SA, Aussie panel turns to crowdfunding for ComiCon trip

This is pretty interesting. The publishers of Velocity, a platform designed to provide South African and Australian comic book artists and writers a place to show off their creativity have been invited to present a panel at ComiCon in San Diego and they’re using crowdfunding to get there.

The team consitsts of Moray Rhoda, the South African publisher of the anthology, Ray Whitcher one of the administrators of the South African Arts forum Legionink.com, and Neville Howard, is based in Australia and manages the publication there.

Rhoda is a designer and part-time lecturer in Cape Town, and is a member of the TDT comic group as well as being co-founder of Velocity Anthology with Neville Howard. Whitcher meanwhile is a scholar of comic adaptation theory (with research outputs published in The Arts in Media journal).

“The invite from SDCC is humbling, and a MASSIVE achievement for us. It will be a first collaborative presentation of its kind at SDCC, (We’ve been given a 90 minute-long slot, which is an honour in of itself),” the team says.

The team says the reason it turned to crowdfunding is that their invitation to speak at ComiCon came at a relatively late stage, meaning that there wasn’t that much time to gather the required funds.

The Velocity team is looking to raise around A$4 000 on crowdfunding platform Pozible, which it reckons will cover about half the costs of the trip.

The members invited to speak on the panel say they’ll also be taking the anthology with them, to show it off to what will hopefully be receptive audience:

We’ll be taking the Anthology with us and will be showing it to the big boys like Marvel, DC, Image and Dark Horse as well as network with publishers we love such as IDW, Dynamite Entertainment and UK’s Com-X. We hope to expose South African, Australian and New Zealand comic artists as extensively as possible.