This is Kevin, back to talk about comics that launched on Kickstarter on the dates of February 1-2. There were 35 launches between Sunday and Monday last week. The first of the month always sees a huge spike in launches for some reason, no matter what day of the week it’s on, and usually Sunday doesn’t have very many launches at all, even during busy weeks, usually less than 10, sometimes zero.

You saw the usual spread of NSFW comics, including a number that weren’t actually comics at all and don’t belong in the Comics category. There are other places for that. There are also several just empty campaigns with only text blocks instead of any actual comic art, any sequential art, any cover art, and any story information. I always call those empty campaigns. There’s just no evidence that they know how to make a comic, have the actual gumption to make a comic, or have the resources to make a comic. Out of 35 campaigns I did find four that are awesome, that I wanna share with you as ‘Comics I Like, and we’ll talk about that here shortly.

Comics by Me

But first, lemme talk about a couple things I’ve got going on. As always, The Comic$ Crowd is brought to you by the only sponsor of this program, which is my comics. So, from Flatline Comics, I have a launch coming up on Tuesday, February 17th, a book called Deep Space Lovecraft. This is a project I’ve been working on for some time now.

I’ve been working it up, formulating it and, and producing it for almost a year and a half, in terms of when the concept actually struck me. The idea is that I’m taking all of the first-person Lovecraft stories and converting them into a retrofuturistic style of comic book using Lovecraft’s words, whether that be narrative or dialogue.

Then, I’m taking my knowledge of how to make a comic and building a really interesting, different way of seeing these, where all of the first-person stories are presented in terms of one character and then serialized into adventures featuring that one character, but without changing any of Lovecraft’s words or content. I think you’ll be surprised at what you see. These books turned out beautifully.

Also, I just so happen to have two projects launching in the next few weeks, because I’m collaborating with Martin Piero of Cosmic Times on another comic called Turbocharged Teenager, which is a lot of fun, been a blast to work on.

This is a parody of a 1980’s cartoon in which a teenager could turn into a car. That’s correct. Not a Transformer where a robot turns into a car or vice versa. This is where an actual high school teenager could turn into an actual car. The idea is so preposterous, but sticks out in our collective memories because we were children in those days around the time this cartoon came out. You could probably find snippets of it on YouTube.

We wanted to take that concept and evolve it, have some fun with it, and kind of twist it into more of a comedy-horror type of vein. We’re just a few pages and one cover from finishing the first issue. and our tentative launch date is March 3rd.

Please check those out. I do The Comic$ Crowd because I love comics, because I love Kickstarter comics, because I love being able to support other people who make comics through Kickstarter. So I would ask that you give some consideration to supporting me and my comics on Kickstarter, so that I can keep doing this and making comics as well. We support each other.

A Wish List for the Incoming Kickstarter Comics Lead

So one quick topic I want to discuss, something of importance to anybody who funds on Kickstarter. There’s a change happening in the lead Kickstarter staffer for the Comics category. If you’re aware of who Sam Kusek is, he was the Comics lead for about the past, probably a couple of years, if I remember correctly. I think he started in March of 24, somewhere around there, but he’s moved back into the publishing arena and good luck to him. hope it goes well. I think that’s the been the passion of a number of the Comics leads, and the past couple actually jumped back into that arena when they had an opportunity. More power to ‘em.

I understand. I have that bug, too. I can’t get rid of it. I love making comics, and I’m sure they do as well, but that leaves a void for the rest of us that are still here funding on Kickstarter. I gave some thought to this. and there are a lot of conclusions I came to that I’ve shared with all of you over the past year and a half, ways to improve what’s going on with the Comics category.

Some things have remained very stagnant for the past few years, if not longer, despite the vast number of improvements Kickstarter has made in their product. But there are still other ways that I believe we can improve the experience for backers as well as for publishers, and I wanna go over some of those, in terms of a wishlist for the incoming Comics lead. I’d like to just put these ideas out there in the interest of productivity and making things better for everybody involved.

Improve the Shopability of the Comics Category

First and foremost, it’s imperative that Kickstarter, that they make the category more shopability for backers. Right now, as I record this at 10:30 PM Central on Sunday night, February 8th, there are 236 projects in the Kickstarter Comics category. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to wade through. Anybody that comes to the platform who is a comics fan, a comics reader, a comics collector, whatever the case may be, is faced with the daunting task of wading through 200 plus campaigns at any given moment, then making a decision about which ones are interesting to them, affordable to them, attractive enough to consider making a pledge, and then safe enough in terms of ensuring that the creator is actually going to deliver the rewards that the backer is paying for.

That’s a lot of decision making points when you have to touch hundreds of campaigns for products and creators that you’ve never heard of before, learn about them and then make value judgements as to whether you want to. and feel secure enough to. support them with your dollars, something we all have to be very careful about these days. It’s a lot to ask. It’s really difficult. It’s a time investment, and it’s frustrating. I can tell you it’s frustrating because I go through these every day, and it gets frustrating to me to just see all the empty projects, all the projects that aren’t comics, that are just nude pin-up books, all the projects that are there from creators who have several campaigns running at once and several that haven’t been fulfilled yet.

It’s a lot to consider, and it’s intimidating to new backers. and it’s intimidating even to regular backers to go in and shop around like you would at a comic shop. where you’re just checking a book out. Does it look good? Is it something I wanna pay for? Is it in a price range I can afford? Doing that on Kickstarter is nearly impossible the way things are configured right now.

Allow me to make a suggestion based on my work over the past 18 months and based on interactions with many of you. The first item on the wishlist for the new Comics lead is to consider changing the subcategories in the comics category from book format, where we’ve got web comics, graphic novels, comic books, which just seems redundant with the overarching category name; and consider switching over to subcategories that are in the form of genres (science fiction, fantasy, NSFW, crime, horror, etc.). People look for comics in genres that they prefer, much more than they’re looking for a graphic novel versus a web comic. I’d much rather know that there’s a comic in science fiction, if that’s what I’m looking for, than if it’s a single issue comic or a graphic novel or a web comic.

If it’s a good sci-fi comic, if it’s a good horror comic, depending on what I’m looking for, that’s gonna make it easier for me to zero in on the stories that I want to read. You know, there should be a superhero genre. There are a lot of superhero comics launched on Kickstarter, but as of now, there’s no way to filter those out to just see the superhero comics, to just see the horror comics. And that’s something that will make the category more shopable. And I hope the new Comics lead and the people at Kickstarter will consider that it will improve pledges because people are better capable of finding the ones they want to read.

Overall, we have to do something to improve the project bloat, in which there are 200-300+ campaigns in the category at any given time, but so many of those campaigns aren’t credible. They’re either from empty campaigns; they’re from bots; they’re from super creators who are months, if not years behind on fulfillment for their campaigns. So, I have a few suggestions, very specific, very simple suggestions, for improving this shopability situation and decreasing the project bloat without affecting anyone who’s a legitimate comic creator, who legitimately fulfills their campaigns from the platform or from opportunities to crowdfund.

The first step in that process is to not allow launch for campaigns that do not include sequential art, cover art, or story synopsis…evidence that a comic is being made. These campaigns typically do not fund. Kickstarter backers are savvy group. They’ve been doing this for a long time, but even novice Kickstarter backers can see that.

Then, I have a couple that’ll probably be a little more controversial, but we have to reign in super creators who are running 4, 5, 6 campaigns at one time on different accounts, sometimes on the same account. To me, a good sound, high-end number for the number of campaigns you can be running at once, even with different account names is 3. If there are more than 3, they should be paused. They should not be approved until the ones that are currently running resolve ...