Posted in: Comics | Tagged: cayti bourquin, kickstarter, paradox girl, Yishan Li

New Comic Paradox Girl Takes A Uniquely Silly Approach To Time Travel

Published Thu, 08 Dec 2016 15:30:31 -0600

Last updated Thu, 08 Dec 2016 15:43:33 -0600

With its first three issues successfully Kickstarted for almost $40,000 back in February, Paradox Girl, by Cayti Bourquin and Yishan Li, is back on the crowdfunding platform for issues #4, #5, and #6. With three days left to go, the project has already raised over $35,000 from more than a thousand backers, and was featured by Kickstarter as one of their "Projects We Love."

What is it about Paradox Girl that has people so excited? Bleeding Cool spoke to Cayti Bourquin to find out.

"So Paradox Girl is a time traveller, and 'sort of' a super hero, though the book is much more about her dealing with her day to day trivialities than it is her fighting crime," Bourquin told Bleeding Cool. "She's ridiculously overpowered, being able to teleport to anytime and anywhere at will, but has no real common sense or impulse control. So she's constantly making more trouble for herself and getting into fights with other hers from her past or future."

"The issues are all self contained, there's no 'arc' to speak of, but amongst the first six issues there is what I call a 'Cycle' where all the issues are interrelated and have easter egg references to each other or sometimes chronological conflicts, creating more Paradoxes between them. (If this happened, then this other issue couldn't have happened) and so on," Bourquin explained. "They can be read in any order, the numbering is just the order they were written in, which is kind of a cool feature."

It's a unique and interesting take on time travel in comics and sci-fi, with Paradox Girl's lack of concern for the rules generating lots of silly fun, while at the same time maintaining continuity within the boundaries of the paradoxes she creates, often presented non-sequentially in the pages. We asked Bourquin how in the heck she came up with such a crazy concept.

"She's based off of me in a lot of ways," Bourquin explained. "Self conflict and internalized doubt turned inside out and made something to laugh at instead of angst over. She's an evolution of a self image I've had for many years, about trying to project this calm well put together exterior but having this anxious, conflicted mess inside. I'm sure many people can relate. She was originally a roleplaying character (in the form of a reformed demoness who'd become catholic) I'd made, to express and get through some of that early 20s self-hate, guilt and existentialism. Eventually she just sort of evolved as I did and I realized the humor inherent and the absurdity of taking ones self so seriously. Thus the Living Paradox was born."

Artist Yishan Li brings some big league credibility to the art on Paradox Girl. With work published internationally starting in the 1990s, Yishan Li may be most familiar to Bleeding Cool's readers as the artist of the Buffy: The High School Years graphic novels from Dark Horse with writer Faith Erin Hicks, or the Convergence: Blue Beetle artist. The material requires an intelligent visual execution that, and Yishan Li is more than up to the task, and it's surely contributed to the crowdfunding success.

How did Bourquin get so good at Kickstarter, and can she share her secrets?

"Luck? I don't really know," Bourquin told us when we asked that very question. "We've had great advice from some people we hired to help us run the Kickstarter, but it's an everyday struggle of 'how do I reach more people', and 'how do we catch their interest with this'. We've been pretty successful (and enormously grateful) thanks to several front page posts on Imgur. That community has been very supportive of our work."

Editor Peter Bensley elaborated: "Well, we've learned a lot during both campaigns, and I need to get it all written down in an article soon, both for my own use and because so many people have asked! I think going into it we had two big advantages. One was a solid product – Yishan's art gets people's attention and Cayti's writing holds it. It's not a hard book to get people interested in."

"The other is that we have the backing of Hanako Games, so we could afford to hire Squid and Crow to help out and advise us on what to expect; we were able to do some advertising as well," he continued. "Prior to the campaign we established a social media presence and set up a Thunderclap. During the campaign it was just a matter of trying everything and seeing what worked. We'd just get up each day and look for a new way to reach people. Which, as Cayti says, is the biggest challenge we face – we know our audience is out there, but the internet is a noisy place."

Paradox Girl isn't the only thing Bourquin is doing, for anyone looking for more of her work. "I'm working on a few other titles right now also under the Hana Comics label," she told us. "WARNING: Dead Inside, is a zombie story with a twist-which ugh sounds like an awful pitch, but we have a preview up at our Kickstarter of it that our backers unlocked, so hopefully people like what they see. Another title is LEGND, which I describe to others is sort of like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the Tumblr age."

"Speaking of Buffy," she adds, "Yishan is currently working on Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The High School Years, and waiting for us to finish this Kickstarter so we can get to work doing more Paradox Girl!"

"I have in mind 2 more Cycles, (so 12 issues more in total) and I'm hoping we'll be able to put out a Cycle per year," Bourquin says of the future of the series. "Kickstarter has been very good to us, but it's also an extremely stressful environment for creativity/production/distribution."

Raising more than 3.5 times your requested funding goal is surely a pretty decent reward for that stress. And there's still time for more. If Paradox Girl interests you, you have three more days to head over to Kickstarter and jump on board. For $25, you can have all six issues in print form, which is slightly cheaper than a Marvel event comic. The biggest difference is, the continuity issues are intentional in Paradox Girl.