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

Alone, Alone.

Published Sun, 11 Aug 2013 16:00:55 -0500

Tony Deans writes;

Breasts.

I am writing here on Bleeding Cool in the hope that you will be persuaded to go click onto Indiegogo and help fund Alone, a four-issue miniseries that I am trying to obtain the funds to release and of which we've managed to get thirty-eight percent in five days. But before I tell you about the super perks we've got on offer, the story or even why you should consider giving a hoot about the campaign, I thought I'd tell you the main reasoning behind Alone; big boobs. Namely the big boobs and massive phallic guns that grace the cover and interiors of nigh on every comic featuring something that even resembles a woman in this industry. It was around the time that Renee Montoya seemed to gain the most common female superpower upon becoming The Question that I decided it was high time I do something to try and break down the doors and create a character that can kick ass without having to possess a bust large enough to engulf the northern half of our planet.

That is what led to the creation of Alone, a story featuring Jade a kick-ass chick with realistic proportions who is the last survivor after an airborne virus has gone and wiped out nigh on the entirety of the planet. Whilst scavenging for supplies she stumbles across Bruce, a baby who possesses the same immunity as she does and decides to take him as her own only to be pursued by SIRU a mysterious masked faction who have their own plans for her and Bruce. I first started writing the script around eight months ago as a casual project with a friend of mine. After completing the script I handed it over to my Artist who duly worked on drawing the comic for two months, only to have my hopes dashed when family troubles meant that he wouldn't be able to complete it and thus the project went on the backburner, with the script saved forever in the vault of my memory stick. After projects came and went including a five pager entitled Swine, made with a new artist I met online called Gabriel Rosswell which was accepted into an anthology that went bankrupt a few weeks before release, I thought it was time to go ahead and resurrect Alone and send it off to a few publishers to seek submission.

Well, that was the plan but things turned out somewhat different. After writing up the thousands of words needed for synopses and plot breakdowns and being just about ready to send the packs out everywhere, I happened to stumble across news about a writer (who shall remain anonymous) spewing some of the most horribly sexist garbage that I've ever heard. Now don't mistake me for some kind of extreme feminist but at the very least a basic respect is deserved to women in comics where the likes of Mary Jane, Wonder Woman and Renee Montoya have all been great female characters who readers loved for their strength and courage. It was then and there that I decided that for Alone we should go out and try to create a truly independent comic featuring a strong female character that was made out of a love of the medium. Only one problem with this; money, mainly the lack of it and thus begun an Indiegogo campaign.

So why Indiegogo over Kickstarter? The main reason is the nature of Indiegogo being more orientated to truly independent content whereas Kickstarter has more often than not started to give way to established acts which seemed wrong to me. So on I went creating the Indiegogo page with a budget of $800, a third of which would go to creating an independent website to distribute the comic, another third would go to a one-hundred issue print run and the remaining third to marketing costs. As somebody who often donates, I believe that the key to any campaign is including great perks and thus we included a total of seven perks, all of high quality be it from one dollar which nets you our free five page comic (Swine) or a thirty dollar perk that nets you a digital copy of the first issue of Alone and Swine and a signed physical copy of the comic (all with free P&P to anywhere in the world). Once I had all my perks, samples of the comic and text explaining who we are and what we're trying to do, I went the route that most do when beginning crowd funding, namely friends and family and I must admit I was surprised at how much support there was. Within three days I had managed to break past the twenty per cent goal and more importantly have the campaign shared to many people I didn't know. As great as any donation is, it's no secret that a donation from a stranger is really satisfying and so I have been absolutely delighted to have managed to have so far obtained eighteen per cent of funding from complete strangers from all over the globe from the U.S to Australia.

Needless to say this was massively encouraging to the project and we currently stand at thrity-eight per cent of our total goal which when considering most campaigns don't break twenty per cent makes me happy to no end. However as with most things a bigger push is needed and that's why I'm glad to be able to write this article on Bleeding Cool to reach out to a wider audience. Any support you can give to the campaign is immense be it sharing or donations and we have set up three different special perk offers for you as a thanks for taking the time to read this. The first is lowering the price of a signed copy of the comic from $30 to $20 until Wednesday whilst the second is that if we reach our goal by Friday we will give every person who donates from now to Friday free digital copies of Alone issues one, two and three. The final perk is that if you donate fifty dollars or more by Friday you will get free digital and signed physical copies of issues one, two and three!

Now that's been said I can take off my marketing cap and end this article by simply thanking you for taking the time to read this and that your support is very much appreciated. If you're sick of weak women in your comics or even just want to read a great story than I hope you take the time to check out our page and see just what we are doing. It's been a great experience so far despite a whole bunch of hard work and with your help I know that it can only go on and get better.

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