Ronal Wimberly’s Kickstarter GratNin is in its final hours (50 as of this writing) and AIPT has an exclusive preview of the project! Wimberly and Philadelphia-based boutique publisher Beehive Books have launched a Kickstarter campaign for the first-ever print edition of Wimberly’s critically-acclaimed, endless scroll webcomic GratNin. Fans can back the project to get a deluxe graphic novel box set, featuring 600 accordion-folded pages that re-imagines how to read the comic.
How cool is that?
“One of the things I wanted to do with GratNin: KGMR is to mythologize street boxing the way that many martial arts films I watched growing up mythologized historical martial arts figures like Oyama Masutatsu, Ip Man, or Wong Fei Hung,” Wimberly told AIPT. “I grew up slapboxing and hearing about 52 hand blocks. I wanted to fold some of that into this comic, drawing from multiple storytelling traditions. I’m approaching the ninja comic the way that Italians approached the American western, applying that form to things that concern me and my world.
Wimberly added, “In hindsight, GratNin is almost a response to Samurai Champloo. …as in ‘call and response’.”
So what’s GratNin about?
GratNin (which is short for Gratuitous Ninja) tells a sprawling graphic saga of Brooklyn’s last shinobi family. The Namba Family are masters of the deadly KyokuGen Muron Ryu (KGMR) craft, but in the police and pirate-riddled streets of Brooklyn, it’s always been best to keep those powers under wraps… until now. For centuries, the Namba clan stayed under the radar as pacifist hippies, peacefully running a community center, neighborhood garden, and food co-op from their 300-year-old house on the Gowanus canal. But what good is being a ninja if you can’t protect your hood?
Check out the exclusive preview below.
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