Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, dc, job bognadove, kal-el bognadove, kickstarter, strongman, superman

The Return Of Jon Bogdanove To Comics, From His Son Kal-El, With A Promise To Bleeding Cool For His Graphic Novel

Kal-El Bogdanove writes;

Jon Bogdanove has been gone a long time.

Or at least that's what people think. And it's true that since his epic run on Superman: The Man of Steel, which included the record-breaking success of The Death and Return of Superman, my father's work has been hard to find.

In reality, he wasn't gone, just out of sight, busily doing designs for DC Licensing that have ended up on everything from lunch boxes, to toys, to Six-Flags rides. You might not have noticed because most of those designs were done indistinguishably in the style of other artists – a skill that my dad first demonstrated drawing Batmen of every description in MoS #37, and on which Warner Home Products has relied since. He has also done spec pre-vis for several film and TV projects, now floating around now in the nebulous world of development. He even served as art director of a video game – hand animating the playable demo for what would have been Reverge Labs' follow-up to Skullgirls, had that lovely little company not foundered.

But as far as mainstream comics fans are concerned, Jon Bogdanove has been in the wind.

He returns now to the world of comics, in collaboration with me and my writing partner Chris Faiella, on an all new title, Strongman. The book follows the adventures of Bron Bellman, a 1920s circus athlete who doubles as a pulp hero. Together with a troupe of lovable sideshow folk – who live somewhere between Todd Browning's Freaks and Louise Simonson's X-Men – Bron travels the world, getting in scrapes and defending the little guy.

Strongman began his/its life as a video game pitch. It was one of ten or twelve our trio imagined on behalf of Reverge, to be brought to Disney Interactive. It was one of the two Disney selected as favorites – ultimately eschewed for being a shade too spooky. After that, the three of us soldiered on with the other ill-fated project – beloved in its own right – but none of us could let Strongman go. Each, on his own time, tinkered with the idea in secret, and ultimately we came together – each prepared to make the same confession: that he'd been noodling with Strongman in his off hours. After that, we realized we had no choice, we would have to bring Strongman to fruition in one form or another.

The book is a love note to all the things we like, and hope others will like too: Bron is an admixture of several real-life period strongmen who were capable of amazing things (for fun Google The Mighty Adam or Louis Cyr), pulp staples like Doc Savage, and the spirit of Jerry and Joe's Superman. The world he inhabits wanders through Lovecraftian horror, hard-boiled prohibition crime, and fanciful Russo-Finnish folklore. And most importantly, the characters live and breathe in each other's lives and hearts, in that way that makes you want to slip off and stay among them for longer than the stories can possibly last.

We desperately want to make a book where the stakes are intimate, personal, and human. We don't want to tease you with twelve-issue galaxy spanning crises. We want you to have the vaguely Whovian experience of sitting down with any one of these stories, and feeling something resonant… Of turning the last page and feeling satisfied, like you got a real meal.

And we've decided to bring all this about – the launch of a new series, the reclamation of a lost idea, and Jon Bogdanove's return to comics – by way of Kickstarter – that democratic, crowd-funding ray of hope for indie comics.

And to be honest, we may have mangled it from the get-go.

We launched at SDCC, which we have learned too-late, is the Kickstarter equivalent of beginning your safe trip through a lion's den by rolling in honey and dusting yourself with Mrs. Dash. Actually, that's a bit of a broken simile since it makes us sound irresistibly delicious, when what we really were was absolutely frack-all buried in the avalanche of awesome-splosion that is Comic Con. We even had some articles written up… no soap.

A week later we are stalled at about $10k, a sight short of our goal of $200,000. And this last may be our other big mistake. Folks have expressed a bit of – to borrow Russ Burlingame's phrase – "sticker shock" at our goal.

I must admit I take a bit of issue with that complaint, though. We are not asking a high individual price. You can get the PDF in two languages for 15 bucks. At 150 luscious hand-washed pages, that's 10 cents a whack! And the printed softcover is priced at a mere 45 clams, totally in-line with comic-shop prices. We don't wanna take individuals for a ride, we just want a lot of individuals to get in on a good book!

The reason we set the price so high was to see if the vaunted crowd-fund model could possibly provide a living wage for working comics folk. We are committed to paying our colorist, letterer, and studio assistant a page rate comparable with DC or Marvel. Those rates are too low to begin with. And when you buy an indie comic, often you are buying it on the back of artists who are working for around three bucks an hour. C'mon folks! We're all happy to drop six bucks a cup for fair-trade coffee. How about some fair trade comics!

I promise, at our goal sum, no one's getting rich on this Kickstarter. Chris and I will scrape some rent money, and my Dad will be able to meet his bills for the year of 18 hour days it will take to do this book (did I mention lovingly hand-washed pages?). We just want to get together and say, "Hey guys, we can do this, just readers and authors, without anyone going over a barrel."

Perhaps we should have broken it up into issue chunks. We may yet, if this tanks whole-cloth. We all really, truly LOVE Strongman, and we'll find a way to bring this little-IP-that-could to the page.

But I am not ready to give up hope. I know that if just 4,000 people in this world of 8 billion back us with a softcover edition, we can do this thing. I know that number of you read The Death of Superman. I know that number of you love the same wonderful, rich genre material we love. I know that the power of social media can move mountains, and elect leaders, and I know that the readers of this site have moved markets before. I know that number of you are, to borrow even more liberally, true believers.

That is why I make this promise:

We are offering a special incentive to readers of Bleeding Cool. Back now at any level where you get the PDF or printed book and include the words "Bleeding Cool" in your message and you will receive a bonus piece of memorabilia: the art-rich recipe card for Bron's Secret Vigorous Vitality Tonic! And that's not all!

If we can crack $100,000 with Bleeding Cool backers, Chris, my father Jon, and I, will SHAVE OUR HEADS, adopt handlebar mustaches like our hero, go to Ralph's, purchase kale and protein powder IN OLD-TIMEY CHARACTER… And videotape the whole thing for you to watch. That is how much we love Strongman.

So, if you love comics, and the men who make them behaving foolishly, then please visit our Kickstarter by going to http://kck.st/1bjqqVy and backing with the words "Bleeding Cool".

Also check out the Strongman Facebook page at www.facebook.com/strongmancomic .

If you have questions, contact us on Kickstarter. We will write back!

And thank you for the time and brain space.

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