Superheroes Dominate NSFW Comics on Kickstarter in February

At least in terms of number of projects launched, there were a third more superhero comics than NSFW comics in the shortest month.

In February, there were 247 Kickstarter project launches in the Comics category that purported to create actual comics (e.g., not art books, pins, sketch books, how-to books, etc.), which represents only an insignificant increase over the 242 projects that dropped in January

In the brief history of my genre monitoring in the Kickstarter Comics category, the most frequent launches were 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, two other genres made big moves in February, with Fantasy comics launches numbering nearly 50% more than the previous month and superhero campaigns almost doubling in launch frequency.

Now in our third month of collecting and collating this genre launch data, it’s very clear that there is a “Big Five” set of genres prevalent in the Kickstarter Comics category, those being:

1. NSFW

2. Superheroes

3. Fantasy

4. Horror

5. Sci-Fi

This fact may seem a matter of common sense, but it’s reinforced by these very robust data findings.

Key Takeaways

• With a whopping 44 launches in February, Superhero comics increased their share of monthly launches by 8% over January. That’s an unusually large leap, but we’ll see if that translates to proportion of funds raised for the month, when that funding data is complete in a few weeks.

• NSFW project launch volume is remarkably stable, remaining between 32-39 campaigns from December 2024 through February, 2025. This phenomenon is likely fueled by the highly reliable funding and campaign success rates emerging from our previous analysis of those data points.

• The anomalous surge in Superhero projects aside, there also appears to be a stable, and perhaps ultimately predictable, trend emerging regarding the launch frequency stability of the other Top Five Comics genres: Sci-Fi (11% in both January & February), Horror (13-14%), and Fantasy (11-15%).

The Argument for Genre-Based Sub-Categories

By my logic, one obvious application of this data is the reorganizing the sub-categories (currently and uselessly based on book or digital format) by genre. Allow the creator to set a primary genre for their project upon set-up, and backers may then peruse all projects at once or narrow the search field to only the genre(s) they favor. This solution also allows backers not interested in NSFW imagery or stories to exclude those from their project searches. This suggested change carries a lot of win and simply more useful overall curation in the Comics category

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 February’s genre launch frequency spreadsheet after the paywall below! That’s all 247 verified Comics projects launched from February 1 - February 28, each neatly sorted by genre, titled and linked to its Kickstarter page for tracking.