Crowdpuncher | ‘The Pride’ returns, ‘Who Killed Nessie?’ + Cecil Castellucci becomes the comic

Check out crowdfunding campaigns by Joe Glass, Cecil Castellucci, Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith, Pan-Universal Galactic Worldwide and more.

Welcome to Crowdpuncher, our new feature on cool comics crowdfunding campaigns. If you’re looking to support a creator directly, you’ve come to the right place. And that’s a good thing to do, now more than ever.

Joe Glass has been working on his LGBTQ+ superhero comic The Pride for a number of years now, going back to at least 2016. Now he’s back with a new series, The Pride: Agenda Dysphoria, which is up now on Kickstarter.

In his latest newsletter, he discussed why he still makes The Pride and comics featuring LGBTQ+ characters.

“You might wonder why I still make a comic all about LGBTQ+ superheroes. Certainly, since I started, queer characters are much more present and active than they were when I began,” he said, noting Marvel and DC both have Pride specials they do every year. But while things might have changed for the better in the world of mainstream comics, progress in the real world has come under threat in recent years.

“We’ve seen the effects and activity of the agenda of a multi-millionaire author, as she attacks and sends her legions of supporters and fans to pile on trans people,” Glass wrote. “Her agenda is both plainly clear and yet somewhat unclear – clear because we can see that harming the trans community is the agenda, but what’s unclear is why? That’s not the case of many politicians that jump on this issue and throw terms like ‘woke culture’ or ‘social justice warriors’ around – they’re clearly hopping onto the ‘culture war’ bandwagon to try and solidify a power base, no matter it harms to get there.”

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‘Plain Janes’ returns in 2019

The former Minx title finds new life in a collection coming from Little, Brown.

Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg still have one more P.L.A.I.N. Janes story to tell, and it looks like it’ll come out in 2019.

According to Publisher’s Weekly, Little, Brown has acquired the rights to Plain Janes, a pair of graphic novels originally published as part of the Minx line by DC Comics. Little, Brown will collect the first two Janes stories and an all-new third story into one volume.

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Comics Lowdown: New charity helps retailers

Also: Manga dominates the BookScan chart, Crumb originals bring in big bucks, Cecil Casetellucci talks ‘Soupy.’

Retailers Help Their Own: A group of comic shop owners has started an organization, Helping Comics Retailers with Issues (a.k.a. HCR Issues) to, well, do just what the name says: They will help pay down the debt to Diamond of comic shops that have run into rough waters. Secretary and co-founder Dr. Christina Blanch, owner of Aw Yeah! Comics in Muncie, Indiana, says that plans were in the works for a while, but Hurricane Harvey sped things up.

Back to School Again: ICv2 has the BookScan top 20 graphic novels chart for August, and vol. 9 of the superhero-school manga My Hero Academia takes the top spot. In fact, Viz has ten of the top 20 titles, with four volumes of My Hero Academia (1, 2, 8, 9), two volumes of Tokyo Ghoul (the first and the last), and assorted other titles. Add in vol. 22 of Attack on Titan and Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up, and you’ve got a chart dominated by manga. On the other hand, there are no Marvel titles at all and the only DC books on the chart are Watchmen and The Killing Joke. BookScan covers bookstores and other retail channels such as Amazon, so their charts are often very different from Diamond’s, which only cover comic shops.

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Second volume of ‘Fresh Romance’ hits Kickstarter

New volume includes comics by Sally Jane Thompson, Cecil Castellucci and more.

The romance comics anthology Fresh Romance returned to Kickstarter this week, courtesy of the book’s new publisher Emet Comics.

Maytal Gilboa, CEO of Emet Comics, emailed backers of the first volume (of which I am one) on International Women’s Day to announce the new volume. “Fresh Romance was a romance anthology founded by Janelle Assellin in 2015 as a way to promote female and LGBT creators, and to showcase diverse stories about love,” she said. “Fresh Romance Volume 1 was a huge success, being published by Oni Press, and selling over 3,000 copies to devoted readers. When Janelle retired last year, she gave us her blessing to continue the series, and we’re doing everything in our power to make good on the promises that were made to everyone who rooted for this series to succeed.”

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DC, Gerard Way share more details on the ‘Young Animal’ line

At Comic-Con International, the former My Chemical Romance singer showed new artwork for “Shade The Changing Girl” and “Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye,” and news of a pretty stellar back-up coming to Carson’s title.

DC Comics and singer/Umbrella Academy write Gerard Way plan to make the DC universe weird again with the Young Animal imprint. Way, along with writers like Cecil Castellucci and Jon Rivera, will put their own unique spin on several DC mainstays, including the Doom Patrol, Shade, Cave Carson and even Gotham in the new line of comics.

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