It must be safe to say in this day and age that most people are familiar with the crowdfunding platform ‘Kickstarter’. Personally I associated Kickstarter with indie videogames and niche product pitches since the company’s inception back in 2009. However, in 2019 Kickstarter hosted a conference on the subject of book publishing and let’s just say it was well received.
To date Kickstarter has launched over 26,000 comic book projects and has a success rate of 66% to fund. Combine the timing of that with the timing of the Covid 19 pandemic (where we saw a staggering spike in North American comic book sales) and we have the largest swell and opportunity of small press publishing that the world has ever seen. Kickstarter has created the chance for creators to solicit their ideas to an audience and then create exactly what people want without any gatekeeping barriers from large publishing imprints. If you can write or draw, you don’t have to beg for a job anymore and I think that’s incredible. Kickstarter is the future of publishing and that future is now.
How relevant has Kickstarter become in the comic book industry over all? Well as far as independently published comic books go there are a few names that tower above everyone else over the last half Century and, ‘Cerebus’ authored by Dave Sim as well as ‘Spawn’ created by Image Comics founder Todd Mcfarlane and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman have all used the crowdfunding platform to successfully reprint and launch new projects as well as Keanu Reeves’ BZRK. If Image Comics is using it it’s definitely worth consideration.
I will conclude this crowdfunding love letter with a declaration of my own bias. I am currently working on a kickstarter campaign that’s slated to run through the month of March reprinting single issues of the first three installments of Badger as well as launching the fourth. If you follow me personally do not worry about missing it, I will remind you all incessantly.
– with passion and appreciation
Ryan Howatt
