Research Prompt: Kickstarter's comics data

 by Mike Rhode

In 2024, IJOCA published my article, "Comics Bibliography For The 21st Century; Or, how is comics history going to be written in the future, and what will be the rare books?" (25-2, Fall / Winter 2023).

You can read the prequel from Transatlantica in 2010 here - https://archive.org/details/the-state-of-comic-art-bibliography-in-north-transatlantica-2010/page/1/mode/2up and John also reprinted it in the same issue.

One of the questions I raised in 2024 was about the future availability and awareness of crowdfunded comics, writing, 

Two popular modes of comics themselves are very fugitive--webcomics

and crowdfunded/self-published comics. How many research library

collections are actually collecting crowdfunded books of or on comics?

My initial suspicion and fear was that almost no libraries are collecting

crowdfunded comics, even large institutions known for their collections,

such as the Library of Congress or Michigan State University. I checked this

via the worldwide library resource, WorldCat. In addition, I looked at the

crowdsourced Grand Comics Database, one of the standard bibliography/

indices of comics published throughout the world, to see how many books

that were funded by Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Patreon, and Zoop were actually

included there. It is my belief that these types of comics will be the true rare

books of the future.(236-237) 

 I found,

The number of Kickstarter projects catalogued in WorldCat,61 and thus in library collections, is disheartening. Actually 174 titles with a total of 1,143 comics or graphic novels are catalogued in WorldCat, but not necessarily held in a library (some searches return a title with zero holdings).  ...

Searching the Grand Comics Database doesn't reveal to many more,

[The word search] does work for “Kickstarter” which lists 37 series of comic books funded via Kickstarter. The data probably does not mesh exactly with WorldCat, as there are no overlapping titles. 

Some of the data I generated at the time, from WorldCat and GCD, is online in Google docs via this blogpost. As of this writing, I plan to move it over to the Internet Archive as well, as add-ons to the 21st Century article.

With the help of A.C.W. van Kruining, comics data was excerpted from Kickstarter, and it's online at  Kickstarter Comics Projects Data (as of August 2026). van Kruining was able to pull data on Kickstarter projects with the keyword 'comics'.

An independent service called Web Robots publishes regular downloadable datasets of Kickstarter projects. Instead of scraping Kickstarter directly, we downloaded the latest full Kickstarter dataset and used a script to select only the Comics projects. The script then created an Excel file containing the Comics projects, including information such as: 

project name 

date 

project status 

amount raised in USD 

number of backers 

funding goal 

currency 

Comics category/subcategory 

Kickstarter URL 

Importantly, the dataset is not just for one month. The July 24, 2026 date is the date on which the dataset was collected. 

Again, the data is at https://archive.org/details/kickstarter-comics-projects-260810 and if it's of any use to you, I'd be glad to hear about it. ACVWVK also provided me with some Python script to run other searches, but that's beyond me. I can pass it along if desired.