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Reality Not Included Volume 2

Contributors: Chelsea Back, James Bourne, Chris Hayes, Morgan Gibbons, Joey Majdali, Kevin Merriman, Stephanie Merriman, Jed Henry, Matthew S. Armstrong, Aaron Austin, Audrey Bagley, Andrea Ballestaero, Markham Carroll, Sarah Cotton, Kendall Hale, Spencer Hawkes, Shane Hunt, Cheryl Johnson, Kienan Lafferty, Megan Lloyd, Ryan Metcalf, Brant Moon, Kiersten Pack-Hale, Liz Pulido, Jessica Shirley, and Danielle Steele (more TBA). Campaign closes on October 2nd 2014. Tentatively scheduled for publication in November, 2014.

Reality Not Included Volume 2 is a comics anthology created by a group of artists, who became friends while attending animation/illustration school at BYU. It is a sequel to Reality Not Included (Volume 1) which they successfully Kickstarted in 2012. The project came together despite many potential setbacks due to the passion the artists have for their craft.

Joey Majdali writes,

It was the third deadline. Usually the first deadline is the only deadline because, well, it's a deadline.

But this was the third time we had told our potential contributors that it was the last day they could turn in submissions for Volume 2. The second deadline might have been good enough. The first may have even sufficed. If it wasn't for one simple problem. We didn't have enough content turned in to reach our 150 page minimum standard. So, like a politician who keeps lying to his constituents, we kept extending the deadline, hoping each time that we would receive enough pages to make up a book not too much smaller than Volume 1.

That was back in July. With that third deadline we gained a lot of great pages. But we still only had around 130 total pages of content for Reality Not Included Volume 2. In the past, when we compiled the first volume we had over 200 pages of content. It felt like we had to turn a lot more people down for that first anthology. But we decided to run with what we had. After all, our contributors had created a lot of great art just for this volume. We couldn't let that work go unpublished.

The next step was to launch a Kickstarter campaign to try and raise the funds to print a run of these shiny new Volume 2s. Last time, James Bourne ran the Kickstarter campaign. But this time he was both going to school and working out in Oakland. And Chris Hayes, who worked so hard to get the first Reality Not Included together was busy with his new job at some video game studio out in Irvine that no one's ever heard of. Something like Buzzard or Wizard or Blizzard, maybe?

Whatever. The fact remained that Chris's time was now extremely limited. So I thought, what if I run the Kickstarter campaign? I bet I could do it, no big deal. I mean, I plan to use Kickstarter in the future to print some of my own, solo comics. Why not get the experience of running this campaign under my belt before I go and jump into a solo project? It is after all, a group project. I should have lots of help from my fellow project leaders and tons of help from all the contributing artists as well!

I may now have to admit that I was being just a tad bit naive. But not about the amount of help I would get from my cohorts. They have been spreading the word like wildfire and helping me figure out the answers to the weird questions that inevitably arise. Rather, I never anticipated exactly how much work would go into the constant maintenance of the sort of beast that is a Kickstarter campaign, even when the workload is divided. Like a new parent gradually begins to perceive how much time and effort will actually be required by the new child they've chosen to rear, so have I begun to understand why it is that people who have been through it before offer so much caution to others who talk about trying out a crowd-funding campaign. Or maybe that parenting analogy is nonsense. I dunno. I don't have any kids.

But it's a lot of work! Crowd funding, I mean. It takes a lot of time. Any day where less than four of my hours are spent "nursing" the campaign shows a diminishing return in the rate of the funds being raised. And this is taking into consideration the fact that we have a team of over 25 artists with a group of five of us project leaders at the head all passing the information around the social media sites like mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner. Perhaps if I were trying to crowd fund mashed potatoes I would be making more money.

In fact if I was doing anything else with my time I might be making more money. This is because I am making no money from this campaign. All the money we get from the backers of Reality Not Included Volume 2 will be used to keep Reality Not included Volume 2 alive and going to conventions for as long as possible. All of the contributors are doing this project for one reason: we love making comics. That is all.

We love art.

We love storytelling.

We love doing what we do for a living so much that when we can't make a living at it we still have to do it just to live. As Chris Hayes so perfectly put it in our Kickstarter video, "We love comics. And we love great stories. And we're just trying to tell a few of them and get them into your hands."

Con06

Contributing artists Kevin Merriman, Stephanie Merriman, and Chelsea Stebar Back listen as Chris Hayes imparts wisdom at the Reality Not Included table during the CTN animation Expo.

During the campaign we have had some contributors, who we had tried to get work from before, respond late with amazing work submissions. We have been happy to announce each new artist as they've arisen for the cause. Now our page count is almost at 200. And it's still climbing! The moral of that story is: stick to your deadlines and the rest will work itself out.

That's one of the powers of a successful Kickstarter campaign. It draws people in. Everyone wants to join a successful project. Collecting footage, editing the video, putting the page together, and spreading the word once the page was launched all took a lot longer than I ever anticipated. I sleep a lot less these days. But seeing this project succeed is worth every new color that shows up underneath my eyes.

So there is no regret for me when I think of the time I've spent, and will spend on this project. And from what I've seen of the other contributors, they don't regret it at all either. Because we get to give our comics and art to the world. When I go to conventions and get to see people look at my comics and smile and say "aw!" or laugh, it reminds me of why I do what I do. To speak to people.

My stories can speak to people who I will never meet. I can speak to hundreds, or thousands, or, someday hopefully, millions without having to repeat myself. And those people can speak back to me through the internet. We can have meaningful exchanges with each other without ever meeting face to face. That's what it means to be a story artist. We can communicate in ways that words alone can only dream of accomplishing. That's why we continue doing what we are doing. For the love of story.

RNI2_Coimcs_Samples

Examples of comics work to be printed in Reality Not Included Volume 2.

About halfway through our campaign period we reached our initial funding goal! We were all like:

r2

But we still have a long way to go to reach our stretch goals. So, as an added incentive to our Bleeding Cool article readers, if we reach at least $6,000 by the 22nd, we will reward our backers with a new surprise stretch goal. Just our little way of saying thanks to you, the readers of this article!

The Kickstarter project page for Reality Not Include Volume 2 can be found here

The campaign only goes until October 2nd so if you'd like to support us, don't hesitate!

2014-09-10 15.05.42

A proof copy of the book. The final version will be perfect-bound rather than spiral-bound.

If you have questions or to request more information about Reality Not Included, contact Joey Majdali at joeymajdali@gmail.com.


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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