Cergam: Inventing an Indonesian Identity for Comics (A Tribute to John A. Lent)

 Cergam*: Inventing an Indonesian Identity for Comics

(A Tribute to John A. Lent)

Iwan Gunawan

Association of Asian Comics Critics Asia (ACCA)

*Cergam means "illustrated story" in English

Among the many stories of Asian comics that John A. Lent helped bring to international attention, Indonesia’s offers a particularly fascinating case. While many national comic traditions developed through distinctive visual styles or narrative themes, Indonesian creators in the early 1960s attempted something more radical: they sought to create a new national identity for the medium itself.

 The story began in the years following Indonesian independence in 1945. Like many newly independent nations, Indonesia faced the challenge of defining its cultural identity after centuries of colonial rule. Debates over the nature of a future Indonesian culture intensified during the famous Cultural Polemic of the 1930s and continued into the post-independence era. By the late 1950s, President Soekarno repeatedly emphasized the need for a distinct Kepribadian Nasional (National Character), encouraging artists and intellectuals to move beyond cultural dependence on the West.

At the same time, comics were flourishing as a popular medium. Following the success of Indonesian comic publishers in Bandung during the early 1950s, artists and publishers in Medan, North Sumatra, began producing their own comics. Yet comics occupied an uneasy position within Indonesian cultural discourse. Because the medium had entered Indonesia largely through American newspaper strips and comic books, it was frequently associated with Western popular culture, capitalism, and cultural imperialism. Critics often regarded comics as trivial entertainment, unsuitable for a nation engaged in cultural nation-building.

The response from Medan’s comic artists was remarkably innovative.

In December 1961, under the leadership of the prominent artist Zam Nuldyn, a group of creators launched a magazine titled Tjergam. More importantly, they publicly proposed that the term Tjergam—an abbreviation of Tjerita-Gambar (“Picture Stories”)—should replace the foreign-derived word “comic” as the national designation for Indonesian comics. They argued that “comic” was a Western term that no longer reflected the personality of the Indonesian nation. The new term was intended not merely as a magazine title but as a contribution to Indonesia’s cultural vocabulary.

This act of renaming was deeply significant. Much like Japan’s use of the term manga, the adoption of Tjergam represented an attempt to localize not only the content of comics but also the language through which the medium was understood. The creators sought to establish comics as a legitimate expression of Indonesian culture rather than a borrowed Western form.

The movement extended beyond terminology. Throughout the period from approximately 1954 to 1966, Medan artists produced hundreds of comics that explored local folklore, regional legends, historical heroes, and national struggles. Stories such as Malin Kundang, Puteri Hijau, Kisah Gunung Toba, and numerous Malay and Batak legends appeared alongside adventure, romance, detective, and fantasy narratives. Even when borrowing narrative structures from popular international genres, creators localized settings, characters, costumes, and cultural references to align with Indonesian experiences and aspirations.

The significance of the Cergam movement lies not simply in its artistic production but in its cultural ambition. It demonstrated that comics could participate in the construction of national identity during a formative period of Indonesian history. Rather than rejecting a global medium, Medan artists transformed it into a vehicle for expressing local values, histories, and cultural imagination.

For scholars of comics history, the story of Cergam reveals how sequential art can become part of broader debates about language, identity, and nationhood. It also embodies a theme that ran throughout John Lent’s pioneering scholarship: local creators do not merely imitate global forms. They adapt, redefine, and ultimately make them their own. The Medan artists’ invention of Tjergam remains one of the most compelling examples of that creative process in Southeast Asian comics history.

Editor’s notes by CT Lim:

The question remains why comics were popular in cities like Bandung (Java) and Medan (Sumatra) in the 1950s and 1960s and not in the capital city, Jakarta. What were the factors that enabled comics to prosper in Bandung and Medan? The latter was the center of pulp publishing in Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s. In the case of Jakarta, the capital could be too embroiled in political battles for it to be a cultural center for the arts and literature, and comics. Medan declined as a publishing hub after the 1966 coup and riots, and there was a nation-wide shortage of paper. In the 1970s, with the consolidation of Suharto’s New Order, Western investments and mass media returned to Indonesia.

