The Brand campaign is officially over, time to see how Antonio did for his second book
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Big oofs. This a far cry from what they got on the first campaign. A drop of 83% in funding and 90% of their backers(granted that was over a year). If we want be generous with the time frame, it was roughly 71% and 83% respectively, so still not good. This is why you don't launch your sequel before people even get their hands on the first book. I also want to hear more about he was considering giving out the first book for free, digitally when people still don't have the damn thing. That's pure exceptionalism.
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Yeah Brand 2 bombed pretty hard, I backed the first campaign twice but didn't touch this campaign. I've read the digital PDF that Antonio sent out and similar to Lonestar and Graveyard Shift I could only describe it as mediocre. Not terrible, not great just mediocre. Caanan White's art is superb and I can't really criticize the script, but one problem was that Antonio introduced far to many characters in the first issue. I was constantly having to go back to previous pages to remind myself who was who. He could have cut the number of characters in half and there still would have been too many.
I think there are multiple reasons this one bombed.
-The first Brand remains unfulfilled.
-The free PDF pissed off a lot of the digital backers (even though it was only to physical backers, so even if the digital backers didn't back, they wouldn't have received anything anyway.)
-There was very little promotion of Brand 2, I'm not sure I see Antonio anywhere else plugging his book.
-No stretch goals to encourage the campaign higher and create a sense of value for backers.
-Too many variant covers, none of which were especially good. Theres an EVS variant which hasn't even been shown (probably because he hasn't drawn it yet.)
-Too much competition. Iron Sights 2, The Expendables, Blade Devil, Unfrogettable Tales, Rekt Planet, Cash Grab and many others are still active or launched during Brands run.
-The price of the book went up from $15 to $25, although to be fair to Antonio he did increase the page count from 48 (Brand) to 60 in the sequel.
-All the infighting and drama within CG causing certain factions to form, although as far as I know Antonio keeps away from drama so perhaps this point could negligible.