Alone in the wilderness, a young mother sees a plume of dark smoke. Hoping it’s her lost son, she follows it across early America.
On a cold morning in North America, 12,000 B.C, a young mother buries her child. Alone, she sees a new sight – a plume of dark smoke drifting over the distant glaciers. Hoping its appearance is connected to her son, she follows it. By luck, she befriends a giant sloth, and the two trek the expanse of the north, tracking the dark drifting plume.
Why I am writing the book
My first comic, After the Gold Rush, was an optimistic look at science fiction – our future. Clovis is an optimistic look at our past, the wilderness of the Pleistocene. I wanted to tell the story of how our ancestors wandered, lived, struggled, and came together. The Pleistocene era was just 14,000 years ago, not so long in the history of mammals on Earth. And the homo sapiens that lived in North America, the Clovis people, were not so different from us. We have the same biology as they, our hardware. Only the software has changed.
As with After the Gold Rush this comic will aspire to scientific accuracy. I won’t be transposing animals from other time periods into the Pleistocene just because they are cool- for example, I really wanted to feature the large predatory Moas. Alas, I had to exclude them, because they never existed in the region. We all must make sacrifices for science. Also, since we know so little about the culture of the Clovis people, I will not try to craft one from my imagination. I have to embellish a bit here or there, but it is not my aim to explore the tribes of the Clovis people, just our lone mother – Mea.
Miles Greb – Writer, Creator, Producer – Former Bob Dylan impersonator whose love of Star Trek is annoying to everyone.
Zak Hartong – Artist, Colorist – Vagrant of time & spelunker of worlds.
Naomi Franquiz – Cover Artist – A ball of sentient sweaters by day, and an illustrator by night.
Jeffrey Veregge – Award-winning Native American comic book artist. His list of accomplishments is literally too long to list.
Andrew Pierce – Editor – Lovable goof. Escaped Kipling protagonist.
Ben Rodgers – Assistant Editor – Historian of historical biographies, at least he was historically.
Just some info on what you are getting in the Clovis Graphic Novel:
As with my first comic series – After the Gold Rush – Clovis will care about scientific accuracy. I have tried my best only to include fauna that lived in the era and region of the world Mea will be traveling. Fantasy is great of course, but telling stories about how fascinating the real world is can be just as interesting.
While researching all the mega fauna, climates, and paleontology needed to write Clovis, I became fascinated by this era. It seems so long ago, but it is just 14,000 years past. There are still so many amazing fossils we can discover, and so much more to learn. All this inspired me to add another section to the Clovis Graphic Novel.
This section will be around 20 pages. Here is a mock up of some of The Tar Pit pages. (We are still working on the layout, so these are not final.)
Do you remember Zoobooks? This will be something like that. It will have art and information about the fauna found in Clovis, as well as a few we left out. It will also have information about the geology, climate, and some awesome things we still need to know more about. Maybe you will be the one to discover them?
These beautiful art prints come in a few sizes, but all of them are on high quality gloss card stock. It’s awesome to see different artistic renderings of the world of Clovis, and I think they all turned out great! The Cover Art is also available as an art print.
The Jeffrey Veregge poster will be added shortly!
We will also have packs of stickers featuring the mega fauna of Clovis. Each pack will come with three random fauna stickers, with one of the animals from the mega fauna poster. You can add extra packs of stickers to your order for $5 each. They will be round-cut, with a white background.
Hand-made, and super cute! We can only make so many, so these cuties are limited. Get one while they last!
All reward tiers Tapirus and higher will also include a digital copy of the book upon request. If you have any questions about the items, or what’s included, feel free to contact me at@Goldrushcomic or message me here.
Most of the funds will go to making the story. There are going to be over 80 pages of art for Clovis, plus all the content in the “Tar Pits” section. So the art costs are the lion’s share of the budget.
After that, you can see printing and shipping costs take up a big chunk. The quality of the printing is going to be the same as a Big Two trade paper back. That costs a bit more, but I think it’s worth it.
The rest is more minor stuff, printing posters and such.
This is a bigger budget than my last two books, but I think it is very manageable.
This is my third Kickstarter for a comic, so I think I have a good lay of the land. I know the costs of shipping, printing, fees all pretty well. I also have a fast and hard working artist in Zak who I know will turn out beautiful pages.
This budget is bigger then my other two projects, and it will take longer to make. That means there is more risk of mistakes. However, I am very confident that won’t be a problem.
However, we will have a good amount of time to finish this book, and once we hit out goal, we should have the capital needed to see it to completion.