There is also a need to examine John Lent’s writings about comics in Indonesia, especially cergam, and how his articles differ from earlier writings about comic strips, cartoons and comics in Indonesia, e.g. those written by Benedict Anderson.

For more on cergam in Medan, see Lintasan Cergam Medan: Catatan Seorang Kolektor (2016) by Henry Iswmono. This book is not translated into English.

Graphic novel review: Failed Notes sa Philippine Politics Vol 1

Reviewed by Karl Ian Cheng Chua, Association of Asian Comics Critics Asia (ACCA)

Anonymous. Failed Notes sa Philippine Politics Vol 1. Publisher unknown, 2026.

 Komiks as political commentary is nothing new in the Philippine scene. Historically, Alfred W. McCoy and Alfredo Roces have curated an interesting volume of 377 editorial cartoons in Philippine Cartoons: Political Caricatures of the American Era, 1900 – 1941 (1985). Outside of editorial cartoons, several artists have experimented and been successful in utilizing the same themes in komiks, such as Nonoy Marcelo’s Ikabod Bubuwit (1970s – 2002) which satirically depicted the socio-political woes for the Philippines and Filipinos by depicting the characters as rats. Pol Medina Jr. and his Pugay Baboy began in 1988 and features obese characters from a neighborhood in Manila who engage in political satire. Despite the shift towards digital media, the genre remains popular with younger artists like Kevin Eric Raymundo whose Tarantadong Kalbo is circulated in his social media for free and compiled as a printed volume. (most of these komiks are in Tagalog and only one of Raymundo’s Tarantadong Kalbo compilation is in English)  

In the last Philippine Book Festival, I chanced upon an interesting work Failed Notes sa Philippine Politics Vol.1 (hereafter referred to as FNPP). This is a compilation of 5 zines dealing with satirical portrayals of political scandals from 2024 to 2026 and written in Taglish, a mixture of Tagalog and English. The format is simple: line art, no colors and basic panels. What is important about the komik is it highlights key political scandals so that readers are able to recall recent events. FNPP no. 1 focused on the issue of Alice Guo, former Bamban, Tarlac mayor, whose Filipino identity is questioned. The zine structured the satire to make readers feel as though they are watching the TV reportage of the scandal, with absurd conversations re-lived.

FNPP no. 2 chose to focus on the impeachment hearings of Vice President Sara Duterte, featuring her misuse of confidential funds. The komik reminds us of the hilarious claim that a “Mary Grace Piattos” was a recipient of confidential funds for the Office of the Vice President, considering that the name was obviously made up by combining the name of a popular restaurant and a potato chip brand.  While the main focus of FNPP no. 3 was on the West Philippine Sea issue, the komik shows that it is not biased against just the present administration but also criticized Senator Bam Aquino for practicing Realpolitik by initially declaring himself independent - instead of being part of the opposition - so that he would be given a senate portfolio.  FNPP no. 4 hilariously mocked Harry Roque, the former Presidential Spokesperson of President Duterte. While seeking asylum in the Netherlands, Roque came into conflict with a supporter over his consumption of humba (a braised pork dish) before anyone else had eaten.  FNPP no. 5 ends the compilation by dealing with the updates on the ongoing investigations regarding the flood control scandals. 

What is important with FNPP is that it engages with contemporary political scandals in the Philippines.  The satire made readers remember and feel the event, and the quips felt like we were exactly saying these in response with our exasperation to the absurdity of the events. Furthermore, the volume acts as a physical historical record that chronicled the events as well as the perceived responses by the populace, and hence will function like McCoy and Roces’ work to keep a visual and comical record of our past.

Karl Ian Cheng Chua is Assistant Professor at the Asian Centre, University of the Philippines Diliman, and a member of Association of Asian Comics Critics Asia (ACCA)

Graphic novel recommendation: What Will Be, Will Be by Lê Phan

A recommendation by Quynh Than, Association of Asian Comics Critics Asia (ACCA)

Phan, Lê. What will be, will be. Ho Chi Minh City,  Vietnam: Du But Books, 2025.

