Research Prompt: Kickstarter's comics data UPDATED

 8/27 [THIS POST IS SUBSTANTIALLY REVISED FOR THE KICKSTARTER DATA SET]

 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, but also 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.

8/27 UPDATE -

Adam Fotos wrote to me, noting, "I thought I'd check if my successful comics campaign came up in the data, but it didn't at least as far as I could tell. The title was "Dragon and Goat: Thyme Bandit" and it ended around 12/5/2017 for the printing of the 9th book in the series and it was funded. Here's the link to the Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1843414090/dragon-and-goat-the-thyme-bandit/" 

 With this information, Arthur started looking at the Web Robots data, and found:

I checked the missing project you mentioned: “Dragon and Goat: The Thyme Bandit.”

It turns out the project was correctly categorized on Kickstarter as:

• Category: Comic Books

• Parent category: Comics

• Kickstarter category ID: 250

• Parent category ID: 3

So the issue was not caused by the search filter. The script already includes all subcategories whose parent category is Comics, so Comic Books should have been included automatically.

The important finding is that this project is present in the Web Robots Kickstarter dump from December 15, 2017, but it is not present in the July 24, 2026 dump we originally used.

The 2017 record contains the expected data:

• Project: Dragon and Goat: The Thyme Bandit

• Status: successful

• Goal: $3,000

• Amount pledged: $3,165

• Backers: 67

• Category: Comic Books

• Launched: November 15, 2017

• Deadline: December 15, 2017

This confirms an important limitation of the Web Robots datasets: a newer snapshot does not necessarily contain every historical Kickstarter project that appeared in older snapshots. (See notes here: https://webrobots.io/kickstarter-datasets/?utm_source=chatgpt.com I guess I hadn’t stressed these limitations enough.) 

In other words, using only the latest dataset can miss older projects, even when they were correctly categorized.

So if the goal is to create as complete a historical overview of Kickstarter Comics as possible, the better approach is to combine multiple historical Web Robots dumps and then remove duplicates using Kickstarter’s actual project ID. 

I went ahead and tested the historical approach.

I first combined a small selection of Web Robots snapshots from different years to see whether older dumps would actually add a meaningful number of projects. They did.

The August 12, 2026 snapshot on its own contained 8,452 unique Comics projects. A test using only seven snapshots from 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2026 already increased that total to 23,286 unique projects.

That made it clear that using a single recent snapshot was missing a very substantial part of Kickstarter’s historical Comics data, so I then expanded the script to process all historical Kickstarter snapshots currently listed by Web Robots.

To keep disk usage manageable, the script downloads one snapshot at a time, extracts the Comics projects, adds them to a local database, removes duplicates using Kickstarter’s project ID, and then deletes the large source file before moving on to the next snapshot.

Web Robots currently lists 137 Kickstarter snapshots covering 2014 through August 2026. The script processed all but one of them successfully. The June 12, 2015 snapshot could not be downloaded because the server returned a 403 error.

The combined result is now:

• 33,047 unique Kickstarter Comics projects

• compared with 8,452 in the August 2026 snapshot alone

“Dragon and Goat: The Thyme Bandit” is included in the combined dataset.

There is still one issue I want to investigate. The earliest Web Robots snapshots from 2014 and 2015 currently produce no Comics records with the present filter. That does not necessarily mean there are no Comics projects in those files. Web Robots changed its crawling method in late 2015 and began crawling Kickstarter subcategories separately, so the oldest files may use different category data or require a different filtering method.

In other words, 33,047 is currently the much more complete historical total, but there may still be additional pre-2016 Comics projects recoverable from the earliest snapshots. So, to be continued...