Hello all,

The Calypso episode of Ulysses "Seen", up to page 27, is online now with corresponding reader's guide entries. We'll be posting a new installment every Monday until Bloomsday. We're quite happy with the way this chapter turned out, and we can't wait to show you the rest of it.

http://www.ulyssesseen.com/comic/us_comic_cal_0001.html

Hello again everyone,

We're happy to announce that the incredibly and unnecessarily arduous process of getting the rewards items produced has finally come to an end. Our shipping materials have also begun to arrive, so we're ready to begin sending them out to you at last. We'll start by sending out the packages that fit into the containers we have and continue to ship others as the appropriate containers arrive. Thank you all so much again for your patience.

Hello all,

We'd like to apologize for the delay in getting you the rewards; we had hoped to have them in your hands by now. We had a hiccup with a vendor, and the snow in our area has delayed the process further. We're quite frustrated with the situation and are doing everything we can to move things along. Thank you all for your patience, and we will get your well deserved rewards to you as soon as we possibly can. When we factor in the shipping time, we think that will be mid-February. We'll update you if there are any further delays.

Happy New Year, all. 2010 was an amazing year for us, and we're looking forward to what promises to be an even better 2011 (thanks in large part to all of you). With the much needed holiday downtime behind us, we're anxious to get cracking again.

Here's a peek at the pint glass design...

Happy holidays to all who are celebrating! The 2010 Ulysses "Seen" hoilday card is up at the link below. A little less obnoxious than last year's, but then, there's no Buck Mulligan in the "Calypso" episode.

http://ulyssesseen.com/landing/2010/12/happy-holidays/

We're putting the rewards together now, and we thought we'd give you a peek at 3 of the hand-drawn bookmarks Rob has been creating. We'll put a few more images up soon. Enjoy!

Wow.

In just over two months here on kickstarter we've finished our fund drive with 142% of the requested goal, enough to keep the lights on in the studio for another year and then some.

Can't help but say it again; wow.

In the next couple of weeks we'll be contacting each of you directly by email to follow through on the rewards that you'll be receiving for your support. I look forward to hearing individual responses to which of my drawings each of you might choose or stories about how you first came to hear about our project or your general interest in Joyce or comics. One of the most surprising things about the whole kickstarter experience has been the exposure here to new fans. Of the 132 people who went out of their way to support the project I'm shocked and flattered to find that I only know about a dozen of you.

Again, wow.

While kickstarter does provide us with email info on our supporters, we don't want to crowd anybody or clog up their inbox. Here's a couple of other ways you can keep up-to-date on the new pages and developments:
1)subscribe on the website;
http://ulyssesseen.com/landing/
2)or follow us on twitter;
http://twitter.com/UlyssesSeen
3)or go to our Facebook page;
http://www.facebook.com/ulyssesseen
4)or "friend me" on Facebook to see my daily studio;
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php...

I look forward to hearing from you each more directly, but while everyone's still here in the room, I wanted to say something more about what your support means to me and the team at Throwaway Horse LLC.

-Thanks to you we're able to spend the next year thinking about this project and digital comics in general as an art form without the pretext of it being a business model.

-Thanks to you we can look at what the shape and content of the digital page might mean in this rather exciting time without bowing down to bottom-line concerns about "how much money and when?".

-Thanks to you we've met our bottom-line for the coming year as artists undertaking a long and ambition project yet, through your abundant support, surpassed it.

-Thanks to you the energetic spirit of self-publishing to a dedicated and involved audience, something so pivotal in the history of American comics, will stay in our minds and in our studio for some time to come.

-Thanks to you we, for at least a year, control our own directions and decisions about what ULYSSES "SEEN" may become without worrying about how it fits into the package of other material by a larger publisher.

-Thanks to you we have the time we need to discover what makes us unique.
-Thanks to you will spend more time finding out just who are fans are through discussion rather than setting up analytics on our website.

-Thanks to you we can build the tech and navigation into what it needs to be rather than a box of ideas built on the sketchy template of Wordpress. Believe me, we know how to get there and can now turn some much needed time and money to that end.

-Thanks to you we'll have the year to build content so that the following year can offer so much more.

-Thanks to you this project can proceed in the same inventive spirit it was conceived under without having to proof it's worth.

-Thanks to you invention has worth.

-Thanks to you we get to keep looking at how to make that the bottom-line of our project in years to come.

So, thanks to you.
-Rob

(Since I like ending with a drawing here's one to sign off on featuring one of the most inventive artists I know. Whether he would approve or not is a matter of some debate. But through your support we'll do what we an to live in that spirit;

Here's a link to SHELF UNBOUND Magazine's interview with Rob, Mike, and Josh, hot off the digital presses. Enjoy!

http://www.zinio.com/pages/ShelfUnbound/Dec-10/416146768/pg-62

We've uploaded new video to our Project Home page -- a piece prepared for our Philadelphia public television station WHYY & a weekly arts program they have. It was produced by Michael O'Reilly, and we think it tells our story better than we could have done ourselves. You should take a look...