Quynh Than is the co-founder and editor of Du But Books in Ho Chi Minh City and the publisher of this book.

 What will be, will be is a graphic memoir by Vietnamese comic artist Lê Phan. At 176 pages, divided into eight chapters, the book follows his journey from a child first discovering what it means to be an artist, to an adult navigating the uncertainties, disappointments, and hard-won lessons of a creative life. Each chapter is inspired by a well-known song and marks a different emotional stage in his path toward becoming a professional comic artist.

 For readers unfamiliar with Lê Phan, he is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Vietnamese comics. In a local comics scene often shaped by manga-influenced aesthetics, he has long pursued a different visual and narrative path. That difference may have placed him somewhat outside the mainstream at times, but it has also allowed him to build a loyal readership entirely on his own terms. What makes his body of work especially compelling is his refusal to stay still. From mystery and dystopian storytelling to travel writing, childhood memory, and comic strips about life, love, and the strange comedy of being human, each of his books feels like a reinvention. It is almost as if every new project tries to undo the image created by the previous one. In What will be, will be, that process leads him to his most personal form yet: a storyteller willing to turn fully toward himself.

 In terms of plot, What will be, will be does not rely on dramatic twists. Instead, it draws readers in through the truthful rhythm of a life shaped by art. The first half carries the lightness of childhood: mischief, wonder, and the first sparks of obsession with drawing. The second half moves into more difficult territory, as dreams collide with reality and artistic passion is tested by confusion, failure, loneliness, and emotional exhaustion. What emerges is not simply the story of one cartoonist’s career, but the story of someone learning, repeatedly, how to lose himself and find his way back.

What makes the book especially interesting is that it works on several levels at once. It is an autobiography, certainly, but also a meditation on what it means to choose a creative life when it is a choice that rarely stable or well understood. At the same time, it serves as an informal cultural record of a generation of Vietnamese artists who grew up with manga, copied comics by hand, made homemade books, and searched for creative communities through magazines, forums, and small circles of fellow enthusiasts. In that sense, the book is both deeply personal and historical.

 Another strength lies in the contrast between style and subject. Lê Phan uses a simple, light, sometimes almost childlike drawing style to tell a story filled with self-doubt, reflection, hurt, and healing. The effect is powerful. The softness of the artwork makes the emotional honesty of the book hit even harder, without ever becoming melodramatic. Comics here are not just a delivery system for memoir, but the most natural language for memory itself: elastic, playful, fragmented, and emotionally precise.

 This is a book that deserves to be read because it is sincere without asking for pity, and thoughtful without ever becoming heavy-handed. For readers interested in comics, it widens the horizon of what Vietnamese comics can hold. For artists and aspiring creators, it offers not instruction so much as companionship and reassurance that doubt, detours, and even brokenness can become part of one’s language. What will be, will be is a gentle reminder that becoming oneself is rarely a straight road. Sometimes we must lose our way before we can recognize the shape of our own heart. Sometimes we must - as Phan wrote in the book - "gather our scattered pieces, one by one, and trust that they still belong to us". Lê Phan tells that journey with tenderness, humility, and grace, and proves that even the most uncertain path can, in time, lead us back to who we are.

Images from the book can be seen in the review at https://vietcetera.com/vn/gui-nhung-trai-tim-can-dam-dang-theo-duoi-dam-me

Comic book review: Singapore Lords of Veracity by Ye Zhen

cover to #13 on Webtoons

 reviewed by CT Lim, Association of Asian Comics Critics Asia (ACCA)

Zhen, Ye. Singapore Lords of Veracity (Book 14 of the Singapore Hip-Hop Horror comics series). Self-published.

Ye Zhen’s Singapore Hip-Hop Horror is the second longest running comics series in Singapore. The longest is Wee Tian Beng’s The Celestial Zone which started in 1999. The “Mr Kiasu” book series by Johnny Lau and friends was started in the early 1990s, but it had a long hiatus in between books. So Ye Zhen’s comics holds the record for being the second longest running comics series in Singapore. His is different from the others because Singapore Hip-Hop Horror is self-published and self-distributed by Ye Zhen himself. This makes him unique in Singapore comics. He is truly indie.

