Can kickstarter be the savior of indy comic books?

GeekDad's Dave Banks explores the current state of indie comic's with New Brighton Archeological Society co-creator and writer Mark Andrew Smith.

Finally, here was an all ages graphic novel that treated kids intelligently and was really entertaining at the same time. So we were surprised to see that the sequel was going to require some Kickstarter funding to get going. Surely a critical darling like The New Brighton Archeological Society didn't need funding to get off the ground, did it?

Unfortunately, as with many creators in the indie scene, the answer from Mark and co-creator Matthew Weldon, is a resounding YES. "We're eight thousand dollars in the red on The New Brighton Archeological Society Book One for coloring and lettering costs... We front the cost of producing the book and promoting the book. The publisher (Image Comics) prints it and the distributor (Diamond) distributes it... In the model we're publishing under, we're the last to recoup."

The recent fundraising success of Jeremy Bastian's Cursed Pirate Girl and others has made Brooklyn-based Kickstarter a game changer in the world of comics -- providing micro-financing to projects that wouldn't otherwise get made in this current state of shifting business models and economic woes.

Support Mark and Matthew! You can donate to the NBAS Kickstarter project and help bring the much anticipated sequel to reality. Or buy the first book.

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Anonymous

“Surely a critical darling like The New Brighton Archeological Society didn’t need funding to get off the ground, did it?”

What world do you live in, and can I join you there?
Anonymous

I have been in children’s publishing for a very long time and 667 books. The comic book companies cut their own throats by selling only to comic book shops, which are like creepy private clubs for arrested adolescents. They lost future audiences by cutting out kids’ access to comics.

Giving away comics on the web is also cutting your own throat. There is no way to make a living doing that. Comics are a tremendous amount of work. You think you can work a day job and still be an artist? You think you can live in your parents’ house the rest of your life?

People who have this insane hostility toward publishing companies fail to understand that, like the music business, an artist needs a support system of people who know how to sell the work once it’s done. You may be a creative genius, but you may just stink as a salesman. You can either engage in creative work or you can bust yourself promoting and trying to sell the work. Only a very few people can manage both effectively. And of course the folks printing, selling and promoting the book must get paid. It is a co-operative effort and everyone gets a cut to make a work successful. Don’t expect to strike it rich because that happens only rarely.
@oric

Image Comics has done more to further Indy Comics and their Creators than any other funny book publisher in history. Period. They were THE trailblazers that revolutionized the industry. All publishers have their issues. But to suggest Image is “ripping Smith and Weldon off” is 100% inaccurate and in poor form. These are industry-wide issues that all creators are facing. Kickstarter is perhaps one part of the solution.
- Anonymous
  
  I agree, Image is at the forefront of creator rights. With Image creators can keep 100 percent of their rights. With most of the other publishers they take half of the rights across the board and the books more than likely don’t turn a profit. Image is the best of the best on the indy scene and a real standard of creator’s rights.
- spriggan
  
  What planet are you living on? Indie publish have been around for decades before Image and long after. They only thing they did was make hacks like McFarlane, Liefeld, Silvestri, Lee, Campbell and the rest greedy multimillionaires wiping their collective asses with 4 color gloss print, variant embossed foil holographic cover with free exclusive trading card inside. Image might have been created to make sure artists and writers retained rights and majority profits from their OWN characters but it didn’t stay that way after the greenbacks started rolling in. Just ask Jim Lee’s stable of ghost artist clones. Or the infighting between the companies founders. Image was a great idea, but a broken model. It did more to hurt comics in the long run than it did to better the industry short term.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_comics#Partial_break-up
  
  And if you wanna see how real indie publishers do it check out someone like Dave Sim (before he went nuts) or Oni Press or the now defunct Kitchen Sink.
  - Anonymous
    
    You’re talking about something that happened in 1996. Top Cow is still part of Image and Rob is part of the company again. Image is one of the best companies today and it’s not the scape goat of the comics bust of the 90s which was everyone’s fault. The height of it was the death of superman. They’re putting out better books than Oni or Kitchen Sink ever did and have a much better deal for creators than Oni or Dark Horse which take about half of your rights but the books don’t sell well. Publishers should be about selling books and not about owning creator’s properties and taking advantage of people. Image is at the forefront of creator rights and putting out the best material on the market today. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Anonymous

That’s an interesting point.

Most of the comics that I’ve paid attention to being funded via kickstarter have been to cover the publishing costs, with a model of “pay for the book in advance, so we can pay to have it published, then you get the book.” Which doesn’t seem like an unethical model to me. It is essentially the same as paying for the book after it’s been published for the consumer, but helps the creator a great deal.

