Click on the photo above visit my Kickstarter Page.

One of the great developments in social media is for artists to be able to directly address their fans. The studios are still doing their normal productions, but companies like Kickstarter allow artists to fun micro runs of books, music and inventions. 

My life work is to traipse in the realm of ideas. It’s not that my ideas are amazing as they come out, they’re not. They’re kind of average. But I document thousands of ideas so I can choose from the pool and usually come up with something pretty good.

A lot of folks email me to make a new Earthworm Jim or Neverhood game. They request Catscratch episodes on DVD and don’t understand why I make graphic novels, but can’t make them about characters I’ve already created. Well, I can’t take my own characters and do whatever I want with them if they’re owned by someone else! I’m at the mercy of studios and executives, and that’s not entirely a bad thing. They have their job to do and I have my job.

My job is to make stories, games and whole worlds. That’s my A game. Getting the characters marketed or made into games, comics and movies is secondary. I’m lucky if any of these ideas make it to the public, it’s a convoluted journey from sketchbook to marketplace, which means hundreds of perfectly good creations and ideas will never be seen by anybody, and that breaks my heart. I’m an entertainer, after all, and if nobody is in the forest to hear the tree fall, who really cares if it makes a sound?

The day before I created Earthworm Jim, I created another character and world… probably Planarian-Hamster-bot. It’s not important, but you didn’t get to see it because we didn’t make a game of it. I’m putting together the best artwork from my 42 sketchbooks that should be entertaining to anyone who has loved any of my work to date. The TenNapel Sketchbook Archives will not only document the creation of characters like EWJ, Neverhood and Creature Tech, but I’ll show you some characters that were great in their own right, but didn’t see the light of day because they weren’t housed in a game or graphic novel (not yet, anyways!).

Take a look at the campaign, and please tell your friends about it! I’m not making a killing on this book, it’s for the fans. The more money we raise the better the book is going to be. We’re unlocking better paper stock, cover stock, I’ll be stuffing every corner of the book with content!