Jules Jones

Alex Woolfson, the guy behind my current favourite webcomic The Young Protectors, has written an article about creating a Kickstarter project to fund a print edition of the comic. This is a really good article about the nuts and bolts of putting together a proposal for crowd-sourcing the funding for your project -- and the information he lays out is more generally applicable than Kickstarter. I think a lot of what he has to say about building interest and a fanbase could also be usefully read by people who want to go through a more traditional route to publication. The article is here: http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/06/10/how-to-succeed-at-kickstarter/

The Kickstarter itself is worth chipping into, if a gay superhero comic with a touch of romance sounds like your sort of thing. The lowest pledge level, $10, gets you digital copies of all the stuff that's been created for the stretch goals, in addition to the digital version of the book, which has extra content that won't be appearing on the comic's website. "All the stuff" is currently around 20 trading cards and half a dozen art prints, some with options to have the boys (and girls) with their bits on display. :-> If that sounds interesting, you have 8 days to put your pledge in.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alexwoolfson/the-young-protectors-vol-1-0

I wandered into Alex Woolfson's sf webcomic site Yaoi 911 while he was still posting Artifice, and was hooked. The ad I clicked said "smart guy-on-guy sci-fi", and that's exactly what I got.

Artifice, now complete, is a solid story about an android soldier who didn't obey orders, and is now being interrogated by the company's top robopsychologist to find out why. There follows a battle of wits as Doctor Maven tries to uncover why Deacon, last survivor of an assassination squad, not only failed to kill the last survivor of the colony his unit was sent to dispose of, but attacked the retrieval team sent in to fetch him. Excellent writing by Woolfson teamed with nice art by Winona Nelson, and it skilfully blends a thoughtful look at the use and abuse of androids with a delightful gay romance.

The Young Protectors, currently in progress, is a superheroes comic. Although some of the superheroes we run into aren't so heroic... In the prologue, young superhero Kyle has just finished a quick visit to a place he doesn't really want to be found by the rest of the team, when he encounters supervillain The Annihilator. The Annihilator's price for not telling the world that he just saw Kyle go into a gay bar for the first time is... a kiss. :-) Kyle goes back to ordinary after-class superheroing in the first chapter, but life rapidly gets more complicated for him. At forty-something pages in, there's a lot of intriguing backstory and long-term plot being hinted at, and I can't wait to see what happens next. Also, some acidly entertaining commentary about the amount of collateral damage around superheroes. Woolfson's excellent script is pencilled by Adam DeKraker and coloured by Veronica Gandini. I have no idea where Woolfson's planning to take this, but if you like your superhero comics with some May/December superhero/supervillain in the mix, take a look at this.

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