By Request Extra: Johanna Draper Carlson On The Collapse Of Digital Manga’s Osamu Tezuka Kickstarter

Johanna Draper Carlson is the writer about comics that most regularly expresses concerns about elements of the comics business from the standpoint of the consumer, so I was interested in reading her summarization of Digital Manga's failure to launch an exceedingly ambitious crowd-funder on behalf of several minor Osamu Tezuka manga licenses.

While it's fascinating to me to muse over the timing of the initial objections to the crowd-funder and how they might have interrupted and then beat down any chance that campaign had to build momentum -- I've always thought a lot of these campaigns are fragile that way -- it's also good to have Draper Carlson remind us that on a fundamental level, just coming in cold off the street at any time during that campaign's run, one might raise objections. She further trashes the responses from the company as not helpful and bad PR.

This whole thing feels a bit more significant to me than usual because of the refinement of the criticial backlash. Sometimes crowd-funding campaigns avoid criticism they might otherwise receive because of the idea that criticizing elements of a crowd-funding campaign is an attack on those that choose to support the thing you're criticizing. That is a tricky gumbo of issues to negotiate, but I think once one campaign is scrutinized the way this one was that this will make it easier for subsequent campaigns to be challenged in their assumptions and strategies.
 
posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink
 

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