Posted in: Comics | Tagged: gavin dillinger, kickstarter, laughter

Laughter: Former Comics Journalist Tries to Break into Industry Through Kickstarter

Published Mon, 18 Mar 2019 17:00:11 -0500

The ultimate goal of any decent comics journalist is to eventually land a sweet job working for a comic book publisher. Why else would they act as de facto PR employees for them for free? But achieving that goal can be a problem if you say mean things about comic book publishers, which is bad news for people like me or any of my former colleagues from the now-defunct satirical comic book news site TheOuthousers.com. Thankfully, former Outhouse Editor-in-Chief Gavin Dillinger has a backup plan.

Gavin, armed with a brand new nose ring he got to be more like his idol, Dave Bautista, has launched a new Kickstarter for a comic called Laughter, featuring art by Y. Sanders and colors by Gab Contreras. No letterer is credited, but nobody cares about letterers anyway.

Gavin writes to Bleeding Cool's readers:

Surviving any sort of horror story is never a given. Perhaps that is what makes it thrilling. You know the good guy probably wins in any sort of action or science fiction story, but horror? It's a toss up. From my unscientific findings of making stuff up, half the time the protagonist does actually live. Some may have been lost along the way, but one survives (usually a woman, leading to the "Final Girl" trope).

However, that seems to be where it ends, with survival or death and nothing more. It is with that in mind, the Laughter begins. After watching their father die at the hands of a demon, a family is forced to process the trauma of not only loss but the realization that there is another element to life which they were previously happy to ignore. With virtually no resources in place to assist in this, the family is forced to cope with whatever is at hand. This would be hard enough if the demon didn't hang around just to laugh at their misfortunes and pick at the corpse of their father, though never touching the family.

Laughter is limited series and my first foray back into the comics industry since leaving The Outhousers. It may fail miserably, but if so I can take solace in knowing I am not The Outhouser who met the worst fate. I mean, Jude has to write for Bleeding Cool.

The joke's on you, Gavin. You just wrote an article for Bleeding Cool… but I'm the one getting paid for it!

Check out the Kickstarter here, where the team is hoping to raise $3,750 to bring this comic to print.