Kickstarter

I'm happy to report that Kelly Williams is feeling much better and is back to the drawing board on THE CABINET! 

For a full account of his hospital experience, I recommend reading his illustrated post "My Xmas Vaction (or Hospital Blues." He's also posting new art to his blog every week. Both Kelly and I are participating in the collaborative art project AlphaBots! as well. And as always, he's available for commissions.

WIth this announcement I'd like to share some pages from THE CABINET with you. We hope you like them! Kelly and I are also excited to both be in the artists alley at Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC from June 7–9, 2013.

Congratulations everyone! Thanks to you we were able to meet our goal, and even exceed it by a little over $800! 

Thank you all so much for your hard work getting the word out there about this story. Now we can share it with you!

For those of you that solely ordered prints or original art, we'll be sending out surveys later this week to get your shipping address. Those rewards will be delivered as soon as possible, once the printing is finished.

I'll keep you updated as Kelly and I progress with the graphic novel. I'm sure we'll have some great secrets to share along the way toward its creation! 

- Christian

As of this writing we've met 103% of our goal!

Thanks so much to all of you. As our ambassadors and supporters you raised over $1,000 in less than 24 hours! Thank you for your thoughtful posts on social media and the messages you sent out to your friends and family. I'm astounded that we've hit our goal with 48 hours left on the clock.

Kelly and I are going to keep pushing forward past 100% and you're welcome to join us. There are two good reasons why:

• Occasionally some people retract their donations toward the end of a campaign. This happened to me last year with my project Think of the Children and it could happen again. We'd prefer to have some padding on the goal so it definitely goes through on Saturday morning.
• Every dollar we raise over our goal will go toward raising Kelly's page rate for the work he does on THE CABINET. What he's agreed to work for is low by industry standards. So the more we raise the better compensated he'll be for his amazing art. He's got a daughter starting college this fall and a big move ahead. I want to treat him as fairly as possible.

To celebrate reaching our goal, I have decided to publish an article I wrote called "Comics and Libraries, Sitting In A Tree..." This piece delves into the relationship between the comics industry and American libraries. I learned that the two are closely tied together after interviewing key players in the library world, as well as representatives from publishers like IDW and Dark Horse.

Please feel free to pass it along, especially if you're a member of the library community. At the end of the piece I remind readers about this campaign and that the hardcover reward is designed with library distribution in mind.

Thanks again for all of your support! 

This morning we passed the $5,000 mark toward our final goal. This is incredibly exciting as we're down to 67 hours to go. That's right... Kickstarter isn't counting this campaign in days anymore. They're counting down in hours.

If you're one of our current backers you obviously want this project to succeed. We have until 9:00 AM on Saturday morning to get to $6,000. Otherwise we don't meet our goal and Kickstarter won't reward us any of the funding you've already pledged. Without funding we can't create the book or fulfill your rewards. 

I believe we can succeed. I'm especially convinced after reading an article this morning titled "The Untold Story Behind Kickstarter Stats." The writer of this piece had previously written erroneous information about why certain campaigns "fail" on Kickstarter. After communicating with a professor of business management, she realized her article was wrong due to poorly calculated statistics. What is heartening is that she then admitted that her previous conclusions were incorrect and along with the professor, conducted further research to get the facts right.

My positive take away from her new data is that projects that successfully fund tend to do so by relatively small margins. On the flip side, projects that fail to fund tend to fail by large margins. This is good news for THE CABINET, since we're so close to our goal, with only 16% left to fulfill! We have a realistic goal and we're going to meet it. Keep helping us get there by spreading the word through direct e-mail, social media etc. 

Since we hit another milestone I'm going to share another bit of behind-the-scenes information with you. In order to write about the expedition of the Scowerer in THE CABINET I created a custom Google map that shows the ship's journey and triangulates the region in the Northwest Passage where they'll end up. You can look at this in Google Maps by clicking the link. Or, if you've installed Google Earth on your computer, you can import this map file to see my map overlaid on top of an interactive globe.

What's particularly cool about viewing the map in Google Earth is you can view photosets by people who have journeyed to this area of the arctic in present day. In particular there's a great set by the Polar Conservation Oragnization. One even shows a sled dog after finishing polar bear bones for lunch! 

Below are some of my favorite photos of the area from the PCO set and others. I'm also including a map of the Belcher expedition in 1852. This is the same expedition we show in the 6 page preview and included the HMS Resolute that was eventually found floating over a thousand miles away. I found the map in Martin W. Sandler's book about the Resolute.

We can push forward in these next few days to meet our goal. You're our ambassadors and we have the power to make this happen together.