So remember yesterday when one of you was like, “take my money”, and I said you should hold that thought till tomorrow?
And remember the allusions I’ve been making to a really exciting new project?
Well, here it is.
I and my pal Jane Dough (janemakesthings on tumblr) are publishing a book in September about the student strikes in Quebec.
It’s really exciting! There’s going to be personal narratives and a bunch of historical stuff about student and union movements in Quebec, it’s going to be in colour, with hand-printed covers, and each of the 500 books of our first print run is going to be hand-bound. It’s a really ambitious project, and we’re super, super excited to be doing this.
WE ALSO NEED YOUR HELP. We were initially going to publish the book through a local publisher of comics and art books, but after much discussion and consideration, we turned down their offer. There are a few reasons for this, and I’m happy to discuss them privately, but the main one is that its important to us, given how truly awful so much of the anglo media in Canada has been about covering the strike, to have as much control over this project as possible.
Publishing a book, especially a full-colour, hand-bound, super gorgeous graphic novel, is expensive, and Jane and I are broke. We need your help to make this happen. So we’ve started an Indiegogo campaign to help us gather funds! We are also applying for grants and stipends from community orgs, and planning to have some local fundraisers. We hope to gather at least 5,000 dollars to cover the costs of printing, binding, distribution, and labour. Anything extra we end up with will go towards hiring a translator and printing a second edition of the book in French.
Right now you can see samples from the book on our Indiegogo site; on Monday, we will be uploading some full excerpts from the book, so keep checking back, signal boost the shit out of this, tweet about it, share it on facebook, write it in the sky with one of those sky writer planes - and if you can, donate. We have some awesome donation perks that I’m excited to start mailing out.
Hooray for comics!
-Laura
