Sal Abbinanti might be familiar to comics readers for his series Atomika, but even those who read that series will be surprised by his artwork in the new graphic novel The Hostage, which is being crowdfunded now.
Abbinanti has been drawing the book on and off for years, but it has its roots in a trip he took to Brazil decades ago. Since then he couldn’t get the image out of his head of homeless children living just around the corner from the bright, colorful tourist district of Rio. In The Hostage, he found a story and an aesthetic that allowed him to tell the story in a way that is unsettling and unsentimental.
For the campaign, Abbinanti enlisted a number of friends to draw work for stretch goals, but the star is what Abbinanti was able to achieve in the pages. He was kind enough to talk about The Hostage, its road to publication and his crowdfunding campaign.
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