The award-winning dark fantasy series described as GAME OF THRONES meets BROTHERS GRIMM.
NOTE: The first wave of Kickstart Orders are now locked for shipping in late-July. Pre-orders placed after April 23rd will ship as part of the second wave in early August.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Our next great horror graphic novel adaptation is coming on TUESDAY!
12 months ago
– Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 12:39:52 PM
Hi everyone!
As backers of THE OGRE GODS SAGA, we think you may be VERY interested in our next black-and-white horror graphic novel campaign launching on Backerkit this Tuesday at 10am CST!
The definitive graphic novel adaptations of Bram Stoker’s DRACULA and Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN by artist Georges Bess!
Known internationally for his extensive body of work with notorious writer and director Alejandro Jodorowsky, GEORGES BESS established himself as a premiere visionary and stylistic chameleon at the height of the European comics renaissance during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Now, Georges brings his immense talent to classic horror, adapting Bram Stoker’s DRACULA and Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN into two bold and powerful graphic novels that retell these seminal tales through lush and unparalleled illustration.
If you have backed our recent premium slipcase edition campaigns, you know that these will be top-of-the-line deluxe art books worthy of any bookshelf. George's work is simply breathtaking, and our 9x12" gallery-quality artist's editions will be a must for any horror, graphic novel, or illustration fan!
It is quite different from ADRASTEA or any of our previous campaigns, but we love it just the same (and hope you will, too):
We love animals. We are big proponents of animal rights and wildlife exploration, with no less than 20 books in our catalog focused on animal tales. From kid's books to all-ages-wildlife adventures, we’ve got graphic novels for animal lovers of all types. April is Animal Cruelty Prevention month, and we are planning a number of things to support that noble cause, starting with our next Kickstarter for MY FRIEND TOBY!
MY FRIEND TOBY is a 144-page, wordless canine adventure about a simple terrier living a simple life with his human friend Marcel, a heartbroken artist who is having trouble making ends meet. But Toby doesn’t know anything about money or bills or electricity; he’s happy as long as there is food in his bowl and new territory to claim in the neighborhood. To him, everything is fine... at least until a stray cat appears, bringing all kinds of questions (and maybe a few unexpected answers)…
This book is adorable, and I’m not kidding when I say I laughed out loud a few times “reading” it. Yes, it is wordless, but it captures the language-less mindset of a dog in a way that seems both perfectly understandable and scientifically plausible. Triple-Eisner Award-nominee Gregory Panaccione (A SEA OF LOVE) is an animation industry storyboard artist turned graphic novelist, and his expert pacing and cinematic eye give this heartwarming story a truly cinematic feature quality.
To help tie MY FRIEND TOBY to our Cruelty Prevention efforts, we will be making an independent donation to the Anti-Cruelty Society based on the campaign’s performance. Kickstarter doesn’t allow pledge funds to be used for charity, or to make it sound like any portion of raised funds will be used as such, but we’ve worked with Kickstarter Trust & Safety Committee to approve our initiative to make a completely independent private donation based on how well the campaign does.
So please consider backing MY FRIEND TOBY to not only get a wonderful graphic novel (or graphic novels, plural – we have several bundles with exclusive bonus items!), but to also help some needy animals find good homes in the process. 😊
Thanks, everyone! We hope to see you there! ❤
International shipping update + a friendly reminder about HOLMES 😊
over 1 year ago
– Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 07:55:39 PM
Hi everyone!
It has been several weeks since our last update, and for the most part, everything that was expected has occurred: all UK and EU OGREGODS orders have shipped (bundledwith ARSENE and ADRASTEA orders) as have most Asia orders. A handful of individual packages may still be making the final steps to some of the more remote locations, but for the most part, Spiral Galaxy and VFI have completed their part. If you are an EU, UK, or Asia backer and haven't received your package by now (or at the very least shipping/tracking notification), please message us here and we can look it up for you.
We were hoping we'd be able to say the same thing for the AU and NZ orders, but with the extra congestion of the holidays heaped on top of their perpetually loaded schedule, their first-week-of-December estimate has slipped a little bit. As of their last report (last week), they expect to pack and ship AU/NZorders startingnextweek. We believe they should send out Address Verification messages to those backers first, but we have asked them to please confirm when those emails will go out so we can give you a heads-up. Hopefully, that will happen this weekend, but we'll let you know as soon as we have concrete information.
In the meantime, we haven't mentioned it here yet, but you may have seen it pop up in messages or recommendations from Kickstarter or Backerkit -- our SHERLOCK HOLMES campaign ends this Friday!
This is a new edition of the first Sherlock Holmes novel by Arthur Conan Doyle originally published in 1887, with brand new illustrations by the magnificent Vincent Mallie. It is a beautiful book, which we are offering on its own or as part of two campaign-exclusive limited editions: a special "Sleuth" bundle with a replica Key to Holmes’s infamous address on 221B Baker Street, a Magnifying Glass, a Pocket Journal, a gold foil bookmark, and other assorted artifacts collected inside a unique manila case folder, and a Deluxe Slipcase Set pairing this new book with a copy of Vincent Mallie's similarly illustrated edition of ARSENE LUPIN, GENTLEMAN THIEF!
Both of these exclusive editions will only be produced in limited quantities for this Kickstarter campaign, and they will not be available anywhere else. These will be gorgeous sets (we think we're getting better with each slipcase we produce) and there are less than 200 setsleft!(And less than 2 days left to join!)
So please check it out if you haven't already... We'd love to end the year on a high note! 😃🎅🥳 Thanks, everyone!
