The Week In Kickstarter Comics

By Todd Allen

Order of the Stick isn’t the only crowdfunding comics project out there.  Let’s take a look at what’s out there right now:

The most interesting project right now is probably the Goats revival. Goats was a humorous science fiction strip that spent the last few years in a long, epic dimension hopping saga.  The cartoonist, Jon Rosenberg, found that having a multi-year story arc wasn’t conducive to gaining new readers (and let’s be honest, story strips are a little harder to make money off of, in general).  He put Goats on the shelve and started Scenes From a Multiverse, where he gets away form long continuities by having each week’s strips take place in a different dimension.  That Kickstarter project quickly hit its initial goal of $12K to print the 4th volume of the Goats “Infinite Typewriters” cycle.  Following the lead of Order of the Stick, Rosenberg has added some goals and if he gets $40K pledged, he’ll go back and finish the 5th and final book in Goats series.  Yes, that’s right.  It’s become a Kickstarter to revive a discontinued series.  That project is sitting on a little under $26K with 19 days to go.

The big earner right now is Erfworld Year of the Dwagon.  They currently have a bit over $56K to turn the first book of the Erfworld webcomic into a motion comic.  Yes… this might be more of a movie/animation project than a comics project, but it’s in the comics category on the site.

The Diesel Sweeties eBook-Stravaganza 3000 has over $44K to go with 5 days left, massively over-funding the project to get the long-running webcomic reformated as DRM-free eBooks.  Cartoonist R Stevens will also be driving cross country to deliver a Pac-Man arcade game to Wil Wheaton.  (I couldn’t have made that up if I tried.)

The Only Living Boy is a new project from David Gallaher and Steve Ellis (whom you might remember from Zuda’s High Moon series and Comixology’s Box 13.  This just kicked off a couple days ago and the boys are looking for $11,500 for the project.

Joe Harris, the new co-writer on Fury of Firestorm is in the last 10 days of his quest to fund the first six issues of Great Pacific, a comic he’d like to do as an ongoing.  He’s currently at $2,283 with a $9,500 goal.

Also in the not-quite-comics category, it looks like Garth Ennis is going to be a children’s author.  The ERF children’s book has been funded to the tune of $15K with  15 days to go.  I could see a children’s publisher picking up a copy of The Boys and fainting dead away, so this may be an instance of an established author really needing crowdfunding to help him switch formats.