Kickstarter is an amazing platform for comic fans and artists. During its lifetime, comic creators had their projects supported by over 76 million dollars. A single look at Kickstarter statistics shows, that it’s the second category when it comes to the success rate. That’s right, 56% of all published projects get funded, compared to 36% for “games” and 20% for “technology”.
How come there’s such a huge gap between comics and other projects?
What Makes Comics so Successful on Kickstarter
For starters: lots of fans really want to support their favourite artists here, and often don’t treat campaigns as online stores. Sure, getting an early or limited copy of series you like is fantastic. But Kickstarter, thanks to its reward system, allows backers to pledge additional money to help their beloved authors. Sites like Patreon allow it too, but with crowdfunding you’re promised to get a particular issue or an album on an (almost) certain date, which is a great motivator.
Price is yet another factor. Most campaigns are much smaller investments than a 3D printer from “tech” category or a miniature filled board game.
Many comic creators joining Kickstarter have some prior experience and established fanbases. These always help. Even a bunch of followers on Deviantart can be a blessing when promoting your indie graphic novel on KS. New gadget makers, or debuting game designers with “one amazing idea” are less likely to have so many fans early on.
Rereleasing Your Best
When it comes to funding, almost all top comics projects are anthologies. Some include few dozens of webcomic pages, others cover a whole decade. The popularity of these is pretty obvious. Fans want to own every work from their beloved franchise. Without Kickstarter this is often either super expensive or straight impossible.
Anthologies also work great for the creators, who have tons of material on their desks (or hard drives) just waiting to be published (or republished). Without too much time and money investment they can give their fans what they want, and focus on creating new works.
The Power of Anthologies
Most successful anthologies on KS include titles like “The Order of the Stick”. The collection of comic stories parodying fantasy and RPG tropes, currently holds the record for most funded comic campaign. Compiled works of Rich Burlew managed to collect $1,254,120 and have helped him reprint the entire back catalog of works.
“Ctrl+Alt+Del”, another popular webcomic, collected $660,000 during the campaign of its 3 volume long anthology. 10 years of work, including some impossible to find artworks, were a real treat for anyone who enjoys Tim Buckley’s sense of humor.
“The Tomorrow Girl: Dresden Codak” by Aaron Diaz was another fantastic anthology success. 5 years worth of colorful goodness filled with science fiction, philosophy and time travel got $534,994 in backer pledges.
All mentioned campaigns offered tons of merchandise in their reward options and add-ons: from posters and stickers to autographed sketches.
Kickstarting New (and Older) Ideas
While the anthologies are in the lead for reasons I mentioned before, Kickstarter also gives birth to tons of new and refreshing projects: both mainstream and indie. For example: “Code Monkey Save World”, based on songs by Jonathan Coulton, was made by Greg Pak (“Planet Hulk”, “Batman/Superman”) and Takeshi Miyazawa. The campaign collected $340,270 in pledges and proved that even the craziest ideas and mash-ups can be turned into reality.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gregpak/code-monkey-save-world
Some people also use Kickstarter to relaunch older classics. Brian Pulido, who has been working on “Lady Death” series since 1991, decided to use the platform to bring these graphic novels back to life. His project got tons of old and new fans interested and resulted in many more installments published. Pulido keeps using KS to release his work. As of now, he has 12 campaigns under his belt.
Final Words
Crowdfunding is breathing some new life into many industries, and the comic one is really benefiting from it. Ideas that could never come true, old favourites coming back and anthologies of decades of work are all awesome to see. And let’s not forget about smaller indie authors, that can finally make their works known by the bigger public and release their creations without huge distributor fees.