In essence, the series is about the protagonists Skateboard P and Snoop Eastwood (it is hard to call them heroes) fighting aliens and beings from alternate realities. It is not clear why they are fighting so hard, but my reading is that the continuous battles are fights to preserve the indie way of life in Singapore. You can have a name like Skateboard P or Snoop Eastwood and look nothing like any 'normal' Singaporeans, but you still deserve your place in the sun on this island city. The mainstream need not prevail, and we can be who we want to be.

Books 1 to 3 were published in 2007 and launched at the Singapore comic con. I remember seeing a nerdy guy wearing a cap and glasses hawking his books hesitantly with his mother. I was wondering where this guy came from – he was releasing three books all at once! Later he revealed that book 1 was drawn in 2004 when he was studying comics at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Over the years, I have gotten to know Ye Zhen and reviewed his books.[i] In 2018, I interviewed Ye Zhen for Ben Katchor’s Comics and Picture-Book Symposium over Skype.[ii] In 2019, I curated a small exhibition of Ye Zhen’s original comic art. I liken his work to be like outsider art. His efforts of doing it alone and doing it his own way reminds me of Jack Katz’s The First Kingdom.

In this new book, Ye Zhen continues the non-stop battles between Skateboard P and Melissa Preta, and between Snoop Eastwood and Lady Impervious. The action scenes are good and Ye Zhen is experimenting with different sound effects to make them look more dynamic. Like the previous books, the dialogue is peppered with what I call Ye Zhen-isms, which express his views about Singapore and the world:

• Peace just stagnates progress.
  
• Son, I couldn’t do a more poignant declaration of war than that.
• My young lass, in order to get stronger one must risk one’s own life. P chose this voluntarily. I CAN’T stop their fight.
• This will, in short, save your lover’s bacon. If you catch my drift. Hehe.
• I don’t know how I did it. But I’m not one to question heaven’s will.
• P’s girlfriend: There’s more to life than endless fighting P. Just don’t get yourself killed…
• P: Your caresses are all I live for …
• Needless to say, my triggered emotional states further boosted my power. Whether I liked to fight or not was another question entirely.

VROOOOM!

Ye Zhen can do comics fulltime because he does not have to work, although he does some basketball coaching occasionally. He spends most of his time playing basketball. Maybe his life is like the manga, Slam Dunk - if only we can be so lucky. I await eagerly his next book.

Some of Ye Zhen’s comics are free to read on Webtoons at https://www.webtoons.com/p/community/en/u/n9o1n. A short documentary about Ye Zhen by his wife, Atman Lim was made in 2019 and is online at https://atmanlim.com/documentary

---

[i]https://singaporecomix.blogspot.com/2017/09/ye-zhens-singapore-pok-kai-zai.html

https://singaporecomix.blogspot.com/2024/07/review-singapore-hip-hop-horror-book-13.html

https://singaporecomix.blogspot.com/2024/07/singapore-hip-hop-horror-book-13.html

https://sgcartoonhub.com/interview-ye-zhen/

[ii] https://nycomicssymposium.wordpress.com/2018/04/04/lim-cheng-tju-ye-zhen-april-10-2018-at-7pm/

 

 

Graphic novel review - Godzilla Library Collection, Vol. 6

 reviewed by Cord Scott, UMGC Okinawa

Churnow, Bobby (series ed.) and Alonzo Simon (collection ed.) et al. Godzilla Library Collection, Vol. 6.    Sherman Oaks, CA: IDW Press. ISBN 979-8-88724-385-6.  $29.99. https://idwpublishing.com/products/godzilla-library-collection-vol-6

Godzilla is one of the most resilient characters in popular culture. He premiered in a 1954 film, and continued in a variety of other media, from toys, to cartoons, to comic books.  This addition to the Godzilla-verse is a compilation of comics.  This volume compiles three stories: Cataclysm, Godzilla in Hell, and Oblivion.

