Kickstarter!

Apologies Patrons, we’ve been promoting our Gimme Five Comics Kickstarter across the web and in person, but we’ve been very quiet here. The reasoning is: You’ve already given us your support and we appreciate it!

As we write this, we’re about 80% funded with one more week to go. If you’d like to help anyway, please help spread word, that would be huge! We made a Kickstarter update today, and here ‘s what we had to say:

Hello! 

First of all, thanks to all of your support for Gimme Five Comics. We’re well over halfway funded and gaining momentum! Thank you so much! 

We’re looking forward to bringing you Gimme Five Comics #3. We just need to add our thank you notes to the book after the campaign is over. You can expect to receive your rewards in mid August. 

We were asked recently “what do you plan to do with $2,500?” The idea was that we wanted to pay artists and writers an average of $100 per page. Each issue is a collection of five 5-page stories, so that’s 25 pages and that plan should work, right? Not really… each issue is really 36 pages, cover-to-cover. Then there are printing costs, at about $400 per issue. And that’s only for 100 books (which makes each book a limited edition)! We are also running some advertising, using software and web platforms, and tabling at occasional conventions. All of this adds up to a lot more than $2,500 for writers and artists, so Skilletfire is contributing a lot to make a book we’re proud of and one that you’ll want to read. We also want to help support the creative community that we love. 

Going into the campaign, we were very unsure about our odds of running a successful campaign, as this is our first one. Now that we’re close to the end of the campaign with less than half of the funds left to raise, we know we can do it. Even so, we’re very anxious for the outcome, so please help us spread word about this project. All pledge amounts help! 

Here are a few reward tiers we added to the rewards list for the home stretch: 

• Pick-a-PDF: $1 backers will get a PDF of one story of their choice emailed to them. 

• Early Bird re-open!: We’re reopening the early bird special for the last week of the campaign. $100 backers will get a 5 x 7 pen and ink drawing on illustration board by JW Harp along with print and digital editions of Gimme Five Comics 1-3.

• Bolyon-anza Pack:  Print and Digital editions of all Skilletfire Studios’ projects to date: Sea Urchins Books 1-4, Boylon Heights graphic novel (from Markosia Publishing), and Gimme Five Comics #s 1-3. PLUS two original pieces of artwork by JW Harp, one 5 x 7 and one 11 x 17.  We’ll only provide four of these. 

• Stretch goal: For every $200 we go beyond our goal, we will add a new cover by a different artist for Gimme Five #3. These are some of the fine artists who have agreed to provide covers should we hit stretch goals: Artyom Topilin, Johan Paul Torres, and James Lyle. 

Thank you again, and hope to see you soon! 

JW and Scott