Frank Gogol’s Kickstarter Anthology GRIEF Comes to Source Point Press!

Creators Workshop member and ardent Comics Experience student Frank Gogol is bringing his Kickstarter success Grief to our Source Point Press collaboration! On this anthology, he is joined by collaborators Nenad Cvitcanin, Kim Holm, Ryan Foust, Bethany Varni, Jey Soliva, Luca Bulgheroni, Esther P. Gil-Munilla, Emily Elmer, Sean Reinhart, and Dani Martins.

“The most important lesson I learned, without a doubt, is to make a campaign personal. Anyone who’s read Grief or has watched my campaign video on the Grief Kickstarter page knows that Grief is an incredibly personal book for me. Creating it was cathartic in a lot of ways and sharing it was meant to be my small contribution to help others who are grieving. And I channeled those things into the book and into the campaign and it resonated with people,” Frank says.

Grief and the Kickstarter campaign, I think, became more than one person trying to sell their comic book to other people. The backers felt connected to me and to the book, and that’s a powerful thing.”

The anthology explores the various ways in which people experience and express grief, using Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ outline of the five stages as a framework. Grief began life as a direct result of Frank’s start taking Comics Experience founder Andy Schmidt‘s Introduction to Comics Book Writing course.

“From there, I set out to write a few more stories that had been percolating in the background. I figured I could put together a portfolio of short stories—different genre pieces and with different characters and so on—to show some storytelling range. I wanted to start out small, to build myself up, and to try new things, and if I had a couple of pieces to submit to anthologies or to show to editors, all the better,” Frank said.

“Then one day, I was sort of taking stock of the comics I’d made to see where I might go with the next story. I’d done sci-fi. I’d done horror. I’d done drama. And though these genres were pretty disparate, I noticed that all of the stories were about characters grieving in one way or another. That was sort of the spark of the idea that these stories could all fit together as an anthology.”

Beyond the introductory writing course, he also found the Creators Workshop community a pivotal source of support and growth as he worked on Grief and other projects. The connections he forged during his time guided the story to Kickstarter, and then on to Source Point Press.

“Top-to-bottom, the Comics Experience community, especially the Creators Workshop, is a place designed to help members succeed… The CE community is a place full of people, who just like me, want to make comics. It’s pros and amateurs and everything in between as peers,” says Frank.

“They support one another and empower one another. And without that support and empowerment, I absolutely would not have been able to move along at the pace I have… Being able to interact with and learn from my peers on the Creators Workshop was invaluable to me as I put Grief together and to it becoming the book that it is.”

You can pick up Grief and the other Source Point Press/Comics Experience beginning with the launch at C2E2 April 6-8!

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Posted by Meredith Nudo