Crowdfunding Spotlight for November 22nd 2024
The Devil's Gate #1
Writers-Silas Dunn & CJ Patereau
Artist-Gerald Von Stoddard
Colorist-Lorenzo Scaramella
I’ve said it before but it always is good to repeat. I love finding new creators on crowdfunding platforms to check out. With The Devil’s Gate I am unfamiliar with the entire team, but the initial thumbnail art made me want to look further into the project. They say don’t judge a book by its cover but we all know that’s exactly what we do. And in comics we often get more than one cover to judge. I am a big proponent of letting the interior artist do the “A” cover of a comic because then the reader gets an honest look at what is in store for that series. If you believe enough in the interior artist to do the work for the series let them be the showcase for the cover as well. With this comic that is what the team did, and that image(the one above) is what drew me in.
The creators of this series describe it as a western noir that mixes The Last of Us, Blood Meridian, with the pulp noir aspects of Kill or Be Killed. That mix sounds like a bloody good time to me. Looking a little deeper the series takes place in 1970 Arizona where our main character John Glass, an old west outlaw, is bent on avenging the death of his brother. What he finds when you goes to the town of Heaven’s Gate is that a group of ex-confederates are responsible and that there is a sinister cult pulling the strings.
The art is done by Gerald Von Stoddard with colors by Lorenzo Scaramella. Gerald looks to be a fairly new part of the indie comics space, being the writer/artist of the new series Immortal Coil(issue 2 is on Kickstarter right now!). While Lorenzo has had some previous work across the indie space as well as comics published with Aftershock. Both men seem to be great at what they do. The art, as I said above, is what got me interested in the campaign to start. See for yourself with some preview pages below I grabbed from the campaign page.
What kinds of goodies can you expect for your pledge? Well as is to be expected there is a digital edition of the comic available. Also the team has created 3 covers for the comic from artist Gerald Von Stoddard, Hernan Gonzalez & Juan Manuel, and Huy Dinh(gallery below). Backers can also add on signatures, producer credits, and trading cards to their plegde.
The Devil’s Gate looks to be a really cool start to a western comic done by a team of newer comic creators. The fact that the project looks to be of such high quality is a good sign to me. As always I recommend checking out the campaign page to go deeper in-depth with the project, and hope that you all end up backing it.
Thank you all for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed the read. If you want to support this Substack, and me there are a few ways you can do that. For starters like this post, comment below your thoughts or if you pledged, and subscribe to the Substack to keep getting more. You could also check out the Fortress of Comic News podcast which comes out every week, sometimes twice a week, on most podcast services. Also you can find all the podcast content on YouTube, as well as more at YouTube.com/@FortressComics.
A quick reminder: I wanted to say that I made the decision to put the Crowdfunding Spotlight series on ice for the month of December. I will put this disclaimer at the end of each post through the month of November to remind you all. The decision came down to the simple fact that December is a tough month for crowdfunding. Last year it was very hard to find projects I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention, and when that happens it becomes hard to be excited to write about them. So I have decided that I will do two Retro Re-Read posts a week in December as we ramp back into the Marvel Comics series Rom the Spaceknight. Thank you for the support, and hope you all understand why I made this decision.