Kickstarter Success for Ditkomania

A drawing by me as printed in Ditkomania #16 (1985)

Editor/publisher Rob Imes recently ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the publication of Ditkomania #90. I wrote a little blog article about the initiative and I want to thank  Jaime Hernandez and Tom Brevoort for retweeting my message to all of their followers. It turns out that one major contributor to the effort was Mr. Mark S. Ditko, nephew of Steve Ditko!

In the interim I learned a little bit more about Kickstarter and how it works. Of course any company needs to take in some money to stay in business and Kickstarter's deal is that they keep roughly 5% of the pledges made on projects that reach their funding goal. The actual collecting of the funds is managed by Amazon Payments and that group also gets roughly a 5% cut. Rob confirmed for me that these percentages were fairly accurate regarding the funds for his campaign.

The Ditkomania #90 project did meet its funding goal and the issue went to press. I received my copy in the mail last week and I feel so strongly about it that I feel the need to start a new paragraph.

This is one of my favorite issues of Ditkomania ever! I've received every issue in the mail since #4 back in 1983 and I've been submitting drawings since #6 that same year, so I have a pretty good understanding of what DM is and should be. It should be like this issue! I was worried that the long article by Ace Comics publisher Ron Frantz would be on the grey and boring side, but nothing could be further from the truth. Mr. Frantz does not sugarcoat or varnish his descriptions of the industry professionals with whom he had dealings and I found his prose to be totally engaging; heaven help the poor man but I might even liken his writing style to (gulp) my own.

I strongly recommend this issue and you can find out about securing your own copy over here.