EU/UK orders to start shipping next week
over 1 year ago
– Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 10:03:21 PM
Hi everyone,
We've received some news from Quartermaster regarding the International shipping hub status:
Spiral Galaxy (UK/EU orders): Address Verification Emails are expected to go out THIS FRIDAY, November 4th. Please watch for those emails from @spiralgalaxygames.co.uk! Once those have gone out, you'll have 48-72 hours (over the weekend) to reply with any address changes. They will then start packing so that orders start shipping that following week!
Aetherworks (AU/NZ orders): The inventory has (finally) left Aetherworks's consolidation warehouse and is expected to reach their primary warehouse in Australia by November 19th. They anticipate fulfillment will likely begin the first week of December.
VFI (Asia orders): Packing is complete, and we expect to have any available tracking information sometime this week. It's possible that CN and HK backers might receive their orders late this week or early next week.
We want to thank all of our backers abroad for your support and patience. International shipping continues to be the most challenging part of this entire operation. There is that old business adage "Cheap, Fast, or Good -- pick two," but when it comes to shipping outside the US these days, it seems like we're lucky to get even one of those... Shipping rates continue to rise along with global inflation and gas prices, while increasing demand puts additional strain on the warehouses and shipping channels. We're doing everything we can to keep the costs and waiting time within reason, but the problems causing these challenges are much bigger than us...! Rest assured, things are moving and your stuff IS on the way. 😊
If you are overseas and find yourself ordering a lot of stuff from the US or backing a lot of US-based campaigns like these, you might want to consider getting a US-based Parcel Forwarding Address through one of many services available online. That way, you can have your pledge orders shipped to a US address, which is much cheaper and 6-8 weeks faster. These services can then collect all of the items that arrive at that location and forward them to you in a single shipment. (Granted, that single shipment may still be a little expensive, but certainly cheaper than having multiple individual orders shipped to you separately...)
We aren't personally familiar with any of them, so we aren't advocating any of these services directly, but it is a good place to start your own research.
If anyone has any other links or services they would recommend, please feel free to share them in the comments below!
(*PS: This update has beencopy/pasted between OGRE GODS, ARSENE LUPIN, and ADRASTEA, as all three of those campaigns are shipping together.)
International Shipping Update
over 1 year ago
– Tue, Sep 20, 2022 at 05:10:46 AM
Hi everyone!
Hope you are all doing well -- our apologies for lack of updates, particularly concerning International Shipping, as we've been waiting for confirmation on freight status from Quartermaster. Getting solid info and turnaround estimates has been a challenge lately as they and their regional warehouse partners (notably Spiral Galaxy for EU and UK orders and Aetherworks for AU and NZ orders) have all been overloaded and understaffed for quite some time now, which is by no means ideal, but it is the unfortunate situation we are having to push through. To complicate that, there was a late-discovered issue where it seems a portion of the Cipher bundles were assembled with the wrong coin (OGRE GODS coins instead of ARSENE Cipher coins), which Quartermaster is in the process of quantifying to make sure that the international copies of those bundles are correct. If any of you received the wrong coin in your Cipher bundle, pleasereport the issue to QUartermaster atwww.qmlogistics.com/contact-us. They are collecting and tracking all claims for replacement as soon as the inventory status can be confirmed. (If we need to mint more coins, that will take a few weeks, but we will get you the correct coin, we promise!)
Believe me, we've been frustrated by these issues, too. Things seemed so much smoother and easier a year and a half ago...
As of this morning, I've been told that the inventoryheading to Spiral Galaxy should be there by the end of this month. Assuming it arrives as expected, Spiral has booked a window to ship out the orders by the end of October/early November. We've asked what we can do to shorten that window, but it is entirely due to freight speed, customs clearance, and their own (over)loaded project queue.
The inventory to Aetherworks will reach their consolidation warehouse in California in the next week or so, but we are waiting on them to confirm when they will transfer that inventory to their hub in Australia. They tend to collect multiple projects at that warehouse, so it depends on when they feel they have a full load ready to go. At this point, however, those orders will likely share the same late-October/early November ship date.
This has indeed been an(other) exercise in patience, not just for our overseas supporters, but for us as a publishing company trying to fulfill projects as quickly and easily as possible. Our offer to bundle multiple campaigns to ship together may have been made with the best intention of reducing shipping costs for you, the customers, but it has in turn introduced a lot of additional complications and delays to each of those individual campaigns. Combining hundreds of orders over several months with unique combinations of several dozen different items -- many of which are heavy books -- requires a lot more diligence and time to pack properly (which has been an ongoing topic of conversation lately). We're taking all of these recent lessons to heart so that our upcoming projects can ship confidently as we move ahead. Will it mean fewer campaign-bundling opportunities? Perhaps, but we do want to do what we can to fight the rising cost of postage overseas. We hope you will stick with us as supporters while we fight this together...
Are there viable alternative solutions for international shipping to consider? Shipping individual packages directly from the US is not financially viable as postage rates for a single 5+ lb package start at $60 and go up very quickly. And books are heavy. The only way to reduce the individual order cost is to consolidate them into regional freight groups through forwarding warehouses, which is what we're doing, but that is taking a lot longer than it used to. So we're faced with only two options: SLOW or EXPENSIVE, and neither of those are satisfactory. It's not enough to simply blame COVID (although that is still a factor) -- everything else about shipping and fulfillment has become staggeringly and increasingly slow over the past 2 years, and as much as we continue to look for options, every alternate solution we explore seems to face the same set of challenges. It is systematic gridlock worldwide, and we feel helpless.
That said, things ARE moving, albeit slowly, and we are committed to seeing them through! If any supporters abroad have any suggestions, we are open to all input! 😊
