowing them the the freedom and flexibility to explore their art. Yesterday, at the final day of Emerald City Comic Con, the fund announced illustrator and cartoonist M. Dean as the first recipient of the 2017 Creators For Creators grant, for their upcoming project I Am Young.

What a week! I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to sit back and read some comics. The weekend is finally here, and the world can relax and rest once more — but the comics industry has been busy too, you know, and the last seven days have seen a flurry of comics-based news and announcements fly past at high speed. ComicsAlliance has got your back, though: when it comes to comics, we never slow down, so here’s a look back and just what’s been going on. New comics, new stories, new podcasts, new art being made — it’s all part of the ComicsAlliance Weekender!

For virtually every comic book creator working today, self-publishing stories is the necessary first step for a career in comics, whether it's through webcomics or creating and printing your own series or graphic novel to sell at conventions or local stores. Unfortunately, it also tends to not be a very financially rewarding part of the process, and it's full of opportunities to make mistakes that can hinder - or even stop - someone with a great story to tell from getting to their full potential. Today, though, that process just became a whole lot easier for at least one young creator. As the final announcement of today's Image Expo, creators from both Image and Iron Circus announced the formation of Creators For Creators, a new nonprofit organization that will award a $30,000 grant to one cartoonist or writer-artist team to "support the creation of a new and original work of a length between sixty-four and one hundred pages over the course of a single year." And believe it or not, the money's only half of what the grant will involve.