Curtis Clow Talks Kickstarter Success and Beastlands’ Dark Horse Debut (Exclusive)

It can be tough to have a successful crowdfunded project, which makes Curtis Clow’s 13 fully-funded Kickstarter campaigns an eye-catching achievement. Clow is the author/writer/co-creator of his books The Wild Cosmos, Beastlands, Slightly Exaggerated, and Majestic, which were all self-published through his own imprint To Infinity Studios using crowdfunding. It was Beastlands that caught the attention of Dark Horse Comics, with the two sides collaborating to release a trade paperback of the first five issues of the fantasy series. The Beastlands trade is already available in comic book stores, with the Amazon and book store on-sale date set for June 28th. 

ComicBook.com spoke to Curtis Clow to find out his keys to success on Kickstarter, crafting compelling fantasy stories across multiple titles, how Beastlands caught the eye of Dark Horse Comics, and much more.

Comic Book Origin Story

ComicBook.com: Let’s start off with what I like to call your comic book origin story. Do you remember if there was a certain comic series or creators that one, turned you into a comic book fan and two, inspired you to become a creator?

Curtis Clow: Yeah, I was always drawn to comics as a kid, but didn’t quite read anything monthly, just some random, probably Spider-Man or Wolverine issues. But once I was in my late teens and early 20s, I started getting into a lot of Image stuff, Rick Remender, I’m a huge fan of him and Robert Kirkman. These writers, I really look up to and are really inspirational with how successful they are.

Fantasy Themes

So looking at your catalog of comics, I saw fantasy seems to be a major theme in a lot of your projects. Can you discuss what all goes into making each one different and unique, so you’re not repeating yourself?

What I love is high concepts, so it’s always sci-fi or fantasy. And I guess to make each fantasy world unique, you have to have these world rules. Beastlands has rules where some people have these companion beasts and they’re like real-world beasts where they could die or get sick, but you have to make these world rules and stick by them when you’re in that world-building phase of writing.

Have you thought about expanding out of fantasy for any future projects?

Yeah, possibly. I love sci-fi as well, so definitely some sci-fi ideas besides fantasy, but I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll ever expand past that. It’d be fun to do creatively as a work-for-hire gig. But for my creator-owned stuff, these are my little babies that I love. You could always mix that stuff, mixing crime with fantasy and stuff like that. I think those are some cool ideas.

Image Comics Inspiration

So you said earlier that Image was an inspiration in the early days. You mentioned Remender and Kirkman, but what titles of theirs really spoke to you?

Oh, man, a lot of stuff. Remender, I just love all his stuff. Low, Deadly Class, Black Science, a lot of his creator-owned stuff, especially all his current books. Si Spurrier is another writer who really inspires me. His current book Step By Bloody Step and some of his older stuff. Coda, The Spire. Kirkman, obviously with his success with The Walking Dead and Invincible and everything he’s done at Skybound.

I remember when I got back into comics in the mid-2000s, I was checking out a lot of Remender’s creator-owned work. I’ve always enjoyed his books, especially his Marvel work with X-Force and Uncanny Avengers.

It’s cool how he used that Marvel stepping stone where now he just pretty much does exclusively creator-owned projects, but he really built up his name doing all that Marvel work. And I mean, now it’s hard to keep up. He’s so prolific. I was just reading The Scumbag and A Righteous Thirst For Vengeance, but it’s hard to keep up with it all.

Kickstarter Success

So you’ve had a lot of success funding your comments through Kickstarter. For people who may not be familiar with how much work goes into crowdfunding a comic series, can you give some examples of the time, effort, and work that goes into self-publishing?

