Dean Haspiel’s COVID COP finds love in a hopeless place

From the Ringo Award and Emmy Award-winning cartoonist Dean Haspiel (Billy Dogma, The Purple Hook, Bored to Loss of life) comes a brand new creator-owned comedian guide, COVID Cop, a 24-page horror romance for mature readers that includes a Twenty first-century antihero impressed by the ONGOING world pandemic. The guide is at present being funded through Kickstarter.

Haspiel is thought for creating the “final romantic antihero,” Billy Dogma, who debuted in Millenium Press’s Keyhole #1, written by Haspiel and illustrated by Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson. The character later went on to star in different works from different publishers. Then, in 2008, Haspiel labored on a Vertigo authentic graphic novel, The Alcoholic, written by Jonathan Ames and drawn by Haspiel, that was later became the HBO collection Bored to Loss of life, for which the cartoonist received an Emmy Award for Excellent Essential Title Design.

COVID Cop was impressed by Haspiel’s favourite cartoonist, Jack Kirby, and he was impressed to inform the story in order that he might discover the “finest and worst of humanity.” A cross between Choose Dredd, Poisonous Avenger, Mad Max, and Sin Metropolis, COVID Cop is Haspiel’s” response to a pandemic that by no means discovered its remedy and has worn out 98% of mankind.” 

Right here’s how Haspiel describes the inspiration behind his Kickstarter mission:

My favourite cartoonist, Jack Kirby (the co-creator of the Marvel Universe and a few DC Comics characters), didn’t simply take into consideration what he needed to spend his time creating or how it will promote. He needed to attach with readers and soften minds. Go large or go residence. For all of Kirby’s cosmic ideas, he by no means forgot in regards to the coronary heart of a narrative. Having fought in World Struggle 2, I imagine Kirby’s comics had been a product of battlefield PTSD. The issues he noticed. The issues he needed to do. Kirby was understanding the most effective and the worst of humanity. He questioned the thought of God after which dared to reply it. And that’s what artwork does finest. It asks the onerous questions that don’t essentially have solutions.

In 2020, across the similar time I conceived & co-curated the Ringo Award nominated PANDEMIX (which was the primary comedian guide anthology to answer the pandemic), I created an concept that I confirmed to a number of publishers and it acquired the identical reactions. “We love your thought however we are able to’t publish it.” They had been too afraid. Petrified of how folks would reply. I took that as a great signal. A significant clue that I’d made one thing that may really resonate.

I spent the winter holidays and the early a part of 2023 illustrating the story that I had written and pitched in 2020, throughout a time of isolation and terror, and do what artwork and comix do finest, spawn an antihero.

Artwork is simply starting to cope with the ramifications of a worldwide pandemic. As somebody who’s disabled and excessive danger, I devour something that offers with the trauma of being forgotten or the FOMO of the world transferring on, so long as it makes me giggle too. Even in case you are able-bodied, books that cope with the pandemic doc our historical past, making them obligatory for future generations. With this in thoughts, Haspiel invitations you “to hop on board the bottom flooring of [his] grassroots effort and assist [him] print an outlier sensation that might be mailed straight to the doorstep.”

The Kickstarter marketing campaign for Covid Cop is stay now, and runs by means of the tip of the month.

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