Winner of the 2013 Herblock award; 2015 Society of Illustrators Silver Medal recipient; 2015 Pulitzer finalist.

Hey! Check out my Kickstarter campaign, 25 YEARS OF TOMORROW!

ALSO: please consider joining SPARKY'S LIST!


READ THE LATEST CARTOON Mondays at Daily Kos and Tuesdays at The Nation!

If you missed the big Kickstarter, you can still pre-order the book here. The number of pre-orders we get in the next few weeks will be a big factor in determining how many extra books over the Kickstarter totals we order from the printer, so definitely don’t assume it will always be available down the road—if you’re interested, you should get your order in now.

I am astonished. I could not have imagined a better outcome to this campaign, and I thank all of you sincerely for this extraordinary show of support. Right before we launched, I said to a friend — okay fine, I said to Eddie Vedder —”I feel like I’m about to take a stage dive, and I don’t know if the audience is there to catch me or not.”

Well, you were.

Many, many thanks to the Make That Thing team — Holly Rowland, Sara McHenry, David Malki, Eliza Rose and last but decidedly not least, my patient and meticulous production artist Christopher Kallini. I literally could not have done this without them.

Thanks also to everyone who donated rewards to help get the campaign off the ground: all the guys in Pearl Jam, of course (with special gratitude to Ed, who really went above and beyond on this thing), Bill Griffith, John Sayles and Maggie Renzi, Daniel Handler, and Andy Fischer. And special thanks to Jacques Lamarre at the Twain House for agreeing to host the book launch event.

And to Michael Moore, who came in at the six-hour mark with a matching-dollar donation to push the campaign over $300K—can’t express what an amazing surprise that was.

And the fine people at Kickstarter, who were kind enough to feature my campaign on their front page for a couple of weeks.

A special shoutout to John Scalzi, Gil Roth, Dave Gilson, John Fugelsang, Matt Ramos, Judd Apatow, Kelly Carlin, Greg Pak, Matt Bors, Seth Green, Peter Sagal, Duncan Black, Steve Silberman, Umair Haque, Richard Kadrey, Michele Catalano, Heidi MacDonald, John Dankosky, Gerard Way, Markos Moulitsas, Nicole Sandler, and everyone else who went out of their way to help me boost signal and get the word out over the course of the campaign. And apologies to everyone I’m forgetting, it’s been a long, mostly sleep-deprived month!

Most of all, thanks to all of you who pledged to this Kickstarter and not only helped me realize the dream of publishing these books, but pushed it so far beyond that initial goal that this campaign became a life-changing moment, not to mention a huge statement about the popularity of alt-weekly cartooning in an era of apparent decline and editorial indifference. The enthusiasm of your response means the world.

ADDING: If you’re just finding out about the KS, as some people apparently are—the campaign is over but we will be offering books for sale by pre-order, starting next week. I’ll post a link here as soon as the page is set up.

Some initial thoughts on this long journey, as the Kickstarter campaign heads into the final few days..

It was October 2013, and I was a guest speaker on The Nation’s yearly fundraising/seminar cruise, which that year went up the Eastern coastline and had a stop in Quebec City. I disembarked with my wife and kid and we spent the day wandering around, at one point stopping in a bookstore where I saw Taschen’s two volume Mid-Century Advertising set — a beautifully produced, 700 page, two volume hardcover set, in a slipcase.

So fast forward to early 2014. I’ve spent many idle hours browsing through the Taschen books, which have become a permanent fixture on my desk. And at some point this idea starts to creep into my mind: wouldn’t it be cool to do something like that for This Modern World? Something like the Complete Far Side, or the Complete Calvin & Hobbes? I started working on the strip in the late 80s, but 1990 was the moment that it started to gain any traction, so that’s what I’ve always considered the starting point—which makes 2015 the 25th anniversary. And I always said, if I was going to go through all the work involved in a Kickstarter, I was gonna do it for something big.

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The Kickstarter has been amazing and exhausting, and we are in the home stretch now. If you want in on this, you should act soon!

As I’m writing this my 25 YEARS OF TOMORROW Kickstarter has raised almost $189,000 with 18 days to go. So, yeah, I’d have to say this campaign has gone pretty well so far. Still hoping to hit more stretch goals of course, such as the once-unimaginable $250K tattoo. I’m overwhelmed by this show of support, and really happy that the people at Make That Thing who have been helping me shape this monster for more than a year are going to actually see some payoff on their investment of time and energy.

The campaign has been written about in Mother Jones, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and Inc. Magazine. The latter has a headline which reads “Anyone Who Says Print is Dead Hasn’t Seen This Kickstarter Campaign.” (After several years in the publishing wilderness, u I am genuinely delighted to be a poster child for the ongoing vitality of print.) There’s also a long podcast with me here—I’ve only heard bits, but I sound pretty coherent, especially considering how tired I was (and am!).

Well that was quite a rollout. We’re at almost $115K as I write this, which is fantastic news for so many reasons. I’ve still got a few stretch goals to go before I’m splashing around in a swimming pool full of money, Scrooge McDuck-style, but what this means is (a) we can give the book some upgrades I was really hoping for, specifically the lenticular cover and the cartoons from 2015, and (b) we’ve got space to breathe. I’m working with the amazing people at Make That Thing, and I kind of insisted we cut our margins to the bone to keep the initial goal as low as possible, which didn’t give us a lot of room for error. Happily it’s a moot point now—if we have cost overruns or other unanticipated expenses, it won’t have to come out of my pocket now. So that’s pretty great. Especially given that we’re a mere 36 hours in. I thought I was going to spend the entire month staring at the numbers, waiting to cross the threshold—in my wildest dreams, I did not expect this to happen in the first day. Thanks to all who pledged, and if you haven’t done so, please consider it! If this thing keeps on, I might actually have to get a Sparky tattoo. Of course, if we reach that funding level, I’ll be delighted to commemorate the moment.

The Kickstarter campaign for 25 YEARS OF TOMORROW is now live!

UPDATE: we’ve reached our basic funding goal 21.5 hours after launch! This is amazing — this book will now be a reality, thanks to everyone who pledged.

Of course there are still stretch goals ….!