The first story arc, Godzilla: Cataclysm, centers on a few people living in a post-kaiju apocalypse.  The setting is clearly downtown Tokyo, with the Tokyo Tower in Roppongi as a reference.  The main character of this arc is Hiroshi, a man who has lived long enough to see grandchildren, but one who is clearly haunted by the presence of the kaiju. Life is now a hardscrabble of finding anything to use to live.  As his grandson Araha and his female friend Shiori go out, Hiroshi is haunted by dreams of the kaiju and his interaction with them. 

After an attack by kaiju on a grizzly bear, and a seemingly exponential growth of plants (later determined to be the kaiju Biollante), Hiroshi laments the fact that the villagers are going back towards their old ways of human sacrifice to appease the kaiju, whom they see as gods.  Hiroshi is also haunted by the guilt that he was a part of a kaiju mind-control project aimed at Destoroyah (another enemy kaiju of Godzilla) which subsequentially sparked the wrath of the kaiju.  While the story arc ends with the idea that the kaiju are going to always be here, regardless of the success or failure of some kaiju over others, the arc ends with a blast that sends Godzilla into a hole towards the center of the Earth. One of the more interesting aspects of this story arc was that it is presented in muted colors, symbolizing the pall over the earth in the aftermath of the kaiju fights.

Book two, Godzilla in Hell is told from the perspective of Godzilla as he falls into the middle of the earth.  The story is a comparison to Dante’s Inferno.  The protagonist, in this case Godzilla, is sent to successively lower levels of the underworld, where he continues to fight a series of monsters.  The story is told with minimal expository dialogue.  Mostly, it is what we have always valued most in Godzilla movies: a fight between two (or sometimes more) monsters battling for dominance.  One level of hell involves the spiritual manifestations of people attacking Godzilla, while another features the monster Anguirus as the two fight on a frozen plane of existence.  As a sidenote, one nice artistic touch in the frozen wasteland was a ship with Valdez written on the prow, a clear reference to the environmental disaster of the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska in 1989.

The various fights make for interesting visualizations, especially a battle with red, bat-like creatures who act like piranhas, stripping Godzilla’s skeleton to may make a new, more violent and vindictive monster.  The book ends with a quote from the Buddha: “Better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours.  It cannot be taken away from you…not by angels or demons…heaven or hell.” (p. 225-226).

In Godzilla: Oblivion, scientists are working on a machine to teleport physical items through a temporal port.  The idea here is that a “school in Cambridge, Massachusetts” is working on a machine to propel humanity to a different time or place.  The Japanese backer, Ms. Yamada and her chief scientist Dr. Eli Talbert, at one point realize that the search for scientific truth may mean unethical decisions or horrific outcomes (p. 280).  As with many science fiction outcomes, playing God does open a dangerous hole, through which kaiju like King Ghidorah come into our world. 

There is a series of issues about the ethical dilemmas of achieving unwarranted outcomes.  To that end, there is a discussion of whether to close the portal in favor of putting all the kaiju in one world, while abandoning the other.  There is also a discussion of whether there will be repercussions for using a nuclear weapon against any of the kaiju.  This sort of irony is part of the story arc and how humans might ruin their home area, to move to another world.  In the end, the monsters who have invaded Earth 2, invade Earth 1 and proceed to destroy it.  The story ends with a cliff hanger: have humans really abandoned the Earth to the kaiju?

The stories are all inter-connections of the Godzilla universe.  The setting of the opening arc in Tokyo brings the series back to the Japanese starting point.  The idea of Godzilla having to face his own personal demons in variations of hell is also an interesting take.  Finally, the continual aspects of science and the concept of “can we” versus “should we” is important and timely in this era of AI.  In all, the book is another important addition to the Godzilla comics canon. 

