Reading · The Comics Crowd

The mission of The Comics Crowd is to curate the crowdfunding campaigns in the Kickstarter Comics category in order to identify and spotlight those projects most likely to yield actual comics and to yield the most high quality comics in terms of story, design, and cover/interior artwork.

Hardcover edition: Case laminate; Oversized A4 format: 8.27 x 11.69 inches

LIVE on Kickstarter NOW for a 1-week engagement ending on August 11!

CLICK to Back Deep Space Lovecraft

Featuring SEVEN classic H. P. Lovecraft first-person short stories reimagined as tales of a retrofuturistic spacefarer encountering and enduring the very monstrosities conjured by Lovecraft’s own tortured mind, but in the environs and technologies of deep space and adapted to the artform of comics.

The fully rendered first page of The Outsider, EXCLUSIVE to the Collected Edition of Deep Space Lovecraft!

14 campaigns came in for this window — 13 comics, plus one trading-card box set filed under Not a Comic.
$37,121 raised across the 13 tracked comics campaigns, from 522 combined backers.
4 of 13 already fully funded: Valiant Comics Supercharged! (553%), Madame Tarantula Magazine #4 (440%), The Sisters Three: Gravesmoor (250%), and A Country Knight in NYC 1-4 (163%).
4 of 13 sitting at $146 or less as of the screencap — two of them, Cyborg Son and BAD IDEAS, at exactly $0.
One campaign, Valiant Comics Supercharged!, accounts for 74.5% of every dollar raised in the entire window.
Mean raised per campaign: $2,855. Median: $814 — the gap tells you most of what you need to know about this weekend.

J.A. Short & David Hitchcock · Folk horror graphic novel

A self-contained, 44-page black-and-white folk horror book set during the English Civil War’s witch-hunt frenzy — cunning folk, witchfinders, and something out on the moor sucking marrow from the dead. Short is a prolific, award-winning genre writer with 25 prior campaigns and 160 backed under his belt, paired here with veteran artist David Hitchcock, and the craft shows. It’s a tightly scoped, single-volume horror comic from creators who know how to finish what they start — already funded well past goal with three weeks left on the clock.

$1,688 raised / 70 backers / 250% funded (FUNDED)

Christopher Irving · Horror-host comic · Project We Love

]A Project We Love pick that pairs comic-and-media historian Christopher Irving with a classic setup: a comic book horror host forced to reckon with his own forgotten life on Earth. Irving’s background curating Mike Allred’s Madmaniverse and writing books like Cliffhanger and The Blue Beetle Companion suggests a creator with real craft instincts about the genre he’s playing in, not just affection for it. Still under 60% funded with almost a month left, it’s a small campaign worth a look before it either breaks through or quietly closes short.

$1,172 raised / 43 backers / 58.6% funded

JD Calderon · Fantasy / adventure crossover

JD Calderon’s Oswald Chronicles universe gets a spinoff here, following a young knight named Anna defending her village against otherworldly creatures with her late brother’s shadow armor. Calderon is an extremely prolific self-publisher — 51 campaigns and counting — and this one bundles four issues at a modest $500 goal, already funded 163% over. It’s an easy entry point for anyone curious about the Oswald Chronicles world without committing to Calderon’s much longer back catalog.

$814 raised / 36 backers / 163% funded (FUNDED)

John Fletcher Pasquini · All-ages buddy superhero comic

The third campaign in Pasquini’s five-issue Packrat & Thunderbunny arc, built on 35-plus years of friendship between Pasquini and co-creator Derek Jason Bush. The bright, Saturday-morning-cartoon art style and slapstick hero-vs-villain setup are a rarity in a slate otherwise heavy on horror and grimdark satire. Sitting at 97.6% funded with 22 days left and a visible, engaged backer trail, this one looks likely to clear its goal comfortably.

$2,440 raised / 69 backers / 97.6% funded

Thomas Huls · Superhero / corporate conspiracy

A relaunch of Kingsville Issue 1 with new Kickstarter-exclusive covers, notable mainly for what happens after the campaign ends: creator Thomas Huls says the book will be published by Critical Entertainment and distributed through the Indie Comic Alliance into more than 1,500 comic shops. That’s a real print-distribution outcome most Kickstarter comics never reach, which makes this fake-heroes-and-stolen-serum conspiracy story worth backing for the shelf life alone. Only 25.7% funded so far, so it still needs a push.

$308 raised / 10 backers / 25.7% funded

Four of this window’s thirteen comics campaigns landed at $146 or less by the time these screencaps were taken — two of them, Cyborg Son and BAD IDEAS, sitting at exactly $0. That’s close to a third of the entire Aug 7–9 slate stalled at effectively no traction, and the timing isn’t hard to explain: all three days in this window fall on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and weekend launches have a habit of opening quieter than weekday ones.

