Crowdfunded comics have come a long way since just over a decade ago, when the venerable Archie Comics canceled its high-profile Kickstarter campaign after the very notion elicited blowback from fans. Today, Kickstarter has become the dominant crowdfunding platform in the comics space, and comics campaigns regularly raise millions of dollars, with some 3,414 projects raking in a total of $46.5 million in 2024. That year, more than 67% of comics projects were successfully funded—the highest success rate by category of any type of Kickstarter project.

In April, Sean Edgar became the newest director of comics and collectibles at Kickstarter, coming to the company after a two-decade career Image, Z2, and Dstlry. Edgar tells PW that he sees the growth of crowdfunded comics as filling a gap in the market.

“It's addressing parts of the market that weren't necessarily addressed before,” Edgar says. “You have a fleet of indie creators who are going to be absolutely supported on this platform with a high success rate. You don't have to ask for permission from any intermediary.”

Even established comics creators like Don Simpson are embracing Kickstarter. Since entering the industry in the early 1980s, he’s worked with established publishers both within the indie comics space (including Kitchen Sink, Fantagraphics, and TwoMorrows) and outside of it (notably on books published through Dutton and Simon & Schuster).

But by 2025, the opportunities for traditional book contracts weren’t quite what they used to be. He has since undertaken three Kickstarter projects. Megaton Man: Multimensions, an anthology of several creators based on Simpson’s hallmark character, raised $34,942 on a $30,000 goal in 2023. In April 2026, The Lost Art of Don Simpson raised $14,452, but this time for Simpson as the sole creator and orchestrator of the campaign. And most recently, the reprint collection Megaton Man Microbus raised $25,079 on a $13,000 goal.

“These projects were more like paydays that would give me a nest egg to do more stuff,” Simpson tells PW.

Dean Haspiel tells a similar story. As an indie comics writer and artist, Haspiel has been in the industry almost as long as Simpson, having been published by DC Comics, collaborated with Harvey Pekar on American Splendor, and stewarded his own webcomic, among other ventures.

Since 2023, Haspiel has successfully mounted four different crowdfunded solo projects, alongside contributions to a number of different anthologies. He estimates that the average solo Kickstarter earns him between $10,000 and $15,000 in net profits for about five months of work.

Yet while the appeal of crowdfunding is intuitive for cartoonists like Simpson and Haspiel, the biggest spotlights on Kickstarter comics campaigns have lately been shining on much bigger projects altogether.

Enter the titans

In 2024, Skybound, the imprint of Image Comics headed by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, set an all-time record when its GI Joe Compendium reprint collection raised more than $3.7 million on a $50,000 target. The following year, the publisher broke its own record when its Transformers Compendium raised $4.6 million in 2025.

Indeed, the list of all-time highest-funded Kickstarter comics belongs heavily to large and established publishers, with Skybound, Boom!, and Todd McFarlane Productions all holding prominent spots.

Skybound’s crowdfunding strategy began during the pandemic, in 2020. For several months in the early part of that year, direct market distribution through Diamond had halted, and for a time it was unclear when shipments to comic shops might return. Crowdfunding, which offered both financial security in a precarious moment and a way to ship books direct-to-consumer, seemed like a life preserver.

That first campaign, for Ava’s Demon by Michelle Czajkowski, beat all internal expectations, raising more than $500,000 to reach its goal. Today, according to SVP and publisher Sean Mackiewicz, the imprint currently maintains a regular slate of three Kickstarter projects per year—enough time, he says, to effectively promote and manage each campaign without exhausting their audience.

“We’ve seen that it’s the lapsed fans who are like, ‘I don’t want to miss out on this moment,’” Skybound editorial director Alex Antone says. “I call it a ‘cultural moment’ for fans of the IP. I think a lot of people who maybe have become more casual fans find their inner hardcore fan in that moment.”

From Kickstarter’s perspective, Edgar sees the preponderance of larger publishers as helping rather than hindering the viability of smaller projects.

“The best months are where you have a massive project that’s attracting eyeballs to the smaller projects as well,” Edgar says. He notes that the median comics Kickstarter raises $17,500, suggesting that the site’s backbone remains small and mid-sized creative efforts.

Old problems, new solutions

For smaller creators, however, the challenges can still be difficult to ignore. Haspiel, for one, is blunt when discussing the tradeoffs of managing his own Kickstarter campaigns.

“Let’s say I made $15,000 on this comic book—Kickstarter takes [a 5% fee] of $750. You’re also paying a [3-5%] fee to [payment processor] Stripe. Then there's me paying the printer's bill,” Haspiel says. “Luckily, I’ve built into the campaign the backer paying for shipping and packaging. But out of $15,000, I’m making maybe $9,000 to $10,000,” on a four-month project.

It’s partly for this reason that independent Kickstarter creators are increasingly joining under the auspices of a new breed of Kickstarter-centered comics publishers.

Dirk Manning is one such entrepreneur. A self-described “accidental publisher,” Manning founded SourcePoint Press in 2024 as a publisher and distributor for independent Kickstarter creators. Manning has designed a four-wave distribution method for SourcePoint titles that sends different versions of a single print run to direct backers, comic shops, bookstores, and conventions in turn.

Manning argues that the model works because multiple waves of distribution allow higher print runs at lower total costs. He says that SourcePoint projects can achieve 20% profit margins while allowing creators to retain full ownership of their IP.

"Nothing I'm doing is necessarily reinventing the wheel,” Manning says. “I'm just trying to take the spokes out of different industries that I've seen work best."