Founded by artist and designer Maëlle Doliveux and writer and editor Josh O’Neill, Beehive Books is a boutique publishing company that likes “forgotten geniuses and lost works and mysterious tomes … things that were pulled out of antiquity, and work that seems to materialize from an impossibly distant future.” As far as geniuses go, designer, cartoonist, and storyteller Ronald Wimberly is anything but forgotten, and likely never will be. His enigmatic style and candidness continue to have a profound impact on the comics and publishing world and beyond. Teaming up to share their storytelling visions, Beehive Books brings Wimberley’s Gratuitous Ninja — aka GratNin — to Kickstarter.
“GratNin is a sendup of all the great ninja comics I’ve read and a project that’s very close to me,” said Wimberly. “GratNin has been a playground for me to work in for about 20 years now and this incarnation with Beehive Books, with its unique presentation, really embodies the ideas of the comic.”
“GratNin has a unique dynamism that thwarts traditional publishing,” said Beehive Books Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Josh O’Neill in a press release. “So we’ve done what our team at Beehive does best: reimagine what a book can be. To give an analog spin to this unruly digital comic, we’ve traded out the tiny phone screens and web browsers for a 600-page accordion-folded concertina wrapping up the urban sprawl of NYC into a manifold paper world. In our approach, GratNin isn’t a linear story — it’s an elaborate, thrilling world to journey through, and try not to get lost in.”
Here, O’Neill takes the time to tell us more about this approach.
Ron Wimberly’s Gratuitous Ninja was initially created for digital media, specifically, the stela app. How did this project make its way to Beehive Books for print? How does it fit within Beehive’s unique vision?
It’s a part of our ongoing collaboration with Ron, who’s become a very central part of our collective here. Our charter as a small press is to create unusual and unlikely projects — things that don’t have obvious outlets or precedents. Our basic pitch when we began approaching authors was: what’s a project that you think no publisher would take on? Ron, who, for my money, is one of the true visionary working artists of the 21st century, was the first person we approached. The answer then was LAAB Magazine, an experimental broadsheet art newspaper powered by the radical imagination — we’ve since released three annual issues of LAAB. GratNin is the next step of our ongoing work together (and part of the sort of nascent LAAB imprint).
GratNin is the first of several planned graphic novel projects in which we’re working with Ron to bring his worlds to life in novel, experimental print formats. We’re trying to build formal approaches and structures that create open space for his voice and creations. It fits equally within Ron’s vital vision and Beehive’s mandate to create paper worlds, projects that demand their readers’ full attention, immersion, and interaction — as well as work that embraces its status as print. We’re aiming at work that defies category, or creates its own category. Nobody’s better at that than Mr. Wimberly, and we’re proud to work with him to give a home to these creations.
This box set sounds like it’s going to be an incredible unboxing experience. Tell us about the process to determine what design elements would best tell this story.
It was an exploratory and imaginative process that we undertook with our brilliant designer Chloe Scheffe (who, along with Natalie Shields, is also our LAAB design team, starting with the recent issue). Chloe is really much more than a designer in the traditional sense — we didn’t come to her with a fully formed publishing vision as much as we did with a series of questions about how to present GratNin in print.
The world-in-a-box idea, which expanded the comic out to include metrocards and maps and furoshiki cloths and trading cards and more, developed organically as we worked out our approach. Chloe pitched us on a design concept which includes a sort of mysterious corporate identity for the GratNin housings — they look less like comic covers than they do some kind of strange tech product or futuristic sneaker box, and they’re covered in all kinds of nonsense boilerplate copy and legalese. Every aspect of the design is intended to build out the world of GratNin and extend the story, or the geography of the story. As she and Natalie have done LAAB, Chloe has a strong authorial voice that’s harmonizing with Ron’s on the approach here. Through our work together this has become so much more than a comic to read — it’s a whole imaginative space to explore.
What kind of stretch goals can backers expect from this campaign?
We don’t currently have any stretch goals planned, though that may change! With all the items that are going into our box sets, and with all the handwork required to assemble these things, this is a very complicated (and expensive) project with tons of moving pieces. Also, with the global supply chain a total mess right now, we’re fairly sensitive to issues that might disrupt our production process, so we’re wary of adding more variables or complicating things unnecessarily. However, extra funding does always improve our projects, so if we fund well above our goal backers can expect more cover effects, upgraded paper stocks, higher-end packaging materials, etc. We may also do things like more trading cards or other bonus items. But considering that this project is so complex in the first place, we’re trying to keep things simple on the funding end.
The GratNin Kickstarter is now live.
