Despite the plague of a worldwide pandemic, comics projects on Kickstarter had their biggest year in 2020, with $22 million in pledges — and there are two months to go.
According to a post on the Kickstarter blog by Oriana Leckert, this surpassed last year’s record $16.9 million, and the success rate is also sky high.
This community’s backers have collectively pledged a whopping $22 million in 2020, outperforming last year’s all-time record of $16.9 million by a mile. The category’s success rate hit its all-time high of 74 percent, almost twice as high as the site average across all Kickstarter categories.
Some of the more than 1,300 amazing projects driving this year’s success include The Nib’s political cartoon compendium Greetings from the Wasteland, Scott Snyder and Tony Daniel’s collectors’ edition of Nocterra, experimental art newspaper LAAB, the Latinx sci-fi anthology Mañana, Iron Circus’ Victorian-era Sapphic graphic novel Patience & Esther, and Ava’s Demon: Reborn, cartoonist Michelle Czajkowski’s third campaign and Kickstarter’s all-time most-funded webcomic project. Not to mention BRZRKR, a graphic novel series by Keanu Reeves, Matt Kindt, and Ron Garney, which raised $1.45 million and became the most-funded Comics project of all time. (In a very Keanu move, the series publisher, Boom! Studios, passed on the goodwill by pledging $100 to all live projects from first-time Comic creators.)
Despite COVID-19 changing life worldwide, and upending economies, some things are hanging in there and comics is one of them. And specifically, supporting the diverse array of projects on Kickstarter is one of them. It doesn’t hurt that Kickstarter offers the kind of deluxe collectible editions that homebodies are craving in all areas these days.
Also noteworthy is how many top-name comics creators have joined the platform this year, as everyone tries to find new publishing models. All in all, the numbers seem very solid.
It’s almost as if….comics are thriving, not dying?
Two news notes about this:
• Publishing veteran Oriana Leckert has joined Kickstarter as their Comic Outreach Lead. Leckert has been at Kickstarter in a different area for a while and fills the position formerly held by Camilla Zhang.
• Boom! making $1.45 million for a Keanu Reeves comic book is pretty darned 2020. I can see why they came under so much scrutiny for the campaign, but clearly they did not drain all the money from other campaigns.
Leckert notes that there are many deserving Kickstarter comic that are still worthy of your money; you can see an ongoing listing of new projects at our regular Kickstarter column, which runs every Friday. Thanks to Josh Hilgenberg for covering this important beat.
What would be interesting to know is what the impact of having larger companies and larger creators has had on indie sales. Has a rising tide lifted all boats, or are the giant boats wrecking the smaller ones in their wakes?
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