The last blog post was pretty negative, wasn’t it? I don’t want to be one of those dudes who’s always talking about stuff he hates, so instead let’s talk about stuff I like. Specifically, let’s talk about Rich Burlew’s record-setting Kickstarter drive.
I assume you’re all familiar with Burlew’s Order of the Stick. If you’re not, that’s too bad, you should be. It’s a terrific comic that blends humor, adventure and D&D jokes (although less of the latter as it progresses). It also has very elegant artwork; despite being “just” a stick figure comic, OotS is very good at suggesting action and a wide range of body language and facial expression. It is, in short, one of the best comics available in any delivery mechanism and you should click that link, suckapants.
OotS is popular enough to sustain a line of books: four (for now) volumes of collected strips plus extras, two prequel books and a limited-run collection of odds and ends. Unfortunately, it’s also so popular that the majority of the books have been out of print for quite some time. Printing costs being what they are, Burlew just couldn’t afford to do four new print runs … until now! Or, more accurately, until February 21!
Burlew started a Kickstarter to get the third and largest book, War and XPs, back into print. Instead, he’s gathered enough funds to put all four out-of-print books back into print, as well as to cover print-runs for the other two books. In a little over a week! It’s already one of the top ten drives in Kickstarter’s history, and there’s about two and a half weeks to go. It’s crazy!
In response, Burlew has just gone all out with a Bag of Holding full of rewards for pledges. I’m not saying you should pledge just to get swag, but right now we’re looking at five exclusive new stories for everyone who pledges $10 or more, plus some other stuff. Not to mention, new copies of previously out-of-print books should you pledge enough.
It almost feels like gilding the lily to encourage people to continue pledging, but I’m-a do it anyway. Hey, he’ll be looking at publishing Volume 5 some time soon, right? Let’s see how high we can push this thing.