Rich Burlew has been self-publishing his “comedy-fantasy-adventure” webcomic The Order of the Stick (OOTS) since 2003. Over the last seven years, Rich has built up an incredible fan base, with over 23,500 fans on Facebook alone – and remember: this is entirely self-published, so Rich isn’t enjoying the benefits of a large publishing house marketing and printing and promoting his comic – he’s doing it all himself.

Below is Rich’s newest OOTS strip, #839: Finding Something, starring a hilarious cast of weapon-wielding stick figures:

Now, here’s where things get good.

One month ago, Rich launched a project on Kickstarter to raise funds for reprinting his older books – full-color collections of the webcomic that have long been out of print, due to his focus on creating new work. Rich launched his project with the goal of raising just shy of $58K, the largest amount of money I’ve seen asked for as part of a comics project on Kickstarter (Womanthology, a comics anthology featuring the works of over 140 industry-favorites female creators, only asked for $25K, half of what Rich, the self-published comics-maker is asking).

With 25 hours to go, Rich, the stick figure-drawing, self-published cartoonist asking for $58K, is sitting at $1,062,993. Look at that number again: that’s one million, sixty-two thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-three dollars. And he still has an entire day to go (Last night I watched his total climb $7,000 over the course of an hour).

Rich has sent out to the world a powerful message: watch           out for the passionate – we know what we want and we’re going to get it!

I love that a 29 year-old D&D-playing New Yorker can pursue his passion by making stick-figure webcomics, open up a project on Kickstarter, and make $1M over his funding goal.

I don’t know about you, but I have some work to do!

(Be sure to check out OOTS and see the Kickstarter project.)