No, that headline does not mean that Georgia Webber’s Indiegogo campaign is stupid. In fact, within a week of its launch, the Montreal-based artist’s campaign (which was created to fund her autobio comic, DUMB, about being forced not to talk for her health) attracted so much attention she was fully funded well before the deadline.
In a very smart move, Webber decided to add new goals to her campaign, promising to do more if she makes significantly more than the $2,000 she asked for. The original intention of the campaign was to raise enough money to print the first two editions of her comic and take them to the Chicago Alt Comics Expo in June. Now, if she reaches $2,500 (which she was very close to at the time of this posting) she will take DUMB to the Maine Comic Arts Festival in May and for $3,000 she will launch a real website for DUMB AND translate the comic to French for a limited run to be sold at the Festival de la Bande-Dessinee de Montreal in June. A $4,000 boost will aid in the publishing of DUMB issues three and four, and $5,000 will help Webber to bring all four issues to Small Press Expo (SPX) in Bethesda, Maryland in September and the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival in November.
Last summer, when Webber lost her ability to speak for long periods without pain, she was struggling with artistic self-doubt and finding stories to tell. Getting a throat injury was, in a way, the push she needed to launch her comic career. “Even though it has been a very painful and challenging experience, the injury provided a sense of urgency, a feeling of ‘now or never’ that allowed me to push through my insecurities about my art and make sure above all else that the story was told,” says Webber in an email to Broken Pencil.
Within a few days of the Indiegogo’s launch Webber was getting loads of attention and funding. “I attribute that to the amazing people in my life who have always supported me — in my creativity and in general,” she says. She also hadn’t put out anything in five years, so people were waiting to see what the follow up would be to her gangLion comic zine.
“For the entirety of my recovery (which is ongoing, and probably will be for a long time yet) I’ve been keeping my conversation notes, my texts, photographing and documenting everything. I have a three-page bullet-point list of particular stories I think people will enjoy reading, and that capture some element of my experience that I hadn’t anticipated, or found especially meaningful. That, along with the research I’m doing and the artistic exploration of how to portray sound in a silent medium, will hopefully produce a series of short stories that play between my personal experience and the cultural, medical, and historical knowledge of the voice. So, it’s a huge project.” DUMB could continue for the forseeable future and she would like to ultimately see it collected into book form at some point.
“If there’s anything I’ve learned from this, it’s that you never know what’s coming, and the sooner you accept that you can’t know, the happier you’ll be with right now.”
All images from DUMB #1.