Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, Drawn Away, entertainment, kickstarter, Luke Foster

It Pays To Listen To Your Parents

Published Sun, 23 Mar 2014 15:00:13 -0500

Luke Foster writes for Bleeding Cool:

Shortly before Thanksgiving 2012, I was complaining to my parents that I was in a rut both personally and in my day job (as I am sadly not a full-time cartoonist). I told them I wanted to move to another city and see what I could make of it there, but they told me not to just up and move. They said if I really wanted to get out of my rut, I should travel for a while.

I'm not normally someone who would uproot his life on a whim, but this time it felt different. This time it sounded like a good idea. And as I thought about it more that day, it sounded like a VERY good idea. So on April 1, 2013, I packed my things into a van and started a four-month trip across the United States (with a brief stop in Canada). It was an amazing time of my life, as I got to see and do so many exciting and interesting things I had never done before and never thought I would be able to do.

And since I'm a cartoonist, I didn't just think about the traveling before I left. I also thought there could be a great project in this. And thus Drawn Away was born.

What's Drawn Away? I'm glad you asked. Drawn Away: A Cartoonist Tours America (its full title) is a nonfiction comic I wrote, drew, and uploaded to the Internet while I was on the road. It combines the personal reflections of a journal comic with the factual and tourist information you might find in a travelogue, as well as other tidbits of travel information that didn't really fit in any particular destination but I thought were important enough to note in drawing form. Because I was writing and drawing each page as soon as possible after each stop, my thoughts and feelings are on the page just as I was thinking and feeling then, without time making me change my mind on anything. And yeah, I drew it in my cartoony style, but it's not a straight-up comedy. Some of it IS funny, but sometimes it's serious, and sometimes, like Joe Friday would say, it's just the facts.

Like I said above, this was an amazing experience, and this comic is a serious passion project of mine that I really wanted to share it with everyone. If you want to read the entire thing now you can, as the entire archive is at http://drawnaway.centerofsomewhere.com/. But I didn't want it to live just on the Internet forever. I also wanted to collect the entire thing in a book someday. That someday is now, and that's where Kickstarter comes in. I have started a Kickstarter project to raise money that will be used solely for the printing and a few related costs. So, once the Kickstarter is done and the money is collected, I will send the pages off right away and get the books printed shortly after that.

And as an added incentive, if Bleeding Cool readers help this project get to $1,500 (aka 75% of my goal) by 12:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on March 24, I will write a special thank-you poem citing Bleeding Cool and thanking all it's readers for their kind and generous help. I will send it out as a project update to everyone who's donated so far, and which anyone who comes to the Kickstarter site will be able to read. And if we get more than that? I just might do a video of me reciting the poem and post that to the site.