In September, representatives from around the world will gather at the United Nations to ratify the organization’s newly developed list of Sustainable Development Goals, essentially a global “to do” list—“No Hunger,” “Gender Equality,” “Fresh Water and Sanitation,”—focused on solving the world’s toughest problems. Beginning today, Reading With Pictures, a nonprofit that advocates for the use of comics in education, is cooperating with the U.N. and several other nonprofits to launch a new global publishing project, The Comics Guide to Global Goals, a series of 17 short comics designed to make the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals accessible to people around the world.

Indeed, the project’s goal is to reach 100 million people around the globe. This ambitious international publishing project will begin today with the launch of Comics Uniting Nations, a Kickstarter campaign to raise $60,000 of initial funding for the project. Under the supervision of Reading With Pictures and its partners, the project will organize international creative teams of artists and writers who will work in concert on each of the 17 ten-page comics, which will be distributed for free in multiple languages in digital formats and in print publication. The first comics will be released in September this year when the goals have been ratified.

Global organizations can use one or a combination of the various comics as they choose. While The Comics Guide to Global Goals is primarily organized as a nonprofit venture, there are plans to create for-pay premium collected editions in print and digital editions that can be offered for sale.

The project will also feature key contributions and support from a range of commercial publishers—including Andrews McMeel, Dark Horse, Papercutz, IDW, Comixology, and Archie Comics—most of which will produce a series of one-page comics, each a kind of public service announcement, to introduce each global goal. Publishers are also providing Kickstarter rewards for its donors. RWP will organize the creative teams that will produce the 17 comics, which will not include branded characters. The group is also working with the U.N. and other nonprofit agencies on plans to distribute and promote the list of SDGs to communities around the world.

Founded in 2009 by comics writer and entrepreneur Josh Elder, Reading With Pictures is a nonprofit advocate for the use of comics by teachers. RWP has used Kickstarter in the past to publish a variety of educational comics publications. In 2014, RWP partnered with Andrews McMeel to publish Comics Make Kids Smarter, a collection of short comics stories addressing a list of educational topics drawn from the Common Core Standards aimed at grades 3-6.

The Comics Guide to Global Goals was initiated after an encounter between Natabara Rollosson, a freelance event producer that works with the U.N. to produce high profile international events, and Elder at last year’s New York Comic-Con. Curious about using comics to promote global goals, Rollosson told PW he visited the comics convention at the Javits Center for the first time, wandered into the Reading With Pictures booth and began talking with Elder. “Josh’s eyes kept getting bigger as we talked about the possibilities,” Rollosson said. The two began immediately working on a proposal to create the comics guide.

Elder compared the Comics Guide to Global Goals to “Ikea’s use of cartoons to make one brochure for the entire planet.” Reading With Pictures, he said, was founded on the belief that comics are “a kind of universal visual language, one that’s ideal for communicating important concepts to diverse audiences. Concepts don’t get any more important than the Global Goals, and audiences don’t get any more diverse than the entirety of the human race.”

Comics Uniting Nations: a comics guide to the goals of the project and how it will be produced.

Update: Added the comics guide to the goals and production of the U.N. comics project.

Correction: the name of the RWP textbook published by Andrews McMeel is Comics Make Kids Smarter, not The Graphic Textbook as stated in an earlier version of this story.