How Kickstarter Comics Super-Creators Are Ruining the Crowdfunding Marketplace

How about THIRTEEN unfulfilled comics projects, some due more than a YEAR ago?

Today, the Kickstarter Comics category reached a new level of bloat with 340 active projects, this following a frantic launch Monday that dropped 22 new crowdfunding campaigns on the platform. We’ve already reviewed the role of underprepared and underequipped aspiring creators in diminishing the searchability and the reliability reputation of Kickstarter. Let’s look at what’s happening at the opposite end of the organizational spectrum.

Kickstarter is pregnant with a growing glut of comics crowdfunding campaign mills, so-called self-publishers who, in actuality, have built out bulk production operations and are running constant, and often concurrent, Kickstarters regardless the fulfillment status of their previous campaigns.

Note: After some internal deliberation, I decided that I won’t identify these creators directly. I’m attempting to make a point, not enemies. Besides, Kickstarter is endorsing these spurious practices by continuing to approve the types of campaigns to which I refer. They bear the ultimate responsibility.

Let’s consider a live example. During my daily The Comic$ Crowd reviews of each and every crowdfunding project launched in the Kickstarter Comics category, I came across a creator who has fulfilled NONE of the seven campaigns he launched in calendar year 2024, said campaigns meanwhile raking in well over $100,000. Based on his own updates to the listed campaigns, the only fulfillment completed for a 2024-launched project was digital fulfillment for his May money-grab-of-the-month. A little more research revealed that he has incompletely fulfilled campaigns dating back to May, 2023. Really. Take a look for yourself:

In fact, it was only last month (September, 2024) that he updated projects ending between May and November, 2023, to let backers know that some varied proportion of them (but never all of them) would be receiving rewards at some point in the near future. By his own promised fulfillment dates, the creator is late on delivery for 7 (and, soon, 8) of the 13 referenced Kickstarters. 3 of those (and, soon, 4) have fulfillment dates a year or more in the past. Yet, the creator continues to crank out comics crowdfunding campaigns on a monthly basis, abandoning the Kickstarter promise of rewards to backers for their pledges.

So, if Kickstarter Trust & Safety is vetting and approving these campaigns, why should we, the responsible and ethical comics self-publishers who rely on Kickstarter and deliver the goods as promised, care how these “super-creators” conduct their business(es)? Because their money-grubbing negligence fuels every online conversation between former Kickstarter backers whose favorite Kickstarter story is how they got “ripped off”. That’s why. They’re ruining Kickstarter as a comics marketplace for the rest of us. And projecting fulfillment dates as far into the future as May, 2025 and continuing to launch campaign after campaign doesn’t make it okay.

How many of the above creator’s backers are repeat supporters who received zero rewards from multiple campaigns over the course of nearly 18 months? Now, how likely are those victims of this swindler to come back to Kickstarter and support your comic, no matter how reliable and talented a creator/self-publisher you are? It’s dreadfully simple math.

And Kickstarter doesn’t care about this practice. In response to contact about this practice of serial launching without fulfillment across 13 campaigns, I received a message that boiled down to, “…it doesn’t violate our rules or community guidelines.” Seriously. Meanwhile, after more than 80 successful and ethically fulfilled campaigns (including my last one, for which books are shipping this week), I’m tapping my fingers on day 3 of may wait for Trust & Safety’s approval of my next Kickstarter, just so I can begin marketing it. If you’re wondering what role Kickstarter’s 5% of that $165,799 (nearly $8,300) plays in their look-the-other-way approach to this creator’s failure to fulfill, you’re not alone.

I should clarify that this creator’s “comics”, if indeed they do exist, are of the low-brow, low-quality NSFW variety and are sold primarily on the availability of a plethora of poorly rendered nude covers. Despite more than $165,000 in dubiously earned funding, he’s too cheap to even resort to the really hot AI-generated covers that most of the porn cover mills are flaunting these days. We’re not exactly talking about erotic literature here.

I offer this information and analysis for the purpose of insight into why Kickstarter funding is drying up for we comics creators and self-publishers who actually launch only after we fulfilled our previous campaigns or have the goods in hand to do so. The knee-jerk tendency is to blame “corporate comics”, but I don’t think that’s a real problem for us. I believe the true culprit is represented by a segment of the Kickstarter comics creator base that has discovered a money-grab scheme that wields much the same tactics of constant launches and telegraphed fulfillment practiced by the one I referenced today. Much like reliance on fossil fuels for energy, there’s only so much blood in that vein, and these folks are gonna bleed it dry.

In an effort to support my theory, I’ll provide a couple of other, slightly different, examples in some other posts, coming soon.

Stay safe out there,

• Kevin