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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If you love newspaper comic strips, you will love my new book How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. I’ve combined years of research and the diligent collection of unique comics printing artifacts with dozens of interviews with cartoonists, historians, and production people to tell the story of how a comic starts with an artist’s hand, and makes it way through transformations into print and, more recently, onto a digital screen. I need your help to make it happen!
The book will be a glorious full-color celebration of the art form, heavily illustrated from the 1890s to the present day with materials that you’ve never seen before, drawn from my personal collection and museums, cartoonists and their estates, and institutions around the United States. It will also feature never-before-published strips and versions of some popular comics.
I’ve interviewed dozens of people for this project so far, including both mainstream and alternative cartoonists, some of them new to syndication and others with strips that span 50 years or which appeared for decades in alt weeklies. This includes Derf Backderf, Lynn Johnston, Barbara Brandon-Croft, Keith Knight, Bill Griffith, Robb Armstrong, Brian Walker, Tom Batiuk, Dave Kellett, and Matt Bors. I also spoke to people in comics production and publishing, historians, academics, and those overseeing cartoonist’s legacies, such as Susan Kirtley, Paige Braddock, Bryant Alexander, Eric Reynolds, and Peter Maresca. Those names are just the tip of the iceberg.
The book will cover the whole scope of newspaper comics in North America, from their emergence in the 1890s through the 2020s. I’ll examine the technological changes that gave rise to comics, then syndicates, and, much later, webcomics; how artists plied their trade and made artistic, commercial, and production choices in how they created lines, tints, and colors; and reveal the several huge overhauls in cartoon and newspaper production across that period.
As of March 12th, this project has raised $83,000 of their $150,000 goal. This project has 16 days left to raise the $150,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $25, you will get one eBook. For a pledge of $65, you will get one book. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/glennf/how-comics-were-made?
