Points of Articulation
Celebrating 10 Years of Digger Mesch Not Delivering
Most Kickstarters are good and reliable; you pay your money, you get your product. It may take a thousand years to happen, but it eventually does.
But "most" is not the same as "all," and there are definitely ones that leave you, the backer, with nothing more than an empty space in your wallet, and no way to cover that. They're rare, but definitely more high-profile, which is why they may erroneously seem so common - just like in any other transaction, complaints get more public attention than compliments.
Some of these failed campaigns deliver nothing, simply taking all the money and disappearing into the night. Maybe they'll even offer refunds, to make themselves look good, then never bother sending them.
The worse, though, are the ones that deliver part of their rewards, because they seem like they're going to be legit, but then they just drop the ball partway through. Which brings us to the tale of Digger T. Mesch.
Digger, for those who don't remember, was the founder of Art Asylum back in the '90s - the company today best known for inventing Minimates. When Todd McFarlane pushed the toy industry forward in terms of sculpting, Art Asylum was one of the sources they contracted to make their toys look better (and speaking as someone who was collecting back then, boy was the change obvious!). After Art Asylum was bought by Diamond Select Toys, Digger began looking for other artistic outlets, including filmmaking.
In 2012, he ran a Kickstarter for Agent 88, a short film about an elderly woman who is also one of the world's greatest assassins. The film (idenified as a pilot for a webseries) was already shot, and the Kickstarter was to complete the post-production work. In order to help draw attention to the project, Digger traded on his successful past, offering various Minimates as rewards. The ploy worked, because Minimates are awesome and the movie characters looked cool in the form, and the Kickstarter was successful.
The campaign ended on August 8, 2012. Approximately one year later, backers could download their digital copy of the film. In February 2014, the art book shipped. And then there's never been another update on the project ever. So all those people who backed specifically because of the Minimatesm the thing for which Digger is actually famous? Get screwed, losers! The next month, March, a reply to a comment promised they were in discussions with DST and "we will be sending out an official announcement in the update section very soon with details." Which was clearly incorrect, since it's now been a decade with no updates.
For our part, we began asking Digger about it on Twitter in August of 2014. And we're been consistently hectoring him about it ever since. He's never paid any attention, but here are the greatest hits of trying to get him to show any accountability at all:
![These Are Your Kickstarter Rewards - [file not found]](art/digger52.png)
So there you go, that's eight solid years of us trying to make him fulfill his legal obligations to the consumers who gave him money. And to any companies out there, that's what you get when you agree to work with Digger T. Mesch: someone who will happily use your money, but will turn his back on you and not deliver his product if he thinks you're not important enough to help him further his career; a professional starfucker who won't do what he promised unless you can offer him more.
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