Launched on Kickstarter today, artist Sean Murphy and New Jersey-based art collective and distributor Essential Sequentials are putting out an interesting new Kickstarter. Offering up a 100-page soft cover anthology book called “Cafe Racer,” the Kickstarter’s actual goal is to help fund an apprenticeship for six students that artist Sean Murphy will be working with. Murphy’s work is well known to comic fans now, having made a splash on the scene with the grand hit “Joe the Barbarian” and moving on to other stellar work like “Punk Rock Jesus” and “The Wake,” so seeing that this Kickstarter is for students to learn from someone already well-accomplished within the comic field is certainly intriguing.
The book itself has a pretty interesting description as well: “Its about a WW2 Japanese refugee who goes to England and gets caught up in the Cafe Racer community.” I’ve never heard of the Cafe Racer community, but hey, sounds fun. And the book will also come with pencils and concept artwork to show the development of the book.
So: you get a book featuring art by Sean Murphy, Andrew Robinson, Dave Johnson, Dan Panosian and Matteo Scalera, but also art from six unknown and brand new comic creators, including but not limited to Corin Howell (as Sean Murphy mentioned on Twitter), whose artwork is quite great from the little I’ve seen online. It’s certainly an interesting opportunity to back, to say the least.
It is also perhaps worth noting that Essential Sequentials has put out a number of Kickstarters (all I wish I’d known about in retrospect), and have had no grand complaints that I’ve yet heard of or seen. I know many are wary on the Kickstarter model for funding due to past Kickstarters not fulfilling their dues, but this is certainly one to take a look at.
