The PopCulteer
October 3, 2025

This week we’re going to talk a little bit about Kickstarter and it’s use to fund comic book projects. Before I get deep on that, let me tell you about a very cool upcoming project that collects, colors and updates a book I first reviewed in this blog over sixteen years ago.

I’m going to recycle bits of my original post because I did a pretty good job explaining the concept back then.

Brian Bolland’s The Actress and the Bishop Coming Back In Print In Color

You can go HERE to pre-save the Kickstarter campaign and be notified for a newly-colored collection of Brian Bolland’s classic comic strip.

Bolland is veteran British comic book artist, best known for illustrating “Batman: The Killing Joke” (written by the legendary Alan Moore), and the ground-breaking maxi-series “Camelot 3000.” He’s spent most of his career as a cover artist, applying his meticulous pen to such characters as Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Judge Dredd and The Invisibles, among others.

Created originally as one plate of a limited-edition art portfolio, Bolland’s strip “The Actress And The Bishop,” ran as three-page installments in the first two issues of the anthology comic, A1 in the late 1980s. The third strip, a 17-page epic, was drawn in the early 1990s, but remained unpublished until a collection of Bolland’s work was released as a hardcover nearly twenty years ago.

“The Actress And The Bishop,” taking it’s title from an obscure (to the US) bit of British slang, tells, in rhyming couplets, the story of the unlikely pairing of an elderly Anglican Bishop, and his beautiful lady of the evening (“Actress” is a very polite British euphemism for prostitute).

The rhymes and stories are clever, but the real star is Bolland’s ultra-detailed art. This is eye candy so good you can actually gain weight looking at it. The level of detail is just amazing. The fact that Bolland draws some of the most beautiful women in comics is a bonus. You don’t get to be the cover artist for Wonder Woman by drawing ugly women.

“The Actress And The Bishop” is a unique, very British, work of art. It’s poetry. It’s comics. It’s drawing. It’s entertaining, charming and engaging. I heavily recommended it back in the summer of 2009, and now that Bolland is coloring it and adding a more recent installment, I’m pretty much on board instantly.

Let me quote form the campaign:

Brian Bolland’s amazing The Actress and the Bishop in a Deluxe Collectors form -gathering all the strips in FULL COLOUR FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER plus prose and illustrations. Available with a companion black and white volume, showcasing Brian’s incredible linework.

A beautiful Hardback with gold foil accentuated dust jacket, printed endpapers, coloured head and tail bands, ribbon and signed – this is the ultimate collection of Brian Bolland’s Actress and the Bishop.

Featuring the strips The Actress and the Bishop Go Boating, The Actress and the Bishop Throw a Party (originally printed in A1), The Actress and the Bishop and the Thing in the Shed (from Bolland Strips!) and finally The Actress and the Bishop Go to the Seaside (printed in Shift Anthology volume 2 issue 5).

Also rounded off with two prose stories with spot illustrations from Brian – The Actress and the Bishop Go Shopping and The Actress and the Bishop Take Up Sport, plus pin ups, covers, preliminary art and an interview.

Brian is colouring the strips over the coming months, for an estimated delivery in November.

The collection I wrote about is long out of print and commanding collector prices. This is a great chance to get an exquisitely beautiful collection of comics from one of the finest illustrators of the last century.

About that black and white linework available in the companion volume, I originally wrote, “It’s in black-and-white, which shows off Bolland’s artwork in sparkling clarity.”

The Actress and The Bishop is definitely not for kids. The Actress spends much of the comic book sans clothing. That’s not really a negative. Any fan of offbeat comics and fantastic art should seek this out. Go HERE to be notified the day that the campaign goes live, which should be any day now.

Speaking of Comics On Kickstarter

You may have noticed that I haven’t been plugging too many comic book projects over on Kickstarter (or other crowdfunding sites) lately. There are a few reasons for that.

I’m still supporting a few of my favorite creators, folks like Anthony Stokes, Austin Hough, Karl Kesel and Jason Pell, and I’ve been keeping up with a few reprints of Golden Age classics, but I have almost completely stopped supporting campaigns by folks who aren’t known to me.

