Small in form but breathtakingly diverse in output, Soaring Penguin Press have become renowned for their eclectic publishing catalogue. From Régis Loisel’s Peter Pan to Howard Hardiman’s The Lengths, through to Ellen Lindner’s The Black Feather Falls and Gary Spencer Millidge’s Strangehaven, Soaring Penguin display a commitment to presenting work from all corners of comicsdom that parallels Broken Frontier’s own mini-mission statement tagline “Exploring the comics universe.”
Today SPP have announced a Kickstarter subscription campaign to back their 2015 list of books, covered here at BF a few weeks back. It’s a publishing model that is less well-known in the UK, perhaps, but has been used to great effect by micropublishers in the States over the last few years.
The cover and a sample page from Laura Howell’s Gilbert & Sullivan book and the cover to Bach’s ‘It’s Hard to Be a Girl’
Publisher John Anderson says “2015 is poised to be an immensely exciting year. We have our ongoing anthology series, Meanwhile, and six new titles! During one of our recent meetings we broke down the costs of the titles, and it really hit us how much initial investment we needed to make it all happen. It’s important that we support our creators both financially and creatively. At the same time, there are many significant costs involved in getting our titles out there long before the books hit the shop shelves. So a little help from our amazing comic readers will make all the difference, and enable us to continue putting out the kind of graphic novels and comics that people have been crying out for.”
Images from Ellen Lindner’s The Black Feather Falls and the cover to Samuel Leblanc’s ‘Perfume of Lilacs’
Anderson is justifiably proud of the projects on offer. “This is also the most diverse and varied line-up we’ve ever planned; three of our titles are by unbelievably talented female artists, and we’re also very excited to be introducing some amazing French-language graphic novelists to the English-speaking world for the first time! Among our highlights:
- Meanwhile, our universally acclaimed comics anthology.
- The Bizarre Adventures of Gilbert and Sullivan, by Laura Howell
- The Erotic Adventures of Space Babe 113, by John Maybury
- To End All Wars(paperback edition), edited by Jonathan Clode and Brick
- The Black Feather Falls, by Ellen Lindner
- Perfume of Lilacs, by Samuel Leblanc
- It’s Hard to be a Girl, by Bach
John Maybury’s Space Babe 113 and an interior page plus the softcover of ‘To End All Wars’
“Of course, our backers will be richly rewarded for investing in our graphic novels during the creation stage. As well as being among the first to secure copies of these beautiful titles, we’re putting together a great selection of goodies and bonus options. We’re the first graphic novel publisher to run a Kickstarter campaign in the UK. We think that this is a great way to ensure that we can do justice to the amazing writers and artists that we publish, as well as our readers, by continuing to put out the beautiful titles for which we have become renowned.”
To find out more about the rewards on offer visit the Kickstarter page here. The Soaring Penguin Press website can be found here.
