By Request Extra: Deb Aoki On That Tezuka-Related Kickstarter

I wrote last week about Alex Hoffman's critical analysis of Digital Manga Publishing's Osamu Tezuka-related crowd-funder; I missed Deb Aoki's articulate summary of that analysis and through it the crowd-funder more generally.

Checking in, it doesn't look like that particular crowd-funder has garnered a lot of momentum in its first week. Aoki points out there have been some concrete changes in the rewards structure that speak directly to one of the complaints, the lack of physical comics product at lower incentive levels. It doesn't seem like that move has triggered a surge in participation.

Looking over the whole thing one more time, I remain semi-baffled by how this particular crowd-funder is structured and justified. I'm glad I'm not alone. I hope that people stay away from easy comparisons to crowd-funders from publishers like Last Gasp and Fantagraphics. Both of those companies have decades of displayed performance. In Fantagraphics' case, there's also a pretty easy to grasp unique role they have in the marketplace: if they don't do certain things, they don't get done. Mostly, though, it seems like the differences in how the various crowd-funders have been presented -- trigger reason, number of books involved, reward level compared to incentive offered, number of employees supported, implications for the future -- need to be processed as actual differences with corresponding value rather than as value-less strategies that either work or don't. In comics we're really quick to let the end justify the means. I would hope that some of these criticisms would be made even if the Tezuka crowd-funder was going gangbusters.

I also wonder if this doesn't get back to an older issue, a perceived need for some sort of direct-to-consumer mechanism that works along similar lines without some sort of charitable ethos or moral force or kindness or personal plea or even just the flattery of being on a certain kind of team having to be employed, either explicitly or implicitly. On a certain level it feels like we're using the same collections plate while being presented with a thousand different colored envelopes on the back of the pew in front of us. I'm all for stricter consideration of the details becoming a thing, and would more than welcome a sustained curiosity about how and when and from whom capital finds its way into an creative work's lifespan.

Update: Heidi MacDonald unearthed a Tezuka-related, crowd-funded project that crashed and burned the old-fashioned way: massive incompetence by inexperienced publishers trusted by those giving them money and then failing to come through. The thought that you could raise $52k to publish a single book and then not even get close to having it get out there is kind of amazing to me -- if you have enough on the ball to secure a license, it seems like you would have enough on the ball to know what shipping costs. At the same time, I think this kind of thing is almost a necessary corrective to the over-application of the moral force of crowdfunding argument.
 
posted 12:05 am PST | Permalink
 

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