From the dynamic duo of Owlin — the co-creators of the graphic novel How Do You Smoke A Weed? — comes THAT SEXY BEAR!, a witty and campy graphic novel filled to the brim with metatextual humor. The book, which will be crowdfunded on Kickstarter by Spike Trotman’s Iron Circus Comics, is a satirical graphic novel about two bears in Cascadia Falls National Park who become the unwitting faces of an advertising campaign for a product polluting their home. The the campaign is now live on Kickstarter.
“THAT SEXY BEAR! is about advertising’s effect on nature & how nature advertises,” said Owlin. “It’s a love letter to 50s and 60s television. We wanted to pay respect to cartoonists like Ed Benedict and Gene Hazelton, along with the mama bears that raised us.
”Welcome to beautiful and scenic Cascadia Falls National Park! Commodified, gentrified, consumerized, and digitized, the Elysian environs of 21st-century Cascadia is now just more Content©™… and so are its hopelessly-acclimatized-to-tourists bears, Ginger and Yaya. Involuntary beer mascots and social media stars, they’ve forgotten how to bear entirely, much to the frustration and chagrin of their park ranger caretakers, Eggs and Ricardo. But things are getting weird now, even for Cascadia. The exploitation’s been kicked up a notch, with a mysterious SUV and colonizing copycat among the new crop of troubles threatening the park! Can bear and ranger, hand-in-paw, push back against the invasion? Or are they as doomed to digestion for digital gain as the rest of us?
“THAT SEXY BEAR! is just the right amount of Completely Nuts,” said Trotman. “Equal parts insight, homage, whimsy and weird. Echoes of classic mid century cartoons, crossed with 21st century sociopolitical anxiety and TikTok sh**posting. It’s a terrible but familiar vision of eking out an existence in an Always Online America. Y’all are gonna dig this one.”
Iron Circus has raised nearly 5 million dollars via crowdfunding and is now the premiere publisher of award-winning, critically-acclaimed graphic novels in the American Midwest.
To support the campaign for THAT SEXY BEAR, head to Kickstarter: THAT SEXY BEAR campaign.
For updates, follow Iron Circus Comics on X, Facebook, Bluesky, and Instagram.