But does the communal fund raising aspect demand a more open ended product from the creator? Perhaps so.

I remember at the Sydney Writers Festival last year a speaker was talking about how if you were creating a work dealing with a concept, that book had to be made through that concept.
His book was about open source collaboration, he got about half way through writing it and realised he was essentially full of garbage because he wasn’t creating it using the ideas he was discussing. So he switched models.

Another example perhaps would be a book all about book binding for the individual, should, ideally be bound by individuals. And so on.

Does this extend to funding models? I don’t know.
Anonymous

“GeekDad’s Dave Banks explores the current state of indie comic’s with New Brighton Archeological Society co-creator and writer Mark Andrew Smith.”

Plurals do not take an apostrophe. Ever. (Or do “dream merchants from Hollywoodland” live in an imaginary universe where punctuation and grammar don’t matter? Dream on!)

Here – I fixed it for you:

GeekDad’s Dave Banks explores the current state of indie comics with New Brighton Archeological Society co-creator and writer Mark Andrew Smith.
Oreo

Fab – my son and I were looking into what happened to book 2 of this just last week and thinking that it had died on the vine. Fingers crossed it makes the necessary level of pledges, and thanks for promoting the fact the Kickstart was still open.
Anonymous

I wish people would be more discriminating with their kickstarter funds.

I really wish people would realize that if they are paying for something as a group maybe they should donate to the commons and not just to the artists pocket.

Kickstarter worries me. When the commons is in such heavy need of quality content, why not put your money where your mouth is and fund something to better everyone, not just yourself.

This is especially important for kickstarter projects that are software oriented. There is no sense funding proprietary software when FLOSS is in such dire need.
Anonymous

Totally going to torrent this. Thanks for the heads up!
Counterglow

I can’t remember who said it, but I remember the quote: “The relationship between a publisher and a writer is the same as the relationship between a knife and a throat.”
Anonymous

Every time I look at Kickstarter I really wish I had a good way to seriously invest in projects like this. I’ve love to actually work with some of these guys… I’ve looked at places like PartnerUp but they really don’t seem to do the same thing.

Is there a good place to go when it comes to looking for folks who’d be interested in funding for these sort of projects?
donopolis

The distribution system for comics is horribly broken…

As soon as the industry went Direct Distribution they signed there own death warrant.

Comic shops are insular and you have to already be a comic person to go into one…meaning no new blood…get these books out to bookstores and 7-11′s and drugstores and new venues…where kids of all ages unstead of kids in their 30′s are going to see them…I’ll do my part by letting my teacher wife know about them.
- Anonymous
  
  In the future, I think the system will be one that is A to B without any middle men and Kickstarter will be a preorder system that empowers creators and knocks down barriers.
peterbruells

“Finally, here was an all ages graphic novel that treated kids intelligently…”

Wow, I must’ve imagined “Leave it to Chance”. Or TinTin. Or most of the Rosa and later Barks stuff corning Huey, Dewey and Louie, not to mention the Italian and Danish stuff.
Joe The Wizard

I might also point out the Kickstarter by Daniel Lieske of the ridiculously amazing Wormworld Saga.

http://wormworldsaga.com/ & https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daniellieske/the-wormworld-saga-app
- Anonymous
  
  It’s like Kanye West is here.
  - Joe The Wizard
    
    You, I’ma let you finish, but first…
Fang Xianfu

Or, you know, you could just put it on the web where anyone can access it and use that model. It has to be better than being $8000 out of pocket on a book.
- Anonymous
  
  That’s for coloring and lettering costs, not print costs. Putting it up on the web would have the same results.
Anonymous

I also want to mention the insanely beautiful Anthology Project here. I am proud to have helped sponsor this with the help of Kickstarter.

http://theanthologyproject.com/

This has to be one of the most fabulous indie comic collections I’ve ever seen and would not exist without backers help.
Campbell

“I wish people would be more discriminating with their kickstarter funds.

I really wish people would realize that if they are paying for something as a group maybe they should donate to the commons and not just to the artists pocket.

Kickstarter worries me. When the commons is in such heavy need of quality content, why not put your money where your mouth is and fund something to better everyone, not just yourself.

This is especially important for kickstarter projects that are software oriented. There is no sense funding proprietary software when FLOSS is in such dire need.”

I don’t really know what you mean here, or how it relates to this comic. Can you expand on this?

