Not even a day into its Kickstarter campaign, Top Cow’s Cyber Force has already raised more than $20,000 of its $75,000 goal.
Announced two weeks ago, the resurrection of the series coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Marc Silvestri comic that launched Top Cow Productions. The company hopes to raise enough money through the crowd-funding website to make the first five issues of the reimagined series available for free, both digitally and in print.
“While most everybody uses Kickstarter to fund a project in order to build it and then sell it, we at Top Cow are going to use the funds to build Cyber Force and give it away — for free!” Silvestri told Hero Complex at the time of the announcement. “Plus we’re not talking just one issue but five full issues of the comic. And it won’t be free just digitally, but also as a full-color printed comic that will be available at any participating comic shop. So for people that want to read Cyber Force digitally — yes, including torrent sites — it’s free. And for anyone wanting to hold a traditional comic in their hands to read it — it’s still free.”
“We’ve tried giving away free comics to induce people to start reading for almost 10 years now, with scattered results,” Top Cow President Hawkins explained to Comic Book Resources. “We’ve participated in Free Comic Book Day every year as well. [Previous Top Cow Publisher] Filip [Sablik] and I spent a lot of time talking about how we needed to get people to get into the habit of reading comics, and how, specifically, to convert free to paid or free to continued reading through ad-based or however. Long story short is, we decided to try something new. [The Kickstarter campaign] came about as a series of discussions over a long period of time.”
To entice donors, Top Cow is offering a number of incentives, from Kickstarter-exclusive variant covers and signed issues to limited-edition prints and hardcover collections. The campaign ends Aug. 17.
