A Fistful of Comics: Crowdfunding Roundup, November ‘21

Welcome back WWAC’s very own crowdfunding corner! We took a break last month due to general work-life balance related exhaustion, but I’m back and ready to share my favorite of this month’s campaigns. If you like heartwarming memoirs and up-and-coming cartoonists and not graphic novel adaptations of movie adaptations backed by Hollywood producers (why do these people think they need seed money), scroll on down!

Cooking Will Break Your Heart

Greg Pak
Ends November 23

I’ve liked Greg Pak’s work for a long time, though I don’t know that I’ve ever actively pursued it. This means, of course, that I wasn’t following his twitter until a couple weeks ago, which means I’ve missed what appears to be one of the more quietly magical things to have come out of this age of isolation: Pak’s almost daily cooking threads. Since he launched this campaign, though, I’ve become a devotee. Cooking Will Break Your Heart is a digital-only zine collecting the dishes Pak has shared over the last year and a half (or more), as well as his writings and comics about and around food. While the digital-only nature of the collection is deeply frustrating to me, a person who desperately wants to physically hand it to the man who taught them to love feeding themself (thanks dad), not having to print means skipping the supply chain nightmare and keeping the campaign manageable. That said, if you really want an object, Pak is designing sticker sheets and has copies of previously-published books available as backer rewards, so there’s something there for you too!

2120, Sleeping While Standing, and Outer Wilderness

George Wylesol (2120), Taki Soma (Sleeping While Standing), Claire Scully (Outer Wilderness)
Avery Hill Publishing
Ends December 7

Avery Hill, original publisher of many of Tillie Walden’s early books and a stack of comics we’ve loved here at WWAC, has taken to Kickstarter to fund the first half of their 2022 line. Avery Hill has an uncanny knack for finding and nurturing creators whose will go on to create some of the most exciting work at mainstream houses, and I’ve noticed that despite the fact that they might not have the reach or marketing presence of New York City’s Big 5, creators seem to have a certain loyalty to the London-based publisher. At this point, I’m willing to give anything Avery Hill puts out a fair shot, but if you need more than track record each of the coming season’s three books are lovingly summarized on the 2022 Kickstarter page!

Foulbrood

Hank Jones, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, Claire Roe, Christopher Sebela, Jasmine Walls
Ends December 11

Christopher Sebela’s comics are kind of weird, and I’m a known fan. Foulbrood, a book about bee crime in rural California, promises to be no different. I’m especially excited to see Claire Roe’s name on the book, as her incredible artwork on We(l)come Back is what first introduced me to Sebela’s work, and I absolutely love her precise, quick-sliced lines. This campaign is to recoup the costs of the first two issues of a six-issue series (and thus, presumably, fund the following two), and all that’s left is to ship the books to backers at the end of the campaign.