#7 - Crowdfunding season
The eternal game balance between making and talking about comics
For the past weeks, I’ve been preparing all the different stages so that the launch of my Kickstarter ANTICUCHO has the best start. It’s fun to prepare a KS campaign, but also all the big tasks and numerous tiny details are so time consuming! I feel like I’ve been working on the campaign for months and on the comics for just hours, comics heh?
Let’s see what’s been happening in the last weeks.
ANTICUCHO & Other Peruvian Cyberpunk Stories was launched last Thursday and in less than 12 hours it was already funded!!! woohoo!!!!!! The campaign keeps growing pretty strong, I have no words to tell you how excited I am about the campaign being so well received!
ANTICUCHO is an 88 page full colour Anthology Graphic Novel, ALBUM size (close to A4 size, 28cm x 19.8cm / 11 inch x 7.8 inch) in Softcover and Hardcover.
It will bring two new stories connected to the Piraña street gang: TAYTA UKUKU and ANTICUCHO and include the previously published L1MA comic.
Take a look at some of its pages:
All the Peruvian Cyberpunk comics in physical and digital versions will also be available through the campaign, and original comic pages, prints, and special rewards for backers!
Don’t forget to take a look at the ANTICUCHO campaign! :)
PROJECTS
Marvel’s Voices X-Men
I can finally reveal that I worked with Al Ewing and editor Lauren Amaro for my story in Marvel’s Voices X-Men!! A first look at the anthology stories was released! I still pinch myself about having this fantastic opportunity.
Take a look at one of my pages with colours by Manuel Ananda Puppo:
Don’t forget that Marvel’s Voices X-Men will be in stores on August 16th.
- To anyone here around the Glasgow area, I will be signing copies at Forbidden Planet Glasgow on Saturday 19th of August from 4pm to 5pm.
Project BRONCA, the still-secret Cyberpunk action story, keeps going steady. One of the fun things about working with a writer is that they will bring concepts and ideas that are completely different from yours, and that’s so much fun!! At the moment I’m designing new characters and it’s such a fun and weird collection of characters!!
TRIPWIRE AWARDS
The Tripwire Awards has nominated me for Best New Talent of this year, pretty cool, right? You can vote until the 12th of September.
CONVENTIONS & FESTIVALS
Next Saturday 5th August is UK Small Press Day, and Forbidden Planet Edinburgh is sponsoring a space at the Edinburgh City Chambers. I will be tabling and selling my comics next to amazing creators, Steven Ingram, Eve Greenwood, Quindrie Press, Tanya Roberts, Batch 25 Comics, Letty Wilson, Colin Maxwell & many more!!
If you are in Edinburgh, come and say hi!
These are the Festivals where I will table later this year:
READS
Just finished reading The Beechwood Helm by Letty Wilson, published by Quindrie Press. Last June at Cymera Festival, I tabled next to Even Greenwood, founder of Quindrie Press, the opportunity was ideal to catch some of their fantastic stories.
Letty Wilson’s art is stunning, and provides such a particular rhythm to this story, I felt a fable being portrayed in front of me. Highly recommended.
I discovered BONE for the first time in 2006-2007 and was completely captured by Jeff Smiths’ storytelling, character designs and cartooning craft… and amazed by how well he could tell a joke and immediately pass to a tense drama without breaking a sweat. The first (and only) time I went to NY, back in 2008, the first thing I grabbed at the comic shop (where I spend entire days drooling over and buying comics..!) were the 9 tomes of this fantastic saga. Every now and then I re-read this amazing story, it’s simply inspiring, it warms my heart in a very special way.
Last Christmas my lovely wife got me Duck Feet: A Heartbreak Soup Graphic Novel by Gilbert Hernandez. Over the years I’ve heard great things about Gilbert’s Palomar stories. This is the first time I’ve read a complete book by Gilbert. It was a slow burn pace of storytelling. I felt like someone was showing me every corner of their neighborhood, and by the end, I realised how all those little pieces, characters, and idiosyncrasies fit together in the most amazing ways.
Close to the end of the book I bumped into this caption, so weird how a joke about something so absurd is now a reality. Many works of fiction don’t age well, but it’s so weird how this time it’s the other way around, there are big corners of our society that aren’t aging well --at all.
A couple of days ago I needed a picture from one of my previous Newsletters, and I had to dig up into my old Mailchimp account. That made me think that it is a pity that those posts are not available anymore. That’s a good thing about Substack, it works like a blog where readers can browse and read older publications if they feel like it. So I’ve decided to bring my older Newsletters to Substack, I will start copy-pasting them to this platform soon. I’ll publish them with their original dates of publication, and if you feel like it, you can read them any time you want. :)
That’s all for now. Please stay safe, and keep being amazing.
abrazos!
Gustaffo
Edinburgh,
August 1st, 2023