FFF Results Post #257—Benefactors

On Friday, CR readers were asked, "Given A Multi-Million Dollar Budget (By Which I Mean Unlimited In A Practical Sense But Not Unlimited So That It Allows For The Construction Of Absurd Answers), Name Five Comics Projects You'd Fund." This is how they responded.

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Tom Spurgeon

1. Fund From Which Prospective Webcartoonists Can Apply For Loans Or Grants To Initiate Or Upgrade Their Web Presence
2. War Chest For A Non-Profit Company Designed To Publish Serial Alt-Comics
3. A Legal Defense Fund For Cartoonists To Apply For Assistance In Copyright And Trademark Cases
4. The Complete Paul Ollswang
5. Seed Money For A Comics Creators Guild, Focusing On Beneficial Programs That The Professional Community Likely Couldn't Or Wouldn't Be Able To Support

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Douglas Wolk

1. Yaddo-style artists' retreat for cartoonists, with free room and board and transportation and comfortable studios
2. Online archive of out-of-print comics and minicomics, to which anyone can submit work they've created and have it scanned, made available to the public as a PDF, and (if submitted in physical form) returned to them
3. Weekly multiple-feature creator-owned sci-fi/adventure comic book by excellent writers and artists, distributed free to middle school students -- sort of a Treasure Chest/vintage 2000 AD kind of situation
4. Cooper Union-style cartooning college that offers a full scholarship to accepted undergrad and master's students, ideally in Portland, Oregon
5. Rachel Hartman offered an unrefusably high salary to create comics full-time

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Jeff Flowers

1. The complete Jordi Bernet library in English (including every single Clara de Noche strip).
2. A Trots And Bonnie collection.
3. A Prince Valiant-style reprinting of Jack Katz's First Kingdom.
4. I'd buy the rights to the Elementals and return them to Bill Willingham.
5. Collected editions of Bruce Jones's Alien Worlds and Twisted Tales anthologies (like Russ Cochran did with EC).

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Mark Coale

1. Restart my magazine as academic journal for comics and related popular culture
2. Fund retirement home for Golden/Silver Age comics pros and cartoonists
3. Start fund that allows cartoonists to apply for health insurance
4. Big, fat donation to CBLDF
5. Bribe Bob Wayne for DC to make Archives for Danger Trail and 1950s Phantom Stranger

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Indigo Kelleigh

1: I would make sure the Stumptown Comics Foundation had enough in their coffers to grow into the biggest and most amazing comics festival in the world.
2: Stumptown Academy of Comics Art -- a 2-year accredited college focusing on sequential art and comics history, following the lead of the CCS, Joe Kubert school, and SCAD's sequential art department.
3: Create a cartoonist's guild with regional chapters which would offer professional benefits to members, including legal advice and medical insurance.
4: Begin a publishing house specializing in new all-ages material, large monthly anthologies a la Shonen Jump, with dozens of creator-owned stories by different creators, serialized through the year and connected only by theme.
5: Found a lending library and art museum of classic comic art, with rotating displays of different masters (Kirby, Ditko, McCay, Crumb, Williamson, Wrightson, Kelly, &c.)

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Buzz Dixon

1. An Internet Library Of all Comics Projects Published Around The World (Past, Present, And Future)
2. A Simple To Use/Easy To Customize Program Of Clip Art/Characters/Animation For Writers Who Can't Draw
3. Bribes To Overturn Recent Draconian U.S. Copyright Laws
4. Kona, Monarch Of The Monster Isle: The Movie (a Cro-Magnon w/an M-60 machine gun vs. a international criminal mastermind w/an army of mutant dinosaurs -- why hasn't this movie already been made?!?!?)
5. My Own Projects

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Mark Mayerson

1. Commission a statue of Jack Kirby for the lower east side of Manhattan.
2. Pay Gary Groth to publish all the Gil Kane interviews in book form.
3. Have Google Books digitize every comic book ever published.
4. Restore Walt Kelly's animated film "We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us."
5. Lobby Congress to rewrite the law so that creators must be given a percentage of a copyright and make work for hire illegal.

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Michael Grabowski

1. A grant for Dave Sim to complete glamourpuss to his satisfaction regardless of whether it meets Diamond's minimum order threshold.
2. Whatever it takes to publish classic Sunday paper strips in the classic Sunday paper format: weekly tabloids reprinting individual installments.
3. A grant for Steve Bissette to complete Tyrant.
4. Funds to develop a comics TPB rental system in North America.
5. Whatever it would take for Alan Moore to get a do-over on Big Numbers.

