A Kickstarter is underway for Untitled, an independent comic from writer Mike Gillan. For the sake of clarity, Untitled is its actual name and not a placeholder until something more meaningful is thought of, as it’s a story partly based around writer’s block. Inspiration also came, in a roundabout way, by Gillan almost giving up on his craft after going through a long period of every idea he came up with being released as a Hollywood film not long after and thus being rendered unusable.

The story follows frustrated writer Ryan, who quite literally finds his muse at the bottom of a bottle, taking the form of a foul-tempered and even more foul-mouthed drunken imp. As the creature escapes back to the realm of imagination, Ryan follows him there and ends up trapped inside his own mind. To get rid of him the muse reluctantly becomes the Virgil to Ryan’s Dante, guiding him through the shifting genre wasteland of his authorial subconscious in the hope of finding new inspiration.

To create the contrast between Untitled’s various chapters, each is illustrated by a different artist in a different style, such as traditional comic book inking in a fantasy dreamscape, a western in watercolour shading or a ballpoint pen zombie apocalypse, each setting acting as a manifestation of Ryan’s previous creative efforts.

The lofty funding goal of the campaign is so, as well as covering the costs of production, the artists themselves can actually get paid, which as many struggling creatives can tell you, is a depressingly infrequent state of affairs.

As well as PDF and print copies of the finished book, the available funding rewards also include promo pieces, signed original pages and commissioned artwork from the numerous artists involved. Additionally, anyone simply sharing the campaign on social media will receive a digital copy of The Rot, a short zombie comic written by Gillan and illustrated by Untitled’s artist wrangler Janine Van Moosel (City of Lost Souls). Check out the campaign here.