When Top Cow Productions announced that it was launching a Kickstarter campaign to support aFREE monthly comic book (in both digital and print editions) I had no idea what to expect. Now that they’ve actually completed their goal EARLY… I still have no idea what to expect. Certainly this won’t be the typical case, as Cyberforce was one of the founding Image Comics titles, and it approaching a big 20th Anniversary date, but the stage has been set for a new era in comics production, now that crowd-sourcing has been proven to help take some of the sales risk out of a new title. (I don’t know how they would handle overprints, or second printings and things of that nature, however.)
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) kinda liked Velocity, but didn’t understand Ripclaw’s appeal, asking: Do you think we’re looking at a new comics paradigm, or just a flash-in-the-pan success?
4 Comments
I’m really not too sure.
I think the use of Kickstarter can only be used on a creator-owned title that still has control of its distribution rights.
I think the success of Cyberforce will spur a bunch of similar titles to try the same thing in the near future but overall there won’t be enough viable candidates to make this funding model work.
Sadly, Kickstarter and its ilk will be a flash in the pan. All it will take is a couple of company’s that don’t deliver on big promises and people will leave.
While I really want this to work, I don’t see it continuing to work if it extends to too many series. Readers will quickly tire of it.
Crowd-sourcing is similar to the direct market because both cut costs by more accurately estimating market demand. Can crowd-sourcing fail so impressively that most people will still away from it? Yep. But then, Deathmate sure did not make retailers and readers love pre-ordering Valiant or Image comics. Also, Marvel’s Heroes World surely was not an effective direct market distributor.
Everyone has had enough of her/his pet peeve clichés and just plain annoying trends. Allowing readers to vote with their wallets is much more sensible (economics-wise) than the clubby publisher/retailer/fan-press interaction we’re living through.
Personally I’ve donated to two crowd-sourced comic related projects but since then I’ve seen greedy/needy/pathetic crowd-sourced campaigns. I would not pledge money if the work was dependent on the funding. I think raising funds for marketing, printing, etc. is sensible but paying for someone’s yearly income to produce 356 pages is just not interesting to me.