By Zack Quaintance — Wildly successful Kickstarter runners Spike Trotman and Iron Circus Comics have launched a new crowdfunding campaign, one that is fully independent, eschewing Kickstarter and other established platforms.

That campaign is for The Poorcraft Cookbook — which as the title implies is the latest entry in that series — and it’s live now through Iron Circus’ website, having already raised $2,485 toward its $6,000 goal (as of this writing), despite heavy traffic crashing the platform the day of launch. As noted (via wild understatement), Trotman and Iron Circus are indeed wildly successful Kickstarter runners, having used that platform to crowdfund nearly $2.5 million with more than 30 projects.

Early technical hiccups aside, this campaign will almost certainly succeed. More importantly, however, it is perhaps the first significant instance of a major comics publisher running its own crowdfunding campaign. The natural question, of course, is if other publishers who have seen success on third party crowdfunding platforms will follow suit.

There’s some significance in Poorcraft being the project for this new venture, as Trotman points out in a statement included with the official announcement of the new campaign.

“The last two years have been eye-opening for me as a publisher and, after a dozen years of corporate crowdfunding, it was time to bring to bring Iron Circus’s DIY attitude to all aspects of our crowdfunding campaigns,” Trotman said in the statement. “The bottom line is there’s never been a better time to launch the first ever independently run Iron Circus Comics’ campaign. I don’t have to worry about being surprised by an announcement or a corporate initiative and we can be directly in touch with backers. Best of all, there’s a nice symmetry here, as the first Kickstarter campaign was for the first ever Poorcraft graphic novel and now the first proper Iron Circus Comics is for The Poorcraft Cookbook.”

I’ve read so many press release statements in my career (I’ve been a journalist outside of comics for many years, double digits even, ahem), and that statement has some substance to it, especially relative to what you usually get in canned PR quotes. The key bit is I don’t have to worry about being surprised by an announcement or a corporate initiative. While not getting specific, it pretty obviously seems to refer to Kickstarter announcing an intent to explore blockchain. That announcement has been controversial in comics, where anything crypto is toxic, especially digital art NFTs.

So yes, the future (and exact location) of crowdfunded comics feels very much influx after today’s news — in fact, squint hard and one could see Substack’s comics as being crowdfunded, albeit in a way that requires readers to swear their swords as part of a content feudal system, where the lords are comic book writers (mostly) and the swords are $6.99 a month, or whatever. Obviously, most indepedent comic creators aren’t setup to build their own crowdfunding capabilities on their websites, but what if web design companies like Squarespace start building that capability into their platforms? It’s very interesting to consider…

But enough contemplation of the future! Checkout some additional info about the new Poorcraft project below, and back if you’re so inclined…

The Poorcraft Cookbook is more than 200 pages of “recipes, techiniques, and buying tips from cartoonist Nero Villagallos O’Reilly,” according to the project’s PR. And, again, you can back it via Iron Circus Comics own website. Pages from the project can be found below:

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.