NC-2-Cover-edited

Hello there, Nerdspanners! Cody Walker here and I’d like to tell you about the second Kickstarter for my comic, Noir City. First, let me give you the logistics of it.

Noir City #2 Kickstarter – 22 page comic
Written by Richard G. Valerius and Cody Walker
Art by Nathan Judah

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2048096852/noir-city-issue-2

Goal: $4,500 

Where does the money go?: $2,500 goes to our artist for drawing, inking, coloring, and lettering this beautiful issue. 9% of what we make goes to Kickstarter/Amazon (how all Kickstarter campaigns work).
The rest goes to the printing and shipping of the issues to backers.

Close date: April 16, 2014 at 6:00p.m.

Elevator pitch: “Take classic film noir and inject superheroes into it and you’ve got Noir City. It’s a world of ambiguous heroes, dangerous women, and powerful mobsters struggling for power and control in a mysterious city.”

More reasons why you should back us:

– The issue is already finished and we’re just waiting for the Kickstarter to complete so we can pay our artist for all his awesome work and to print the book and send it off to people.

– We are offering issue 1 in the Kickstarter as well for people who missed the first issue. 

– The trailer for the comic is really awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTQVv0cJ218

– We have a number of short stories, behind the scenes, and other things on our website www.noircitycomicbook.com

How I met Nathan:

When my good friend Kim Piddington asked me to speak at a local children’s author’s group, I was excited but a bit apprehensive. I’m not remotely a children’s author so I wasn’t sure what to say. Kim told me that I could talk about comic books but instead of talking about how to write a comic (a subject that I am less than an amateur on), I decided to discuss my experience with our first Noir City Kickstarter.

Most of the group was made up of much older women, Kim, and two guys my age. As I went through my presentation, I realized that I was lecturing about the internet to a room of mostly grandmas. They were impressed with some of our work, but also picked apart the mistakes we had made fairly easily (because underneath their warm smiles, all grandmas wield emotional machetes that they expertly use to hack at your accomplishments and the things you love). All in all, I had a great time and I loved being able to talk out my experience and process my thoughts about the Kickstarter.

A few weeks later, Kim contacted me to tell me that one of the members of the group wanted to discuss working with me.

That’s when I met our new artist, Nathan.

I was so focused on trying to justify this goofy little comic to grandmas that I didn’t even consider that someone would want to work with Rich and me.

Nathan sent an image of the Jacket to me and I was in love with his work. Unfortunately, I was so exhausted from our first kickstarter and other projects I had in the works at Sequart (also, I was a new dad) that I wasn’t quite ready to start a new issue.

Time passed and the bug bit me. I felt like we HAD to put out another issue. The Noir City story hadn’t even begun to be told yet. We have years of stories to tell and it’s not going to get made any other way, so we HAD to keep it going. So, we contacted Nathan and got the ball rolling.

Noir City is really overwhelming to me. Underneath the surface of a fairly simple revenge narrative, there is a rich world teeming with history and ideas that are just trying to burst forth. I wish I could just unleash everything on you right now and say “This character is what THIS is and what we want to do with him is THIS” but that would defeat the purpose of developing the story. If Dan Slott had said after issue #1 of Superior Spider-man, “No no no, don’t worry. Peter Parker will be back in X number of issues, but I wanted to explore these ideas and here is the breakdown of everything I have planned for Doc Ock in the meantime,” then there would be no point in reading the comics.

Rich and I crafted Noir City to be a bit of a slow burn and in the world of breakneck pacing, it may not be everyone’s cup of tea and it may work better as a trade one day, but we wanted to make sure that people got glimpses of these characters and for readers to fill in the blanks themselves rather than just lay it all out for everyone. I hope that comes out on the page.

We’ve got years of stories to tell and I hope you’ll join us on this journey.

Weekend Goal: If we can reach $2,000 by the end of the weekend, Nathan will draw a group shot of the golden age Noir City superhero team, the Forces of Valor. Then, we will put it up as a reward on the Kickstarter.

 

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