What Is Top Grift?

What’s going on everyone? I haven’t written a blog in a while so I figured I’d write a quick primer/explainer of what Top Grift is . It’s a deeply layered joke as far as the campaign goes, but there’s a very real, very good book at the bottom, which is not a joke — it is part of the parody.

Top Grift came into fruition because I was making fun of Andrew Tate’s comic, Top G #1, which he sold to his fans for $117 for a 30-ish page comic. It was a gift. The art was terrible. There was no real storyline. His people were getting had. I’ve seen this often with content creators marketing their sub-par products, and as a professional author who knows what I’m doing, it’s sometimes insulting to see how well those do.

Mike S. Miller and I developed this as a joke on a live stream, “Well, we could do Top Grift,” and then we decided to actually do it. If you don’t know him, he’s the artist from DC Comics’ Injustice and Shad M. Brooks’ Shadow of the Conqueror Graphic Novel. A real A-List heavy hitter talent. The joke is born: we’re making a “Top Grift” comic, but we have a stellar writer and an amazing artist. It’s literally NOT a grift.

On the campaign, I decided to take shots at how people grift on Kickstarter with dozens of variant covers. We made fun of this by offering a graded version, a “draw your own,” which is, in essence, a blank cover, a sexy variant with a nearly naked woman on the cover, and then exclusive covers if you get all the covers. This is a commentary on the comic industry which uses all of these methods to sell books not for reading but for random collecting. Again — all of these are real, so if you want to collect them, they WILL be rare. It’s not a grift even though it is!

Then, I decided it would be funny to do a parody OF my parody to create a parody-ception. I got together with The Quaff, who’s awesome as a parody artist, and we did Top CG as a secondary book to parody the first. There are TWO SEPARATE BOOKS and storylines. Making this even less of an actual grift as we’re producing multiple fun stories, something very few people do in the industry as most rest on the laurels of one or two crowdfund books a year, if that.

The point is to show that we are the real deal. We’re fighting the culture war. We are creating content in this movement beyond what anyone else does. This is the real pulp writer mindset that made our culture great in the 1930s-1950s where we’re working our tails off to produce books. No one else in the industry is doing this. It’s the anti-grift, and that’s why it’s top grift.

Support our efforts. Quaff and Mike worked hard — and Top Grift is a great story about an aspirational man who needs to come into his own. It’s not a reference-fest of Tate, who’s never mentioned in the book. We made something special, and I want to share it. By contrast, Top CG is a love letter to the fans of Comicsgate, complete with so many inside jokes that if you’ve been following over the years, you’ll die laughing.

Grab these both today on FundMyComic or the A-Covers here on the website store.