Cartozia Tales: A Great Kids Comic

As I was just recently bemoaning the state of kids’ comics, it would be remiss of me not to draw your eye to this Kickstarter for Cartozia Tales, a new compendium comic featuring a raft of new artists and writers, as well as guest indie superstars like Dylan Horrocks and James Kochalka each month.

Each artist has a section of the map of Cartozia to cover, and Editor Isaac Cates rotates artists through each section month by moth like a sort of comics exquisite corpse, with artists continuing previous stories or starting new ones. In this way the world gets filled out; built as its written from a set of shared stories. There are also activities skewed at kids, like map drawing and paper dolls. My copy came with a luchador sticker on the envelope. This pleased me more than perhaps it should.

As with any anthology, some things will be more to your taste than others. I particularly enjoyed Shawn Cheng’s, as well as Lucy Bellwood’s and Dylan Horrocks’ (a neat little tale about a girl and a robot that will almost certainly appeal to Studio Ghibli fans).

Cartozia Cloud Herders

If you want comics for your kids’, to read something all-ages, or just to be introduced to a bunch of great artists each month for not too much cash, consider investing. The Kickstarter should guarantee the first ten issues, and it will be interesting for kids and adults alike to see how this world gets built. There are some samples up at the Cartozia Tales site if you need convincing.