The Couri Vine Kickstarter was named the “Kickstarter of the Week” in the the popular blog Women Write About Comics. Here’s a little of what they had to say:
Couri Vine is a new kid’s comic Kickstarter from all-woman team of Leah Lovise and Vanessa Shealy, with colouring by Indigo Rael, and it’s pretty darn cute….I don’t know about you, but I am always here for girl detectiving and adventuring.
Read the entire post HERE, and Share!
We’ve got more than one week left of our Kickstarter campaign, and we’re happy and proud to say that we are already FUNDED! So far, 62 people have backed this comic book, and we are extremely grateful.
So, we’re gonna keep on going! We’ve put a lot of time (and money) into creating this book. Now that we have exceeded our initial goal, additional funds will go toward creating Couri Vine Book #2!
Thanks to all for your support!
And we’re off! This week we’re launching our Kickstarter campaign!
That’s right – we’re going for it. We’re completely finished with COURI VINE: Young People for the Leader, and we want you to have a copy! So we’re creating a Kickstarter with a copy of this comic book as the PERK that you will receive for any donation above $20.
Because we’re passionate about this comic book!
We decided early on that we wanted to make an action-packed adventure story about a young person who is hiding from her disability, who then discovers that her difference can become her superpower. We’re personally inspired by this goal; Vanessa is the mother of a child with autism, and Leah’s father was wheelchair bound due to muscular dystrophy. These two heroes in our lives inspire us and instill endless admiration. We hope that our science fiction story will speak to children and adults who live with challenges of all kinds.
Our Kickstarter is for $3000 so that we can print 1500 print copies. With that many copies, we can sell them (online and at festivals), submit them to publishers, and, most of all, entice people to support us as we work on the next three books, which together make up the first complete COURI VINE Story.
Here’s what we plan to do with it:
Which brings us to $2,898, so, in Kickstarter world, that means we better round it up to $3,000, since there’s probably some fees that we didn’t know about. Plus, we like round numbers.
Notice that we aren’t taking any money for ourselves, or putting aside any money for our collaborators. We’ve been funding this project ourselves for the past 2 years. If we exceed our Kickstarter goal maybe we can finally pay down some of these nasty credit cards we’ve been living on.
You’ll get more info on our Kickstarter page, but these are the PERKS that come with donations at various levels:
That’s a lot of great perks if you ask me. Once our Kickstarter page is live, there will be a link to it right HERE!
We hope you’ll contribute. We want you to have a copy, like this guy:
This charming chap (aka, Marty Percy) is holding one of the 50 copies that we printed for the STAPLE! Independent Media Expo in Austin, TX, where we SOLD OUT immediately. Of those 50 copies, here’s what @s_orem said about the copy she bought:
“Probably the most exciting to me is Couri Vine by Vanessa Shealy and Leah Lovise. It’s about Couri, a young girl with a disability who “discovers that her difference can become her superpower.”
What happens after this Kickstarter?
This Kickstarter is for part one of a four part series, so we really need a Kick in the Start to get this going in a way that we can sustain. We’re already working on books two, three, and four, and we plan to release each book on a digital platform, followed by a limited printed run. Below are blurbity blurbs for each of the subsequent books:
Book Two: Journey to the Planet Earth
Couri travels to Earth, where she finds Doo Dad’s InData device, but is pursued on land and sea by the evil Anaxia Nervosa.
Book Three: Hostages
Couri learns the origins of a dangerous compound, Sathrite. Enforcers seize her and transport her to the Near Side of the Moon where Moon Leader Todal reveals his evil plan.
Book Four: Sacrifice
Couri realizes how she can stop the Moon Leader, but it will do irreparable damage to her life support system. What further damage can Moon Leader Todal do?
SPECIAL THANKS goes out to the following heroes:
When I was growing up, my sister and I would put on tights, a pillowcase cape, and a plastic mask to play Batman and Robin. She’s about 4 years older than me so I always had to be the trusty sidekick. The fact that we were pretending to be men never even entered into our minds. We were just superheroes: guys in capes with crime-fighting superpowers.
