I am ecstatic to report that the Runners Kickstarter project has achieved its initial goal of $6000 in just 2 days! That has far exceeded my expectations and I am extremely thankful for everyone who has pledged to date to make that happen. The project still has 28 days to go, so hopefully it will hit its next goal of $8500, which will bring the print job here to the U.S.
If anyone’s going to be in the Austin, TX area this weekend, I will be set up as a Guest at STAPLE! The Independent Media Expo! Not just a comic show, STAPLE! is an event that promotes a variety of independent creative media that includes comics, art, animation, and self-published literature. Check it out and I hope to see some of you there.
And now the moment of truth! The official Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of Runners: The Big Snow Job is now LIVE!! The campaign will run for the next 30 days, but hopefully it will at least meet the initial goal relatively quickly so I don’t have to suffer the stress of waiting for the entire duration. 🙂 Visit the project now by clicking the image below!
And here are the last of the Reward Items (for now!). These are the higher tier rewards of the actual original art used for the 5 chapter cover images for Runners: The Big Snow Job, as well as the cover image for the graphic novel itself. Each piece is 11″ x 17″ inked over blue pencil on bristol board. As an extra bonus, each piece of original art will also come with an 11″ x 17″ color print of the image. Three of the color images are also available as Prints, but the other three are only available paired with the original art. Obviously, there is only one of each piece of original art, so if you’re interested, you’ll probably want to act quickly.
Here are some sample pages from the Runners: The Big Snow Job Sketchbook, one of the many Kickstarter rewards available. While the actual graphic novel will have 10 pages of select sketchbook content, this expanded stand-alone sketchbook will contain much more material. It will be a 64-page, perfect bound, comic-sized book chockful of concept sketches and designs for the various aliens, costumes, props, weapons, environments, and space yak that appear in the story. Each page will also include plenty of commentary describing the thought process that went into the designs. Much of the content and commentary has also been posted here at www.runnersuniverse.com over the course of the story, but I figured it’d be nice to have a single printed volume of the work to save people the effort of all that pesky clicking.
  
  
  
