One More Plea for Kenosha Cartoon Festival

It’s down to the wire for the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning’s Kickstarter campaign to help fund the event. It’s woefully short right now with only 4 days to go.

This is very disappointing. Outside of comic book conventions, which few outside the working industry actually attend, there are not many events where the general public can meet and listen to prominent cartoonists speak about what they do and how they do it. For free. The lineup is pretty stellar:

• Stephan Pastis of Pearls Before Swine
• Greg Cravens of The Buckets
• Michael Jantze from The Norm and Jantze Animation Studios
• Norm Feuti of Retail and Gil
• Dave Coverly of Speed Bump and Parade Magazine

Over 70 people have lent their support…great thanks to them for doing that. The other 999,999,930 on the internet have not.

My guess is the primary reason for so few donating is the rationalization that “I can’t attend this thing, why would I support it?” That’s not really the point. Whether you can attend it or not, the reason to donate to help support the event is to support these kinds of events, so other people can attend it. For anyone who loves the art of cartooning, an event like this is an important thing to support. Maybe among the crowds of people attending the speaker presentations and meet and greets is a young kid who might be the next Charles Schulz, and getting to meet and listen to some of his favorite cartoonists is what puts him on that path. In general, the promotion of the art form and the connection between readers and creators . . . and I’m talking a real connection as in looking into the actual face of another human being and communicating and not some virtual one in 140 characters or less . . . is a great thing to support.

Four days left, and one of the premiums includes a signed page of original MAD art from me. These aren’t going to be lame pages from a parody of “Boston Public” either. The pages I have set aside for his are from my parodies of “Mad Men”, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” and “Batman Begins”. In fact, thanks to the recent offer of matching newly donated funds, should all 5 of my pages get bought at the $400 level, we’d only be a few hundred short of the goal.

Visit the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning page and lend your support today.