Kickstarting Comics: The Return Of ‘ComicScene’ Magazine
by Richard Bruton
The return of old-fashioned, wonderful print magazines about comics – the return of ComicScene magazine.
We used to have lots of print magazines about comics, and there was a real joy to reading through them. Whether it was The Comics Journal, Amazing Heroes, Comic Buyers Guide, Comics International, Speakeasy, or a host of others. Sure TCJ is still irregularly publishing and we have Joel Meadows‘ excellent Tripwire still being published, but there’s always room for more.
And now, we have one more returning print magazine – ComicScene, currently funding the first issue of a new series on Kickstarter right now.
Originally launched in 2018, ComicScene ran for 20 issues, full of great writing from many different voices in comics – including my own efforts. The print mag eventually ended up in comic shops and newsagents in the UK and made it overseas to the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
The plan was for them to launch in US comic shops somewhere around the start of 2020 – and we all know what happened then. Cue pandemic, lockdowns, plague conditions are hardly the best environment to continue a print mag, never mind expand into the US. So, sadly ComicScene finished with those 20 issues, along with volumes of The History Of Comics and Crikey. And that, we thought, may well have been that.
But no, you can’t keep a good magazine down it seems, as ComicScene is making a return, with this first Kickstarter campaign to relaunch with a new #1 issue, the Yearbook, bigger and better than before.
The new magazine will be 64 pages at least and there’s hopes to publish three times a year, each through Kickstarter.
Hitting the original target in just six days meant they could afford to print the mag and pay everyone involved in making it. For every £300 over the target, the plan is to add more pages, including up to 16 pages of new comic strips.
As you’d expect, plenty of rewards, tiers, and add-ons, including the CS+ digital comics library with nearly 100 comic titles.
I know I’m writing for them, but even if I wasn’t, this is still the sort of thing that I think is vitally important for the comics medium.
So, head over to the ComicScene Kickstarter and get pledging to take them over the next tier!
The ComicScene Issue 1 Kickstarter ends on Thursday June 29 2023.
