The Kickstarter is really going great, thank you to everyone who has pledged. We’ve revealed a bunch of new goals that I’m very excited about. If you take a look at what we’ve proposed you can see this isn’t just about an ad free Penny Arcade. This is about what we can do if we are freed from that model. We will be going into all these various projects in greater detail as the month goes on but right now I want to talk about Strip Search.
At some point during a PATV episode I brought up the idea of a sort of “America’s next top webcomic” show. Essentially Hell’s Kitchen for web cartoonists. The response to that concept was overwhelming. Well we’ve been working on the details and Strip Search is the result. So how does it work?
We would start off by asking for submissions. Any webcomic artist could send us a sample of their work and a quick video of themselves stating why they would like to be on the show. Then we take all these submissions and narrow it down to our cast of 10 artists. They are flown out here to Seattle and live together in a house rigged with cameras. We will then put them through a series of challenges based on the skills needed to run a successful web comic. We will test their artistic skills as well as their business smarts. Tycho and I will knock them off one by one over the course of the show until we are left with one winner.
The last artist standing will win a sizable cash prize along with getting plugged into the Penny Arcade machine for one year. That means they will have access to our merchandising, graphic designers, and business brains as well as a studio in our office. This is a massive undertaking for us and it’s sitting at the 450k level of our Kickstarter. If we manage to hit this goal we will release more details about how and when you can apply to be on the show.
Strip Search is just one of our proposed projects for the year. We’ve also got plans for a new Automata comic called Silverside which is the colloquial term for the robot slums. A new Lookouts story that focuses on the Daughters of the Eyrewood. A Twisp and Castby Children’s book, a tabletop RPG adventure created by Tycho and I that any DM can take and run at their table, The old DLC podcasts and a shift to a Creative Commons license for the comic that would involve releasing a version of every comic strip without any word balloons. Like I said, we’ll be going into all this stuff in greater detail as the month goes on. I’ll also be posting sketches and concept work for the projects. Right now we’re able to make Penny Arcade because advertisers pay us. In return we have advertisements on the site and Tycho and I devote hundreds of hours to creating projects for their brands. We’d rather make Penny Arcade because you pay us and then Tycho and I can spend all that time making the projects you’ve been asking for. This Kickstarter is probably the biggest experiment we’ve ever tried. Thank you so much to everyone who has chipped in already. This is huge for us and we really appreciate your support.
-Gabe out
