From the Ringo Award and Emmy Award-winning cartoonist Dean Haspiel (Billy Dogma, The Red Hook, Bored to Death) comes a new creator-owned comedian guide, COVID Cop, a 24-page horror romance for mature readers that includes a Twenty first-century antihero impressed by the ONGOING world pandemic. The guide is presently being funded by way of Kickstarter.
Haspiel is thought for creating the “last romantic antihero,” Billy Dogma, who debuted in Millenium Press’s Keyhole #1, written by Haspiel and illustrated by Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson. The character later went on to star in different works from different publishers. Then, in 2008, Haspiel labored on a Vertigo authentic graphic novel, The Alcoholic, written by Jonathan Ames and drawn by Haspiel, that was later became the HBO collection Bored to Death, for which the cartoonist gained an Emmy Award for Outstanding Main Title Design.
COVID Cop was impressed by Haspiel’s favourite cartoonist, Jack Kirby, and he was impressed to inform the story in order that he might discover the “best and worst of humanity.” A cross between Judge Dredd, Toxic Avenger, Mad Max, and Sin City, COVID Cop is Haspiel’s” response to a pandemic that by no means discovered its treatment and has worn out 98% of mankind.”
Here’s how Haspiel describes the inspiration behind his Kickstarter undertaking:
My favourite cartoonist, Jack Kirby (the co-creator of the Marvel Universe and a few DC Comics characters), didn’t simply take into consideration what he needed to spend his time creating or how it might promote. He needed to attach with readers and soften minds. Go huge or go residence. For all of Kirby’s cosmic ideas, he by no means forgot in regards to the coronary heart of a story. Having fought in World War 2, I imagine Kirby’s comics have been a product of battlefield PTSD. The issues he noticed. The issues he needed to do. Kirby was figuring out the perfect and the worst of humanity. He questioned the thought of God after which dared to reply it. And that’s what artwork does greatest. It asks the arduous questions that don’t essentially have solutions.
In 2020, across the similar time I conceived & co-curated the Ringo Award nominated PANDEMIX (which was the primary comedian guide anthology to reply to the pandemic), I created an concept that I confirmed to a number of publishers and it obtained the identical reactions. “We love your idea but we can’t publish it.” They have been too afraid. Scared of how folks would reply. I took that as a good signal. A significant clue that I’d made one thing which may actually resonate.
I spent the winter holidays and the early a part of 2023 illustrating the story that I had written and pitched in 2020, throughout a time of isolation and terror, and do what artwork and comix do greatest, spawn an antihero.
Art is simply simply starting to cope with the ramifications of the worldwide pandemic. As somebody who’s disabled and excessive danger, I’ve been devouring something that offers with the trauma of being forgotten and the FOMO of watching the world transfer on, all whereas making me snigger. Even if you’re able-bodied, books that cope with the pandemic doc our historical past, making them mandatory for future generations. With this in thoughts, Haspiel invitations you “to hop on board the ground floor of [his] grassroots effort and help [him] print an outlier sensation that will be mailed directly to your doorstep.”
The Kickstarter marketing campaign for Covid Cop is stay now, and runs via the top of the month.
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