Oh yeah. It’s a ton of work if you’re not familiar with it. I’ve been doing four Kickstarters a year, which is kind of crazy. Usually, people do maybe one a year, one every two years. I’ve done 15 Kickstarters now. They’ve all been successful. 14 of them for comics. One of them was for a soundtrack for Beastlands. We had an orchestra perform the soundtrack, but it’s a ton of work. Usually, they’re going to run for anywhere between 10 to 30 days. Usually, 30 days is the mark that they run for. So just during that 30 days, it’s pretty exhausting. You’re always checking updates. You’re checking the funding, making sure you hit your goal. I’ve been really fortunate where we built up a following on there where we hit the goal usually on the first day.

It’s a lot less stressful than if you’re just starting out, but it’s still a lot of work and always in your head space. And that’s just the first part of it. After you get the funding and get the money, that’s where the real work starts, where if you don’t have the book finished, then you have to work with the artist. You should already have all your scripts done, but then you have to pay the artist for all the art and all the work that they did. And then you have to order the books. And then these days you have lots of shipping delays. So sometimes the books take a lot longer than they used to get here if you’re printing overseas and such. And then all the shipping. The shipping’s probably the most intensive and the busiest work.

I still do all the shipping myself where I’m just packaging, touching every book, bagging, and boarding. I haven’t offhanded that yet, which I probably should, but maybe one day. For now, it’s all done by me, just to make sure it’s done right. Kickstarter is almost for the super fans, the high-end collectors. I want these books to feel like collector’s items. So I ship them on these nice comic boxes, everything bagged and board, signed by me. So it’s to make sure it gets there safe.

Have you learned any tricks of the trade as far as running Kickstarters?

Yeah, I’ve learned a ton. I’m still learning stuff. 15 Kickstarters in. Every Kickstarter, I’m trying new stuff. But I guess if you’re just starting out, definitely start small. If you’re making your first comic, don’t try to make an 80-issue comic. Start small on a miniseries. So if you’re funding that first issue, you have an attainable goal. But it’s really important just to build up that trust between you and your backers. That’s why they keep coming back to me, 15 Kickstarters because they trust me. They know the quality of the books. They like my stories and they know that I’m going to fulfill them. So if you can build up that trust and get those returning backers where you’re putting out monthly updates, you’re sharing the progress of the book.

If anything does go wrong, just be completely open with it. It’s normal these days to have shipping delays. I think these backers … Like I said, it’s such a positive and cool place on the internet when there could be so much hate online, but Kickstarter seems like such a positive place. And they totally understand that as an indie creator, if you run into any issues with shipping delays or anything like that.

Beastlands Soundtrack

You mentioned that one of the Kickstarters was for a soundtrack for Beastlands. Is that another one of your passions? And how exactly did you decide to come up with a soundtrack for it? Did you make the music yourself or did you outsource that as well?

That’s actually a crazy story. I’m not that musically gifted or anything. I don’t know much about it. I just love soundtracks when it comes to movies, video games, and anime. So I never really thought I would have a soundtrack for one of my comic series. It’s kind of like, you don’t really see that often. But during one of the Kickstarters, a composer named Nolan Markey, lives close to my area and he’s worked on Star Wars and a bunch of other cool stuff. And he was just really excited about Beastlands. He saw it on Kickstarter and he just contacted me about making a theme song. So we worked together and we had the Budapest Orchestra perform it. And it’s on YouTube, if you type in Beastlands‘ theme song and it turned out amazing. 

Everybody loved it. So then we put out a survey and were looking at doing a full soundtrack album for it. We did that back in February and it did well. So now he’s writing all the music. I work with him and give him my opinions on it. And then this summer we’ll have the Budapest Orchestra perform that again. And we’ll be making a vinyl, CD, digital version, and everything. So just super lucky that the right people saw it and that he wanted to make music for it. And it just all turned out amazing.

Beastlands Description

For fans who are unfamiliar with Beastlands, what’s your elevator pitch on the project?

Beastlands is a fantasy adventure story in a world where some people have companion beasts, and it’s about a boy that has to save his beast and friends before a king tries to execute them all.

And that’s one of your successful Kickstarters. I saw Dark Horse is collecting the first volume of it. Is that right?