Now that we've met our goal, we thought it would only be fair to show you a little bit of what we've been up to. Here are the first four pages of the Calypso episode of ULYSSES "SEEN". Enjoy! There's more where these came from...

Wow.

Well, first of all, thank you all so very much. With your support we are now over 110% of our initial goal in just 28 of our 69 days. Mike and Josh and Chad and I are all feeling just great about that and, tonight, we'll a sleep the sleep of righteous men knowing that we're doing something many people thought crazy but that so many of you have gone out of your way to support.

And let's face it; the "sleep of the righteous" is just about the best sleep possible (coming in just behind the "sleep of the completed" and the "sleep of knowing" in a dead heat for first place at the end of the Daily Rat Race).

110% is a strange number in fundraising. People seem to think, "okay, so they got what they asked for. Great for them. What's with the extra money?"

Well, yes, we did get the first goal in our fund drive. The lights in the studio will burn brightly for another year and the "Calypso" chapter will be finished through the help of supporters here on kickstarter. I'll be able to spend more time with a brush in my hand and less time making drinks or slinging sandwiches. I can't thank people enough for that.

But kickstarter is a unique funding platform in that this initial funding goal is only the first step in building a relationship between artists like ourselves and supporters of the arts like you. It's the level at which we can begin to receive your support and find ways to give it back.

So it's time to make the fund drive about you.

We've worked pretty hard at setting up some great rewards that are going to be unique to this kickstarter drive. original drawings, products and educational or collaborative features that won't be offered anywhere else. ULYSSES "SEEN", both on line and as a download, remains free of charge and we'll be keeping it that way throughout the next calendar year. Your continued support here over the next 40 days will go a long way to carrying us through that year. And, thanks to the rewards-for-support platform of kickstarter you can get some pretty cool, one-of-a-kind souvenirs for helping us out.

-I've taken all of my original art for ULYSSES "SEEN" of the market so people can buy pages here by pledging support at the $200 level. There's a lot of great pages left from the "Telemachus" chapter, and we'll putting up some of the "Calypso" pages later today.

-For pledging your support at the $35 level, we've just added an exclusive reward that gives fans a chance to choose from the drawings in my "Dubliners sketchbook" of characters and costumes for ULYSSES "SEEN". There's only going to be 69 of these drawings (one for each day of our kickstarter fund drive) and choices on the drawings will be on a "first come, first served" basis. They've been quite a lot of fun to make and you've seen some examples of them here in the blog (just like the one below).

-But even at the $25 pledge level (and for all the regular levels above that) there's some original art to sweeten the pot. In addition to the very cool pint glass, supporters will receive bookmarks with one-of-a-kind drawings on them.

So thanks again for getting us to this level of the fund drive. Please keep the support coming and we'll promise to keep showing our appreciation with some really fun and one-of-a-kind souvenirs.

Sincerely,
-Rob

About 10 months ago we were discovered by the Metafilter weblog site. We had some fans, we had some critics, but one comment stuck in my mind. It was a visceral reaction from a contributor along the lines of-- "Ugh. Do we really need a comic book of Ulysses?" It suggested that what we are doing is gratuitous, as if the only things remaining to be turned into comic books were insurance policies, farm reports and the local crime blotter. I kind of get it. Prior to this if you wanted to mock the proliferation of graphic novels you'd have probably said, " oh, what's next, a Ulysses comic book?"

But maybe we should turn everything into comic books. Different people learn in different ways, some by reading, some by listening, and others, myself included, by seeing a picture. Rendering ideas in pictures makes the abstract concrete, puts a pair of work boots on the ephemeral. And, hey, we don't question when Hollywood takes a great book and turns it into a movie, do we? Sure, we might hate the way Hollywood ruins the story, but we don't think it's gratuitous for them to do it. There's a fundamental desire to have great stories and hard ideas presented in different ways and shown in new lights. Is it gratuitous of you to sit down and read Hamlet instead of watching it spoken and played out by actors? Next thing you know, you'll be reading lyric poetry quietly to yourself. Reading, listening, and looking-- why rate them according to some false hiearchy of cognition?

And then, of course, what we are doing is considerably more than just a comic book. You can't separate the comic from the reader's guide. When you read Ulysses (or Shakespeare, or Tolstoy, or Milton, etc.) your concentration is repeatedly and consistently broken up by unfamiliar references-- historical events, literary allusions, or just syntax that has fallen out of use. So it's hard to say that just simply reading the book is truest to enjoying the work as it was intended-- you have to resort to footnotes and reference books to really get it. By toggling back and forth between the comic and the reader's guide at your discretion, we hope to put you on equal footing with the author's originally intended audience by making the unfamiliar familiar-- sometimes with pictures, sometimes with Mike Barsanti's insight, sometimes by linking you out to further resources for self-directed learning.

