After the cancellation of Superman Family Adventures, the creative team of Art Baltazar & Franco haven’t wasted any time in moving onto their next project. And what a move! After putting a Kickstarter up for their new ‘AW YEAH COMICS!’ series, which was to last six issues, it took only a few hours for them to hit their target of $15000.

awyeah

You can read more about the project over at the Kickstarter, which is still offering up various goals and will run for twenty-nine more days. But it does go to show that there’s still an incredible market out there for all-ages comics – it’s just a case of marketing them correctly. And this is without accounting for international interest – this Kickstarter has thus far mainly been aimed at North American readers, with international shipping not offered on any of the pledges.

If the people running the Kickstarter – this looks to be Chris Smits, who will be contributing to the final comics, along with creators like Chris Roberson and Mark Waid – can find a way to offer comics for people like me in the UK and elsewhere, then the funding could totally explode.

So that’s six months of AW YEAH COMICS! funded. What’s next?

 

21 COMMENTS

  1. If there’s such an “incredible market out there for all-ages comics”, how come the titles they were working on sold so poorly? In others, no – the market wasn’t there. And if their DC titles were supported as much as this kickstarter, they would still be doing DC titles.

  2. Mikael – Do you work for DC Comics? If not, then I doubt you know whether certain comics are or are not, profitable. All you can do is look at a cancellation, and make an assumption, which may be right, or may be wrong. In this case, I’d wager that assuming that Tiny Titans and Superman Family Adventures were unprofitable is a very bad guess. It may be a case where DC just didn’t think they were profitable enough, or it may have been done due to other considerations.

  3. The market is there, folks. When Art and Franco appear at cons, the line at their table is always deep. The kids books I write now, Strawberry Shortcake, sells better at my table than any other title I’ve worked on, including Batman. My Little Pony is killing. And the store Art owns, Aw Yeah Comics, is packed with kids for events. The market is there, and we need to make products for them.

  4. So is this market just not interested in buying books based on DC superheroes? We keep hearing that the market is huge and thing like this seem to prove that the market is huge so what is the disconnect? I would imagine that most of the people who contributed to this didn’t hear about Franco and Baltazar yesterday. They probably knew about their work on Superman Family Adventures and of Tiny Titans before that. SFA was available in print and digital form.

    Are these just not profitable enough for DC?

  5. I’m glad to see this getting support. But the character set of Daring Dog (boy), Darling Dog (girl), Action Cat (boy), and Adorable Cat (girl), Adventure Bug (boy), Shelly (girl) seem right out of the Silver Age… and not in a good way. Are there any female characters in this that are not copies of male characters with lipstick added?

  6. The potential market for kids is huge.
    BUT… kids don’t own cars and (mostly) cannot get to a comic book store. If you want to sell comics to kids, you have to go where the kids are.

    As long as DC and Marvel are beholden to Diamond and the direct market, their kids books (all ages books) will suffer (not sell well).

  7. I am thrilled for Art and Franco that this was fully funded so quickly . And I hope that they have ORDER OF THE STICK level success and make millions.

    But, as of a few seconds ago they are at $23,148 from only 600 backers. I am not sure that is evidence of a huge kids market.

    They have less than 100 5 dollar backers and some people have pledged hundreds of dollars for stuff that has nothing to do with this new comic book such as ADVENTURE TIME cover art and a signed full run of Tiny Titans.

    Again, I don’t think the fact that a relatively few people are willing to pay a relatively large amount of money for this stuff says anything about the health of the kids market. Or about the sustainability of AW YEAH COMICS!

  8. Mikael–there is most DEFINITELY a market for kids’ comics. Anyone who loves comics and has kids wants to buy comics for their kids, I guarandamntee you, and kids like reading them.

    The big problem is that there may not be a big market for kids’ comics in comic stores–a totally different issue. Average soccer mom doesn’t go to the comic store–why would she even think of that? But digital comics for kids is a potentially MASSIVE market.

  9. My earlier comment aside, I agree that there is potentially a huge market for kids comics. I think the three main things keeping comics from selling to kids in the millions are availability, awareness, and price.

    I think digital helps with the availability and could potentially lower the price. Although I think widely available, inexpensive print comics would be great too.

    I guess wide availability would help with awareness too. But, some sort of marketing would be great if it could be economically feasible.

  10. Outside of the comic shop Scholastic, Grafix and many other publishers have had great success with kids comics. Bone and Amelia Rules both were a huge success. I teach kids and they love comics and cartoons. LOVE them. Granted most don’t know about comic book stores. They either read them through the library or purchase them at book stores. If the product is there at an affordable price point the market can be gained. I love all ages comics when they are done right. It’s something I strive for in my own work as well.
    peace,
    Herc

  11. “I’m glad to see this getting support. But the character set of Daring Dog (boy), Darling Dog (girl), Action Cat (boy), and Adorable Cat (girl), Adventure Bug (boy), Shelly (girl) seem right out of the Silver Age… and not in a good way. Are there any female characters in this that are not copies of male characters with lipstick added?”

    Are you referring to the character sets that Art’s 7 and 9 year old children helped him name and come up with, sir? Are those the character sets you’re referring to?

    I guess we dropped the ball in not taking into account a grown adult man’s sensibilities while creating comic books for children.

    Note to self: The next Kickstarter I do that reaches $25,000 in less than two days should really be more better thought out-ish and stuff. Me am comic book dumb.

    Thanks for the well wishes, everyone else! Thanks for the write-up, Steve! You’re awesome! The books will be made available worldwide afterwards, directly from us. They’re not going to be solicited through Diamond and we plan on getting copies to every person that would like one, sir.

  12. “They’re not going to be solicited through Diamond”

    That’s probably a big mistake — there’s really no way to profitably bring in the sub-10 quantities that make up the overwhelming majority of most periodical comics (kids comics, or not) without a distributor consolidating shipping. You can make that math work adequately for $15 books, but not so much for $4 comic books. And god forbid reorders.

    I say this as one of your (so far) eight retailer-package backers! I very much want this comic to succeed, but without adequate national distribution, you’re going to run into big problems on your post-KS issues, IMO.

    -B

  13. I could be wrong, Brian, but if I remember what I heard at the Aw Yeah store, the plan is to only sell the book locally — at the store Art and Franco own — or at their con tables. No Diamond needed because there’s no plan for national distribution. But again, that’s just what I remember as a fan and fellow Chicago-area creator.

  14. Chris, are you arguing that kids can’t fall into the same pattern of sexism as their parents… and the rest of our society? It’s understandable that they do, and I don’t blame them for it, but that doesn’t mean we should just accept it. The tendency of kids to hyper-identify with gender roles is why it’s important that we as adults offer them a variety of role models, to give them wings instead of boxes.

    But we don’t like people challenging our friends, so I get pissed on for pointing out that Franco and Baltazar (and kids) apparently fell into the same habit here that comic book creators have been falling into since the days of Hawkgirl, Bulletgirl, and Mary Marvel.

    The success of the Kickstarter campaign shows that they’re doing a lot right. But I also think they can do better than what I see here, which is why I hope they also include some female characters that are simply their own character. Like so many of the male characters. And aren’t defined primarily by their attractiveness. Like the male characters. That’s something that women and girls have asked for many times (including on this very blog). I’m just repeating their request.

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