Kickstarters. Oh, how they have become the bane of my life. There are so many incredible things on there that I just don’t know what to back. With a limited supply of money, I have to think carefully what I want and what I should let go. Following several Kickstarters, I always wait for that forty-eight-hour reminder to come in before I make my final decision. Yet, in the last month I decided to forgo the waiting and back a campaign as soon as it went live, a first time for me! It was Elsa Charretier’s latest artbook, Volume Two.
Charretier is no stranger to Star Wars. She has illustrated numerous stories in the original run of Star Wars Adventures (co-writing a lot of these with her partner Pierrick Colinet), illustrated Marvel’s Doctor Aphra Annual #3 and illustrated the Star Wars: Choose Your Destiny Books. This doesn’t even cover the various variant covers she has created too.
Last year saw Charretier launch her first Kickstarter, which led to over 800 backers and pledges almost up to €60,000. When the book finally arrived at the start of this year (just before the start of lockdown), the quality and attention to detail that greeted backers was astonishing. This wasn’t just a book but a labour of love with a vast amount of Star Wars artwork included (You can read my in depth review of the book here). After such a successful campaign, after producing such an incredible book and after pleasing her backers the world over with the final product, you would think Charretier would take a well-earned rest. But while the world paused for COVID-19, Charretier has been busy getting Volume Two ready.
With such uncertainty in the world, you would be forgiven to think that perhaps releasing a successful Kickstarter now would be rather difficult. Yet Charretier’s campaign is already a huge success. It was funded in six minutes (yes, minutes) and at the time of writing has over one thousand backers with several days still to go. It shows just the sort of reputation that Charretier is making for herself in the art world and that people want more and more of her work.
Now seemed a good time to catch up with Charretier and find out what Volume Two promises for fans:
JN – Hi Elsa, it’s a pleasure to talk to you again!
EC – I’m thrilled to be back on Jedi News! Thanks for having me again.
JN – It’s been a year since you released volume one, why was this the right time to release volume 2?
EC – You might laugh because it’s a bit ridiculous. I was supposed to take a 3-week break between projects because I haven’t had a vacation in years, but after 4 days of wandering aimlessly around the house, my partner (writer Pierrick Colinet) begged me to get back to work because I was impossible, haha! And I thought what better way to fill in some extra time than with a new Kickstarter! Because, honestly, the whole process is just a lot of fun to me. Pierrick ended up joining me, and we’re doing this together. So, this is technically my vacation from comics.
JN – I expect we’ll be seeing lots of incredible art in this volume, what can we expect in terms of Star Wars pieces?
EC – I’ve got some Luke coming for you, multiple Leia’s (one of them in her Boushh costume!), Ahsoka and some more. Some of them are in grey scales, which I didn’t have in vol.1, so I’m very excited to see how that prints out.
JN – How do you decide how much of a certain area of your work to put into the book? I imagine trying to work out the proportions so everyone is happy can be a nightmare.
EC – First and foremost, my golden rule is: don’t do the things you think people expect from you. So, I don’t think in terms of pleasing everyone. I have a clear idea of what I want the book to be, and I work tirelessly towards this goal. One of the most challenging parts, like you said, is to balance out the chapters’ length to make sure they feel right. For that, I can always trust my friends for quality feedback, and I also trust my own instinct. I do keep readers in mind at all times, but more in the way that I’m trying to give them the best product I can, rather than what they would want me to do. If that makes sense.
JN – With the world as it is, with people having a lot less disposable cash, how does it feel having such overwhelming support for Volume Two, even surpassing the support you had for Volume One?
EC – Completely and genuinely unexpected. The “expected” course of a vol.2 on Kickstarter is to go higher than the first one, but the economies around the world being what they are right now, we figured we might finish with a lot less. So when we raised our goal (9.000€) in 6 minutes and finished the first day with over 55.000€, I realized that no matter how dire the situation, people were gonna show up and back the hell outta this thing. You know, I don’t accept praises easily, they always feel unjustified to me. But this is the highest compliment backers could ever give us, and I will do everything in my power, so the new book knocks their socks off.
JN – The quality of volume one, and all the extras, was simply incredible and noted by many fans. Has that made it more difficult to try and set the same high standard for volume two?
EC – There is definitely more pressure, because now there’s a level of expectations that we feel we absolutely have to surpass. The one thing we have worked on a lot is the campaign itself, the whole 30 days. You could argue that it’s not the book itself, that it doesn’t matter as much, but it truly does! A crowdfunding campaign is a chance to connect readers in an entirely different way. You can engage people, have fun with them. We’re putting out videos, unique content, and very fun stretch goals which I hope, brighten people’s day (backers or not!). So that’s the first area where we’ve upped our game a little.
