If you crave originality in your comics, nothing beats creator-owned stories. That’s because ‘creator-owned’ really means what it says: the ingenious writers and artists from whose rich imagination these stories have sprung completely own their ideas.
Unlike working on most mainstream superhero books, where editorial and corporate factors are in play, when doing creator-owned books comics creators are truly free to do with their characters and settings whatever they please. They can take risks and go wherever their imagination guides them, which has led to some extremely creative storytelling in comics as of late. Just google the words ‘Saga’, ‘Descender’ or ‘Sex Criminals’ and you’ll see what I mean.
The drawback here though is that it’s often hard for a lot of creators to bring their own ideas to life, because creator-owned projects are usually back-end deals, meaning that writers, artists and colorists won’t see any funds until well after they’ve done the work – and even then, it has to be a success for the creators to make a living.
That’s why I was so impressed by the Broken Frontier Anthology, a great project I came across on writer David Hine’s website, put together to celebrate creator-owned storytelling in comics. This anthology pays creators a very nice sum up front for doing their stories and they still get to keep all of the rights to what they’ve created.
Or as David Hine, who’s writing an existential murder mystery for the book, puts it:
“I can't emphasize enough how important it is that this kind of project gets the support of the readers who genuinely want to see more independent, creator-owned material.”
The Broken Frontier Anthology has stories by over 40 top comics talents from around the world, including Cullen Bunn, Marguerite Bennett, Nathan Fox, Carla Berrocal, Greg Pak, Toby Cypress and Karrie Fransman, who gave this great TEDx talk about the power of comics. They’ve all united to tell stories built around the theme of exploring the great unknown and pushing beyond our human limits.
I really want to this book to happen and I hope you do too because it’s a unique chance to help push the comics medium forward and to get creators to tell what they do best, which is telling the stories they really want to tell.
Have a look at some of the wonderful artwork released thus far:
More info: kickstarter.com
