Let's Dive Deep into the April Kickstarter Comics Launches

Strong trends emerge from our monthly analysis of Kickstarter Comics launches by genre

The Kickstarter Comics category saw 246 project launches in April, inclusive of only those crowdfunding campaigns that are actually intended to produce a comic (e.g., not art books, pins, sketch books, how-to books, etc.). It’s notable that the monthly launch volume is very consistent, with the exception of March, when there was a substantial surge that did not carry over into April.

The raw launch data for Jan - Apr 2025.

In the brief history of my genre monitoring in the Kickstarter Comics category, the most frequent launches are often for NSFW comics, which I characterize as:

Features nudity and/or explicit sexual content on covers and/or explicit sexual content on the interior pages of the comic.

However, Fantasy comics (narrowly) topped NSFW drops in April, and so did Sci-Fi projects, as NSFW launches diminished by nearly 1/3 from March.

Key Takeaways

• So far, the most robust finding from 5 months (counting December, 2024) of monitoring daily Kickstarter Comics launches is that the 5 elite genres (NSFW, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror & Superhero) predictably occupy around 70% of the project launches in a given month, each typically hovering between shares of 11% and 15% of the total Comics volume for those periods. The less densely occupied genres tend to be more volatile and are much more influenced by the occasional presence of prestige Kickstarter campaigns.

• The clear upward trend in Various genre launches is interesting, but, given that almost all projects in this category are multi-genre anthologies, attribution for the surging launches is difficult to establish with any reliability.

• Even after folding the Western genre into Action-Adventure and combining Crime with Thriller, these genres each display a persistent trend of lower launch numbers each month.

• Conversely, the mashed up Romance/Slice of Life genre is trending gradually up after a hot start in January.

The Argument for Genre-Based Sub-Categories

1. Comics readers and collectors search for new comics according to their preferred genre, not by book format.

2. Assign NSFW projects their own sub-category, thus consolidating them for their massive corner of the Kickstarter market and removing them from turning off potential backers who are not there for the porn or the kink.

Want to Review & Access My February Kickstarter Comics Genre Launch Data for Yourself?

Initiate a paid subscription to The Comic$ Crowd now, and you can access April’s genre launch frequency spreadsheet after the paywall below! That’s all 246 verified Comics projects launched from April 1 - April 31, each neatly sorted by genre, titled and linked to its Kickstarter page for tracking.