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• Valiant announced VALIANT ORIGINS a web series spotlighting the origins of Valiant’s biggest heroes. 10 episodes will be released bi-weekly Valiant’s official YouTube channel.  Heroes in the spotlight include Bloodshot, X-O Manowar, Ninjak, Livewire, Quantum and Woody, Divinity and more.

• In July Valiant is releasing the BOOK OF DEATH. Teaser art by Robert Gill.

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman is now exclusive with IDW with many new projects to be announced. “Kevin is one of my oldest friends in comics and it makes me extremely happy that he’s going to be part of the IDW team, said IDW CEO and Publisher, Ted Adams. “Kevin’s contribution to pop culture can’t be overstated and everyone at IDW is looking forward to helping him bring his new ideas into the world.”

• Archaia is release an Art of Mouse Guard book in July:

THE ART OF MOUSE GUARD 2005-2015

Author: David Petersen

Artists: David Petersen, Mike Mignola, Stan Sakai, Bill Willingham, Various

Cover: David Petersen

Format: 12″ x 12″, 368 pages, color and B&W, hardcover

On sale: July 2015

Celebrate the first 10 years of a comics classic from the very first sketch. For the first time since the series debut, David Petersen’s process for creating the world of Mouse Guard and bringing it to life in stunning illustration is documented in exquisite detail. With never-before-seen sketches; 100 pages of full-color, oversized artwork; and commentary from colleagues, collaborators, and Petersen himself, readers and fans get an unprecedented look behind the pages at how their favorite characters and adventures were born.

• Boom is releasing Adventure Time with Fionna & Cake: Card Wars, a miniseries by Jen Wang (In Real Life) and Britt Wilson, also in July.

Cake is a Card Wars champ who can’t be beat, and Fionna…is really tired of getting beaten! They set off in search of a challenger who can really test Cake’s mettle. When they stumble across some gamer slugs, they think they’ve hit the jackpot, but these guys have never heard of Cake and refuse to even play with her!

 

• And Dark Horse is releasing TEN new series!

Barb Wire #1

Chris Warner (W)

Patrick Olliffe (A)

On Sale in July

Nail-hard tough and drop-dead gorgeous, Barb Wire is the baddest bounty hunter on the mean streets of Steel Harbor, where gangsters can lift bulldozers and leap rusting factories in a single bound. The hunting is stupid good and the bounties are hella big—if Barb lives long enough to collect!

King Tiger #1

Randy Stradley (W)

Doug Wheatley (A)

On Sale in August

Blood, death, and fire—the darkest kind of magic. A monstrous secret from King Tiger’s past has found the mystic warrior, but can Tiger’s skills and sorcery triumph against an unthinkable supernatural obscenity linked to his own destiny? If the Tiger falls, the Dragon will rise!

Negative Space #1

Ryan K Lindsay (W)

Owen Gieni (A)

On Sale in July

When one man’s writer’s block gets in the way of his suicide note, he goes for a walk to clear his head and soon uncovers a century-old conspiracy dedicated to creating and mining the worst lows of human desperation. A corporation has manipulated his life purely so they can farm his suicide note as a sadness artifact that will be packed and shipped to ancient underwater creatures who feed off our strongest and most base emotions. Our hero partners with a cult intent on exposing the corporation, and only a suicide mission can solve the whole mess.

The Tomorrows #1

Curt Pires (W)

Jason Copland (A)

On Sale in July

A bold new speculative-fiction comic from the mind of writer Curt Pires, each issue illustrated by a different brilliant artist!

The future: art is illegal. Everything everyone ever posted online has been weaponized against them. The reign of the Corporation is quickly becoming as absolute as it is brutal—unless the Tomorrows can stop it.

They told you the counterculture was dead. They were wrong. Welcome to the new reality.

Death Head #1

Zack Keller, Nick Keller (W)

Joanna Estep (A)

On Sale in July

When Niles and Justine Burton go camping to get a break from their stressful lives, they expect to find peace . . . not an abandoned village hiding an ancient evil. In a turn of events ripped straight from a horror movie, a brutal killer wearing a plague doctor’s mask begins hunting Niles, Justine, and their two kids. Who is the Plague Doctor? What does he want? And how will the family survive?

Zodiac Starforce #1

Kevin Panetta (W)

Paulina Ganucheau (A)

On Sale in August

They’re an elite group of teenage girls with magical powers who have sworn to protect our planet against dark creatures . . . as long as they can get out of class! Known as the Zodiac Starforce, these high-school girls aren’t just combating math tests. They’re also battling monsters—not your typical afterschool activity! But when an evil force from another dimension infects team leader Emma, she must work with her team of magically powered friends to save herself—and the world—from the evil Diana and her mean-girl minions!

