Extract

14. Building a Better Kickstarter: Crowdfunding My So-Called Secret Identity

WILL BROOKER

I sometimes put things in writing, in public, to force myself – my future self – to live up to those promises. I made a number of claims in the Times Higher Education magazine when I was appointed editor of Cinema Journal, in summer 2011, about the broader platform and wider engagement that we’d offer under my tenure, and I’ve tried to stick to those ideas. A little later, in autumn of that year, I set out a series of aims for a project called My So-Called Secret Identity, concluding with the pledge that we were “building a better Batgirl.”

It was a rash pledge, considering that all I had at the time was a rough storyline and a selection of sketches and costume designs; and it was complicated by the fact that, while Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon had not been historically well-served by scripts or art, Gail Simone and her creative team had just started a run on the character that did more with her, and did her better, than I’d ever imagined. But rash, bold pledges can be useful: they mean you can’t easily back out.

Over the next 18 months, I – and an ever-increasing number of other people – developed My So-Called Secret Identity from a concept and a handful of script and sketch scraps into a five-episode story arc, a full set of characters and, ultimately, a 22-page...