This begs the question, how many comic artists actually want to be youtubers? Is being a comic artist even worth it when being enormously talented is no longer enough to sell books? Does someone like Kenneth Rocafort need to start shaking his ass on instagram and making videos about Joe Glass in order to sell his art? Many people would make the argument that it's actually more difficult to become a successful youtuber than it is to become a successful comic artist.
I would argue the opposite - that's it's far easier to be a successful youtuber than a successful independent comic artist, hence why artists are turning to youtube to get their projects funded versus traditional means. And why shouldn't it be? The audience for independently made youtube content is orders of magnitude greater than the audience for indie comics. I can't imagine Bill Willingham or Graham Nolan are willing to risk decades-long careers devoid of controversy out of some desire to guest on the JACK show or something. As much as some guys gripe about "not wanting to be youtubers", people turn to it and stick to it only because the alternatives to success as an independent comics creator must be that much harder. Harder but not impossible, as
Kamen America proves.
Also, to go back to a post
@Smug Freiza made a few days ago on the subject of fatigue within the Comicsgate audience:
Leroi answers that with so many creators and so many streams, it's near impossible to watch them all and perhaps some people are getting burnt out by trying to. Leroi admits that sometimes he'll go to a certain creators stream, mute it and give it a thumbs up before going to watch tv or do something else entirely. Users from the chat agree with him stating "there's only so much time in a day", "excitement has a shelf life" and "there's very little awesome to be had. imo" showing that this topic is resonating with elements of the CG audience.
...
Unfulfilled books and long wait times, sometimes even years in the case of high profile books like Red Rooster, Brand and Brutas The Badass.
The launching of multiple campaigns before the previous campaigns have fulfilled.
In order to get some hard figures to help get to the bottom of this, I added a feature to my current tools to pull data directly off of IndieGogo pages from the listed campaigns on CreatorGo. I felt that the best metrics for the cause of waning excitement for campaigns and fatigue would be the following:
- "Exposure": Exposure is the amount of time when the IGG campaign page is created and pre-order mailing lists start to be made. This therefore counts the amount of time between when a CG consumer first becomes aware of a campaign and when the product is actually received.
- "Wait" - "Wait time" encompasses the time between when a campaign launches and when a campaign fulfills - how long someone who backed on launch will have to wait until they received what they paid for (assuming they meet their estimated fulfillment date) and how long they are expected to maintain excitement for their purchase.
- "Overdue:" This tracks projects that have passed their estimated fulfillment date and by how many days. Late books are of course a common complain of repeat business.
Now I realize that there are outstanding projects from 2018 and 2019, but the independent crowdfund careers from the likes of Mitch Breitweiser, Andrew Huerta, Cridious, Donal Delay and Martina Markota are effectively finished as far as the consumer is concerned even if they fulfill at this point.
With that said, which product in Comicsgate that launched in 2020 has the highest wait time between purchase at launch and receiving of product?
#1 - CYBERFROG 2: REKT PLANET
TOTAL WAIT: 426 DAYS
So there may be some correlation between the CG people complaining about waiting so long to get what they paid for that they're no longer excited when they get it and the majority of them backing
the longest wait period between purchase and reception in all of Comicsgate. Comicsgate customers may talk but money walks, and the benefits of grindingly marketing a product for long periods of time appear to overwhelmingly outweigh any appeal or good word of mouth that quick fulfillment brings. It also means that much of these criticisms of Comicsgate are generally synonymous with complaints about being a Frog customer.
Personally, I don't get why Camel Moon's sycophantic 32 page e-celeb comic "Hail Salad" takes longer to get in customer hands than it took Liam Gray and Ody to produce 310 pages of work. The due dates highlighted in green are upcoming estimated delivery dates; the ones in red are dates that have come and gone by. The wait times highlighted in orange are late campaigns. So far
, every one of these extremely high wait period projects (
Cash Grab,
Expendables Go To Hell, Shadow Sentry, Blade Devil, Brand and
Tales from the Stacks) have had their extremely generous estimated delivery dates come and go and have yet to be fulfilled. We'll have to wait and see if any of the listed people are able to meet the standard set by
Liam.
But anyone who reads a campaign page in full knows what they're getting into as far as estimated delivery date goes. People who back campaigns that turn out to miss their deadlines have no real warning. With that, which campaigns are the
latest?
#1 - THE EXPENDABLES GO TO HELL
TOTAL LATE: 244 DAYS
Clocking in at 244 days past its initial due date of June 15th 2020, "consumer advocate" Simple Zack holds the distinction of the most overdue of any campaign launched last year. Between late delivery, an underwhelming gross and now an across-the-board superior alternative of Ross Ritchie/Boom Studios for interested celebrities, it's safe to say that this is Zack's first and last work involving a licensed franchise.
So Comicsgate's #1 and #2 hold the distinction of the longest wait time and most overdue campaigns of all the options available to CG consumers. And yet they are the most popular consumer choice. Let's take a look at all the currently late, unfulfilled campaigns:
At present there are 17 overdue campaigns launched from 2020, again not counting the well-known unfulfilled crowdfunds from 2018 and 2019. Of those Zack is the only one who has closed his campaigns and has stopped taking additional funds. Ardanna #0 is having fulfillment reports coming in today.
On the other end of the spectrum, what benefit does rapid delivery have? We all know
Vestige #2 tried and failed this, but some actually succeeded. These three outings were the lowest wait times of any new (non-reprinted) content:
Seicho 66 by Matthew Fowler & Matt Weldon - 75 days wait time, $6845
Do As You're Told: The Ballad of No: by Richard Meyer & Kelsey Shannon - 28 days wait time, $69600
How to Die #1 by Joshua Plack & Bogdan Ristea - 75 days wait time, $1455
Only a handful of CG titles have released non-reprinted content with 3 months of launching a campaign and none of them except Ballad of No have made 5 digit figures.
In conclusion: The Comicsgater may complain of having to wait but the data shows delaying to shill is objectively more productive then delivering as fast as possible, so they suffer what they must.
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