We’re just starting out, so we don’t get asked any questions frequently yet. These are ones we think people would ask.

I heard you talking about raising money for real-world change efforts.  As a comic book company?  It’s all a little confusing.
We’re still figuring it out, too.  When I got started on this, I thought a crowd-funded comic book could go on to raise money for one of the many cool projects that are trying to find legs everywhere.  For example, check out Growth Industry, our short about the fantastic Urban Gardening efforts going on in Rochester, over in the sidebar.

Of course, the more we looked around at other crowd-funded comix projects and planned our own work, the more it seemed like whatever money we were likely to raise would fund us making more comix, if we were lucky. Long term, we want to keep this project as connected to the real work as we are.

Revolution sounds scary and violent.  Are you guys into the smashy-smashy?
Good lord.  No, not really so much, because who actually is, besides fools and psychopaths?  No, by Revolution, we don’t necessarily mean that stuff- we mean getting real about the enormous, fundamental transformations we have to make ASAP, throwing ourselves into them with joy and creativity and fearlessness, not being worried about the mess and the stumbling blocks along the way.

Some of those stumbling blocks can look pretty scary.  We’re operating under conditions of a total, open rupture of institutional legitimacy, and it would be nice if we had more acknowledgement of that from people in our institutions.  Eric Schneiderman, thank you.  Everyone else, please get in gear (or if you are, show it, ’cause I’m sorry, but I ain’t seeing it).  It doesn’t have to be punitively; in fact it’s probably better to take a different approach.  But we’ve got to change direction.

So by Revolution, we mean creating a world so different from the one we’re used to, that this one is hard for kids of the future to even imagine.  Just as slavery was once routine, we think a lot of things that are routine and accepted today will be completely unthinkable in any kind of working future.  Whether we manage to navigate to that future is the open question in front of us.

As far as the rough parts, Iceland and the revolutions of the Scandinavian countries strike us as admirably violence-free templates for revolution, and we’d love to see things transform as peacefully as possible.  Not that we have all the answers.  All we have is a hunger to look for them together.  And there’s a lot of imaginative, practical work in the right direction already.

We know what this moment is about.  This ought to be easy.  Don’t know that it will be.  But it ought to be.

This global revolution stuff ain’t no joke.  Just who do you think you are, making play-make-believe about it?  

That’s a really good point, and one we think about a lot, which is why it’s a Frequently Imagined Question.  Not only are we out there in it ourselves to one degree or another, some of our friends are even closer to some of the most troubling situations in the streets of Ferguson and elsewhere. You can feel the galvanization when they report back.

So yes, it feels like asking for a privileged, plum assignment to get on the internet and be like “hey everyone, will you help us make superhero comix about global revolution?  It’ll be totally fun!”

Why don’t you go eat a bag of dicks?

Not the greatest plan, but thanks for asking.