So A FISTFUL OF PAIN is into its final 3 days on Kickstarter!
It’s been an awesome few weeks for crowdfunding my latest hardcover graphic novella with Louie Joyce as my co-pilot and Thomas Mauer on letters.
If you want to support our comic about sisters, vengeance, and the family dragon, click here!
This campaign has been a wild ride so far, here are the bullet point highlights!
We were fully funded in about 13 hours
We are facing the chance to be the most ever funded and backed comic project for ComixTribe
We are actually just shy of $50,000 [AUD] right now
We’ve added 8 pages to the hardcover, and the next stretch goal is to add another 4 again
We’ve unlocked the chance for hardcore supporters to buy two different metal covers - I don’t know why I love these things so much, but I do - so you can get A FISTFUL OF PAIN in metal, or my old surf noir CHUM #1 in a special metal rerelease
We started with 3 art prints - from Elsa Charettier, Sebastian Piriz, and Nathaniel Oooten - and we’ve added two more - from Matty Huynh and Louie Joyce himself ←and all international backers outside the US get these prints for free! FREE!
But the best thing is just people so genuinely excited to read this wild story about two sisters kung fu duelling on a yacht at night off the Melbourne coast to see who will become the caretaker for the family dragon - and to think that such a weird concept has been illustrated by Louie Joyce just makes me smile every time because he went to town on this one - the book is eleven kinds of gorgeous!
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Here we are, the final days, and I want to thank everyone that’s come on board and backed for a copy of the book so far.
I want to remind people you can get the book digitally for a decent price.
You can buy the standard softcover version - less extra pages, but less cost - and this awesome cover!
You can buy the Eric Zawadzki cover, that’s exclusive to just the Kickstarter!
You can get the hardcover deluxe die-cut treatment!
You can score the metal version with Nathaniel Ooten art!
Or you can personally manage your pledge so you can select add ons like the art prints, or a Louie Joyce sketch, or these Kickstarter exclusive enamel pins!
There’s an awesome story being told that we love, and then there’s more for those that want more.
CLICK ACROSS TO THE KICKSTARTER TO SEE HOW YOU’LL GET YOUR FISTFUL OF PAIN!
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I just want to wrap up here with a final little thing I wrote, it’s all about why I love working with ComixTribe. It’s a decent little slab of text, but I hope it shows my appreciation for Tyler James and all he does through his publishing company…enjoy.
Why ComixTribe Rules!
When I first started writing, often just scripts with no artists and no actual publishing plan, just enjoying the words and worlds coming to life through my fingers, I had no real idea what I was doing.
But I knew I wanted to be doing it.
So I wrote everything I could imagine - a 60 issue story plan, a dozen story outlines, about 60 issues of scripts, even a Daredevil OGN - and it was all learning. Just me sitting around in odd hours tinkering with how words came out of me, and how stories would build within me.
Eventually [and maybe not soon enough, I don’t know], I realised I should try my hand at writing some short stuff. At least I could get someone to read a 5 page script, and maybe even partner up with an artist to make that comic actually come to life.
I wrote a bunch of short scripts, and eventually made one in an anthology organised by my local drink ‘n’ draw, and then posted another one up online, and then organised to have one put into the back of an Image Comic, GRIM LEAPER - and this came about because I’d discovered a writer who excited me with his new book GREEN WAKE. His name was Kurtis J. Wiebe and he made this comic with Riley Rossmo that absolutely blew me away, it still stands as one of my all time favourite comics, and I reached out to Kurtis to interview him about the comic and one day we conducted the interview over like 3 hours of back and forth emails and we just clicked, so a friendship was formed.
Kurtis was also good mates with Jeremy Holt and somehow it was decided that we should start a podcast about writing where we just shot the breeze and thought about this passion we all shared. THE PROCESS was born, and I don’t remember how long that podcast ran for, but I remember loving every chance we took to chat, record, and just love writing so damn much.
Now [and I’m going somewhere, I promise], this podcast had an email and one day a digital missive arrived where Tyler James asked if any of us would be interested in writing a short story for an anthology he was putting together for his nascent publisher around this character he’d created, Oxymoron.
