A Couple of Cool Canadian Comic Kickstarters

Y'know what's great about Kickstarter and the like?

Really cheap PDF copies of comics you never would have read otherwise.

Y'know what's also great about Kickstarter and the like?

Being able to help awesome things get made. 

There are a couple of projects I'd particularly like to bring your attention to.

First up, because it's finishing soonest, is Nelvana of the Northern Lights, a project to collect together and reprint every issue of Canada's first female superhero comic.

Created in 1941, Nelvana ran for 31 issues and until now it has never been reprinted. There aren't that many known copies still out  there, because y'know it was the 1940s and you didn't have comic collectors sticking them in little polythene bags with bits of card then storing them in air tight climate controlled, laser equipped, titanium lined stasis units to stop people from breathing on them. 

I might be exaggerating slightly there. 

Anyway, Canadian comic obsessives (I mean that in the nicest way of course) Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey have acquired the rights to put this comic back in print, every single issue of it and they've tracked down copies of each one, copies whose owners are willing to let them take them out of the climate controlled, laser equipped titanium lined stasis units and scan them.

Ten Canadian dollars will get you a reprint of the only colour issue of the comic, fifteen will get you a digital copy of the complete Nelvana collection and thirty will get you a nifty processed wood version of it (also known as a book).

There are also a bunch of artists who you may well have heard of drawing new art specially for backers, so go check that one out. It looks cool.

The second cool Canadian comic Kickstarter is for Jonathan Dalton's A Mad Tea Party, which has absolutely nothing to do with current day US politics before you ask.

As well as sporting a nifty collection of hats (please watch the video above for nifty collection of hats) Mr. Dalton is the creator of several comics including this really neat sci-fi comic called A Mad Tea Party, which is still not about US politics but is available to read online here.

I'll steal the description for the comic from the Kickstarter page, because his description is way better than mine.

"A Mad Tea-Party is the story of Connie and Matilda Sakura- two perfectly ordinary girls who just happen to be genetically engineered. Their parents fought a war against giant alien robots and saved the Earth from being invaded. But now it's the girls' turn to deal with the post-war political fallout. Connie has been kidnapped by teenage revolutionaries and Matilda has to rescue her, even though she's the one who doesn't have any useful genetic enhancements.

A Mad Tea-Party is a young adult book, so it is suitable for most readers, especially if you like complex stories with unconventional protagonists."

The bit he forgot to include there is that it's also really very good.

For a piddly little seven Canadian dollars you can get all 288 pages of A Mad Tea Party in digital form, plus Chop Suey #1 and #2 and the brilliant Lords of Death and Life. I have a print copy of that one sitting on my desk and it's looking lonely. I think it needs a friend. I'm thinking A Mad Tea-Party will be a good friend for it, so I've picked the slightly more expensive, but still a bargain $22 dead tree option (including free shipping to any inhabited place in the known universe). Have a look at the Kickstarter page and consider throwing some money at it so my lonely little comic can have a buddy to sit next to.