Welcome to our revamped “Crowdfunding Corner” rounding up some of the latest crowdfunding news. We’re going beyond just announcement projects, we’ll be tracking to make sure these projects get delivered as well as what we think the “risk” of backing them are.

We’ll be updating the format as we get a better handle of the needs of this sort of coverage, so stay tuned and check out the first round of projects!

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A Steampunk Love Story – Vol. 1

Publisher: N/A
Creative Team: Dan Bouchez
Launch Date: Launching Soon
Risk: Medium – It’s the first project listed for the profile which is always a risk.

A Steampunk Love Story is a graphic novel (4 volumes) blending romance, adventure, and steampunk aesthetics for young adult / adult. Here, steampunk is not just a retro futuristic backdrop, it’s a coherent, harsh, and poetic world serving a deeply human and universal story: love.

Deeply in love with Julia, Bernardo Rosa – a moody, talented yet accident-prone illustrator – struggles to make a living in a society driven by rapid industrial innovation. Short on money and refusing to work in the city’s new factories, he jeopardizes their relationship, with Julia reproaching him for not contributing to their household. The night she vanishes on her way to the theatre, where Bernardo planned to propose, he becomes convinced she was kidnapped by Bones, a mobster to whom he owes money for the wedding ring.

Helped by Ana, a lively and unpredictable street girl longing for the kind of love Bernardo shares with Julia, he embarks on a frantic chase through the city’s various districts before Bones can reach them first.

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Buster Keaton’s One Week

Publisher: N/A
Creative Team: Maciek Jozefowicz
Launch Date: Launching Soon
Risk: Medium – It’s the first project listed for the profile which is always a risk.

There is DC Universe. There is Marvel Universe. And there is Buster Keaton Universe.

I discovered the films of Buster Keaton about 15 years ago and fell in love with their wit, charm and inventiveness. Buster Keaton is one of the great filmmakers. At the height of his fame, during the silent era, he was second only to Charlie Chaplin.

Since then, I’ve been wanting to bring the universe that Keaton created in film to comics, but I did not have the tools to do it in the way that I wanted to do it. I now have the tools, the iPad and the Apple Pencil, and so I have began my adaptations.

“One Week” is one of Buster Keaton’s short classics. It’s been selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry. It is my fourth adaptation of a Buster Keaton film. All four adaptations — “Day Dreams”, “The Blacksmith”, “The Balloonatic” and “One Week” — are available on Amazon.

Unfortunately, while the Amazon’s ebook versions of the comic books are presentable, the physical versions, softcover and hardback, are barely so. Amazon’s print-on-demand is of low quality, even by print-on-demand standards. It’s fine for text, but not graphics. The black-and-white artwork is printed dark-gray-and-white, or faded-black-and-white. It’s as if the printers were trying to save ink. The interiors look like something that’s has been lying in the sun for years and lost its intensity. Or like pants that have gone through hundreds of washing cycles to become faded jeans. (If you like faded jeans, many do, you may like faded comics, too. I won’t judge.)

It’s frustrating to put effort into making something of quality only to have it ruined by the company that prints Amazon’s books! Buster Keaton deserves better. My artwork deserves better.

I launched this Kickstarter project to raise the funds necessary to print “Buster Keaton’s One Week” using offset printing. Offset printing offers the highest quality, but it is not on-demand, meaning that I can’t order one or ten or fifty copies at a time. There is a minimum number of copies that an offset printers are willing to print. That number varies between different printers, but the lowest that I’ve come across is 500.

At that small a count, one is not saving any money by printing offset. In most cases, print-on-demand will still be cheaper per unit. There is no difference in unit cost, but there is a difference in quality. Offset printing offers the sharpest and most intense graphics. It’s what big publishers use for their books.

This is why I am trying to raise $10,000 rather than a $1,000 or $2,000. If the campaign reaches $10,000, I will be able to offset print “One Week”. If it doesn’t, Amazon’s inferior versions is all that will be available for now.

Ideally, I would like to offset print all four books, but that would be only possible if the campaign reaches certain milestones. (I can dream, but I won’t put the carriage before the horse.)

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Good Grief: The End of Talking Back

Publisher: N/A
Creative Team: (w) Keith Frady (a) Phillip Ginn
Launch Date: Launching Soon – April 20
Risk: Low – A previous campaign was delivered after the projected date, but delivered

What if one day you turned to the funny pages to discover Charlie Brown sacrificing Linus in a cult ritual? What if, in the last month of their lauded series, Calvin and Hobbes were discussing the best ways to cook and eat human flesh?

From artist Phillip Ginn and writer Keith Frady, Good Grief: The End of Talking Back is a book collection of newspaper strips showing the sudden change of a family-friendly comic into the macabre and surreal. Accompanied by commentary from the strip’s longtime editor to hint at the mystery behind the comic’s shift in tone, Good Grief unspools stories within stories in service of a not-so-simple question: Why do we make art?