RazörFist has announced Ghost of the Badlands 2: The Ghost Dance, the sequel to his Western comic, and Arkhaven Comics will crowdfund it on Indie Crowdfund. A prelaunch page is live now, and the campaign opens Monday, October 19.
The first book was RazörFist’s debut in comics. Ghost of the Badlands is a 105-page graphic novel illustrated by George Alexopoulos and set in Canyon Diablo, Arizona Territory, in 1896. A masked gunman works the high desert, killing coach robbers and murderers while legends of him spread through the territory. RazörFist has called it an ode to the Eastwood Westerns, with Biblical underpinnings.
RazörFist is a YouTube culture critic and novelist. His books include The Long Moonlight and Death Mask, and he coined the #IronAge hashtag for pulp-inspired fiction. He brought that audience to the comic.
The audience showed up. The Indiegogo campaign launched in April 2023 and funded in under two hours. It closed at $347,439 from 5,761 backers, 694 percent of its $50,000 goal. Arkhaven then took the book to retail, with monochrome hardcover and paperback editions at $29.99 and $19.99, plus color editions and a leatherbound version. The book was well received, and readers kept asking for more.
For a stretch it looked like they would not get it. In October 2024, RazörFist said a sequel was unlikely because Alexopoulos could not commit to another book at that scale. Alexopoulos said on X that a project this size can overwhelm a small indie team, and that the Badlands setting could carry many volumes under many illustrators. Two years later, the sequel has a campaign page.
The platform choice follows a pattern at Arkhaven. Indiegogo canceled the publisher’s Alt-Hero: Q campaign and refunded backers after Vox Day gave an interview to Bleeding Cool. BackerKit banned Arkhaven’s Hypergamouse in 2024 over “associations.” Indie Crowdfund pitches itself as a Kickstarter alternative for independent creators, and it has become a working home for indie comics lately.
Castalia Library, the leatherbound imprint tied to Arkhaven, will offer The Ghost Dance in leather and in a black-on-black blind-embossed Ghost edition. The sequel’s pitch line introduces a new faction, “The Children of the Ghost,” who strike from ambush and refuse to be reasoned with or placated.
You can get notified for when the project launches here.
The first campaign set a high bar. Can The Ghost Dance match $347,439 on a newer platform, and what would that say about where independent comics crowdfunding is headed?
My body is ready! If both Ayla Rin Gateway to Doom Pt. 1 and Ghost of the Badlands 2 crowdfunds launch simultaneously I will cry both tears of joy and pain that a Cenobite would probably find moving. Can't wait for the crowdfund!