Shopping for something unconventional this Black Friday? In an interesting coincidence, several crowdfunding campaigns to revive / reprint well-known comic books launched within the same month, and they’re all competing for Kickstarter dollars at the same time.
If you recall earlier this year, when cartoonist and graphic novelist Jeff Smith launched a campaign to fund the first-ever print book of his college comic strip Thorn — basically an early version of Bone — he’s back at it again, this time with Bone itself. BONE Deluxe Edition Part One: The Valley reprints Out From Boneville and The Great Cow Race in a larger 12.5″ x 8.75″ format, and adds new bonus features.
But you can add even more if you’re rich. The book itself costs a $50 pledge in paperback and a $100 pledge in hardcover, but the $600 Big Merch Tier packs in four ceramic coasters, four Individual Cloisonné Pins, a die-cut Map of The Valley at 8.5” x 12”, a full-color flipbook of Fone Bone being chased by a Rat Creature (originally sold in 1994 and animated by Tom Bancroft), an Infinite Objects Animated Frame of the same scene, and a Fone Bone Evolution Print poster, all in an exclusive red box. Only 85 of these packages will be sold and 27 have gone so far.
The ultimate plan is to reprint Jeff’s entire life’s work up to this point, with three more volumes (and probably three more Kickstarters) in the future. After that Smith will get to his underappreciated followups Rasl and Tuki.
But this isn’t the only thing going on. Metal Hurlant, the landmark French sci-fi anthology comics magazine that was localized here as Heavy Metal, will return as a quarterly publication with your help. The original publishers, Humanoids, are behind the effort. In its heyday the mag attracted legendary talent like Frank Frazetta and HR Giger, and this time will be no different, with Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, Miran Kim, Karla Pacheco, Simon Roy, Matthew Sheean, Mark Waid and many others planned to contribute. The new Metal Hurlant will also reprint classics from the old Metal Hurlant by Moebius, R. Crumb, Trina Robbins and more.
So why are they revering to the original name? Because….um….
Heavy Metal just launched its own separate Kickstarter as its own separate magazine. Whah? What’s going on? It seems the two are no longer the same thing, even if they’re both sci-fi comics anthologies. One party owns the Heavy Metal brand and another owns the content that first appeared in Metal Hurlant. It’s another Harvest Moon / Story Of Seasons situation.
This’ll be interesting to watch. Without the classic content, the Heavy Metal revival is leaning hard on what it DOES own — the iconic branding and the characters from the movie. Taarna, the warrior woman from the movie poster, is heavily featured on the new covers. Some might find it shameless, but the reality is there are now TWO sci-fi magazines for artists to work for, when last month there were zero. Let ’em fight.
Who’s winning this battle so far? Metal Hurlant launched first and has a head start of several days. They’re at $443,000 as of this writing, while Heavy Metal lags behind at $340,000 — but HM has more days left before its campaign expires, and could very well catch up.
All three of these campaigns can be found on Kickstarter right now. Bone Volume One wraps December 28, Metal Hurlant will be open until December 12, and Heavy Metal closes December 29.
