The Garlicks Is Cookin’

Lea Hernandez has less than 48 hours to go in the campaign to raise money for her project The Garlicks on Indiegogo.


Images © 2012 and characters TM Lea Hernandez.

So yeah, I’m putting up this post kind-of late, but that’s no reflection on my enthusiasm; I also figured, maybe wrongly, that promoting the project towards the end rather than towards the beginning might be better. Anyway...

The Garlicks is the tale of young Pandora Garlick and her family. Pan’s mom is a human who runs a butcher shop. Pan’s dad is a vampire barista. Pan’s baby sister, Ham, turns into a fishbat — that’s right: a fishbat — while Pan can’t turn into anything at all. But she can and does make comics inspired by her crazy life.



You can help Lea bring this project to fruition by chipping in as little as $1. For just $5 you’ll get a wallpaper image for your computer desktop and acknowledgment as a backer on the Garlicks website. For $10, in addition to the acknowledgment, you’ll get
a PDF of the first Garlicks book and a fridge magnet. For $25 you’ll get all that plus a published softcover of Book One with your name in it recognizing you as a backer — 60 full-color pages with an introduction from Jill Thompson, the divine creator of Magic Trixie (reviewed here back in 2009) and Scary Godmother. Even better? Starting at $15 every contributor gets either a print of Ham the fishbat, as seen below, or one of Astro City writer/creator Kurt Busiek eating a bug. For $60, Lea will include a custom sketch of Kurt eating a bug of your choice. I can tell you that Kurt Busiek only eats bugs for a good cause.



When I relaunched my ill-fated magazine Comicology some dozen years ago, Lea provided one of the second first issue’s two great covers and three great interviews. (The other Q&As were with Bruce Timm and Jeph Loeb; I also talked to Stan Sakai for a feature story on Usagi Yojimbo and Kris Dresen for a piece on Manya. Timm did the other cover. I’ll have a small number of copies of that issue for sale here eventually.) Lea was a treat ’n’ a half to jaw with, and to my delight when I reconnected with her over Twitter this past summer I discovered that she was prepping a new series of all-ages graphic novels — looking better than anything I’d ever seen from her before, with a neat premise, drawn in an even more minimalist style reminiscent of Andi Watson.



The Garlicks apparently had an earlier campaign through Kickstarter that generated some controversy within the larger context of crowdfunding and comics. I don’t know much about that; as I’ve said here before, the last decade or so found me sadly but necessarily outside the comics industry and ignorant of much about today’s scene in cyberspace too. What I do know is that Lea is a talented lady and has plenty of people in her corner hoping to read a copy of The Garlicks Book One of However Many She Wants to Make. I have no qualms about pledging what I could for this.

Lea’s not attempting to live off donations while daydreaming nifty ideas but rather actively working on this project and planning to use the Indiegogo funds to publish it in an affordable format. You’re paying a premium for the pride and pleasure of getting it into the hands of more people.




Related: Blam’s Mags • Braids of Glory • Bedtimes and Broomsticks