The likely mechanics aren’t mysterious. Kickstarter’s own data has long shown campaigns perform best launching on a weekday morning, when backers are at their desks browsing and a creator’s own promotional push — newsletters, social posts, Discord pings — lands during peak attention hours. A comic that goes live Saturday night is competing with everyone’s actual Saturday night, not their inbox. It’s also worth noting that three of the four near-zero campaigns here (Freetown Stories, Cyborg Son, BAD IDEAS) are first-time Kickstarter creators with no existing backer list to activate on day one — a cold-start problem that a weekend launch only compounds.

Worth flagging on the opposite end: Valiant Comics Supercharged! alone accounts for 74.5% of every dollar raised across the tracked comics campaigns this window — more than nine times the combined total of the other twelve books. That’s less a trend than a reminder of the gap between an established publisher’s built-in audience and a solo creator’s cold start, which makes the zero-dollar debuts above look even starker by comparison. The perpetual mining of the deep, if disparate, Valiant catalog will never end, a prediction guaranteed simply by the repeated over-investment in associated IP’s in multiple desperate attempts to achieve Big Two-level status.

1 — Valiant Comics Supercharged! — Alien Books — $27,645 — 199 backers — Goal $5,000 — 553% funded — Avg pledge $138.92 — Superhero Anthology — Funded

2 — Packrat & Thunderbunny 1-3 (Comics I Like) — John Fletcher Pasquini — $2,440 — 69 backers — Goal $2,500 — 97.6% funded — Avg pledge $35.36 — All-Ages Superhero — Active

3 — The Sisters Three: Gravesmoor (Comics I Like) — J.A. Short & David Hitchcock — $1,688 — 70 backers — Goal $674 — 250% funded — Avg pledge $24.11 — Folk Horror — Funded

4 — Madame Tarantula Magazine #4 — Mike Hoffman — $1,209 — 44 backers — Goal $275 — 440% funded — Avg pledge $27.48 — Sci-Fi Western — Funded

5 — Joe Unknown #1 (Comics I Like) — Christopher Irving — $1,172 — 43 backers — Goal $2,000 — 58.6% funded — Avg pledge $27.26 — Horror — Active

6 — The Ravishing Radium Girl Issue #2 — James Hagan — $1,099 — 34 backers — Goal $2,022 — 54.4% funded — Avg pledge $32.32 — Horror / Golden Age — Active

7 — A Country Knight in NYC 1-4 (Comics I Like) — JD Calderon — $814 — 36 backers — Goal $500 — 163% funded — Avg pledge $22.61 — Fantasy / Adventure — Funded

8 — Acquired Taste: Book 2 — Rachel Martin — $580 — 12 backers — Goal $1,500 — 38.7% funded — Avg pledge $48.33 — Paranormal Romance — Active

9 — Kingsville Issue 1 (Comics I Like) — Thomas Huls — $308 — 10 backers — Goal $1,200 — 25.7% funded — Avg pledge $30.80 — Superhero — Active

10 — Caught In The Middle - Graphic Novel — Parker Cliffe — $146 — 3 backers — Goal $809 — 18.0% funded — Avg pledge $48.67 — YA Horror / Drama — Active

11 — Freetown Stories — Domagoj — $20 — 2 backers — Goal $8,000 — 0.3% funded — Avg pledge $10.00 — Post-Apocalyptic Satire — Active

12 — Cyborg Son Half Robot, Half Boy, All heart — Goodness — $0 — 0 backers — Goal AU$4,941 — 0% funded — Avg pledge — — Sci-Fi — Active

13 — BAD IDEAS — Lenny Ryan — $0 — 0 backers — Goal AU$7,058 — 0% funded — Avg pledge — — Humor — Active

Widow Trading Card Box Set: 100+ Horror Cards & Stickers — Mike Wolfer · $2,006 raised / 31 backers · FUNDED ✓ · A boxed trading-card and sticker set built around Wolfer’s Widow horror-comics character — cards and stickers, not a sequential-art comic.

Creator: Alien Books · Location: New York, NY · Genre: Superhero Anthology · Goal: $5,000 · Raised: $27,645 (553% funded) · Backers: 199 · Avg pledge: $138.92 · Ends: Aug 25, 2026 · Project We Love

Alien Books, current publisher of the Valiant Comics library, bills this as “the MOTHER of all Valiant campaigns” — a career-spanning celebration of the imprint Jim Shooter and Steven Massarsky built in the late ‘80s. The campaign bundles hardcover collections, art books, and crossover material (including a Street Fighter vs. the Valiant Universe volume) aimed at longtime fans and new collectors alike.

Day-1 note: $27,645 on a $5,000 goal is a 553% overfund with 15 days still to go — this single campaign out-raised every other comic in the Aug 7–9 slate combined, more than 9-to-1.