IAN JAY

CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER THE BOOK!!
http://igg.me/at/epiphany-print

[This is the little intro article from my fundraiser page. I'm reposting it here so you have a full idea of the fundraiser's pitch and goals.]

Who Are We & What Is Epiphany?

Hi, I’m Ian Jay. I’m an independent cartoonist with a B.F.A. in Sequential Art and over eight years of webcomics experience. You may remember me from the fundraiser I did last year to finance my short story comic collection, Ian Jay Super Comics Volume One. This year, I’m back with an even more ambitous project: turning my long-running webcomic Epiphany into a printed graphic novel.

Epiphany is about Eli, a deer kid in high school with a lot of issues– bad grades, careless friends, and a strained relationship with his preacher father, Henry. But when an errant truck puts Henry into critical condition, Eli seeks out Oscar, slacker ex-god of his family’s religion, to help recover his father. Things don’t go entirely as planned, and both Eli and Oscar will have to put everything they hold dear at risk in order to make things right again.

Although I’ve been publishing Epiphany online serially since 2008 (read it as it finishes up at ianjay.net), it’s a story that’s meant to be read as one continuous experience, not in drips and drops over the course of years. That’s why, even before I started the series, I knew it would eventually need to be printed as a book– it’s the medium that best fits the content. Now that Epiphany is reaching its conlcusion, it’s time to make that book a reality.

What We Need

The finished book will be 6 by 9 inches, 236 pages and in full color. Within those pages will not only be the entire comic run, but also sketches, annotated location references, a guest gallery and more. Gasch Printing of Odenton, MD has sent me a quote for $3797.34 for 300 copies using the book specifications I gave them, so I’m asking for an even $5000. Here’s how I’m breaking down our 5K goal:

$3800 – printing the book.
$600 – shipping pre-orders.
$400 – donation perk merchandise.
$200 – Indiegogo fees.

Shipping really bit into my stretch goal earnings during the last fundraiser I did, so this time around I want to make sure I leave enough of a budget to get every pre-order shipped.

What You Get

We have a really incredible range of donation perks, including glow-in-the-dark and gold buttons, t-shirts, votive candles, and that ever-popular staple of fundraisers everywhere, tote bags. We’re also selling off original inked artwork from the book, and providing all donation tier levels with high-resolution digital book copies. It’s the biggest wave of new merchandise I’ve put out since… well, ever!

I feel like the most significant perk, though, is that starting at our $20 level, you can get your name (or pseudonym or alias of choice or whatever) printed in the book’s Acknowledgements section. It might seem like an odd gesture to make, but Epiphany in general has always been a team effort. Drawing a comic isn’t just about me shouting my ideas into the void; it’s about you readers (and potential readers, of course) receiving those ideas and thinking about them within the individual contexts of your lives. Comics are a really intense collaborative experience between artists and readers, and printing this book is only another way that we’re all banding together to help create something amazing.

Also it should go without saying that the books themselves will be so completely great. You’ll be able to read Epiphany without a device or internet connection. You can put them on a bookshelf and marvel at how impressive and prestigious it makes your collection of books look. If you read it and don’t like it, you can use it to kill insects or prop a wobbly table leg up or something, I don’t know. IN ANY CASE: YOU’RE STILL A TEAM PLAYER.

How You Can Help, Besides Donating

I’m going to be absolutely screaming my head off about this fundraiser campaign until May 25th, but I can’t possibly do it alone. I’ll regularly be posting updates and news posts both here and on my progress blogs at http://twitter.com/IanJay and http://ianjay.tumblr.com; any reposting, retweeting, reblogging or otherwise there will really help me out. Ian Jay Super Comics also has a Facebook fan page, in case you’re more of a Facebook fan.

I can’t emphasize enough, though, how important word of mouth is– not just on social networking sites but person to person as well. Go to my website, read Epiphany, and if you like it, don’t just stop at pre-ordering a book for yourself! Tell your friends! Blog about it, or bother other people’s blogs about it! Recommend it to others who might even vaguely find it interesting, both online and “in meat space”! It’s really, really easy to get drowned out here, so let’s make sure this project gets the attention it deserves.

Thanks for stopping by. Whether you’re a long-time fan or a newcomer to Epiphany, whether you’re donating a whole pile of money or only a few cents (or nothing at all), I really appreciate you taking the time to check out this project. Let’s make this book happen together!

Hey guys! Haven’t updated this blog on here in a while. I wanted to remind any readers in the Columbus area that I’ll be speaking in a panel on webcomics and crowdsourcing at MIX 2012! It’s a symposium on comics held by the Columbus College of Art and Design, held October 5th through the 6th. Be there! Enrich yourself with knowledge! And if you can’t be there, then I’ll try to get someone to film it so I can post a video of it up on here.

IN OTHER IMPORTANT, WEBSITE RELATED NEWS: I put up a Commissions page here on ianjay.net! If you’ve ever wanted a cool piece of art designed by me, whether a sketch, a colored illustration, a comic page, or whatever, now you have a one-stop shop for all the info you need to commission it off of me! (Well, most of the information. You’ll have to request a quote if you want something really complicated like a tattoo design. But hey, I also have a brand new seperate e-mail for that now!

ALSO: again, to all those who found Epiphany from SPX and also from the other conventions I attended over the summer, thanks for taking the time to visit my site and (hopefully) read Epiphany! What do you think so far? Good? Bad? Weird? I’m always open to feedback.

Also, would anyone cry murder or anything if I put Project Wonderful ad space on this site?

I’ll stick up a new Epiphany page in a couple days– right now I need to focus on putting everything away in our new apartment. I CAN give you some other freebie comics, though!

First, in case you haven’t read it yet, here’s ROAD TO HELL, a 15-page report on how much of a fiasco ECCC turned out. Read the whole thing on Deviant Art starting here.

Here’s a comic I did for a horror anthology last year. I didn’t write it, but I did draw it.I never heard back from the editor once I sent the files, so I’m going to assume the printing press exploded or something and it’s okay to post here for a couple days.
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Finally, here are some storyboards I did as a final project for Advanced Storyboarding class around this time last year. We had to do a two-vehicle chase scene in downtown Savannah, so I picked two vehicles that I think characterize the city best (and are the dumbest to use for a chase scene). I know storyboards aren’t exactly comics, bu-u-ut good enough.
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Cheers, and hey, don’t forget to check out our new store! I’ve got some BIG PLANS in the works for it, ohhhhh yes.