The story behind the crowdfunding decision

We’ve had some questions as to the story behind our decision to try crowdfunding for the new volume (by the way, please help fund us!). Why we lost the magazine support (“Kulturtidskriftstöd”) from the Arts Council. So here’s the story:

The previous CBK crew (ca 2012-2014) had this idea of publishing every other volume of CBA as a stand-alone graphic novel with one creator doing the entire book. The first one was CBA vol 23: All Saints by Marcel Ruiters, published in 2013.

In November of 2014, that crew didn’t work anymore for various reasons, and more or less decided to shut down CBK. One of the crew members who didn’t want it to die went to the comics school to invite anyone from there who would be interested in taking over to come to a meeting. They also made a general invitation/call for help. So a bunch of people from the school and some others (like one of the original founders who had left a few years previously) came to this crisis meeting.

Because of the abrupt end to the former crew, they left some loose ends for the new one to tidy up. One of those were the publication of the last few graphic novel volumes (vol 29, 31 and 33, the last one of which came out in 2016).

The thing is that CBA had had this “kulturtidskriftstöd” since 2005(?), and when we applied again for 2016, we got rejected. The explanation was that CBA had turned into something that was less of a magazine, and they thought we should apply for litterature support instead, for the separate issues as separate books.

So we tried that, but with no success. Another problem is that the litterature support is applied after the fact, so you still need to have the money for printing etc before hand. So we really wanted to get the “kulturtidskriftstöd” back. After a meeting with a representative for the Arts Council, we thought we had understood what to do to get it back; we stopped with the graphic novel volumes and returned to a pure anthology like it was before, with 4 issues/year.

We thought that it’d be a one year step back, but that now we had made amends and solved the problem. But no. Another rejection. This time because we were “too much of an anthology and not enough of a magazine”. Which was kind of a shock since the difference between now and all those years when we got the support was negligible.

We will make another try in the application for 2018, to add more text material that’s relevant to the subjects we’re working with, and to the comics scene that we’re a part of. It’s an ongoing process and a balance between what we want to do and what our readers want and what might give us money, and we may end up in some other direction along the way.  We’ll stay true to our ideals while trying to adapt and then we’ll see what works out.

And in the meantime we still need to finance this year’s publications (and rent, somehow), so now we’re trying out crowdfunding as an alternative.

So now you know a bit more about the current situation, along with some hints of where we might be going in the futurte. If you want to be part of the crowdfunding, go to the Indiegogo campaign page.