Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, kickstarter

Deep Dive Daredevils Makes Rich Johnston Swab The Deck

Published Sun, 28 Sep 2014 12:00:11 -0500

Deep Dive Daredevils – Golden Age Sci-Fi Adventure – Funding ends Oct. 23rd. Matt Heistand/Dan Fifield/Evin Dempsey, Artist/Co-creator – Danilo Guida, Letters/Design/Aging effects/Production – Fonografik

Deep Dive Daredevils is a Submarine Adventure webcomic set in the 1930s, inspired by Golden Age Pulp/Sci Fi comics and 60s Star Trek. We've been posting new pages online every Tuesday for over two years, but now we are finally taking the PLUNGE and bringing DDD to print!

Matthew Heistand writes,

We launched a Kickstarter campaign on Tuesday Sept. 23^rd to fund an offset print run of Deep Dive Daredevils No. 1, a 48-page, full-color comic book that collects the crew of the U.S.S. Custer's first adventure, Secret of the Beaufort Sea. This is not only our first Kickstarter but also our first attempt at print self-publishing, and let me tell you, the lead up to the Kickstarter's launch was NERVE-WRACKING.

The story we are bringing to print has been finished and online for nearly two years, and we wondered if our readers – or anyone for that matter – would buy the print edition of a story that they had already read or could read whenever they wanted for FREE. Despite that fear, we knew that to make the project viable in the long-term we needed to bring it to print and try to widen the readership beyond our loyal web readers.

So, to silence the nagging specter of failure hanging over our heads, we set out to produce a DDD print comic that is a unique, exciting product for new and old fans alike. The plan is to deliver a comic that looks and feels like a relic from Golden Age of comics that inspired us, with period accurate design and aging effects applied to the art; created by one of the best in the business, Fonografiks (Saga, Trees, Nowhere Men). The cover, which is exclusive to the print edition, will feature halftone color, faded ink and faux creases. The interior pages will be printed on lightweight, uncoated paper (the next best thing to newsprint, without the smudging and massive ink bleed), and will have an effect applied that gives the pages a yellow tinge, while still preserving the integrity of the art.

Basically, we're going ALL-OUT, and you know what? It worked!

Within the first 12 hours of the campaign we eclipsed our initial goal of $3000.00, by the end of day two we'd already blown through a pair of stretch goals, and now we are chugging along toward our third stretch goal, which would expand the comic to 52 pages.

The initial success of our campaign, I think, illustrates that even in the Digital Age print still matters. Despite the rise of reading comics on computer screens, smart phones and tablets, digital technology still can't quite match up to holding a comic in your hands. There's just something magical about ink, paper, and the feel of them together between your fingers.

With all that said, we'll still be posting DDD page, for free, online every Tuesday. So, it's the best of both worlds, right?

Anyway, enough with the proselytizing, now it's time for the fun part: if 10 Bleeding Cool readers back the Deep Dive Daredevils campaign over the weekend we'll draft Rich Johnston into service ,making him a recurring DDD crewman!