Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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Hello, everyone! We’re Iron Circus Animation!
Born into the pandemic chaos of 2020, we’re a scrappy li’l studio in the American Midwest, an ambitious new arm of the celebrated and award-winning Iron Circus Comics! We were built from the ground up by founders Tracy Butler, Fable Siegel, and C. Spike Trotman to animate Lackadaisy, the 27-minute pilot based on Tracy’s Eisner-nominated webcomic of the same name. And our mission? To extend the Iron Circus Comics philosophy to animation, and showcase the Strange and Amazing.
Our work is off the beaten path, one-of-a-kind, and one thousand percent worth the trip! We hope you’ll come along!
Once the pride of St. Louis’ swingin’ Prohibition Era, shabby little speakeasy Lackadaisy is barely hanging on in 1927.
Hidden under the unassuming Little Daisy Cafe and run by the widowed and strong-willed Mitzi May, Lackadaisy still holds its own in the rough-and-ready world of bootleggin’ bandits… but for how much longer? Will tenacity, class, and a little bit of crazy be enough to ensure the survival of Mitzi and her gang?
Calamity after calamity has worn down the once-popular establishment. Now, jazz band riffraff, a sassy flapper, a tommygun savant, and a beleaguered veteran of The Great War are all that remain to keep Lackadaisy from shuttering… paired, of course, with some halfway-decent booze.
You’ll have to pry Mitzi’s hole-in-the-wall haven from her cold, dead hands.
And unfortunately, her rum-running rivals are happy to take their shot.
A cult classic with over a decade online, Lackadaisy has been a webcomic since 2006, earning a Eisner Award nomination in 2009. In 2020, Iron Circus Comics stepped in to print Lackadaisy Essentials — an art-and-lore volume highlighting the scenes and characters of the Lackadaisy universe — and couple it with the ridiculously ambitious proposal of a Lackadaisy short film.
In April of 2023, that film finally dropped.
The Lackadaisy film has since racked up over 9.7 million views and drawn half a million new subscribers to the Lackadaisy YouTube channel. It’s a bigger and better response to our years of hard work than we even dared to dream of!
And now, we wanna do more.
Animation is expensive, and far too often, treated with disdain by its own platforms. Traditionally, the only studios that can afford to produce entire animated series have been tied in some way to large corporations; large corporations that finance productions in return for control and copyright. And those large corporations don’t always have a series’ best interests at heart.
We don’t want that for Lackadaisy. We want to retain ownership, direction, and oversight, and that’s usually a dealbreaker for corporate financing. We want to make more of what millions of viewers have already come to love about our animation. And beyond that? We feel we’ve come to the fore at a potentially critical moment for the future of independent animation.
We have a chance to help establish the new normal. We don’t just want to do this, we want to prove it can be done. And to do that, we’re going to need your help.
And this is the part where YOU come in.
If you want more animated Lackdaisy, supporting this BackerKit is the most direct way to make sure that happens! Independent funding like this is the best way to guarantee we have the freedom to create this series on our own terms, and see it through to its true conclusion.
The first Lackadaisy film was funded with an art book, Lackadaisy Essentials. Our next venture beneath the Little Daisy Cafe will be led by a triumphant return-to-print for the Lackadaisy comic itself, and a first-time-ever issue of Lackadaisy plushes! We’re also introducing not one, but TWO all-new, extra-large enamel pin sets.
As of July 28th, this project has raised $743,000 of their $125,000 goal. This project has 28 days left to raise as much as it can. For a pledge of $25, you will get one volume one hardcover book. For a pledge of $35, you will get one volume two hardcover book. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.backerkit.com/c/iron-circus-comics/lackadaisy-bookset-and-plushes
