And I’m here with yet another cool comic creator interview! Josh O’Neil is here to tell us all about GratNin and it’s unique style and why he’s launched it as a Kickstarter, which went live yesterday, Marc h 16th.
What brought about the idea for the accordion style pages?
Part of our brand at Beehive is to take an inventive and unusual approach to design, production and presentation. GratNin presented an exciting and singular problem — how to present this pageless digital comic in a print format. As per our usual ideological commitments to inventing unusual reading experiences, we came up with the least practical, most exciting solution — to present these remarkable stories on a series of unbroken accordion-folded scrolls, turning the downward-swiping digital read into a fantastically physical experience. You track down four hundred feet of narrow page-space, in a format that brings to mind skyscrapers, alleyways, subway tunnels — all the long verticals iconically representing this fantastical vision of New York. And we filled the box with ephemera from this alternate reality — metrocards and maps and furoshikis and trading cards, making up a whole enveloping experience. A world for you to crawl into a skulk around. We didn’t want to just present a print version of Ron’s wonderful webcomic – we wanted to work with him to reinvent it, and to build out his world.
Where did the story idea come from? I love the “Woke Naruto” tagline.
This is really a question for Ron, not for us. I do think that “Woke Naruto” is a brilliant and somewhat hilarious description of the project, and I do believe the project comes out of a combination of a deep love of a lot of source material, combined with a sense of political conviction.
Why kickstarter?
Crowdfunding is the basis of our whole enterprise here. We tend to specialize in a lot of very ambitious, high-end projects, which we couldn’t afford to do if we didn’t have this little committed base of readers and supporters who want to bring these things into the world. Crowdfunding has its flaws and challenges but one thing I appreciate about it is that it breaks down the producer/consumer relationship that traditional publishing has. In a very real and literal way, our readers are making these projects possible. We’ve been able to do a lot of very crazy and unlikely things due to their faith and their funding. They are our collaborators, our fellow travelers.
What is next from you?
An illuminated edition of Carlo Collodi’s PINOCCHIO, with a full suite of illustrations from Mike Mignola, and the text fully annotated by Lemony Snicket. We can’t believe it either.
