This one’s coming to you folks much later than I’d intended, but it’s been a busy month.
Nearly a month ago, Goats Flying Press launched a Kickstarter campaign for the original graphic novel The Fables of Erlking Wood, by Juni Ba and myself.
The campaign is now in its last few days, so I wanted to alert you to it if this might be something you’d be interested in (which, given that you follow my blog/newsletter, sounds likely).
From the Kickstarter page:
The Fables of Erlking Wood is a century-spanning epic, exploring the intertwined lives and fates of the denizens of Erlking Wood, the many peoples, critters, and demigods that call it home, and the shadowy figure of the Erlking himself, an ancient entity who haunts the woods and is known to strike bargains with any brave enough to dare approach him, offering them their hearts’ desire … but at a great cost. (Suggested for readers age 11 and up.)
The Fables of Erlking Wood is written, drawn and coloured by Juni, lettered by me, edited by Sebastian Girner (Goats Flying Press head honcho) and beautifully designed by Jeff Powell.
The Erlking is an existing figure from European folklore, a cognate of an elf-king or fairy-king, of which Oberon is a version. Juni, however, has put his own spin on the character, working from an emotional core that resonates back and forth in time in a non-linear narrative. The art and colours are some of my favourite work from Juni, as is the story, and this was one of those books that was created with the intention for me to letter it, so my work here is just as personal to me.
It’s some of the best work we’ve both done, and publishing it like this with GFP has enabled us to own this book and have creative control over it while also having the editorial backing and design and production assistance that comes with working with a publisher.
So far, the campaign has done great – we were fully funded in less than an hour, and blew through most of our stretch goals in a single day.
The rewards, other than print and digital copies of the book, include copies of other Goats Flying Press books, bookplates and sketches, original art, commissions, virtual hangouts with Juni, and one custom comic (which was snatched up on the first day).
Once we reached the funding goal, we added stretch goals and add-ons like bookmarks, stickers, enamel pins, t-shirts, and we upgraded the book itself to a deluxe hardcover with UV spot gloss on the cover and a four-colour gilded edge.
When the campaign crossed $40,000, we added my personal favourite reward – a fully black-and-white edition of the book (limited to 100 copies) with gold foil accents on the cover, for which I’ll be reworking the lettering of the entire book to fit the BW art (particularly necessary since the colour edition is lettered in strokeless balloons, which … er … wouldn’t show up in black-and-white anyway).
As I write this (quite literally as I was writing the last paragraph), I got an email from Sebastian saying that we just crossed $50,000, which is quite wonderful. We’ve believed in this project for years now – I think Juni first told me about this idea before we’d started working on either our Harley Quinn short or Robin: The Boy Wonder. I’ve seen the many iterations of the book (Juni, being an artist and therefore weird, “writes” a graphic novel by drawing thumbnails of the whole book and then throwing them out and drawing new ones), and I’ve seen it grow and become stronger and more complex, and, to me, something that incorporates our lives and our feelings about the world right now.
There are four days to go till the end of the campaign. We are assured now that we are funded, and we finished making the book before the campaign began. So there is no doubt that this book is being published. But if you like Juni’s or my work, if you’ve enjoyed our previous collaborations, or if you just like supporting independent comics, you can still go and back the book. The project page also has a short preview of the book, to give you an idea of what it looks like, and a project video that features Juni’s cat being pampered like a prince.
This is a special book for us, and we’d love your help to make it happen.
