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

Kickstart From The Heart: The Superiors

Published Fri, 09 Aug 2013 12:00:52 -0500

Bleeding Cool's Kickstarter Correspondent, Shawn Demumbrum has lead three Kickstarter campaigns to launch comic books, two successfully funded and one that wasn't. Each week he will point out some of the unique Kickstarter projects that wouldn't normally be published by the big comic book companies, but deserve your attention. Shawn is the Manager of Comic Book Programming for the Phoenix Comicon. He is currently working on the Nothing Can Stop Me Now: Stories Inspired by the Songs of Nine Inch Nails.

Clint Hilinski (Justice League, Xena Warrior Princess, Greatest American Hero) has launched his third Kickstarter campaign. The campaign for his new 50 page full color graphic novel, The Superiors. I contacted Clint to talk about his new comic book.

Tell me about the Superiors.

The Superiors are an alternate reality superhero group. They are not too different than the Avengers or Justice League. They are their world's greatest heroes. The story plays on alternate realities pretty heavily, so there are elements to the story that the regular comic book reader will find familiar, but then since it's my own world and I can do what I want with it. There are elements to the story that will be vastly different than your average superhero comic.

Your Kickstarter campaign is actually for two books. What prompted you publish your older material along with your current Superiors story.

I've had the Superiors story floating in my head for over 10 years and at different points I started different versions of the story along with finished pages of art, multiple times. At that time, there was no Kickstarter to create the resources I needed to get the book off the ground and I was a working comic book artist on other projects, so these different ideas I had for the story sat on the shelf while I worked on other things. Once I decided I was going to launch the Superiors on Kickstarter, I started looking back thru all the old ideas and pages and remembered how much fun they were, so I figured I'd put all the old stuff into a Preview book for the Superiors. I always enjoyed seeing the ideas that went into making a book, character designs, early versions of stories, etc. and I had plenty of material so I just figured it would be a cool reward. The Preview book seemed like a natural idea to go along with the actual Superiors Graphic Novel.

You mention other alternate realty superhero stories like Crime Syndicate, Squadron Supreme or Authority. How did they influence your work on Superiors? What do you feel your bring to this sub-genre?

They were a big influence on the story. The story is heavily based on alternate realities, which are some of my favorite types of superhero comic stories. I loved the old and new Crime Syndicate stories, so there are definitely elements of that in my story. The Superiors are their world's greatest heroes, but there are evil versions of each of them out there floating among the different alternate realities. This is the story of a huge final confrontation between these to different sides. I think my story just brings a fun new twist on the old evil duplicates type of story line. It really allows you to have fun with the characters and with people ideas of the old archetype of superheroes. I look at the fun stuff that Grant Morrison or Mark Millar did with alternate reality heroes and it just inspires me to do my own twist on the idea.

Is this a stand alone book or is there the potential for additional Superiors stories?

Definitely the potential for more stories, like I said, I've had these characters floating around in my head for a decade or more. So I've had plenty of ideas in that time. The Kickstarter is going great, so I definitely see more stories to come down the road.

This is your fourth Kickstarter. What advice can you give to aspiring Kickstarters? What lessons did you learn from your campaign?

#1 Know what things will cost: Printing, shipping, paying creators, ahead of time. Don't guess.

#2 Have clear well thought out rewards, and make it fun stuff people will want.

#3 Set realistic goals. Set it for how much it will cost you to make the book, if you get more, then that's great, but don't set the goal for how much you want to get, set it for what you need.

#4 Realize that shipping all this stuff is going to be a total pain in the ass.

#5 Have a really cool story to tell. That's really all people are looking for, they want a fun comic to read. Make sure that's what you are giving them.

You've reached your initial Kickstarter goals. Do you have any stretch goals planned? What could you tell potential Kickstarter pledgers to convince them to pledge?

Yeah, I've got a Stretch Goal for $12K, right now the Preview book I mentioned is a B&W book, but if we can hit $12K then I can have that colored and lettered also, so we've got 1 week left to hit that goal. The Superiors Graphic Novel will be Full Color and 50 pages either way. But it'd be great to make the Preview book full color also. As to convincing people, I just ask that they check out the Kickstarter page, I've got a ton of Preview art up there from earlier versions of the story, so they can see how my art and story telling has developed thru the years, I'd like to think I'm an even better artist now. It will give you a good idea of what the project is all about. As you mentioned, this is my third successful Kickstarter and I've been thru the whole process and know how to get these projects made and sent out to everybody pretty efficiently. Also, there's still some really cool rewards left like Original Art, Exclusive Prints, and some awesome 'Be in the Book' Rewards which always seem to be pretty popular. You can be a Superhero, either drawn in with your own likeness, or design a Superhero of your own to be a member of the Superiors. So I just ask that you check it out and see if you like what you see.

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