Public Financing

I recently got a message promoting the upcoming miniseries "War of the Independents" (a play on words, I get it!), which is a big crossover event featuring lots of independent creations.  If you look at the image above you'll see some fairly big names on the independent circuit: Savage Dragon, Zot!, Hack/Slash, Kade...oh, and hey!  Ms. Monster in the top right.  I'm not quite sure how this all came together (or how many permissions the people working on this had to get), but it seems like a pretty cool idea.

The message included a link to the website Kickstarter, which allows people to raise money for various causes - in this case, the creators are looking for funding to create the project and are asking the Internet comic community at large.  I'm not sure how I feel about something like this.  I mean, if someone wants to ask for money for a project, then he or she is more than welcome, and if someone is willing to drop a few dollars in the cyber hat, then all the better.  But I don't think it's something I'd ever do with Teddy and the Yeti.  Maybe I just want to keep the creation process as simple as I can, or maybe I just want to focus on putting the book out and not asking for donations.

In any case, there's a tiered structure that awards several "prizes" based on how much one donates.  Donations start at $5.00 and go all the way to $350, which gets you a bunch of things including the miniseries, a page or original art from the series and - oh yeah - a cameo appearance by characters of the donor's creation.  It's a unique concept.  I'd be happy - naturally - to get Teddy and the Yeti in this book (hell, almost any book), but it's not something I want to spend $350 on.  For that price I could get a top-rate cover for the book or a bunch of other production work.  Now, if I could talk the people putting this together down to, say, $100 for just the cameo, well, that might be a bit different.  Ah hem.

"War of the Independents" debuts at the New York Comic-Con in October.  The Kickstarter donation page is here.