The Silver Cord, by Kevin Kelly and others

My friend Kevin Kelly is senior maverick at Wired, editor of Cool Tools, co-founder of Quantified Self, and author of many books. He has been working with some colleagues for the last 8 years on a graphic novel called The Silver Cord. He sent me a hard copy, and it's terrific. It's available free to read online, and you can also buy it as a full-color paperback. He has also launched a kickstarter for the sequel. He says:

I launched a Kickstarter fund today.

At the same time today I released a 210-graphic novel about angels and robots I have been working on for 8 years. You can read it for free on the web. I call it a techno-epic. Or speculative theology. It's visual, cinematic, and presents a world I promise you have not seen.

But I am also joining the Kickstarter joyride partly to explore what audience-funding, user-financed, hive-mind VC'ing is all about. I suggested four years ago that 1,000 true fans might be able to support an artist with direct, unmediated pre-funding, but I would have never predicted that tens of thousands of creators would be successful a few years later using this model.

I am convinced that crowd-sourced pre-funding is a BIG DEAL, and may prove to be a disruptive force in the networked world.

Anyway my project, The Silver Cord book, is my first try at fiction. My co-authors and I are giving away the first book, hoping that those who enjoy it will want to fund the concluding book. First part of the story is free; the ending will cost. We'll see how well that works.

The Silver Cord on Kickstarter

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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robertjberger

Ok, just read the whole thing in one sitting, couldn’t stop. Its really good! Love the style too…
http://twitter.com/Hannahcomb Hannah McGill

It’s a lovely comic. No problems with the work itself.

On the website, though, the image load times are a little ridiculous. :) While that IS incentive to read the comic in print, I can’t help but wonder if the jpgs were processed for web viewing or not, or if that’s just a symptom of high traffic.
- Little Mouse
  
  I suspect it was slow to load because Boing Boing linked to it. I got to page 102 before it went from slow to completely dead.
  
  Right up until then it was fantastic though. Even if I can’t donate to the kickstarter (oh how I wish for an endless bucket of money!), I’d like to get this and the second one in print when it comes out.
http://www.adamfields.com/ Adam Fields

It appears that the site is being crushed by the traffic.

Also, the running commentary along the bottom is fairly insufferable.
- jimbeaux
  
  it only goes to about page 5 or 6
Gavin Berry

And now the site is down, too much love from BoinBoing I think.