One more thing-- if you don't read the book, what we are doing is pointless. We are not trying to replace reading-- we are trying to replace footnotes. Once you have acquanited yourself with the alien world the writer is plunging you into, you will be more able to enjoy the work as intended, or at least as it would have been enjoyed by a contemporary reader or, in the case of Ulysses, enjoyed as the polymaths that appear to have been Joyce's intended audience.

Thanks for your support.

Chad A. Rutkowski

Business Manager

(oh, and here's another of Rob's drawings to sweeten the pot.)

Wow. Two-thirds of the way to our goal and we haven't even started pleading to friends and relatives yet. Thanks everybody!
Since Josh and Mike have chimed in a bit here about the merits (or lunacy) of the project, I figured it might be a good time to talk about why we're on kickstarter and how this kind of fundraising environment is exciting to me as an artist.
My personal background in art is as an easel painter rather than as a cartoonist. When I was in art school in the '80's it was a kind of flush time for painters. Young artists who were lucky enough to receive some attention for their work had some different choices available for how to support themselves then; some worked through the galleries or commission system making products for a pretty large market of "art consumers", and some went through the academic route or learned to write the grants necessary to make a less "consumer-driven" kind of art.
And quite a few more of us became waiters and carpenters, bookstore clerks and plumbers, security guards and upholsters, anything to make a (mostly) honest buck and still give us a studio to come home to and the freedom to do work that we believed defined us beyond the job that paid our bills.
These were all options in the '80's and '90's, in my youth as an artist, that we had open to us because there was a stronger market for art and a lot more chance that making the art one believed in could become a viable career. While there's exciting new things happening now as publishing and other media turns to a digital format, and while no one quite seems to know how that will effect us in the future, this doesn't seem to be the economic climate of art these days. No one is sure of what art might look like as a career when the traditional employers of artists, publishers and manufactures and a financially secure middle- to upper-class, are uncertain of their future. The older, surer systems are breaking down in such a way that no one is quite certain where a career in art may eventually come from.
We've been fortunate enough to see some really exciting attention come to us very early on in the development of ULYSSES "SEEN" and, frankly, that's given us some unique options. But following up on some of those options could very easily close us off to some of the new potential we see happening in web-based art and media. Personally, I don't want that to happen just yet. I was always one of those guys who would rather wait tables than take commissions or write grants to pay the studio light bill. Hell, I'm still waiting tables to make sure that happens now.
But kickstarter offers a different kind of opportunity for artists like myself and projects like ULYSSES "SEEN" in this collapsed and uncertain market. It gives us direct and grass roots contact with supporters who want to see the art get made. It lets people, the real fans and users of art, help artists in small ways that they can afford while providing those people with a direct return, or reward, for that support. Frankly and personally, I think that's just genius.
One of the most troubling and rewarding things I ever faced as a painter was the day I realized I was successful enough to make paintings that I, my family and my friends could not afford to purchase or own. It was a big factor in my decision to leave painting in favor of books and cartoons and stories.
So, for me and for why I'm happy to be here on kickstarter?
Kickstarter offers more than just a chance to support artists or projects. It allows us all to support an environment for art beyond its traditional, conventional connection to the marketplace. And it offers artists some time and support to do the thing they do best: think about what comes next.
-Rob
(oh, yeah, here's another Dubliners sketch to keep your appetite up for the next chapter...)

If you’ve read Ulysses already, you probably recognize this as the way Molly Bloom asks her husband for the definition of a word in the “Calypso” episode -- the particular word is “metempsychosis.” It refers to the belief in reincarnation, that we all lived past lives. Joyce brings it up as a kind of playful clue, suggesting that Leopold Bloom is the reincarnation of the Greek hero whose name is on the front of the book.

I wrote a few days ago that one of the great gifts Ulysses Seen gives to readers of Joyce’s novel is drama. Not so much drama in the sense of emotional highs and lows (though it does that too), but drama in the broader sense of seeing characters relate to each other on a kind of stage, and seeing their reactions, gestures, positions, attitudes, as Rob imagines them.

This is really helpful in the “Telemachus” episode, but it’s even more so in “Calypso.” Not much happens in Calypso -- Bloom feeds his cat, goes to the butcher, makes breakfast for himself and for Molly, they have a conversation in their bedroom, he goes to the outhouse for his morning constitutional. The conversation that Leopold and Molly have in their bedroom, though, is critical for establishing the complex nature of their relationship. And much of that conversation happens through gesture--something is quickly hidden under a pillow, a book is pointed at, tea is drunk, clothes are moved-- and all of those actions have meaning.

Rob and Josh in particular have spent a lot of time figuring out (and sometimes carefully imagining) the fine details of the Blooms’ house. It’s been mapped out and the action storyboarded, the “floorplans” of each scene sketched out. Your contribution will help us finish -- we’re getting closer every day, and we’re thrilled. If you’ve pledged, thank you. If not -- now’s the time!

Here's another Dubliner from Rob's studio -- look for them as the "extras" in the comics' street scenes.