Look at her.

She doesn’t ask permission from the storm. She doesn’t negotiate with the sky. The wind obeys her because she commands that obedience, through every moment the world tried to convince her she was less than what she knew herself to be.

“They make all beings tremble with their mighty strength, even the very strongest, both of earth and heaven.” — Rig-Veda, Mandala I

This is not a comic book pitch.

This is a testimony.

I need you to understand something about what we are building here, because I think sometimes in the noise of algorithms and ad campaigns and stretch goals, the truth of a thing gets buried under the mechanics of selling it. So let me tell you the truth.

Twenty-two years ago, a group of people found each other in a virtual world and built something that should not have survived. They built friendships that crossed race and class and geography and time. They built heroes out of the pieces of themselves they were most afraid to show. They built a mythology. Not from nothing, but from everything they had actually lived.

Every person in this story is real. Every wound is real. Every moment of grace clawing its way up through the wreckage, real. I processed two decades of actual living through the language of superheroes because that is the only language big enough to hold it. James Baldwin once said that the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers. This book is all those questions. Who do you become when the thing you were built to do is taken from you? What do you owe the people who showed up when everything was on fire? What does it mean to choose, in full knowledge of the cost, to be good? I don’t have clean answers. Neither does Wynd. Neither does Frank. Neither does Kenyana. But they showed up anyway.

Here is what I am asking from you today. Not tomorrow. Today. If this story has moved you, back it. Whatever tier you can reach. The campaign ends April 7th and we are in the final stretch of a very long road. But more than your pledge, I am asking for your voice.

Tell one person. Text one friend who loves comics and has never heard of this. Post it somewhere. Tag someone who needs to meet Wynd. Call in the favor you’ve been saving for something that mattered. Because here is the thing about movements, they do not begin with crowds. They begin with one person who decides that something deserves to exist, and then tells another person, and then that person tells another, and before long the thing that should not have survived is standing in the storm with its arms open, making the whole sky tremble.

You are not backing a book. You are backing the proof that twenty-two years of friendship and fire and failure and getting back up and trying again was worth something. That the stories we build together in the dark have light in them. That the real ones, the ones that cost you something to tell, are the only ones worth reading.

April 7th.

The storm is waiting.

Back The Legendary Vol. 1 on Kickstarter kickstarter.com/projects/584061525/the-legendary-vol-1