The Black Mill is a New Weird comic from Paul Di Filippo, a treasure of science fiction, drawn by Orion Zangara and colored and lettered by Derek Chase.
The team’s hoping to raise $2500, and $5 gets you an ebook of the comic; $10 gets you the ebook. poster and sticker — and up! The team have successfully produced many comics, books, etc, between them I rate them as a very good risk for finishing the project and fulfilling their obligations to backers.
The unique vision we have nurtured among us features a tasty blend of science fiction and naturalism, steampunk and gothic, humor and pathos.
Imagine Mervyn Peake’s famous GORMENGHAST—an endless castle inhabited by quasi-medieval eccentrics—altered to a more industrial setting, and you have THE BLACK MILL.
The mill/factory of the title is an immense structure of stone and brick, wood and glass, iron and plaster. Its construction of indeterminate origin, this city-as-factory/factory-as-city sprawls for an indeterminate length across a distant, human-colonized planet.
The technology that powers the Mill is pre-steam water power. A subterranean river as big as the Amazon runs through the lowest level of the Mill. Vast waterwheels power a network of shafts and belts, delivering power to the machinery of the Mill. Lighting is strictly oil lamps; heat comes from coal stoves. (And as expected, fire is an everpresent danger. Portions of the Mill are blackened ruins.)
Raw materials flow into the Mill from the outside world. But no average worker in the Mill knows these sources.
Even the end product of the Mill is a mystery to the lower-class inhabitants. Various sub-units are made and sent off to other divisions of the Mill. But how they ultimately come together is a mystery.
The inhabitants of the Mill are divided into two classes: Workers and Bosses. Above these two groups sits the legendary and omnipotent, but never-glimpsed, Owner.
The Black Mill Comic Book: Issue Zero [Paul Di Filippo/Kickstarter]