WATCH: ”Besides Kickstarter, what’s your opinion on those alternative platforms?” from our panel at GalaxyCon Richmond ’24
As a part of GalaxyCon Richmond 2024, we hosted a panel featuring three indie comic book creators — Charlie McElvy (known for “Milestone: GodQuest,” “Spider-Squirrel” and more), Anthony Stokes (known for “Tap or Die,” “Decay” and more), and Pat Shand, the force behind the publishing company “Space Between Entertainment.”
Our panel was all about crowdfunding, and we asked the creators a few different questions (here is the complete conversation, including questions from the audience). But, after some requests, we went ahead and broke up the panel into short snippets, so you don’t have to watch the whole thing if you don’t want to.
Presented here is the portion of the panel when we asked “Besides Kickstarter, what’s your opinion on those alternative platforms?”
The following is the transcript of session:
INDIE COMICS ZONE
Now, Pat just mentioned some of these other platforms, but I did want to get your opinion because you guys mostly do Kickstarter? Yeah. So there’s Crowdfundr, FundMyComic…
• For a complete list of crowdfunding options for your project, click here
PAT SHAND
It’s difficult to get people to move to different platforms. As many people as have Hulu and Paramount plus now you don’t say “Hulu and chill.” There’s always one main thing, Kickstarter has been and will be the main thing for a long time.
These startups, to me, the idea is that they’ll be worth doing in time. You know, there’s the brave creator who’s going to try these things back again. Honestly, right now, they’re the biggest competitor to Kickstarter as far as offering a non-Kickstarter crowdfunding solution for comics creators.
But even there, you see comics creators doing things that are comics adjacent. But the fact of the matter is that if you choose something that’s not Kickstarter right now, you are going to sacrifice your dollar amount in the now to service the overall vision of that company. And are you serving yourself? Or someone else’s vision is my question.
ANTHONY STOKES
Yeah, I feel like more or less, it’s just Kickstarter, for the time being, you know. It’s that simple.
CHARLIE McELVY
I’ll add a little bit too, because I actually am the only one of the three of us who has tried another platform. I did Zoop. Last year and Pat’s exact point.
You have to bring your audience into [Zoop], Pat’s point, you’re really building their audience to you’re not tapping in yet to the audience they’ve established because they haven’t established it very much crowd.
Zoop is a great example, where they initially curated heavily curated, they invited creators to create books on their platform, so they had the Ron Mars’s of the world, right? Ron’s a hero of mine, and a friend. You have the Ron Mars’s the world, you have the Alex Ross’s or the you have Walter Simonson [and] big names who have 30 and 40 year histories of building an audience and bringing an audience with them? They can they’ll do well, right? They’ll do five figures you know, six figures on crowdfunding or a Zoop at you know — no problem.
But Johnny Snacks over here with his first comic is probably not gonna make a dime. So, you gotta be you’d be willing to recognize that I had under my belt, I had five successful Kickstarters, two of which went five figures.
Recently, before I went on the Zoop, I got on the Zoop, and I struggled to the last day to do the smallest campaign I had ever run on the same quality of book that I’ve always done. So exactly what Pat said is, I helped Zoop more than they helped me and that’s not a knock on Zoop at all. Jordan is a good dude; good friend. I like him. I love what they’re doing. I think it’s a great platform, because it’s built around comics specifically and comics, adjacent products.
They’re not doing tabletop gaming and CDs and movies and all this other shit. They’re doing just comics and comics adjacent stuff, like the comics-based puzzle or whatever.
At the same time, having engaged with Everett, of the CEO of Kickstarter, I can tell you that I love his vision. I love what he’s doing. And I love how responsive he is. And he recognizes that these other platforms are popping up and they’re not eating their lunch yet. And they recognize they could be disrupted at some point, and they will be somebody will disrupt them.
Is it Zoop? Is it Crowdfundr? I don’t know. But he’s watching and he’s learning. And he’s listening to the competition. But more importantly, he’s paying attention to guys like us who are funding on their platform, and they’re building the platform to focus on what we do best. So, Kickstarter it is — if you didn’t catch that.
