By Katharine Sagan

This is the first post in a weekly series profiling all of the Awesome Inc. companies.
The vision of The Comic Arts Partnership, or the Comic AP, is to engage the local community in the experience of the visual narrative of the Comic Arts. They foster local talent and provide an outlet for their content to be seen in Lexington, Ky.
Blueprint Saints Magazine is a seventy two page, 11.25 x 13.5 inch, full color publication. 10,000 issues will be released every month. Since the Comic AP is a nonprofit entity, there is no cost to the reader and no advertisements in the magazine. There are thirteen styles or themes of comics. Knowing that every reader has their own taste, the Comic AP wants to enable the public to see the full gambit of the comic arts. Blueprint Saints Magazine is an open source print environment for comic creators, which means that all artists inside the publication retain their intellectual property. The Open Age of Comics allows for comic creators to be seen in print, yet still own all their property. Blueprint Saints Magazine does not take any ownership to any content created by the artists involved; they take no percentages, no membership dues, and have no requirement for any of the artists to stay. The Comic AP does not take funding from comic organizations in order to print Blueprint Saints Magazine, but takes funding only from arts organizations. Blueprint Saints Magazine is not a comic label, but an arts foundation that promotes Comic Arts. This is a risky, new idea that has faced resistance from certain facets of the local comic community. However, undaunted, the Comic AP, Comic Creators Live, and Blueprint Saints Magazine is venturing forward, sustaining and protecting the printed comic which has been around for eighty years. The team of Blueprint Saints Magazine has vowed to never make an electronic version of Blueprint Saints, as that would undermine the entire purpose of protecting the physical comic. Inspired by Harvey Pekar in Cleveland, Ohio, who started the underground comic movement, the Comic AP is not about changing how comics are drawn or read, but changing the environment in which they are created. As they say, "we have a giraffe, and we're going to release it down Main Street. When you do that, all social media and digital technology will react. You don't get that from a website no one will ever see." So, in other words, people will notice this magazine. |