So we’ve already done, besides the music for Beastlands, we’ve done up to issue seven for Kickstarter, for the Beastlands single issues. And now Dark Horse is coming along and they’re going to collect issues one through five to put it in a trade paperback for us. And that’s the first time we’ve ever had a collected version of Beastlands. So it’s exciting.

Dark Horse Collaboration

How did the talks with Dark Horse begin when they decided to come aboard and release the paperback?

They contacted me back way before the pandemic and then we just had to pitch it up to them still. I think there are a lot of companies now looking at Kickstarter books and seeing that there’s actually quality stuff on there. I think people would think of it differently where they would think it might be less quality years ago, but now you have all these big-name creators using Kickstarter. And you have a lot of people like me who are getting their start through Kickstarter. So these companies realize that there’s good stuff on there and that they don’t have to fund the whole book because you already have the art finished. You already funded it yourself and you can hit a completely new market by going to bookstores and comic shops.

Kickstarter is such a small and different audience in those markets. We’ve kind of pitched up the chain there still. And I guess it had a lot of upside. Hopefully, they think it’s a good book, and it’s already funded. So everything just worked out. And it’s a fully creator-owned deal. And so we still have all the rights. We’re still Kickstarting singles issue by issue. And hopefully, if sales go well, they’ll want to publish volume two as well.

Work-For-Hire

Did that help you build up your work-for-hire jobs as well?

Yeah, definitely. I’ve heard that advice a lot. If you want to make comics, you just have to make them. Marvel and DC aren’t going to hire you right off the bat if you’ve never made a comic. And same with these big publishers, like Dark Horse and Image, they’re not going to hire you if you’ve never made a comic. So you do just have to make stuff. And we’re so lucky to live in a time with crowdfunding and Kickstarter, where you can make comics and not be totally in debt doing it. So I think that’s just super fortunate to live in this time where I can build up my name and make these creator-owned comics that I love. And I’ve really built a big fan base there and it definitely helps.

You have publishers like Dark Horse or Image now looking for books there. It’s so cool that we can also hit that direct market and get validated by these big publishers. And then I have done a lot of freelance comic writing work, where they then also see my creator-owned stuff that I’ve been on Kickstarter and that leads to jobs as well.

Beastlands Ending

Do you already have an end planned for Beastlands? And if so, how many issues do you see it running for?

So right now, we’re up to issue seven. We’re for sure going to get to issue 10. That’s the end of this first story with this first main antagonist, but I’ve outlined up to issue 25 if we could get there. It is a pretty lofty goal for a small indie series, but we have the support on Kickstarter, and everything’s been going great there. And as long as my co-creator, Jo Mi-Gyeong, as long as she wants to keep drawing it. It takes years at a time to do these volumes. So if she wants to keep drawing it, I would love to get to maybe issue 25. But yeah, I already have an ending in mind for it.

How did you link up with your collaborators?

I just saw Jo’s work, I think on Twitter. I saw some commission pages she had done. And little did I know, she actually had never drawn a comic before. It was just commissions. She went off pages and I contacted her and I already had the idea for Beastlands, but I just wanted to see if she was interested in drawing it. She took a little time to think about it. And luckily, she said yes, because she totally makes the comic with her art style. She’s perfect for the story. And she puts so much into it.

And then my letterer, Toben Racicot, I had worked with him on a different series and of course, he letters most of my stuff. Just great work as well.

Future Projects

Lastly, do you have any other creator-owned work or work-for-hire projects in the pipeline?

Lots of stuff in the pipeline. As a writer, you have extra time to always get new pitches going, always working on new series. Your mind never stops working. Even though you haven’t finished the series, you always want to start writing something new. So I have some new creator-owned stuff that I’m pitching to some publishers. So maybe we’ll get on Kickstarter, if these publishers don’t accept it. And then I have a few freelance comic writing jobs that I’m working on now, but nothing that’s been announced yet. So a lot is in the works though.