Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Kickstarter Raises $600K for Web Comic, but ‘Ashes’ Is Threatened


Crowd-funding

Crowd-funding, the technical term for fund-raising sites like Kickstarter.com, has been an increasingly popular way for cartoonists to raise money to publish independent comic and graphic novel projects. While Kickstarter has just hit a new high point with the funding of the first $600,000 comics project, another recent high profile project has hit a snag over creative differences and illustrates how these ventures can fall apart.
When things work, the results can be spectacular. The Order of the Stick is a Web comic written and drawn by Rich Burlew. At press time, “The Order of the Stick Reprint Drive” had raised $663,546 from a little more than 9,000 backers on Kickstarter with days to go before the project’s pledge period ends on February 21. The fund-raising doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Raising this amount of money is even more impressive considering that this project is intended to bring old books back into print, not create a new graphic novel. This is already the highest funded book project ever on Kickstarter, and it continues to climb through the top 10 of all-time highest crowd-funded projects.

No comments: