After graduating from Stevenson and college, Paul Axel ’06 began working in the foreign language department of a textbook company. With plenty of free time, Axel wanted a side project.

With a passion for comic books, Axel dreamt of creating his own. However, as a hobby, he was not able to pay an artist to draw his comics as artists are expensive to hire. For art alone, there is a penciller, inker and a colorist. According to the Kickstarter website, Axel’s comic, Rotten Roots is a six issue historical crime comic taking place in an area around Cape Cod during the era of Pilgrims.

When he found Kickstarter, a crowd funding organization, he was able to achieve his dream. Prior to beginning his own project, Axel had donated to others on the Kickstarter program and looked to that to help him when he started out.

Since Axel has first created his Kickstarter campaign on Oct. 1, 2014, he create the goal of raising $4,600 by Nov. 14. Now, he has over 100 supporters and has raised over $6,300 which will be used to pay for different covers, extra pages and the opportunity to print the comic in color.

Kickstarter is an organization which allows friends, family and strangers to donate money towards a hobby, like writing or major scientific research, Axel said. According to their website, Kickstarter began in 2009 with hopes to fund creative projects. They have helped people around the nation start over 72,000 projects. Kickstarter has raised over $1 billion dollars with 7.3 million people donating money.

Based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with a staff of 96 people, Kickstarter strives to bring creative based projects like art or comic books to with funding to a reality from a dream. The donations, for Axel, helped him fund the artist and the printing of his book a reality.

There are always going to be obstacles, Axel said, and with Kickstarter, there are opportunities to get over them.

“Kickstarter has blown the doors open for people who want to be involved in something creative,” Axel said.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/921709127/rotten-roots-volume-one