a people's history of british columbia, and a chance to preserve it for the future

Here's a chance to preserve Canadian history - the real history, not the government-approved kind - and to preserve art and creativity and alternative media, all at the same time.

Please consider giving $7.00 - or any amount - and sharing this excellent campaign with your friends and on social media. More info:

Hi! My name is Nicole Marie Guiniling and I’m the founder of Ad Astra Comix.

Ad Astra is a website that promotes political and historical comic books, and has recently stepped, albeit with shakey legs, into production, distribution, and publishing.

Over the next 40 days, I'm here on IndieGoGo to promote the re-mastering of "100 Year Rip-Off: The Real History of British Columbia." It’s a graphic history of the province that was first published in 1971. That makes it the oldest "Graphic History" on record in Canada.

100 Year Rip-Off

In July 1971, 100 Year Rip-Off was printed as an 8-page tabloid-sized insert in the counter-culture newspaper, Socialist Youth. It was produced in response to festivities celebrating 100 years of British Columbia's time as a Canadian province. When I first looked through it 40 years later, I was holding a photocopy of a photocopy--after four decades out of print, it was unlikely that too many originals were still around.

Pages were creased, graphics were scarred, and the text was messy, but I loved it. What a wonderful documentation--and piece, in and of itself--of B.C. history! I just knew that if the work were re-issued, there would be others like me who would want to see it.

In cooperation with the original artist, Bob Altwein, Ad Astra Comix is re-releasing 100 Year Rip-Off for a new generation of readers. The original work has been re-mastered and re-formatted into a black-and-white, 30-page comic book--the same size as your garden-variety Marvel or DC comic.

Ad Astra Comix is already at the presses, ready to begin printing.... but in order to get 100 Year Rip-Off into comic shops across Canada, we need costs to be as low as possible.