A Fistful of Comics: Crowdfunding Roundup, August ’19

Comics Indie & Small Press Lists Webcomics
Zora Gilbert
A crop of a page from Kelly Chan's story from Life Finds a Way. A figure speaks to different groups of people in a town and a desert, in a palette of swirling yellows and reds. The series title lettering is laid over the artwork, and reads “A FISTFUL OF COMICS” in big yellow text. Below, in red, reads “CROWDFUNDING ROUNDUP, AUGUST ’19.” Artwork by Kelly Chen; Fistful of Comics lettering by Zora Gilbert.

It’s August and as of yesterday I am rid of all the packages from my own Kickstarter, which means the website no longer seems to carry malevolent, threatening energy. So let’s take a look a this month’s bounty!

A mockup of the HEY, AMATEUR! hardcover. The cover features a white person with long brown hair, wearing an orange shirt covered in painty handprints and large circular goggles around their neck. They're holding a blowtorch, and panels behind them show a teacup, a roller skate, a tambourine, a ruler, and a lava lamp. The subtitle at the bottom of the page reads "GO FROM NOVICE TO NAILING IT IN NINE PANELS!" Cover art by Michael Allred.

HEY, AMATEUR!

Shelly Bond
Black Crown (IDW)
Ends August 31

HEY, AMATEUR! started out as a series of single page comics at the end of the Black Crown Quarterly anthologies, and is now evolving into its very own hardcover book! This collected edition includes comics from the quarterly magazines, as well as a ton of brand-new single-page how-tos (hyphens) by creators like Kelly Sue DeConnick, Liz Prince, and Gail Simone. Buy this book, and you too can have incredibly limited knowledge about: surviving bear attacks, contour drawing, doing ollies on skateboards, lucid dreaming, spotting galaxies, and more!

Three pages from ELEMENTS: Earth. The rightmost (by Chrystin Garland) features a large cat staring down and then swiping at a smaller creature in a mask; the middle page (by Diigii Daguna) follows two small, pointed-eared figures as they wander happily through a forest, mountains, and a meadow; and the rightmost (by Chan Chau) is a full-page illustration of a figure with chin-length hair standing under a tree.

ELEMENTS: Earth

Taneka Stotts
Ascend Comics
Ends September 9

ELEMENTS is an incredibly inspiring all-ages, LGBTQ+-friendly, POC-created anthology series, edited by Taneka Stotts. The first installation, ELEMENTS: Fire, won an Eisner and an Ignatz and instilled me with a deep, abiding excitement about the power of spot color in comic anthologies (listen, I work in production, this is what I care about). And it deserved every accolade it got—Fire was easily my favorite anthology of its year, and I’ve been waiting for Earth with bated breath ever since. Back this book!!! Buy it for your teacher friends! What are you waiting for!

A mockup of the softcover of Help Wanted. A white woman with long blonde hair and a flowing blue-teal knee-length dress leans against the main character, a black woman with red hair wearing a varsity jacket, ripped jeans, and a baseball cap and holding a baseball bat and a toolbox. A ratty brown cat with missing patches of fur rubs its face on the main character's leg. Other characters appear in asymmetrical panels in the background. Cover art by Payton Francis

Help Wanted Volume One

Payton Francis
Ends September 14

Anne Black, the main character of Help Wanted, gets to live one of my weirder post-college fantasies: moving away from all of my responsibilities and doing maintenance on a cool old building. In this case, though, the building is an apartment building, and the tenants are all, like, werewolves and vampires and junk. So that’s different? Help Wanted Volume One is a collection of the first six chapters of the ongoing webcomic, coming in at about 190 full-color pages including a bonus chapter and some extras!

The cover to Modern Mythology. A wild crew of humans battles a hydra with heads resembling mythic figures from many different mythologies, including one that breathes fire and one that looks like Anubis. One of the humans is sitting on a neck, writing in a notebook; another brandishes a phone; a third is wearing a baseball uniform, and the fourth waves a hockey stick. A human-sized frowning spider peeks out from one corner, and a jar with limbs sits on one of the necks. Cover art by Angela Oddling.

Modern Mythology: The Hero’s Journey

Caleb Palmquist
Enkidu Studio
Ends September 19

Maybe it’s just that I’ve been systematically churning my way through all the existing Rick Riordan Presents novels this year, but I’m deeply pumped about a new anthology full of modern, slightly goofy retellings of ancient myths. And that’s what Modern Mythology is! With a broad array of styles and mythologies, this book looks vibrant and exciting… and educational, with a page at the beginning of each story that describes the history, mythology, and even linguistics behind the entry.

The cover to Life Finds a Way. In the foreground, a figure stands on a ridge looking over a dilapidated city. Green-glowing deer graze in the ruins of a building; skyscrapers lean haphazardly in the background. The figure is wearing goggles, and carrying a large backpack and a toddler on their back. The title lettering sits in the bottom-left corner of the cover, in sleek white all-caps text.

Life Finds a Way

Dan Anctil & Alina Pete
Cloudscape Comics
Ends September 28

Life Finds a Way is an anthology of collaborative post-apocalyptic fiction. Comics and anthologies are collaborative crafts, naturally, but the stories in this one are themselves about collaboration—about people working hard and working together to build their lives back up after world-shattering catastrophe. With stories from over 35 creators (including WWAC’s own Jameson Hampton!), Life Finds a Way is meant to bring hope to its contributors and its readers in a year that can all too often feel like the end times.

And more!

Hazel: A Witches’ Lifestyle Zine, issue IV: Ritual. Ends August 31. We wrote about issue III last year!

APPEAL! Pilot (a werewolf x vampire YA romance)! Ends September 13.

NEO-TOKYO 2019: An Resograph Akira Fanzine. Ends September 14.

Weekend Warrior Comics #1: A New Superhero Comics Magazine. Ends September 19. Read our interview with editor Mark O. Stack!

Nonbinary Folks in Tech zine series. Ends September 22.

Zora Gilbert

Zora Gilbert

Zora Gilbert cares a whole lot about words, kids, and comics. Find them at @zhgilbert on twitter, and find the comics they edit at datesanthology.com.
gilbert.zora@gmail.com
http://zhgilbert.net
Zora Gilbert

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