Kickstarter

FRONT PAGE UPDATE 3!!

Thanks thanks and thanks to everyone to pitched in a little of their hard-earned dough to bring Beat L.A. to life! The floodgates have now been opened, and Gary, Tony and Mani are give our esteemed donors the sharpest, slickest version of this comic we can!

Of course, if anyone else wants a first-run signed copy of Beat L.A., please fire off another contribution at the $25 level and we'll make it happen!

Otherwise, look out for another video Gary and Tony will shoot together thanking everyone for their help, hard work and heavy donating! We couldn't have done it without you.

FRONT PAGE UPDATE 2!

Almost at $2000! We're absolutely certain we can do this, all we need is your help! 5 days is an eternity when you have the right promotion... plus, who knows? Maybe we can beat our number if we all put in a little time and get it done!

In the meantime, Tony Chavira sat down in front of a camera to chat about where Beat L.A.'s Brand & Reese story came from, what is like to work with Mani, the artist, and why you should contribute a few bucks to our awesome project!

Thanks so much everyone!

FRONT PAGE UPDATE 1!

Things are rolling along fast here at Beat L.A., so we did a little video for novelist Gary Phillips, who wrote the first half of Beat L.A., Bicycle Cop Dave, to give us a lowdown on where this whole thing came from:

THE CONTEXT

Bicycle Cop Dave and Brand & Reese are two distinct, yet connected webcomics that first ran on FourStory.org, a site that initially began as a way to look at issues of housing, transportation and development.  More, writers from various backgrounds write on a myriad of interesting and informative topics ranging from the aforementioned issues to sustainability, justice, the economy, arts, media, politics and even ongoing fictional pieces.

FourStory is about fact and fiction for a fair future.

THE CHARACTERS

Into this terrain rides Dave and patrolmen Brand and Reese in their Crown Vic.  Beat L.A. is set in a downtown Los Angeles where gentrification seeks to displace the homeless, where loft dwellers walk their little dogs past dark alleyways from which the sickly sweet smell of something else wafts, police officer David Richter, once a plainclothes detective, patrols this mixed area on his trusty bike.

Bicycle Cop Dave – 84 pages in glorious black & white and grey tone and created and written by mystery novelist Gary Phillips -- unfolds on several levels as we follow Dave’s quixotic day taking us into various environs of the changing downtown Los Angeles. He encounters interesting characters from a lawyer smoking crack in a port-a-potty to a one-armed prophet in a Skid Row bar with his wooden tablet of odd commandments.  Oh, and there’s a couple of bodies hung upside down below the Sixth Street bridge, a character calling himself the Genghis Rabbit, and some big time development hanky-panky going on too.

Brand & Reese – 100 pages of L.A.-style sepia written by FourStory’s associate editor Tony Chavira -- meanwhile, are Dave’s two unfulfilled middle-aged beat cop colleagues who become entangled in a struggle between a sinister, Mexican Cartel-funded property developer, the ever-pressing will of pandering politicians, and the enormous, growing homeless community we all know Los Angeles houses (or rather, doesn't). When a gigantic homeless community is discovered on a large portion of city-owned Downtown Los Angeles property before it’s handed over to a developer, the developer only sees one way to clear the land: work with their shadowy financiers to brutally eliminate every obstacle in the way.

All of Beat L.A. is drawn, inked, toned and lettered by the talented Manoel Magalhães (Vincent Price Presents).

WHAT WE WANT TO DO WITH THE DOUGH

All the writing and artwork for both strips is done. Now we’d like to hand Beat L.A. to you, bound, sealed and delivered.

Our goal is to produce and distribute gunsteel-cool tradepaper editions, nearly 200 pages, of Markus Brand, J.P. Reese, and Dave Richter as they shepherd the wilds of Downtown L.A--Tinsel Town's dark, unrelenting heart--in Beat L.A.

So we came to Kickstarter to get it done right.