For a while there, I was taking more chances, snapping up books by more unknown talents and looking for fun, new kinds of work.

But it got to be too costly. See, I hate to read comics digitally. I literally will only do it if I’m writing a review and that’s the absolute only way to read a comic. If this makes me sound like I’m older than sin and out of touch…well, you may have a point.

But I remain defiantly within my old fartedom to the point where I will never pay money for a digital comic book again. I have Myasthenia Gravis. Trying to work a touchscreen is torture for me. I look like a bear trying to solve a Rubik’s cube.

And reading on a computer screen is what I do for work all day. It’s not relaxing to me. If I’m reading a comic book…something I’ve been doing for going on sixty years, I want to hold it in my hands.

So I have to go with print versions of the comics I support, and the prices on those have skyrocketed, along with the postage. I understand and accept that it costs more to make physical comics now, but the cost has gone up so much that I have to be pickier about what I support.

Most of the time, a single comic book, after the postage is added in, will set me back more than twenty bucks on Kickstarter. And I can’t just gamble that on an unknown quantity.

With the creators I support, I have no problem paying enough to cover the shipping costs, printing costs and a decent wage to the creative team. But if I’ve never heard of the artist or writer, and the concept is sorta stupid and you’re asking me to cough up over twenty bucks for a print copy…I’ll take a pass.

What’s worse is when you somehow get on somebody’s email list and get inundated with plugs for campaigns where, in many cases, they don’t even bother listing the names of the writer or artist.

Another reason I’ve stopped gambling on new comic book projects is that my bets haven’t all come in. Some show up and just aren’t very good. Others take their sweet damn time showing up.

ZOOP! is a competitor to Kickstarter. They run campaigns for larger collections for books, with deluxe features and first-rate production and printing. Often their books are in support of a great cause like supporting victims of war and wildfires and such. When you support a ZOOP! project, you feel like you’re donating to a charitable cause.

The main reason for that is that you’re lucky if your book shows up within two years.

I have supported three books via Zoop! The first one showed up 26 months after the campaign closed. The latest one is closing in on the two-year mark with no publication date in site. It was supposed to have been delivered in April, 2024.  The one in the middle showed up about a month ago. It was a shock to me because it had been so long since the campaign ended that I totally forgot I had ordered it.

In fact, I still don’t remember ordering it. When it did finally appear in my mailbox, it seemed like the first time I’d ever heard of it.

There are other things that bug me about crowdfunded comics. I realize that this next one is a bit of a necessary evil, and without it the creators would be leaving money on the table, but I personally despise variant covers.

And I find it pathetic that so many of the variant covers are “naughty” with gratuitous nudity. I’m not a prude by any means. I wouldn’t have plugged The Actress and the Bishop if I were. Don’t get me wrong…I’m a huge fan of gratuitous nudity, but living in a world where real women are naked all over the internet for free, it’s beyond my understanding why somebody would pay ten or twenty dollars extra for a comic book just because it’s got a poorly-drawn tit on the cover.

Some of these artists draw like they’ve never seen a naked woman in real life. it’s weird as hell to me. Some of these girls don’t even look human. What manner of meat-beatery be this? I mean…how hard up are the people buying these things?

But I can’t blame the folks making the comics for indulging in a little softpore cornography if it puts more money in their pockets. This is more just me being cranky in my old age…and really embarrassed for the younger generation.

It strikes me as weird that, in a time where raw boobage is abundant and universally free to anybody with a smartphone, folks will still plunk down money for a crudely-draw nude chick on a comic book cover.

Another annoyance is something that’s happened to me three times in the last two years.  I have Kickstarted books that became fully-funded, then changed their publishing plans and delivered books to comic book stores months before they were delivered to Kickstarter supporters. That might’ve been the biggest thing that soured me on crowdfunding.

Anyway, that’s my venting about Kickstarter and comics for now. I’ve get to get up early in the morning to go yell at some clouds.

Now, as far as using Kickstarter for other kinds of projects…the tariffs have pretty well killed off most crowdfunded action figures, but non-sport trading cards are still going strong, and I’ll be telling you about some of those in a week or two.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for fresh content every day and all our regular features.