Tracy Butler has worked as a game designer and illustrator, but for many of us, Butler is the best known as the person behind the webcomic Lackadaisy. Set in St. Louis during Prohibition, the comic has followed a band of anthropomorphic cats in story involving speakeasies, bootleggers, jazz musicians. It manages to both simultaneously romanticize the past, while never straying into sentimentality. Butler depicts the hardships, the violence, the sacrifices, the tough choices and losses that characters face along with many of the real life details and complexities that marked that period.
Butler’s new project is an animated version of Lackadaisy. To help her, she’s enlisted Fable Siegel, an animation veteran that Butler is co-directing the film with, and C. Spike Trotman, the woman behind Iron Circus Comics. The Kickstarter for the project launched this week and hit its goal in a matter of hours, but Butler answered a few questions about the project and offered us a look at some of the design work for the film.
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