EDANIEL'S COUNTDOWN (DAY 23) AND A PSA!

Thanks for the intro, scribbly cartoon version of Edaniel!

Friends (and shamwows), I wanted to talk to you today about something very important.  Maybe not earthquake or collapse-of-the-stock-market important, but relatively important for a given value of "important."  It's kind of long, but ferrets are mentioned at the end, as well as party hats, so just take five minutes to read it please!

So in the course of this Kickstarter for the Bizenghast video game beginning, we've been covered by a few places online...not very many big places, just a few mentions here and there on various blogs.  Anime News Network was kind enough to mention us on their site just recently:

www.animenewsnetwork.com/inter…

Which was really terrific of them, since we're not exactly on the same radar as most of the stuff they report!  But possibly what was less than terrific were the comments left in the forums regarding that article.  I'd like you to take a look at them, because I think it's important that you read them:

www.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/p…

Please note that they are less than kind. Please also note that I am asking you, VERY EMPHATICALLY, not to log on to that site and leave comments in response. I mean it, this is not some "set forth my minions" post, neither is it a reverse-psychology "wink wink don't go say anything, GOT IT?" post.  I am genuinely asking you NOT TO DO THAT, because flame wars in comment sections are for morons and nobody ever in the history of the world had their opinions changed by something they read in a comment section, and you won't win, and you'll just feel bad and then I'll feel bad that you feel bad.  So please for the love of Rutger Hauer's teutonic petulance do not do that.  That's NOT the reason I want you to read it. 

I wanted you to take a look at those comments, then think on the fact that I was once the very same person, saying the very same thing.  I was in high school, I was a manga and anime fan and I was standing in my local comic book shop, wearing my backpack with the Sailor Moon stickers on it, hovering over the incredibly tiny little section of translated manga...basically just one small shelf of maybe ten books.  I was reading a comic by an american artist who had been doing "american manga" sinc the late eighties...american art with a manga influence.  Not a photocopy of manga, but a hybrid of the two styles.  15-year old me pretty derisive of it. How AWFUL! It didn't look a THING like real manga!  What a crappy american knockoff of a copy of a JOKE.  What a terrible artist.  He had no business trying to compete with REAL manga.

I was saying this to myself, while holding my own little sketchbook full of drawings...drawings done in a distinctly hybrid american manga style.  I was an american manga artist who was sneering at american manga artists...because *I* was going to grow up and do it better than them. I'd show them how a REAL american artist could use manga style art to make a real story!  They had no idea, they were so clueless, I bet they didn't even read real manga.  But I knew better.

It wasn't until years later, when pitching around my series, that I realized the only reason I was even going to get published in America was because of people like that.  Those early artists, who maybe didn't have it all figured out and whose style of art didn't appeal to me personally.  But they did the HARD work, setting the foundations for other artists to come along and do it much better.  They did what no one was doing at the time and they got a lot of shit for it...and then when younger artists down the line turned up to get published, they were there as the precedent.  When those new, younger artists submitted their own work, publishers looked to that early version of american manga and said, "Well, those earlier guys had a pretty decent cult following.  They did all right.  I guess we can give this new guy a shot, might be worth our time."  Without those original comics paving the way, none of those younger, newer artists would have had such an easy time selling their work.  And manga itself wouldn't have been pushed into the american comics industry as much as it was, for you to easily buy in the bookstore, all translated and ready to go. The early ones may not have been the best, but they were necessary. 

That same thing is happening now, with the Kickstarter.  I'm a small, independent comic artist, not a billion-dollar Batman franchise with a huge studio behind it.  Logically and historically, I should have next to no hope of ever having a game based on my books.  Despite what one of those comments on that ANN forum asserted, even having OSCAR-WINNING ANIMATORS on our creative time isn't enough to get the funding we need without turning to Kickstarter.  Animators aren't rich, and just winning an award doesn't mean you get a huge check to go with it.  Our entire creative team are just normal guys and gals with families and kids to feed, none of us are wealthy and we have bills to pay.  But despite that, we've worked overtime on top of regular jobs to make this Kickstarter happen.  All that money for those blockbuster movies and films came from the huge studios and their investors, not from the animators' pockets.  And those same big investors, which we went to first to get funding, have looked at the BZG game concepts and said, "Wow, that looks so cool!  But it's not, you know, BATMAN.  It's not something big-name.  We don't invest in things that aren't huge money-making franchises.  Raise some money first and then we'll know if there's a precedent."