From Kevin Panetta (Bravest Warriors) and Paulina Ganucheau (TMNT: New Animated Adventures, Bravest Warriors), this super-fun and heartfelt story of growing up and friendship—with plenty of magical-girl fighting action—delivers the most exciting new ensemble cast in comics!

Adam.3 #1

Scott Kolins (W/A)

On Sale in August

Award-winning writer and artist Scott Kolins (Past Aways, The Flash, The Avengers, Solomon Grundy) premieres Adam.3.

On a futuristic island paradise populated by talking animals and monitored by orbiting control satellites, the peaceful lives of Adam and his wife Skye are troubled by growing tension between Adam and his previous son, Beo. The situation goes from bad to worse when an alien invader infects the animals—turning them into aliens themselves. When Beo is captured, Adam must battle his transformed animal friends to save his son—and their island home!

Power Cubed #1

Aaron Lopresti (W/A)

On Sale in September

On his eighteenth birthday, Kenny’s inventor father gives him a phenomenal piece of matter-reinterpreting technology, attracting the attention of a bumbling Nazi scientist and an elite government agent. Aaron Lopresti delivers a comical coming-of-age tale in a fantastic sci-fi universe!

The Steam Man #1

Mark Miller (W)

Joe R. Lansdale (W)

Piotr Kowalski (A)

On Sale in October

The Old West (but not as we know it): Giant robots that run on steam power are created to take down invading Martians and armies of killer albino apes in an all-out brawl. The Steam Man, a giant metal man operated by a team of monster hunters, seems to have the town protected and the West under control, until a crazed and powerful vampire comes to town to bring forth the apocalypse.

Chimichanga: Sorrow of the World’s Worst Face #1

Eric Powell (W)

Stephanie Buscema (A)

On Sale in late 2015

Wrinkle’s Traveling Circus’s most adorable bearded girl and her savory-named beast are back, and there is a new act in store! Come one, come all to the Sorrow of the World’s Worst Face! But beware: those who look behind the curtain are in for an awful treat, and it’s not just his face we’re talkin’ about!

If Ed Skudder and Zack Keller’s Dick Figures – The Movie is any indication, the animated feature revolution will not only be televised, it will be fan-funded and delivered directly to its audience through an innovative multi-tiered distribution strategy.

On = September 17, the entire film will be available for purchase or rental in a variety of digital platforms, including Google Play. However, the 73-minute movie adaptation of the popular webseries Dick Figures will have a day-and-date episodic release. It will be made available free of charge on YouTube, distributed in twelve weekly ad-supported installments.

“We want to give people the option to download or stream the movie from wherever they’re comfortable, from wherever they have accounts, from wherever it’s easiest for them to get access to the movie,” co-creator Keller told Mashable. “We operate in online space, so we wanted to keep it in an online space. People don’t even have to leave their couches or their desks or wherever they are.”

Since its premiere in 2010, Dick Figures, which follows the comic experiences of two juvenile young adult stick figures, Red and Blue, has racked up 43 short episodes and over 350 million views on YouTube, making it one of the most popular animated webseries to date. Creators Skudder and Keller raised over $300,000 in crowdfunding for the feature project on Kickstarter last year. (Most of the Kickstarter backers will be able to download the film at no cost.)

Tailoring the film’s release primarily with its core audience in mind, distributor Mondo Media and production company Six Point Harness partnered with digital platform manager Cinedigm, (who will also release the film to DVD in December) and Yekra, a VOD provider that enables viewers to stream and download content through blogs and social media sites.

When television creators Dan Harmon (Community) and Dino Stamatopoulos (Moral Orel) — partners in Los Angeles production company Starburns Industries — were thinking of ideas to develop for animation, they remembered a Charlie Kaufman-penned play called Anomalisa that they’d seen staged in Los Angeles in 2005. They envisioned great possibilities for the project, and soon had Kaufman’s blessing to pursue funding to produce an animated film.

The only hitch was that the idea — a 40-minute stop-motion film revolving around a man crippled by the mundanity of his existence — wasn’t an easy sell to either TV networks or film studios who have predefined notions of what animation is. In another country, they might have been funded by a government arts program, but in the United States, Anomalisa was destined to languish as an idea.

Enter crowd-funding.

Harmon and Stamatopoulos launched a campaign in early July using the online fundraising website Kickstarter. Their campaign, which ended yesterday afternoon, set a new record for an animation project on the crowd-funding platform, raising over $406,000, more than double its goal. More impressively, it is at least the 5th animated project that has raised over $100,000 this past summer on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter says that films have been the second-most funded category on their site this year with over $42 million pledged through August 31. They haven’t provided a breakout for what percentage of that amount has gone toward animation projects, but it is in the millions of dollars.