I hit Tyler up because I was intrigued, and he shared the book Oxymoron came from with me [THE RED TEN] and he laid out his anthology plans for a slate of stories about Oxymoron, and he told me about this publisher he’d started up to publish this comic he wrote, but that he had plans to do more.
It’s a decade ago, but I still remember so much about working on that anthology. I brought in Daniel J. Logan as my artist, because we’d been working on GHOST TOWN, a title at Action Lab Comics, and I really liked his style, and him as a person. I wrote this nasty short story and Tyler guided us in for our landing and it felt so awesome to just be getting a little space to make a comic somewhere else where someone saw potential in me.
I remember in the build up to the Kickstarter campaign, and through it all, the excitement amongst all the creators as we had a group email chain and we were all looking for ways to make this book exceptional and the campaign a success.
This was back in 2012, I think, and Kickstarter was fairly new [and USA exclusive] and Tyler just ran an exceptional campaign - it was hugely funded, and it seemed to flood my online vision at the time, it was a huge success.
I knew, right then, a decade ago, that I wanted to keep working with Tyler. So I pitched him a 3 issue crime comic with Sami Kivela on art and he was all in for it, so CHUM was born.
I loved that comic and am eternally grateful Tyler took a chance on two beginning creators for a whole mini. It’s been great to see that comic get fans and great reviews and then help push Sami Kivela into the superstar he is today with titles at Dark Horse and AfterShock!
Over the coming years, I watched as Tyler built himself and ComixTribe up into a Kickstarter /slash/ Crowdfunding empire and I was more impressed with every year that passed. I was also inspired.
Tyler took ComixTribe through numerous successful Kickstarter campaigns. All the while creating and running the ComixLaunch podcast - hands down one of my favourite podcasts of all time, and a huge resource for anyone looking to crowdfund.
I’ve personally run 8 successful Kickstarter campaigns, and everything I learned was learnt patiently at the steps to the ComixTribe Temple. Tyler continues to experiment with how he raises funds [and heart rates] and I have applied so much of it, so obviously it’s perfection when I get to do it alongside him [or maybe just a few steps behind].
Two years ago, just as the pandemic sunk its teeth into the world, Tyler hit launch on a much bigger affair than I’d ever really tried before. We set our sights on launching an OGN - a beautiful hardcover affair for my story with Chris Panda, SHE: AT THE TOWER OF ALL THAT IS KNOWN.
Now, Tyler had an idea to do a die-cut cover that came off better than we ever could have predicted.
We smashed ComixTribe records with the most backers on a comic project, just six shy of 700, and being one of the most funded in $$$ amounts comic projects they’d ever done [a ceiling that only continues to rise as Tyler puts together more and more amazing teams, stories, comics, and campaigns].
Obviously, for every possible reason someone would wake at 4am to make these kinds of stories and worlds up, I wanted to partner with Tyler again on something and I’m forever thankful for his faith in me because we instantly started preparing our engines to launch A FISTFUL OF PAIN into the world.
Louie Joyce and I had been working on this book for nearly a decade since its inception, and I knew the ComixTribe experience was the only way to really put this one out in the style it deserved.
So here we are: years into the journey, days away from a major milestone, and we have the finished comic ready to present to you. It’s such a personal book - a manifestation of a story about two family members dragged down by rivalry which is a result of a collaboration of two great mates elevated by creativity, and we really hope you dig this book!
I’ve put everything into this script, and Louie has gone above and beyond with every single page. Thomas Mauer is such a lettering genius and there are so many little moments here where he’s made the right choice and a page has clicked into its proper final form. Tyler James not only assembled this mastermind campaign for the book, but he also edited the comic and gave me some really strong notes that improved the whole thing tenfold.
A FISTFUL OF PAIN is the result of so much hard work, but even more passion. Now we just hope the investment in ourselves paid off and you are ready to support us in getting the story into your hands, and into the record books as ComixTribe’s most ever backed and funded comic on Kickstarter!
Thanks for sharing the joy.
They do damn fine stuff. As do you.
-gmc