Crowdfunding the Future of Comics

Right now there are comic book campaigns from top creators and big names out there on crowdfunding platforms, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. You might have heard about some of them, especially the campaign for BRZRKR which has Keanu Reeves attached.

If you ask a lot of comic book creators or just find a post with historical page rates for different publishers, you'll find that there is very little money in making comicbooks for the mainstream audience. The economics are harsh and brutal. Just check out this list of page rates for various publishers. Getting $100 a page for lineart, a job that typically only produces a page a day at best, isn't going to make anyone rich.

My point is that either you get lucky and work for one of the big two on a major book, like Batman or Spider-Man, or you have to find some other way to earn money. For many artists over the years, they find that extra cash through taking commissions, going to cons and selling prints or other merchandise, and even working outside of the industry itself.

Crowdfunding is changing that. Established creators have come in and upset the apple cart, showing that there is big money in the world of crowdfunding. It's a lot like the indie boom in the 80's that launched a million careers and led to properties like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and companies like Image with remain with us today.

While big creators have an easier time drawing an audience and creating backers for their campaigns, Indiegogo and Kickstarter are both littered in independent comic projects that bring in 5-figure amounts, which can result in substantially larger payouts for the creators than the traditional publishing model.

As Peter Simeti, among others, has noted, comic book publishers don't seem as interested in bringing in new readers, or even preserving their existing audience, as might be expected. This might be due to big comic companies being owned by larger megacorporations which seem to view their comic publishing subsidiaries as a source of cheap spec scripts or as mere IP mills to keep trademarks current by keeping characters constantly in print.

But even if you want to work in the mainstream industry, and you get that big job on a big book, the market as a whole seems to be drying up. For years people claimed that graphic novel sales were keeping the industry alive, but a trip to a local bookstore will prove the lie to statement with manga growing while western comics shrink in representation. It feels like every month for the last several years, the number of dedicated comic book stores themselves has been shrinking, one by one, stores closing and the year 2020 hasn't lessened that effect.

Crowdfunding seems to the way of the future, and a lot of different artists are pursuing different models for it. Marcel Dupree's Evoluzione publishing funds everything through crowdfunding, running a campaign for a different book every month. Brian Ball has a Patreon for his comic book. Others seem to be publishing fewer, larger books like the large hardbound volumes produced by Doug TenNaple.

With crowdfunding come a lot of other issues, things that publishers traditionally furnish, like dealing with the printer and distribution of the book - and maybe the most difficult one of all, advertising. Those are challenges that are hard to overcome for a first time creator, but there are resources and there is information out there to help approach these issues. The most important such resource is just talking with other creators in the community and making use of their experiences and hard-won wisdom.

I doubt that the traditional publishing model will completely die any time soon, but crowdfunding seems to bring a lot of benefits and it has the chance of being able to reach a new audience that might not even know that comic books are even still published.