MY NEW PATREON PAGE/EMAILS OF THE WEEK
Loading...PATREON!! HO!!
Extremely excited to announce I have a new Patreon page set up. It’s essentially like Kickstarter, but not for just one project. It’s for your ongoing output of goodness! You can donate as little as $1 per month!!
This vid explains it well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH-IDF809fQ
If the page is a success, I’ll be taking less freelance work, and get back to what I do best!!
Here’s my sexy new page:
http://www.patreon.com/user?u=44928
LETTERS/EMAILS OF THE WEEK:
Keith:
I think you are really doing this subscription thing right. I’m not interested in seeing strips “a day early”, but I am interested in the other cartoons, sidelights on how you make a living at this, and other issues that you bring up in the newsletter.
Life as a black man today is one of the issues that I feel is very hard for someone like me to truly understand. Today, when I started Black Eye for the White Guy, I noticed that you had a nice drawing of my striped shirt, and obviously had looked in my refrigerator, so I was kind of expecting some light tips on a complete fashion and lifestyle overhaul. However, the whole sequence was seriously well done, and the last panel was painful for me to read.
If I’m on a jury, I will have this strip pasted in my heart and stand up when needed and not sit passively in tacit approval of this kind of situation.
Sorry if this sounds kind of fan-boyish and west coast – latte – liberal. I just wanted you to know that you have a wide audience and I think you are doing a great job. I read the Funny Times and you are always a highlight.
D.
—————————
Love all your work
R.
After thinking about it for quite a while — I’m notoriously tight with whatever dollars I can imprison — I decided that Keef deserved more of my support than just my enjoying his work and passing it around.
So — I decided to contribute $100 a month for one year through Patreon. To my nasty surprise, though, they charge a five percent cut for ‘administrative costs’. While I understand that they have expenses and I applaud their efforts in helping the art community, I’m not comfortable with them taking sixty of my dollars that I’d rather go to Keef, Mrs. Keef, and the Dwarf Keefs. That — at least to me — is significant folding money. YOU got sixty beans YOU don’t need?
So I canceled the Patreon signup, and sent the first month through PayPal.
But something else bothered me. It almost feels like I have something I can hold over Keef’s head. “If you publish something I don’t like, I can withhold it”. AND it feels patronizing in a way I DON’T care for, like I’m giving Keef an allowance as if he’s got a paper route or something.
So I sent the whole years’ worth in one smash. I’m not saying that my way is the right way for everyone, but it feels the most right to me. And Keef can use the extra sixty smacks to take Mrs. Keef out to lunch, for art supplies, for gas money. Or for ‘administrative costs’.
An expansion on the above views, please.
I support Keef as the purest of American artists. What he does is not only unique within the comics universe (and remember, please, that comics are an accepted art form) but in the realm of protecting and practicing one of the five First Amendment rights, the freedom of speech.
Recently, Fred Phelps of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church died. Phelps and his congregation were/are chimps, screaming and flinging their hate feces at other people. They make one ashamed of the human race. What they are teaching to their children to me qualifies as child molestation. As a proud veteran, seeing them protesting at a military funeral and dragging the American flag in the dirt appalls me.
But in a perverse way, the only positive is that this country’s greatness is framed by the fact that these bizarre people are protected by the same Bill of Rights that covers us all. Phelps’ whoring of the protections afforded by our system of laws simply makes those protections stand out in sharper relief.
Instead , it’s just necessary to put Westboro Baptist Church in its proper context; they are aberrations, freaks, and probably not dangerous. Instead of greeting their spewing, smug, sanctimonious hatred with anger, it is MUCH more effective to laugh at them, and then dismiss them as irrelevant. And while I have grave doubts about the likelihood of a human afterlife, I rather enjoy the image of a sweating, groveling Phelps listening to the Big Kahuna point out that HIS Son spent His entire adult life hanging out with his twelve male fishing buddies.
Artists like our Mr. Knight lead in this fight. I may not agree with ALL of Keef’s work, and I don’t, but after seeing his work blossom and his voice grow year after year, I’m delighted to give him a helping hand; and I remember that Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Dali, Steinbeck, Schulz, King, Hopper, Lloyd — virtually any artist have done commercial work.
Yes, it’s my hope that Keef’s work will become recognized for its merit, and it will become as popular as it deserves to be, and supports him and the Keef Konspiracy so that he’s able to do it and nothing else, but the fact that he believes so passionately in his work demands and deserves our attention.
And, I feel, our support.
Yeah!! What he said!!