And so that's the long and short of it.  A lot of future artists and comic creators right now think they can afford to look at this little project and go, "PPFFF, I hate your art, I'm not supporting you." And the project will fail, like so many others just like it.  And ten years down the road when those future artist think they want to try and do a video game based on their own projects, those same investors are going to say, "Yeah, we tried that years ago, they never got funded either.  Clearly there's no market.  Sorry, but it's all about precedent."

Think that's not how business works?  I had Howard Chaykin tell me once at a forum that back in the 80's, a Marvel comics rep once stood up at a meeting and said to him, "Look, we tried selling comic books to women, and it didn't work.  Clearly there's no market."  Took years and years and YEARS (not to mention the precedent of female readers already set by manga, then introduced to the US) to change their minds.  It's all about precedent.  If you want it for your own future, you have to help make it happen now. 

"But Marty, I am only a simple snakey pal, albeit very rad!" you say, "and I have zero dollars!"

Well that's OK, because the phrase "talk is cheap" is about to get a completely new and much more positive definition.  Talk IS cheap...in fact, it's free.  It's so free that people who HATE Bizenghast actually feel that it's worth their time to bother telling the world why they don't like it.  It's so free that one of the commentators specifically said they wasted time signing up for a forums account on ANN, JUST so they could state that they wouldn't be supporting the Kickstarter.

There are people out there actively wasting their time telling the world why they don't care.  So why aren't you telling the world why you DO care?  I get messages all time from people that start off with, "I have loved Bizenghast ever since I was 10..." And yet our comment section on the Kickstarter is ghostly empty.  You think your message doesn't matter, or that it won't help?  IT WILL HELP. 

Here is the comments section for the Kickstarter page: www.kickstarter.com/projects/c…

Have you donated to the Kickstarter? TELL US WHY. Tell a story about the first time you read Bizenghast, how old you were, how you felt, what it means to you, how long you've been a fan.  Link us to your favorite piece of fan art that you've drawn.  Take a picture of yourself holding a copy of your book and post it in Tumblr or Flickr, then POST THAT LINK.  Did you ever have your picture taken with me at a con?  Post that.  Got a Bizenghast cosplay photo you want to share?  POST THAT SHIT POSTHASTE.  Favorite Mister Mittens quote?  Favorite Edaniel moment?  Favorite snoaf story?  FREAKING GET IN HERE.  That comment section is bogusly empty and we must cram it full of people and animals and ferrets in party hats and boomboxes and nachos and balloons and MORE NACHOS and streamers and the Harlem Shake and EVEN MORE NACHOS.  What we don't have in donations yet, we will make up for with the BIGGEST COMMENTS PARTY OF ALL TIME.  Other Kickstarter projects will be banging on the ceiling and calling the COPS, we'll be so loud.  Nothing but good times, photos, stories, anecdotes, MADNESS.

Have you not donated yet to the Kickstarter?  You can only comment if you're a backer.  Back us for 1 dollar. ONE DOLLAR.  That's not a donation, that's your one-dollar entry fee to the comments party.  We're stamping hands at the door and you can come back in as many times as you like. But there's a ten-ferret minimum. 

And maybe, just maybe, somebody somewhere will say, "We need a new feature for our Kickstarter promotion section this week, so who's project is making the most money right now---what the hell is that?  What's going on over there?  Do you hear that? Is...IS THAT A WHALE IN THE POOL?!"

Precedent set.

Like my favorite quote from the Lorax says: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing's going to get better.  It's not."

Unless you help right now, RIGHT this minute, and stick with it until the very end, this project will fail.  The game won't get made, we'll all be sad and I'll be out of work for the summer, so I don't know what on earth I'll do for money.  So grab your ferrets and your nachos and GET IN HERE.

LINK TO KICKSTARTER: www.kickstarter.com/projects/c…