Crowdfunding Comics In The Time Of COVID

Hi. My name is Oz and I’m addicted to crowdfunded comics. But I promise it’s for a good cause. Stay with me. The COVID era began just when I’d quit my ten-year run working in a used bookstore. I realize that, as human beings, we’re more than our day jobs, but when you do something for ten years, eventually, it attaches itself to your identity. It’s a part of you that you’d know the way you know where the alarm is on your nightstand without looking in the morning. That’s books, comics and graphic novels for me. I was starting to miss the feeling of discovering comics, something I’d begun to take for granted after a decade. Sure, as a critic, I receive review copies of comics all the time, but it’s not the same. The Magic of Discovery Part of the magic of comics is the feeling of browsing, thumbing through bins and stumbling onto something new, cool or obscure. And for someone who isn’t leaving the house any time soon, algorithms and advertisers take a little of the fun out of this on the digital frontier. But I’m a consumer, so there’s still a void to be filled. On top of this, the pandemic brought the comic industry to a large halt for those first couple of months. There weren’t a lot of mainstream comics coming out as the business as a whole was trying to acclimate to this “new normal.” Then, I happened across a retweet from an artist that had just launched a Kickstarter for The Bone Herder, an Afropunk fantasy comic about a young Chosen One girl who breaks tradition by deny…