Here’s the thing folks: Mad Art Lab contributor, Maki, has had a Hell of a Year. In addition to almost being beard-napped by angry space gnomes (long story), he was a contestant and FINALIST on Penny Arcade’s reality web-series Stripsearch!, where he battled 11 other contestants (to the death? Wait that can’t be right) to win a bunch of money and move to Seattle, like a jerk. If he had won I would have been sad because I’d be stuck in Brooklyn alone without any Makis to drink with. So that’s why I bribed the judges to make him lose. I feel bad about that, but only a little bit.
Anyway, Maki did not win Stripsearch. But the thing is, the comic he created for the finals is really good! (Oh yeah, spoiler alert, he didn’t win). So that’s why he created this Kickstarter to raise funds to get his new comic, Sufficiently Remarkable, off the ground. (Make sure you watch Maki’s video there, because it’s hysterical and features a pipe and a pineapple and LOTS of glasses. Also a cat.)
But here’s the thing, as I was preparing to write this very article, I was opening up links to get ready and I went to Maki’s Kickstarter page to grab the link and… well, how about that. It’s fully funded? Crap. I wish I had known sooner that it had gone live, I could have been promoting it for the last few weeks… What’s that? It only went live today? Huh…
I see.
I was about to pack it all in. I thought “Well, Maki’s attained his goal of $10,000 already… oh wait, it’s at $11,110 $11,220 $11,655 now… Anyway, I can’t really be all that helpful at this point.”
I mean, of course you can still donate and get all sorts of really cool things like a custom avatar or a limited edition “Erotic Heights’ scarf (wait, what?)
But then I heard a voice. And the voice was muffled because it wasn’t actually a voice. It was me reading an email from Maki on the Super Secret Mad Art Lab Backchannel where he basically said:
“THERE ARE STRETCH GOALS! STREEEEEEEEEETCH GOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAALS!”
And so I said to Maki, I said, “Oh hey, yeah. I can write about them. Sure.”
So here’s the idea:
Maki has already hit his goal of $10,000 in one day. Less than one day? Dammit.
Okay, so what happens at this point is that there are rewards for going above and beyond the original goal.
Rewards like:
At this point, every person who donates at or above $75 gets a commemorative print.
At the $15,000 mark, everyone at or above the $125 mark gets a patch and a lapel pin (Hey, Maki wears lapel pins!)
and on and on up until the $100,000 mark at which point Maki will shave his entire head, beard and all (it hurts just to type that) at PAX.
I’ve also been given authorization you tell you that Maki is working on “collaborations and fun side projects for the fans” (That is a direct quote even though he told me to ‘hint’ at it.)
I’m gonna see if one of the stretch goals can be something like “Maki takes Brian out for a nice dinner and then they get drunk and send pictures of them rubbing each other’s beards to all donors above the $500,000 mark”
I think that would be really nice.
So please go donate more money to Maki. Because I want him to take me out to dinner. Oh and make really great comics for us all to enjoy.