The director of the forthcoming Anomalisa is Duke Johnson, a veteran of Starburns projects including Moral Orel and Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole. Johnson explains to Cartoon Brew how the crowd-funding route can be a boon to both the filmmakers and the audience:

“For this particular project, we are inspired by the idea of a pure artistic vision from script to screen.  Meaning that all creative and even technical decisions, like distribution, are made by a core creative team with no incentive beyond making the best possible film out of a script they believe in.  Which we believe will ultimately give people something they really want and can’t otherwise have.”

Visual effects veteran Phil Tippett, who owns the esteemed Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, recently restarted production on a twenty-year-old personal film project called Mad God, which he calls an “anti-studio, anti-corporate, anti-commercial statement.” He got back into it at the urging of younger employees working at his studio who wanted to step away from their computers and learn the craft of stop motion animation. To fund the project, Tippett initially auctioned props from his long career in visual effects, including an AT-AT Imperial Walker from The Empire Strikes Back and a RoboCop puppet from RoboCop 2.

When the funds from those auctions began to dwindle, Tippet turned to Kickstarter. He sought to raise a conservative $40,000 to cover the costs of studio space, crew lunches, hard drive storage, lab services and other bare essentials. He admits the costs would be much higher if not for the all-volunteer crew and the fact that he owns a lot of film equipment after decades of running his own studio.

Tippett raised more than three times his goal—$124,156—enough to comfortably complete the first chapter of Mad God. He says that the free-from nature of the film, which he likens to painting or sculpture more than filmmaking, leaves it open to an indefinite number of episodes. “The narrative allows me to go back in and open it up,” he told me. “It’s not stuck to a logical timeline. The chapters will continue to get revised over the years.”

Just to be safe, Tippett has already shot an end title for Mad God — “If I die, that’s the end,” — though intriguingly, he also suggests that other artists “after me or alongside me” could take aspects of Mad God and expand upon the concept in different directions.

Another animation veteran who has embraced Kickstarter is Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi. His run-ins with network executives have been well documented throughout the years so when he wanted to resurrect a short film idea based on his character George Liquor, he reached out directly to his fans.

During his fundraising campaign, he told potential supporters on his Kickstarter page, “This is the absolute best way for me to make cartoons for you without pesky executives and middlemen second guessing every gag and drawing I do!” Feeding into the anti-corporate sentiment, one of the rewards he offered was a producer’s shirt that reads, “I Made It Happen! The Body In This Shirt Is The Official Producer of John K’s Can Without Labels.”

Kricfalusi easily exceeded the $110,000 goal needed to produced an 8-to-10 minute short. He wrote that the budget was only half of what it would have cost to produce a Ren and Stimpy short at his former studio Spümcø. The lessened cost is due in large part to the way that Kricfalusi has revamped his production pipeline. He no longer ships animation overseas, instead producing the animation from a home studio equipped with Toon Boom software and a small crew of artists.

The projects by Starburns, Tippett and Kricfalusi aren’t based on series currently in production, and they were able to achieve their financial goals largely on the reputations of their creators. However, two other animation Kickstarter campaigns that have recently achieved six-figure pledge amounts are based on series currently in production. The creators of the Animusic dvd series raised $223,137 to produce a third installment in their series that combines computer animation and electronic music. Meanwhile, the popular Flash-animated series Dick Figures, produced by Six Point Harness and distributed online by Mondo Media, blasted past its $250,000 goal to reach $313,412.

Ed Skudder and Zack Keller, the creators of Dick Figures, encouraged fans to donate so that they could produce a movie-length version of their cartoon. Their financing campaign benefitted from Mondo Media’s 1.1 million YouTube subscribers, says Aaron Simpson, vp of animation and business development at Mondo Media. The company embedded ads for the Kickstarter campaign throughout their YouTube videos, which resulted in approximately half of the Kickstarter funding.

Simpson is quick to point out that having a popular online animated series doesn’t guarantee a successful crowd-funding campaign. Last year, Mondo Media conducted a campaign for its well-established Happy Tree Friends, which raised only 10% of its goal. The company learned a lot from that early failure, including the importance of offering rewards revolving around the project itself (HD film downloads, film soundtracks, behind-the-scenes making-ofs). Ancillary rewards (T-shirts, posters) are fine too, but Simpson says that many supporters are more interested in items directly related to the project itself.