Graphic novel review - MrBallen Presents: Strange, Dark, & Mysterious: The Graphic Stories

 reviewed by Lizzy Walker, Wichita State University

John B. Allen, Robert Venditti, and Andrea Mutti, with cover art by Rob Prior. MrBallen Presents: Strange, Dark, & Mysterious: The Graphic Stories. Emeryville, California: Ten Speed Graphic, 2024. 208 pages, $24.99 978-1984863423. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/742533/mrballen-presents-strange-dark-and-mysterious-by-stories-by-mrballen-illustrations-by-andrea-mutti/

 

            Former Navy SEAL and renowned storyteller John B. Allen, known as MrBallen online, has entertained audiences with his unique and conversational narration style, with a focus on the weird and unexplained on his YouTube channel. He also developed two podcasts: MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious, and MrBallen's Medical Mysteries. In MrBallen Presents: Strange, Dark & Mysterious: The Graphic Stories, Allen, adapter Venditti, and artist Mutti turn nine of Allen's tales from his popular YouTube channel into a collection of tales of the macabre.

            While all of the stories leave their mark, there are a few that stand out. Allen relates what tragedies befell a number of people who ventured into "The Valley of Headless Men," located in the Nahanni Valley in the Northwest Territories. The allegedly haunted valley is plagued by strange and horrifying events. Those who venture in to search for and reclaim the dead often find grisly scenes, and headless bodies. Nobody knows what is in the valley, but some whisper about white demons, waheela, or something else. Allen shares various stories of tragic events, such as accounts of gold prospectors who never make it out of the valley, a group of hunters in 1926 where one of the party, Annie Laferte, goes missing, and a strange creature is scene stalking the forest later; and other tragedies that happened along the years.  

            "Thorns" tells of Elsa, who became a camp counselor in 2012, and had fond memories of the camp as she attended it herself as a child. The first night at the camp in her new role, she is tormented by a horrific nightmare, expertly illustrated in a simple red, black, and white color pallet by Mutti, where strange men are forcing a crown of thorns over her head in front of an angry crowd. As she screams in pain, vibrant blood drips rivulets down her face. When she wakes up, she finds her head aching and her hands are covered in blood.

            "What I Saw in My Room Still Haunts Me" is a personal story of Allen as a teenager when he sees something enter the room where he and his friends are staying in New Hampshire. It happens three nights in a row, culminating in a message for his friend's mother, a recent widow.

In "The Beast of Gévaudan," Jacques is endlessly bullied by other children for being a sensitive soul. He dreams of following in his uncle's footsteps and joining the clergy, but his village earns a living by farming and tending livestock. Children had been found killed in the pastures and fields, mangled viciously by what villagers initially thought was a wild animal. However, with the pattern of killings, they eventually come up with supernatural theories for the murders. From that point, the children responsible for tending the sheep ventured out in groups, one such being Jacques, his brother Jean, the ringleader of the former's bullying, and a few others. One of the boys suggests that Jacques, an expert storyteller, relay something to pass the time, which he does. Unfortunately, the focus is pulled away from the flock as the story starts to get good. Jean is taken by the beast. Now, Jacques must decide: face his fears or run away like the other children.

"Make It Rain," set in 1983, follows Don Decker who is on furlough from a jail sentence to attend his late grandfather's funeral, not out of affection, but as a way to get out of his cell for a short time. He hated the man, and his ire raises as he listens to the well wishes and grief pouring from the other funeral goers. After he leaves the services when he sees the corpse move and look in his direction, Don becomes haunted, perhaps possessed, by the dead man.  

            Other stories included in this collection are "La Mussara," in which some friends out on a hike visit an abandoned Spanish town with a strange past; "Bells Canyon," where a businessman spends what he hopes to be a relaxing stay in the woods away from the bustling city turns into a few nights of terror; a group of Green Berets face a sinister, legendary creature in "The Kandahar Giant," and a Russian hunter becomes the hunted in "Cat and Mouse."               

As mentioned, Allen has a conversational and personal way of telling a story, something which New York Times bestselling graphic novelist Venditti succeeds in conveying this adaptation. Mutti's inclusion of Allen's likeness at points in the stories emphasizes the storyteller's intrusion, albeit welcome, in the narrative.

Mutti's distinct and realistic artwork is fitting for this collection.    

The book includes a location map where the stories take place, a section of recommendations for further reading for each story, and short biographies of Allen and Mutti, as well as information on Ballen Studios.

 

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...