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...

 

 

 

Graphic Novel Review: Who Killed Nessie?

 Review by Daniel Peretti, Memorial University.

Paul Cornell and Rachel Smith. Who Killed Nessie? Avery Hill Publishing, 2025. https://averyhillpublishing.bigcartel.com/product/who-killed-nessie-by-paul-cornell-rachael-smith-preorder

             The early study of folklore (in the nineteenth century) focused heavily on collecting traditions and classifying them into various genres, and further on developing indexes of those genres, which included narratives such as legends, myths, and folktales. A century of this scholarship followed in the footsteps of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose works on legends (German Legends, 1816/1981) and myths (Teutonic Mythology, 1835/1966) are not quite as well known as their fairy tales. The differences between these genres have never been settled to the satisfaction of all the scholars who work in the field, but they have attained a general currency outside academic work. Among the various narratives we can find stories of creatures such as elves and other hidden folk in Scandinavia, fairies in the British Isles, mine, forest and household spirits in Germany, and other assorted goblins. As ethnographic inquiry took root in the new world, Asia, and Africa, creatures such as Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the various Yokai became common knowledge. The stories of these beings, once documented from local folklore, entered popular tradition in a range of discourse that encompasses television, cinema, and literature—including comic books. The generic terms employed by folklorists to mean very different types of stories began to function, in popular culture, more or less identically, connoting a traditional origin and a sort of nebulous history that only vaguely attaches them to specific cultures, and only then at national levels. What has formed over the end of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first is a pantheon of creatures, often now called cryptids, that are generally accepted to be part of human heritage, and appropriated by creators into Euro-American fiction. Think of the Vertigo series Fables (Willingham et al. 2002-2015) or the Shrek (d. Adamson and Jenson, 2001) animated films. 

Fig. 1. The Beast of Bodmin Moor explains the global distribution of the cryptids to Lindsay during the first night of the convention.

 

            So it is not surprising to find a story in which the Loch Ness Monster exists alongside the Wendigo, or the Cyclops talking to Bigfoot, or a jackalope next to Baba Yaga. A wyvern consorting with Slender Man seems slightly incongruous, but there they stand in the pages of Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith’s Who Killed Nessie? a crowdfunded graphic novel on Zoop acquired by British publisher Avery Hill for print publication. The story might be best described as a cozy mystery, with a limited—though large—cast of characters (see Fig. 1). The book is relatively short at just under 100 pages of story material, with a pared-down art style and simply rendered colors that fit a middle-grade aesthetic, despite telling an adult story.

Fig. 2. Lindsay Brockle arrives at the 

Wisconsin hotel to begin her new job.

            Who Killed Nessie? is set during a cryptid convention at an isolated motel on a lake in northern Wisconsin (see Fig. 2). Lindsay Grockle—the human protagonist—arrives at the hotel as a new employee, only to be left alone to tend to the convention attendees because the other employees do not want to handle the strangeness of it all. At first Lindsay thinks that the convention-goers are wearing costumes, but soon she learns that the people staying at the hotel for the weekend are in fact the cryptids themselves. She learns the truth of the matter when the Beast of Bodmin Moor (a figure of English legend) intrudes upon her sleep to get her to solve the murder of the Loch Ness Monster. Lindsay at first thinks she is dreaming, but her acceptance of the existence of the cryptids takes only a couple of pages. Initially, she insists she can’t help, but a Hippodrake convinces her of their need, so she takes the case. From there, the story follows the structure of the mystery, with suspect interviews, red herrings, and several twists.

            Some liberties have been taken with the cryptids. For example, the Beast of Bodmin Moor is, by all accounts, black—thought to be an escaped panther or puma; in Who Killed Nessie? it takes the form of a tannish, shape-shifting cat with a bushy, striped tail—perhaps a British Shorthair. The Hippodrake, which appears in the comic as a serpentine horse with horns and an ectoplasmic mane, does not seem to be a genuine cryptid at all, but rather a type of dinosaur. But that’s the folklorist in me searching for authenticity where it isn’t necessary. The popular tradition is inclusive, not exclusive. It can include characters from the Wizard of Oz as well as Tengu from Japanese folklore. The story plays loosely with recorded tradition. The Cyclops, for example, claims to be part of the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, so readers are left to wonder if Cornell accidentally conflated the Argonautica with the Odyssey, or simply wanted the reference in the story for a joke: Jason got fleeced.

            A lot of the mythology is played for comedy. The unicorn slut-shames other females. The minotaur confesses to eating the sacrifices in the labyrinth, but only because there were no vegetarian options. Lindsay uses a squeaky toy to bribe Cerberus so she can get into the underworld. Much of the humor is also sexual in nature, which is what makes this an adult comic despite the absence of graphic depictions of violence or sex.           

Fig. 3. Despite their common lot in life, the cryptids don’t all get along. The Yeti is frustrated with the fairies for many things, including eating Yeti-flavored potato chips. 

 

 

             

There are rules to this world—for example, upon death, the monsters vanish and reappear in their homeland. Though Nessie dies in Wisconsin, her body washes up on the shore of Loch Ness in Scotland. There’s backstory, too, about how the convention started in the first place. Human encroachment caused the cryptids to seek help. Fairies (see Fig. 3) employed magic to keep the creatures hidden, but the creatures had to sign a contract in order to be made “mythological” or “legendary,” ostensibly so that human beings will “respect [them] again” (53) According to one fairy, the creatures go out of their way to be noticed, creating what she calls parasocial relationships with humanity.

            The creators develop a system for how the cryptids’ existences work, allowing Lindsay to explore suspects who reveal that system in bits and pieces along the way. The system incorporates many academic terms that have diffused into popular culture. There’s a mummy with no recollection of his living identity; he calls himself an archetype, caught up in the fairy spell, which effectively makes him immortal. He tells her that the cryptids that might be real animals can be killed, but “the more archetypal creatures” will come back to life (64).

            Cornell also incorporates an awareness of the processes of folklore. The Jersey Devil, from the east coast of the United States, keeps changing form and complains about its conditions: “You just try livin’ without a proper legend of your own,” it says, “with everyone thinking you’re somethin’ different!” (45). Variation of this sort results from the fluidity of oral tradition, since there is no canonized version of any story.

            Myth, fairy tale, and legend converge in a popular tradition that postulates a fictive world in which all of them are real. Cornell and Smith use this trope, which has become more and more common across media, perhaps an inevitable outgrowth of popularized academic work such as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Most likely, Cornell and Smith are using literary renditions of these characters, but despite the presence of a literary or cinematic tradition, Who Killed Nessie? demonstrates that the stories of these popular characters, like the folklore from which they arise, will keep changing.

 

Bibliography

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press, 1949.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm. 4 volumes. Translated and edited by Donald Ward. 1981.

Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology. 2 volumes. Trans. James Stallybrass. Dover Publications, 1966.

Willingham, Bill, and others. Fables. DC Comics, 2002-2015.