So it’s interesting to me that, when Leah and I first started working on Couri Vine, we started with a male protagonist. I mean, we just made our hero a guy without really questioning it. It seemed natural; I’d been watching and reading stories that star MEN for most of my life. Only after we started working on Couri did we have a realization, “Why have we been imagining a male protagonist? Let’s write about a girl!”
So Couri, who was initially a supporting character, became our hero. And I took a good look at our supporting characters and made sure that there are numerous interesting, complicated, and fierce female characters.
Moon Leader Todal is our “Bad Guy”, but he has a female counterpart, Anaxia, who is actually a little meaner than the Moon Leader.
And there’s Doo Dad, the “Good Guy” in Book 1. In subsequent books, Thyme, a grandmotherly genius, comes into prominence as Couri’s mentor and ally. Thyme is only mentioned briefly in Book 1, but I promise you that by the end of Book 4 her awesomeness will be revealed.
I believe it’s vitally important for young girls to see strong women and girls in comic books. Yet, as we were getting started, I fell into the same trap that I hope young girls WON’T fall into: I assumed the best person for the job was a boy.
So Couri is a girl – a real girl. She’s eleven years old with strengths and weaknesses, and a hugely obvious, frustrating disability. Her feelings are complicated, but she has a purpose in life that’s greater than just getting some boy to notice her. She has to learn to embrace who she is, and when she does, she’ll find her superpowers.
With immense respect for comic book artists, it’s fair to say I was a little intimidated by the thought of making my own comic book. It’s a huge undertaking! The process of making a comic book is like putting together a giant puzzle, one which stretches your creative muscles in limitless ways. So when Vanessa and I decided to make COURI VINE as a comic book I knew it was not something to attempt lightly. For popular comic books, it might take five artists to complete one book. This includes a concept artist, penciller, inker, colorist, and letterer. Here, I was about to attempt all of these roles. But I listen to my mother’s words of wisdom, “take one thing at a time,” grabbed my sketchbook, and started chipping away.
Vanessa and I started with the idea of a girl with an unbeknownst superpower who lives in Moon City with her senile grandfather, an old scientist who was displaced from Earth years ago. From there I set out to determine what this world looks like. At this point in the process, my role as artist was to develop concept art for the characters, determine the setting, architectural designs, spaceship and robot designs, and develop a map of the city.
Life drawing had been something I practiced on a fairly regular bases. But drawing a model who is posing for you and doing portraits is much different than drawing for comics. In my research, I picked up Tom Bancroft’s book “Characters Mentor,” and also “How To Draw The Marvel Way” by Stan Lee and have referred to these books often. With comics, characters emote with their entire bodies. Expression is found not only in the face but also in the pose of a character. Even the perspective of the composition can bring a character to life. I continue to learn and practice this as I illustrate these characters in each panel.
Then there’s the setting for the characters. When it comes to designing a futuristic, sustainable world, I’m intrigued by Janine Benyus’ concept of biomimicry and her book called “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.” According to Wikipedia, biomimicry is the imitation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems. How cool is that!? I wanted my designs to reflect this idea.
Other inspiration was found at an instillation by Architects of Art called the “Luminarium Pentalum.” These giant inflated structures linked domes to a maze of tunnels and allowed sunshine to stream in through colorful vinyl panels creating brilliant arrays of light. Inflated structures on the moon connecting existing lava tunnels, it made sense!
Vanessa and I also had questions like: What kind of games do people play in Moon City? How would people get around? Where would they live? What were the dilemmas and advantages of having a lower gravitational pull? How many hours are in a day in Moon City? All of these questions, and more, needed to be considered when approaching the design.
Helicopter Cycles were a must! Take an old-timey, penny-farthing bike crossed with a helicopter, add a lower gravitational pull, and there you have it, a fun and potentially life threatening, pedal-driven, aeronautic machine specially designed for lunar extreme sports!
Book 1 of COURI VINE scratches the surface of the possibilities in Moon City, exploring ideas of sustainable living in a man-made province, concepts that will continue to unfold in the upcoming books. Included here are some of the pre-visuals developed for the first book.
Like Couri, I am discovering what the universe has to offer, and what I have to offer in return. Thanks for reading.