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Justin J. Major

1. Not-for-profit health insurance corporation for the benefit of comics professionals (loosely defined)
2. Subsidized, scattered-site housing (in Chicago) for comics professionals
3. Legal aid clinic for comics pros (estate planning, document review, intellectual property work, etc)
4. Cartoonists retirement community
5. Comics in the classroom

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Danny Ceballos

1. fund an "All Things Lynda Barry Convention" in Wisconsin
2. commission a statue of John Stanley for CCS
3. pay all of the song/lyric licensing fees for CARTER FAMILY COMICS
4. Research into the life and work of George Carlson (and publication of said research and all related comics)
5. produce an animated series of Grant Morrison's DOOM PATROL for PBS

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Jeet Heer

1. An annual "MacArthur Genius" type grant for mid-career cartoonists (i.e., people with at least years of work in comics). Ideally the award should go to people like Gary Panter, Lynda Barry, Kim Deitch, etc.
2. An annual Doug Wright style award for American comics, with a nice award ceremony and only three categories (best book, emerging talent, hall of fame).
3. A press devoted to publishing old comic strips that are not commercially viable: i.e., the complete Bungle Family, the Complete Gumps, the complete Felix the Cat.
4. Seed money for a proper comics museum run by academically-trained curators.
5. A press devoted to publishing non-fiction books devoted to comics: i.e. Gary Groth’s memoir, Frank Young’s Life and Art of John Stanley, a book length analysis of Grant Morrison by Douglas Wolk, the collected essays of R. Fiore, Carter Scholz and Tim Kreider.

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Nat Gertler

1. A charity providing an ongoing supply of free new comics to children's hospitals... enough so the kids can take them home with them.
2. A legal source setup to provide and review contracts, and to help with copyright and trademark registration, to both creators and small publishers.
3. 'Mazing Man trade paperback series
4. Understanding Comics: The Musical
5. Hire some folks to help me turn the AAUGH.com Collectors Guide to Peanuts Books into a complete wiki-driven fully photoreferenced guide to all editions, variants, and so forth.

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Max Fischer

1. The construction of a real-life garden like the one from Yuichi Yokoyama's Garden
2. The $100 million art film that Dan Clowes wanted to make with Michel Gondry
3. Worldwide activist movement calling for people of all nations to put aside their differences and read Love and Rockets
4. Jack Kirby memorial city
5. Rent-free sound-proofed apartment building where poor cartoonists can live and work until they finally break even

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M. Emery

1. Funding to create a Hicksville Lighthouse to house Australasian comics/original comic art
2. An international Xeric Fund
3. Fund for artists to apply for travel costs to conventions
4. A free monthly all ages anthology comic for libraries exclusively worldwide
5. The Complete Barry Linton

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David Brothers

1. A series of anthology graphic novels based around showcasing comics' best and brightest (working in whatever genre they prefer)
2. Health insurance for needy cartoonists & their families
3. A series of grants to help budding cartoonists make it without starving
4. A program that donates comics for children created by top flight talent directly to libraries
5. An overhaul of every comics company's site to make vital information for consumers easier to access

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Ramon De Veyra

* The Complete Paul Pope
* Seed money to set up a cartooning course in my alma mater, with an awesome library
* a publishing company to translate more great classic/current alt/indy comics work from the asian/european markets into english
* project to help save/restore/preserve original comics art from the many talented Filipino creators of the '50s-'80s, translate/publish projects where they can
* company to make awesome merch (toys, shirts, posters, etc.) of indy/alt properties

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Mike McGhee

1. Technological distribution project focusing on teaching Native Peoples how to use computers to make comics for self expression with a centralized database for upload and global reading. Think of the discourse!
2. System of hostels in major cities exclusively for comickers, with alternating floors of studio space and boarding space. Comix productivity during residency would be prerequisite.
3. Lobbying for return of copyright expiration to 14 years.
4. Granting system for Comix-to-Animation. Think Xeric funneling into the National Film Board of Canada.
5. Um... Free Lifetime Health Insurance for every Comicker producing more than 80 pages a year for a 15 (20?) year stretch? Is that too absurd?

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Douglass Abramson

1) The Spectre
2) Dr Fate
3) Resurrection Man
4) Gross Pointe
5) Xero

Editor's Note: This came slugged "My Five For Friday," and so it is!

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Jason Green

1. The themed anthologies published by Ink and Drink Comics *shameless plug*
2. The CBLDF, as much as possible.
3. Savage Dragon, for as long as Erik Larsen is willing to do it.
4. A complete English-language translation of the rest of Urusei Yatsura, adapted by Gerard Jones.
5. A new work by Masamune Shirow that's an actual story, not just pin-ups or dirty pictures.

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Gil Roth

1. I'd pay Eddie Campbell to do a b/w autobio strip about his affairs with a girl and her mom
2. I'd pay Dave McKean to do a 10-issue mixed-media comic about an apartment building and the cosmos (and then publish it at a loss-generating cover price)
3. I'd pay Jim Woodring and Mark Martin to each do comics so tonally different that they should never appear in the same volume, and then publish them in the same volume
4. I'd pay Scott McCloud to do a 200-page comic about comics theory
5. I'd pay Alan Moore, Bill Sienkiewicz and Al Columbia to just sit in a room together, uncomfortably

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Kiel Phegley

1. As close as you can get to a major mass market kids comics anthology these days – simultaneous aggressive distribution on newsstands and in digital. Chock full with A-list classic strips and creator-owned originals.
2. Lots of really strange gag cartoons in 3-D.
3. Basil Wolverton retrospective hardcovers.
4. Literary agency whose primary role is representing cartoonists to the big book publishers.
5. However much money it takes to get Ben Edlund to come back to comics and do something regularly.

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topic tweaked from a twitter suggest by Brian Moore; thanks, Brian

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