What the heck is a Zoop Alert? Well, we publish quite a few Kickstarter Alert articles letting our readers know about really cool Kickstarter projects (mostly board game related). So this is the Zoop version of a Kickstarter Alert. But I don’t think we have covered Zoop here on GeekDad before. Zoop is a crowdfunding platform that is built specifically for comics. It launched as a crowdfunding service in 2021 as a complete end-to-end service that handles all aspects of crowdfunding such as printing, manufacturing, and distributing/fulfillment. But starting in 2022 Zoop opened up the campaigns to allow creators to choose how much of the fulfillment process they wanted to own versus how much of the service Zoop would provide.
Pink Midnight Presents: The Butterfly House is one of several active campaigns on Zoop and is the first issue of a planned series of one-shot stories from writer Paul Allor, artist Juan Romera, and editor Claire Napier. I’ll let the story summary from the Zoop campaign page speak for itself:
“This first issue is a silent descent into one person’s nightmare, as our protagonist enters the titular Butterfly House—and soon discovers they may never be able to leave. This is a deeply personal story for Paul, part existential horror story, part allegory for Paul’s own discovery of their gender identity.”
I’m pumped about Pink Midnight Presents: The Butterfly House for several reasons. I read almost exclusively one-shot comics, so I am always looking for something new and slightly different to read. There are a couple of things that really drew to me this title. For one, the main art of the comic is all done in black and white, which I think is an interesting design choice given the horror slant to the story. Another aspect that sets this comic apart is that there is no spoken dialog in the storytelling, which is going to make it a very unique read. And finally, I am really impressed when a creator is willing to put a bit of their personal life and experiences into their creation. Paul’s decision to infuse experiences regarding their gender identity journey into the story is a bold move, and that generally pays off for the reader when the creator has that kind of emotional connection to the source material.
You may recognize Paul Allor for different reasons than I do. Like I said earlier, I mostly read one-shot comics, so I hadn’t read a lot of Paul’s past writing accomplishments like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, GI Joe, and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. But I have read Tet and Monstro Mechanica and thoroughly enjoyed them. Paul is also teaming up with Juan Romera, and Juan was one of the first artists that Paul worked with when he started writing for comics.
The campaign for Pink Midnight Presents: The Butterfly House is active on Zoop right now. As of the time of this writing, they are only 3 days in and 70% of the way towards their funding goal, so this project is looking like it stands a really good chance of being fully funded at the end of the 30-day campaign. If you are new to crowdfunding, be sure to check out our article that goes into all the details of how they work here.
