An Interview With Ben Costa

I just interviewed my friend Ben Costa for the Longbox Project about his life and work in comics. I'm really proud of it! You should go read it.

One of the first things I did when I moved to San Francisco in 2006 was I went to my grad school's meet n' greet. It was pretty scary. I was 27, I'd just moved across the country to attend an MFA writing program in San Francisco, a place I had barely ever visited before. There were writerly introverts, writerly extroverts, intimidating new instructors, and a whole new social world to decipher.

And there, where the sea of humanity parted.

A gangly tall dude with scruffy hair and a Usagi Yojimbo t-shirt.

I had found one of my people.

Ben Costa, Amy Martin, and me, with our comics at APE in 2007. Two of these people went on to be successful comic creators!

When the rest of the CCA gang were going out drinking or carousing or troublemaking over those two years in our MFA program, Ben would hang out for a round (sometimes) or a joke or two after class (usually) and then excuse himself to go home and draw pages from his comic, which then only existed on the web. It was (and still is) called Shi Long Pang, the Wandering Shaolin Monk. Ben was award one of the last Xeric grants to publish the first volume of Pang in hardcover, and earlier this year he successfully Kickstartered volume 2. Ben debuted the new volume at Comic Con 2013, and he's sending out copies to his Kickstarter funders any day now.

Ben's a damn good friend and a weird dude and I like him a lot. I'm hella proud of the work he's done and the manner in which he does it: how he wants, and to exceedingly high standards of quality. Read the interview, read his book, and check out the beard that won him the CCA 2008 beard-growing contest:

Me;  Ben; Ben's Beard; 2008.

Not the Kickstarter You're Looking For

I found this Kickstarter via io9, which found it via Superpunch, which listed it with little comments aside from "Pathetic kickstarter a from major artists."

It's a proposed illustrated novel by Bill Willingham & Frank Cho, of Fables & various comics featuring cavewomen, respectively. I'm not an active follower of either man's work, but I've got nothing against them either -- Cho draws a wonderfully glamorous She-Hulk, in my personal opinion -- but this is a dreadful Kickstarter.

The project itself makes me think of the Veronica Mars kickstarter from a few weeks back. It sounds perfectly interesting -- in this case, an illustrated novel about the last descendent of Norse gods, and the primate detective she's teamed up with -- but the rewards involved here are pretty paltry. Post cards and thank yous at the lower levels, and 5-minute phone calls as you get up to $100. If you kick in $10k, you can be served dinner by Cho & Willingham. There's no low-level option to donate and get the book, presumably because Willingham & Cho are going to sell this project to a big-name publisher (and get rightfully paid for doing so), but that no doubt introduces complications with regard to giving actual copies of the actual book away.

The specifics of the Veronica Mars project were different, but essentially it was a film being backed by a major studio who didn't want to pay for it. So they asked fans to pay for it, upfront. There's nothing immoral about that, but to me the spirit of Kickstarter is that it allows people to make something they otherwise couldn't, without crowdfunding. With Veronica Mars, the studio could foot the bill upfront -- they just don't want to.

But where they do deliver above and beyond Willingham & Cho is that backers who pledge $35 actually get a digital copy of the movie. With Bifrost, the proposed illustrated novel, the closest equivalent is for backers who pledge $125 -- they get a signed copy of the book. There's no unsigned or digital equivalent for someone who pledges a lower amount. Willingham & Cho are trying to get paid twice for the same book: once now, from fans who want to donate ahead of time in order to win the chance to buy the book on the shelves later, and again from whoever agrees to publish it.

Like the Veronica Mars project, there's nothing immoral or wrong about going about the process this way. This would be a several-years-long process, and as they say on their  page, "this is a Kickstarter project for selecting out the inordinately patient from the rest." But it doesn't sound like it's a project they're especially passionate about, either. Aside from the dreadfully boring video of Willingham describing the project and the process it would involve, the underlying message of this Kickstarter is, here's a project we would do if no other paying gig came up in the meantime, and if fans were willing to throw $30k at us to inspire us give up our downtime to work on it.

There's nothing wrong with asking. But I prefer to back projects that are inspiring, from creators who are willing to put a finished project in their backers' hands.