Simpson points out the importance of “creating something really, really special” in relation to the existing product. The creators of Dick Figures didn’t simply ask audiences to fund the production of additional shorts of the same length, but to help create a movie. And successfully reaching a goal is not the end of the line: another important part of their strategy was to create an online space where fans could continue to support the project financially even after the initial Kickstarter campaign was completed.

The Kickstarter projects discussed within all benefitted from being connected to well known creators or established animation properties. It would be unreasonable to expect that an independent or moderately successful filmmaker could raise a similar six-figure amount. That doesn’t diminish the achievement of these campaigns, however. Even known filmmakers such as those in this article would have struggled to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from their fans just a few years ago.

Over the summer, crowd-funding finally emerged as a viable alternative to traditional film production models. There are enough people who are now using platforms like Kickstarter to support the production of professional-quality animated films by name filmmakers. The possibilities are, indeed, limitless now that filmmakers and fans can connect directly with one another instead of relying on a third-party. For animation, it may herald a new era of more innovative and unique projects.

Continue reading for stats about the projects discussed in this article.

Anomalisa by Starburns Industries
Goal: $200,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 40 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $5,000
Raised: $406,237
Backers: 5,770
Average Pledge: $70.41

Mad God by Phil Tippett
Goal: $40,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 12 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $3,333
Raised: $124,156
Backers: 2,523
Average Pledge: $49.21

Cans Without Labels by John Kricfalusi
Goal: $110,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 8-10 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $11,000-13,750
Raised: $136,724
Backers: 3,562
Average Pledge: $38.38

Dick Figures: The Movie by Six Point Harness
Goal: $250,000
Length of Film Project: 30 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $8,333
Raised: $313,412
Backers: 5,616
Average Pledge: $55.81

Animusic 3 by Animusic
Goal: $200,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 40 minutes (based on previous Animusic release)
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $5,000
Raised: $223,137
Backers: 3,284
Average Pledge: $67.95

When television creators Dan Harmon (Community) and Dino Stamatopoulos (Moral Orel) — partners in Los Angeles production company Starburns Industries — were thinking of ideas to develop for animation, they remembered a Charlie Kaufman-penned play called Anomalisa that they’d seen staged in Los Angeles in 2005. They envisioned great possibilities for the project, and soon had Kaufman’s blessing to pursue funding to produce an animated film.

The only hitch was that the idea — a 40-minute stop-motion film revolving around a man crippled by the mundanity of his existence — wasn’t an easy sell to either TV networks or film studios who have predefined notions of what animation is. In another country, they might have been funded by a government arts program, but in the United States, Anomalisa was destined to languish as an idea.

Enter crowd-funding.

Harmon and Stamatopoulos launched a campaign in early July using the online fundraising website Kickstarter. Their campaign, which ended yesterday afternoon, set a new record for an animation project on the crowd-funding platform, raising over $406,000, more than double its goal. More impressively, it is at least the 5th animated project that has raised over $100,000 this past summer on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter says that films have been the second-most funded category on their site this year with over $42 million pledged through August 31. They haven’t provided a breakout for what percentage of that amount has gone toward animation projects, but it is in the millions of dollars.

The director of the forthcoming Anomalisa is Duke Johnson, a veteran of Starburns projects including Moral Orel and Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole. Johnson explains to Cartoon Brew how the crowd-funding route can be a boon to both the filmmakers and the audience:

“For this particular project, we are inspired by the idea of a pure artistic vision from script to screen.  Meaning that all creative and even technical decisions, like distribution, are made by a core creative team with no incentive beyond making the best possible film out of a script they believe in.  Which we believe will ultimately give people something they really want and can’t otherwise have.”

Visual effects veteran Phil Tippett, who owns the esteemed Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, recently restarted production on a twenty-year-old personal film project called Mad God, which he calls an “anti-studio, anti-corporate, anti-commercial statement.” He got back into it at the urging of younger employees working at his studio who wanted to step away from their computers and learn the craft of stop motion animation. To fund the project, Tippett initially auctioned props from his long career in visual effects, including an AT-AT Imperial Walker from The Empire Strikes Back and a RoboCop puppet from RoboCop 2.

When the funds from those auctions began to dwindle, Tippet turned to Kickstarter. He sought to raise a conservative $40,000 to cover the costs of studio space, crew lunches, hard drive storage, lab services and other bare essentials. He admits the costs would be much higher if not for the all-volunteer crew and the fact that he owns a lot of film equipment after decades of running his own studio.

Tippett raised more than three times his goal—$124,156—enough to comfortably complete the first chapter of Mad God. He says that the free-from nature of the film, which he likens to painting or sculpture more than filmmaking, leaves it open to an indefinite number of episodes. “The narrative allows me to go back in and open it up,” he told me. “It’s not stuck to a logical timeline. The chapters will continue to get revised over the years.”

