Why You Should Support Our KickStarter
As of this writing we have 10 days to go and have only raised 13% of our goal, which is $4,000. If you don’t know what a KickStarter project is, well it’s a crowd funding program where people ask for financial backing to complete an artistic project. Oh, and you get “rewards” for donating your hard earned cash to these causes. But there’s a catch, if we don’t hit our goal we get nothing.
So things are looking a bit bleak at the moment. 13% of our goal means we’ve only raised $520 of the $4,000 so far. So we have 10 days to raise another $3,480. Not impossible, but clearly not too easy. And dear reader, you are the one that can make that happen. You can find our KickStarter project right here at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaelbalistreri/black-snow-two-drink-minimum
So, why are we asking for your money? To publish our first graphic novel, Black Snow: Two Drink Minimum, which you can read online at https://blacksnowcomic.com/bstdm/
The money we are trying to raise will go towards printing costs and possibly some advertising costs. Why are we asking you to help front the costs? Because we don’t have enough money to do it ourselves.
For those who don’t know who “we” are, let me give you a little background about us. Black Snow Comics consists of myself, Michael Balistreri the artist and co-creator, and my partner Alex Siquig, the writer and other co-creator. Alex and I met in the late 90s and it didn’t take long before we became good friends.
Being fairly creative teenagers, in the early 00s we decided to start a comic book. And thus Black Snow was born. For those who don’t know what Black Snow is all about, he’s a guy living in Detroit in late 30s who wants to be a superhero, but doesn’t have any clue how to achieve his goal. He claims to have some superpowers, but they are rarely seen and hard to control. Over the years he’s become a jaded drunk and started charging people for helping them. The story takes off from there, featuring a large ensemble cast and a plot full of gangs who want to rule Detroit.
So in our late teens we started writing, drawing and posting on the internet. Here we are over a decade later, still telling his story. Only this graphic novel represents a relaunch of the series, so we could tell his story with better writing and art.
Black Snow has always been a labor of love for us. We haven’t made any money from it, in fact posting it on the web and appearing at conventions has cost us money over the years. It certainly isn’t our day job, though we’d like it to be. We are very much like Black Snow, a couple of ordinary guys who just don’t know how to achieve our dream.
And also like Black Snow we have financial problems. I have a wife and two kids to take care of, which isn’t easy. It’s even harder when my passion for creating comics takes time and money away from my paying jobs. But it’s a sacrifice I’ve willingly made for years because I really feel that we have a unique story to tell and it is worth telling.
I don’t know about you, but there aren’t a lot of things I’ve stuck with for over 10 years. This is the 12 anniversary of Black Snow, and we’re not giving up anytime soon. In these confusing times where I’m only supposed to like things ironically, laugh at bizarre alternative humor, receive instant gratification via the internet and take every new piece of information with a healthy dose of cynicism it is hard not to become really jaded and to find something to believe in. But I believe in Black Snow, and so should you.
In all this time we’ve given everything for free online with the hopes that eventually we’d print it all up with a bunch of bonus content. We’ve never asked for your money before because we just wanted to entertain people, but now we need your help.
If you do support us you’ll get some sweet rewards. Take a look at some of the stuff you can get.
Most of those rewards are things you can’t buy online, and other than a rare convention appearance this is probably your only chance to pick them up. And really, $10 to help some guys achieve a dream and get a cool bottle opener seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Again, you can find our KickStarter project right at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaelbalistreri/black-snow-two-drink-minimum and anything you can give would be much appreciated.