Are you suggesting that the comics community should use kickstarter to fund a comics publishing body rather than publishing individual projects?
cinemajay

Here’s a great example of a project that took off thanks to Kickstarter–”Johnny Recon” a sci-fi comic homegrown here in the Twin Cities. Just proves that it doesn’t matter how many fans you start out with once you have something you can show as your work you’re fans/momentum increases exponentially.

Johnny Recon when it was posted on Kickstarter: http://popgunpulp.tumblr.com/post/289216767/that-big-news-ive-been-talking-about-its

The creators’ website: http://www.popgunpulp.com/

So there’s at least one more success story!
Anonymous

Campbell, it means that if we fund the creation of a comic book or something like maybe the license of the resulting comic book should be a creative commons license like CC-BY-SA, such that the commons benefits from such input. Instead funds are often used to bankroll some artist who keeps everything to himself, even the ability to distribute any of the results.

I’m saying if you try to fund a comic via kickstarter the end license of the material should benefit more than the donators. Besides, the original author never loses their copyright on their work anyway.

I would never fund a kickstarter for proprietary software. If we’re working together to fund a project, it should benefit more than the silly hipsters (such as myself) who heard about it and were in on it.
das memsen

Let me understand something. Kickstarter gets 5% of the collected money, and Amazon gets another 5%. So people pitch in 10 grand, and 500 bucks of that goes to some brooklyn hipsters who had a good idea, and 500 bucks goes to one of the richest, most powerful media distributors in the world.

And everyone is cool with this? Why can’t someone with a little less greed in their pocket create a site that charges a lot less? I can only imagine how much kickstarter pocketed last year. I can understand taking a small cut to cover your expenses and (reasonable) salaries, but after that, the rest should go where it’s supposed to- to the artistic project in question.

There must be an html-savvy, art-loving altruist out there who could create a competing site that charges less and still remains profitable, right? I had the exact idea as kickstarter years ago, when I was hoping to get a tv series off the ground (i say “tv” but it would have been online) but I haven’t the faintest idea how to go about creating that. Then kickstarter appears, appealing to creative folks’ passion while making bank. If I could find a less-greedy way to fund things, I would be very supportive of it… but this place just screams out S-C-A-M.
Avram / Moderator

We front the cost of producing the book and promoting the book. The publisher (Image Comics) prints it and the distributor (Diamond) distributes it

I’m stuck wondering in just what sense Image is a “publisher” if they’re not doing any promotion, or paying an advance. If all they’re doing is arranging the printing, well, the self-publishers I know of all arrange that on their own. I’m wondering if maybe Image isn’t ripping Smith and Weldon off.

Or possibly Image is fronting the printing fees in exchange for a piece of sales revenue? That could make sense, depending on the numbers.
- Hools Verne
  
  Most self publishers can’t front the cost to print at the levels that Diamond requires for distribution and Diamond has little interest in giving space to people they consider no names. They barely tolerate small press publishers as it is. Image gives indy creators a reliable way to get onto the racks in the direct market.
Anonymous

Kickstarter will work for a few big-name projects that already have a ton of fans. Thousands of other projects, some just as worthy, will not meet their quota. So, no – this is not the savior of indie comic publishing.
- andygates
  
  “Kickstarter will work for a few big-name projects that already have a ton of fans. Thousands of other projects, some just as worthy, will not meet their quota. ”
  
  So you, with your knowledge of these great projects, draw together an anthology, spin up some fan buzz with cross-pollination, and … oh, look, the Anthology Project is there. On Kickstarter. :)
  - Anonymous
    
    Seriously now, if indie comic authors knew how to organize and create buzz they wouldn’t be indies and they wouldn’t need Kickstarter in the first place. ;)
EFA

It’s great to see Kickstarter enabling creators to be able to share these dream projects. Another great case in point, Michael Zulli’s Fracture of the Universal Boy, which he worked on for nearly a decade and actually went so far as to be solicited by Diamond before being canceled by the previous publisher. Here’s an artist who is pretty much an industry legend, and could likely get one of the big guys behind this project. Instead, he has decided that he’s tired of big publishing’s model of churn-and-burn, and the consequence of that model being work that may be of an unacceptable standard. Instead, he’s going to do it his way with minimal outside influences.

http://kck.st/emwM5l

What’s amazing is how fans and admirers, not to mention some serious heavy-hitters in the industry, have gotten behind these creator-driven endeavors which totally short-circuit the traditional publishing process AND the typical distribution model. Kickstarter has opened up a world of possibilities to creators.

Exciting times!