5 Takeaways from Reading Every Comics Kickstarter Launched Over Two Weeks

Immerse yourself in the system, and patterns begin to emerge.

For the past 2+ weeks, I’ve spent a good portion of each day combing the Comics category of Kickstarter for daily releases. For each launch, I determine if it’s actually for a real comic (e.g., not a pin-up or art book, not to “fund a dream”, etc.) and put together a little capsule of information for it to include in my daily The Comics Crowd Substack posts that go directly to subscribers there. No need to bother with Kickstarter’s clumsy search function and dig through walls of text and porn covers when I’m delivering a curated list of the real comics right to your inbox on the daily and for FREE.

An example of the information I deliver on every single Kickstarter launch of an actual comic

It’s been a busy week for me, as my own comic, Vicious Circus: Big House Big Top, just finished it’s run on Kickstarter Sunday evening, successfully funding, though admittedly at a lower level than we hoped for. You can still late pledge for it if you’d like. Regardless, my partner in life and comics, Amanda Rachels, and I are ecstatic to see this book realized. I’ve already delivered the print files to our printing partners, and our Patreon patrons have the PDF edition to enjoy as of this morning. Next up for us is our annual Patreon-exclusive comic, co-written by our daughter, Graceland. This one, called simply Vicious Circus: Dot, can be had simply by joining our Patreon.

Cover by Amanda Rachels & Alivon Ortiz

Despite grinding on my own creative endeavors, I continued to push forward on The Comics Crowd, adding a daily list of real comics projects that are ending successfully. Naturally, all of this time spent in the Kickstarter comics stacks yielded some revelations, a few epiphanies, and a couple of realizations. Here are 5 of those for your consideration:

1. A Lot of People Want to Make Comics

Obvious, you say? I suppose so, but there is empirical weight to this assumption in the form of upward arcing numbers of projects launching in the Comics category. When I started this The Comics Crowd project, there were 260+ total projects in the Comics category. Today, as I write this post, there are 294, a number I (anecdotally) have never seen before. 28 of them launched YESTERDAY.

These potential comics run the gamut from corporate books with five-figure marketing campaigns to established self-publishers with devoted legions of followers on email lists and social media platforms to novice creators with nothing more than the sacred urge to create stories and art. It says much about the appeal and popularity of the medium, but it also creates a conundrum for the creators without massive budgets, audiences and related resources. Getting noticed becomes more and more difficult, and this problem is obvious in the sheer number of new Comics launches that generate less than 25% of their initial funding goal in pledges during the first 24 hours. And there are plenty of those. I see them every day.

2. Many Creators Are Unprepared to Run a Kickstarter

This fervent desire to tell stories via the comics medium sets in on many a comics fan as we find ourselves inspired by the epic, awesome tales we discover on the racks or in back issue boxes. Sadly, that burgeoning drive to create is only the first criterion for: a) crafting an actual comic story, and b) finding and connecting with a target audience with real interest in supporting that story’s creation via crowdfunding. Almost every day, there are desolate Kickstarter launches with single-digit or zero pledges.

An example of a comic that may eventually be sufficiently realized to be crowdfunded, but is clearly not ready. And the backer response shows it.

These Kickstarter pages are either filled with paragraphs atop paragraphs of dreams of new superhero universes without any actual art (a necessary component for a comic) or laced with tiny and/or obscure snippets of art without any sign of story synopses or description of the attributes (e.g., size, binding, etc.) of the book being proposed for crowdfunding. I hope the poor response from backers is not too discouraging for these new and well-intended creators.

The only art samples on the Kickstarter page for the above-referenced “MotaMan” comic.

3. There are Some Heavy Users of the Kickstarter Comics Category

In just the 17 or so days I’ve been reviewing the Kickstarter Comics launches, some frequent and redundant users of the platform have emerged. That’s not a value judgment. It’s simply a fact. Right now, former Zenescope editor and writer Pat Shand is a major part of three live Kickstarter campaigns in the Comics category:

And who can blame him? Combined, these three campaigns have a total funding north of $100,000. That’s major cabbage by any account and rare air on Kickstarter. Seriously, more power to him. My point is that there are select creators with the prolific creative fire to produce quality content quickly and the logistical acumen to produce it and efficiently put it in the hands of backers/buyers. They transcend the growing project glut in terms of visibility and popularity and are doubling and tripling down on those production and marketing talents as much as their creative ones.

4. Kickstarter is Now Extremely Lenient with Comics Project Approvals

There was a time, not so long ago, when Kickstarter’s Trust and Safety team disallowed creators from being involved in more than one unfulfilled (forget simultaneously running) campaign at a time. That stance shifted in the last few years, but I personally experienced delays in launches due to (sometimes inaccurate) claims from Trust and Safety that a prior campaign was as yet unfulfilled. We plan our campaigns such that we can begin printing once we can safely predict needed inventory mid-campaign and order at that time, so that we receive finished products and can begin fulfillment often before even receiving the funds from Kickstarter.

The now relaxed launch guard rails were always in place to minimize the risk of campaigns going unfulfilled by underprepared and overwhelmed amateur creators. While I am happy with the reduction in overly strict responses from Trust and Safety when we submit a campaign to Kickstarter for review, I am aware of heavy platform users who consistently fall behind on fulfillment of multiple campaigns but continue to launch, and to be allowed to launch, additional Kickstarters, complete with the now hollow “Project We Love” tag at the instant they go live. It’s a real problem.

And so is auto-approving campaigns from novice comics creators who have even less experience managing a crowdfunding endeavor or building a rudimentary audience before launching or generating adequate art and story samples for their comic before taking it to Kickstarter to be lost in the piles of campaigns and ignored. These doomed projects stand out like the vacant lots of Kickstarter and should be identified and offered direction to creative and organizational resources before being approved for launch.

5. NSFW Comics are King on Kickstarter

Sure, it’s a common gripe among purist comics creators, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Almost every day, there are one or more launches in the Comics category of projects that primarily consist of a plethora of variant covers offering varying degrees of topless and/or bottomless women. The majority of these that I see do not enclose any sequential art or story. These covers just fold around more of the same, perhaps slightly less well rendered, images of exaggerated women in some degree of undress and, often, a compromising situation. My only issue with this is that these books ARE. NOT. COMICS. If Kickstarter wants to support production of porn art books, simply assign them their own sub-category under the overarching Art category. Those porn cover factories that actually include sequential art and stories between the titty covers can remain.

Again, no one can blame the creators of these books, real comics or otherwise. There’s clearly a huge market for them, as they typically fund quickly and at high levels. Without deep diving into the numbers, it’s safe to say the greater bulk of funds used to back projects in the Comics category is invested in the growing NSFW library there. This is a fact of life, and all the rest of us can do is work to carve our own audience in our own niche, lest the siren song of NSFW dollar bills lure us into those infested waters.

Those are my initial, and likely unsurprising, thoughts on the current state of the Kickstarter Comics category after wading around neck deep in it for a couple of weeks. I did feel they’re worth sharing, and I hope you find some insights of value in navigating the space as a creator, reader or collector.

More soon!

• Kevin