The 12 (Week)Days of Comics Crowdfunding, Day 7: GreenScreen

[Since jumping into comics crowdfunding in March, I’ve received 12 projects in paper form. Some have arrived digitally, but I’ll wait until the paper copies arrive because I’m that type of luddite. This “Year in Review” will catalog each one…and I promise to be done by New Year’s Eve!]

I come from the small press self-publishing world, albeit with a slightly older viewpoint than most today (I was active in the mid-late 80s and only recently got back to my hobby). And while the crowdfunding scene and social media have presented me with some fascinating developments over 30+ years, a lot of it looks the same. In fact, both eras have roughly the same types of books:

The WannaBe Book – Written and drawn because the creators desperately want to be in the business of making comics full-time for a publisher (most likely DC or Marvel, but perhaps less so these days). Change the spandex and the super-powers, and you probably have a hero book of the day. See: Tryout book.
The Side Gig – A professional who actually works for a publisher and decides to do a little something to scratch an artistic itch (like Jerry Ordway back on Ka-Blam#1) or tell a story that might not otherwise be told (like Declan Shalvey’s Time Before Time – Process Edition).
The Total Freedom Book – Presented by the creator who may or may not want to get in the business, but whose talents are so totally unique and outside the realm of the mainstream that they create their works to simply Do Their Thing…and don’t really care about what the publishers think. You will see wild creativity, unorthodox skill in storytelling and art and styles you’ll see nowhere else in this category.

You can have great books in each category. You can also have poor books.

GreenScreen, by Geoff Grogan, strikes me as a Total Freedom book….and a VERY good one at that. Grogan has a clear idea of his concept, his story, his writing style, his art style…heck, even his lettering style. And knowing what he wants to do, and how he’s going to do it, he moves forward to make an entertaining comic book.

Had to go with the cool variant cover…and he signed the first page, too!

Green Screen is the 36-page, full color comic book story of Bella Dilemma, who along with her friends “stunt-man Sudz and special-effects puppet Emmy, have been cast adrift aboard their movie-set spaceship and pulled into the Cine-verse, an alternate dimension where every movie ever made is a real world” (taken from the Kickstarter campaign page). The humor is everywhere, and often lightly adult-themed, in this unauthorized behind the scenes of Disney’s “Snow White” after the show ended. It’s cute, it’s fun, it’s a little baudy but in a PG-13 way.

I have to give a special mention to how Grogan used color. Word balloons are color-coordinated by character. Some sound effects are color-coordinated with the panel colors to minimize the visual intrusion. Most of the linework isn’t done in blacks but instead uses more natural colors that allow the black-outlined characters to pop on the page. Real creative stuff.

And because Grogan offered, I chose to catch up by grabbing issue zero, in which Bella and Co. start in Los Angeles and wind up out in space, spoofing parts of Star Wars lore:

And the add-ons! Holy cow, this must’ve been a super-successful campaign. Lessee — there was a bookmark, a magnet, a sticker, a postcard and a faux tv promo card.