Weekly CLAPTRAP Update #1!

We are officially one week into Desmond Devlin and my CLAPTRAP book project campaign, and we are off to a terrific start! Thanks to over 200 backers, we are already at 44% of our goal! THANK YOU to all of you who have backed the project! Here’s what’s been going on this week with the book and the campaign:

Book Stuff!

Des and I are already working on the second movie parody. The script is done, and I’m working on the art. We’ll be releasing a sneak peek at the splash page for this one soon. EVERYONE is going to love that we picked this movie.

We’ve also been working on which other movies we’d like to include. We’ve decided on five of the ten so far, but we don’t have a complete list yet because we want to do plenty of new movies as well as some classics, and new movies aren’t coming out right now! We are waiting to see which ones come out in the next 6 months that are “spoof-worthy” (that’s a little like being sponge-worthy, but not really.) There is also a perk tier on the campaign where YOU get to participate in choosing some of the movies we do! That’s right, at the “Doofus” level, you get your name printed in the book as a supporter, AND you get to suggest movies you want us to parody. After we get enough suggestions, we’ll send out a list to all the “Doofus” (or higher) backers to vote for the ones that you’d like us to spoof! Democracy at its finest. And of course we have the ridiculously expensive “Megalomaniac” tier, where you sponsor an entire parody. YOU tell US what movie you want us to spoof! We put you in the spoof as a character, and you get all the original art. You get to play Bill Gaines! We’re still waiting for Quentin Tarantino, J.J. Abrams, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola to snap those up… but they haven’t returned our emails yet.

Des and I have also figured out what we are going to do for the “exclusive print” that all backers from the “Schmuck” level and up are going to get. I’ll be doing the art for that in the next few weeks and we’ll reveal it before the end of the campaign.

Press Coverage!

Several popular movie, comics and pop culture websites have done stories on our project:

Bleeding Cool had me write a piece!

SlashFilm did a story!

Cup of Coffee by Craig Calcaterra gave us some love! (you have to subscribe to see this, but the free version will get you access to this post)

That’s awesome because very few media sources do stories about crowdfunding projects. We do have a unique twist… given we are trying to keep a beloved and long lived humor comics genre alive after it was abandoned by the very publication that did it best for over 60 years, and the two of us have been the main creators on said genre for about 20 years.

Famous Supporters!

Lots of people loved the movie parodies in MAD, and want to see new ones! Some of them are famous! We’ve gotten support from the likes of Judd Apatow:

And Svengoolie!:

We’ve also had some big time comics professionals promote the campaign:

Mark Evanier! Doug Mahnke! Bill Morrison! Stan Sakai! Graham Nolan!

Many thanks to those and so many others who have shared our campaign and spread the word. BUT WE NEED MORE HELP IN GETTING THE WORD OUT! Please keep sharing the campaign far and wide. Getting it in front of new eyeballs is crucial!

That’s it for this week’s update. Look for more from us including some goofy videos soon!