Just to be safe, Tippett has already shot an end title for Mad God — “If I die, that’s the end,” — though intriguingly, he also suggests that other artists “after me or alongside me” could take aspects of Mad God and expand upon the concept in different directions.

Another animation veteran who has embraced Kickstarter is Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi. His run-ins with network executives have been well documented throughout the years so when he wanted to resurrect a short film idea based on his character George Liquor, he reached out directly to his fans.

During his fundraising campaign, he told potential supporters on his Kickstarter page, “This is the absolute best way for me to make cartoons for you without pesky executives and middlemen second guessing every gag and drawing I do!” Feeding into the anti-corporate sentiment, one of the rewards he offered was a producer’s shirt that reads, “I Made It Happen! The Body In This Shirt Is The Official Producer of John K’s Can Without Labels.”

Kricfalusi easily exceeded the $110,000 goal needed to produced an 8-to-10 minute short. He wrote that the budget was only half of what it would have cost to produce a Ren and Stimpy short at his former studio Spümcø. The lessened cost is due in large part to the way that Kricfalusi has revamped his production pipeline. He no longer ships animation overseas, instead producing the animation from a home studio equipped with Toon Boom software and a small crew of artists.

The projects by Starburns, Tippett and Kricfalusi aren’t based on series currently in production, and they were able to achieve their financial goals largely on the reputations of their creators. However, two other Kickstarter animation campaigns that have recently concluded with six-figure pledge totals are based on series currently in production. The creators of the Animusic dvd series raised $223,137 to produce a third installment in their series that combines computer animation and electronic music. Meanwhile, the popular Flash-animated series Dick Figures, produced by Six Point Harness and distributed online by Mondo Media, blasted past its $250,000 goal to reach $313,412.

Ed Skudder and Zack Keller, the creators of Dick Figures, encouraged fans to donate so that they could produce a movie-length version of their cartoon. Their financing campaign benefitted from Mondo Media’s 1.1 million YouTube subscribers, says Aaron Simpson, vp of animation and business development at Mondo Media. The company embedded ads for the Kickstarter campaign throughout their YouTube videos, which resulted in approximately half of the Kickstarter funding.

Simpson is quick to point out that having a popular online animated series doesn’t guarantee a successful crowd-funding campaign. Last year, Mondo Media conducted a campaign for its well-established Happy Tree Friends, which raised only 10% of its goal. The company learned a lot from that early failure, including the importance of offering rewards revolving around the project itself (HD film downloads, film soundtracks, behind-the-scenes making-ofs). Ancillary rewards (T-shirts, posters) are fine too, but Simpson says that many supporters are more interested in items directly related to the project itself.

Simpson points out the importance of “creating something really, really special” in relation to the existing product. The creators of Dick Figures didn’t simply ask audiences to fund the production of additional shorts of the same length, but to help create a movie. And successfully reaching a goal is not the end of the line: another important part of their strategy was to create an online space where fans could continue to support the project financially even after the initial Kickstarter campaign was completed.

The Kickstarter projects discussed here all benefitted from being attached to well known creators or established animation properties. It would be unreasonable to expect that an independent or moderately successful filmmaker could raise a similar six-figure amount. That doesn’t diminish the achievement of these campaigns, however. Even known filmmakers such as those in this article would have struggled to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from their fans just a few years ago.

Over the summer, crowd-funding finally emerged as a viable alternative to traditional animation financing models. There are enough people who are using platforms like Kickstarter to support the production of professional-quality animated films by name filmmakers. The possibilities are, indeed, limitless now that filmmakers and fans can connect directly with one another instead of relying on third parties. For animation, it may herald a new era of more innovative and unique projects.

Continue reading for stats about the projects discussed in this article.

Anomalisa by Starburns Industries
Goal: $200,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 40 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $5,000
Raised: $406,237
Backers: 5,770
Average Pledge: $70.41

Mad God by Phil Tippett
Goal: $40,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 12 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $3,333
Raised: $124,156
Backers: 2,523
Average Pledge: $49.21

Cans Without Labels by John Kricfalusi
Goal: $110,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 8-10 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $11,000-13,750
Raised: $136,724
Backers: 3,562
Average Pledge: $38.38

Dick Figures: The Movie by Six Point Harness
Goal: $250,000
Length of Film Project: 30 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $8,333
Raised: $313,412
Backers: 5,616
Average Pledge: $55.81

Animusic 3 by Animusic
Goal: $200,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 40 minutes (based on previous Animusic release)
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $5,000
Raised: $223,137
Backers: 3,284
Average Pledge: $67.95