Progress Report: September and New Endorsement
This month has been a month full of Kickstarter promotion. It launched on the 15th of August and is roughly half way now. Due to this my part of the creation process has not progressed a great deal (the pencilling and preparing for colourists) but as you can see the colourists, Leslie and Ryan have powered on and the pie is looking very full of dark cyan now.
Just over a week ago the family and I, were at Westpoint, it's a regional Christian weekend away. I was promoting the comic and it was very well received with lots of interest.
This weekend I was at ICE comic con in Birmingham letting people know about the comic and learning from the professionals in the second day's talks. Generally, all the delegates I spoke to were encouraging about the idea even if it wasn't their cup of tea, which was kind of suprising as I thought some would be dead against it.
I had some great talks with publishers from some of the biggest names in comics, with greater or lesser degrees of interest in taking on the project, but all were positive in the concept and the artwork which is good stuff coming from professional editors.
Next week I have a stand and even get to introduce the project on stage at the Catalyst Men's one day conference in Bristol.
Please pray those who were keen to support the project at both events get behind the Kickstarter sooner rather than later, and the publishers that I will be following up with will take on the project.
New Endorsement
This month we got a new endorsement from an Old Testament scholar. Dr David Beldman, Assistant Professor of Religion and Theology at Redeemer University College (Ancaster, Canada). His doctoral research was on Judges, he is the author of the forthcoming book Kingless in Canaan: The Book of Judges (Lexham Press), and is currently writing a commentary on Judges for Eerdmans' Two Horizons series.
His full endorsement statement was...
I have researched the book of Judges for a number of years and enjoyed its stories since I was young, so it was exciting to discover that Judges was the first installment of the Word for Word Bible Comic. Judges seems designed for the graphic novel format. Adventure, warfare, intrigue, betrayal, tragedy--Judges has it all! A surprising feature of Old Testament narrative is that physical description--of people, places and objects--is often quite sparse if it is not important to the purpose of the narrative. This leaves readers guessing about what the landscape looked like, what people wore, and so on. On the basis of careful archaeological, historical and cultural research the WfWBC not only tells the story of Scripture using Scripture's own words, it also gives readers an accurate window into the Old Testament world in its ancient Near East context. In the WfWBC, the ancient narratives of the Bible are creatively and freshly portrayed in a modern visual format.
Cut down version for the website and Kickstarter.
What I am really please with is that David has also read through all the completed sections of the work and did not find anything that was in error, but there are a few more chapter for him to see so I guess there is still time. ;)
In regards to the project, the plan is to finish the work on the project by the end of the month, prepare it for print in October and have it printed and sent out in November.
This final stage is so important to get done on time so please pray that nothing gets in the way of completing everything on time, especially the Kickstarter being successful or it could impact this a great deal if it does not reach it's goal. The funding is currently 38% so it is a little behind the curve but we are confident it will make it in the end, however to do so we do need quite a few more backers. So please tell your friends and back it now if you haven't already.
Kicktraq Graph: From today's graph you can see the projection is close to the wire. It is common for much of the funding to be in the last week, but please get in there now and help it keep rising.