The printing quality was already very high for vol.1, so our focus for this one is going to be producing more out-of-the-box content. Things that you don’t usually see in an artbook. Things that challenge people’s understanding of how we create and how creators collaborate. I feel like we only brushed the surface with vol.1, and we have ideas to fill out the next 10 volumes.
JN – Were there any lessons you learnt from the first Kickstarter that have helped you this time round?
EC – I do post-mortems on all my projects and that’s come in very handy. Stretch goals were something we had not planned ahead enough because we never expected to be funded so quickly (regardless, we should have), so we worked on that. We also mapped out our promotional strategy in advance this time, so there’s a lot less improvisation. Oh, and in case we have to travel out of town, upload all our assets online! Last year we were in Copenhagen for a signing when we hit a big stretch goal. Putting news and updates and posts together on an iPad with a finger was quite the gymnastics.
JN – Last week on Twitter, you showed your copy of Loeb and Sale’s Batman: Long Halloween (and I’m very jealous of your black and white version!). What are some of your other prized graphic novels in your collection?
EC – I’ve got B&W editions of Watchmen, Risso’s Batman and a few others. Some graphic-novels I keep on my desk at all times, like the Parker series from Cooke, and screenplays from films I love but I’ll admit I’m not much of a collector. Oh! I take that back. I’ve pre-ordered the Martini edition of Parker and I am very, very excited for this one.
JN – With the success of your graphic novel November (with writer Matt Fraction), are there any plans to go further than the original four books?
EC – Matt’s scripts were so tightly knitted, the intertwining of chapters so carefully mapped out that I don’t think we could have added a single thing!
As a fan, I’m always grateful to creators who know when to stop with a successful property, who resist outside attempts to squeeze every bit of money that’s left to take. I would never prolong a story that’s coming to a natural end for this reason.
That being said, leaving the characters and their universe was very hard, I had become very attached to them. We have talked about the possibility of doing something with secondary characters from the series. But not now, I think it’ll be good to get some creative fresh air and maybe, maybe come back to it later.
JN – You’ve done a range of incredible characters, from Star Wars characters, to Batman. Is there any character, in any franchise, that you would love to have the chance to draw that you haven’t already?
EC – I know graphic-novels adaptations from movies are controversial, but I would die to do some myself. George V. Higgins’ “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”, Madeleine Miller’s “Circe”, or “Hyperion” are some of my favorite novels and I can’t help myself breaking the story down in panels when I read them. I guess it’s not exactly comicbook-ey, but those works of prose always light a fire inside me.
JN – Can we expect these Kickstarters to be an annual release, with Volume Three next year?
EC – I would certainly love that, but I also don’t want to set it in stone. First, I wouldn’t want to underestimate Kickstarter fatigue. Lots and lots of projects are funding right now and although I expect that to quiet down in a little while, backers are still being solicited a lot right now. Then I also want to make sure I’ve got enough quality content to justify a new volume.
JN – What projects can we look forward to seeing your work in the near future?
EC – In a couple of weeks, I’m starting on a standalone issue for Tynion and Simmonds’ The Department of Truth, and I’ve got a few other short but very fun commitments before my next, big project starts in 2021. It’s too early to announce what it is, but trust me, it’s BIG 🙂
JN – Elsa, thank you so much for your time and for the incredible work you create. Good luck with the rest of the campaign, myself and the rest of the Jedi News team can’t wait for volume two to show up on our doorsteps next year!
EC – I’m the one that should be thanking you! You guys and your audience are the sweetest, most passionate people, and I feel extremely lucky to have your support.
It is not too late to sign up to Charretier’s campaign, which ends on October 22nd. There are various levels of pledges that come with a variety of stretch goals as well as add-ons if you missed Volume One the first time around. I do advise that you might want to pledge before October 17, as Charretier will be hosting a special ‘Con at Home’ for backers, with free sketches, live drawings and more. If you’ve been missing that convention experience this year, then this will hopefully fill that void until the world returns to normality.
I cannot recommend this campaign enough, particularly having been a backer of Volume One. The attention to detail, to not just the book itself, but everything that came with it, is like nothing I’ve seen before and Volume Two promises to be just as impressive. If you’re a fan of her artwork, this book is for you, as even her non-Star Wars pieces are just as impressive (I still gaze longingly at the Batman piece from Volume One). It has been a pleasure to speak to Charretier again and hopefully I will see you for the ‘Con at Home’!
Be sure to follow her on Twitter, Instagram and her website for sneak previews of her upcoming work and details of her latest Kickstarter campaign can be found here.
