Ink to Table #7: Blood of Atlantis
Novels to comics with Jon Auerbach
Table of Contents
Introduction and Preview
An Interview with Jon Auerbach (Blood of Atlantis)
An Interview with Tyler James About the State of Kickstarter
How I Found Comic Books by Tanya Stoparczyk
Signing Off
Introduction and Preview: Blood of Atlantis
Introduction and Preview
This month’s featured comic is Blood of Atlantis, which was written by Jon Auerbach, illustrated by Francine Delgado, and lettered by Toben Racicot. It’s an ongoing urban fantasy story about a puzzles, adventure, and an ancient secret.
The second issue is live on Kickstarter until May 15th: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jaauerbach/atlantis2
An Interview with Jon Auerbach
by Caleb Palmquist
Jon Auerbach is a talented writer who has worked in both novel and comic book formats, and had tremendous success on Kickstarter in both categories. His comic book series Blood of Atlantis actually takes place in the world of his novel series, Guild of Tokens.
In this interview we talk about the differences between novels and comics on Kickstarter, worldbuilding in comic books, and more.
CALEB: This is the second Kickstarter for your comic book series, but you started out doing fantasy novels on Kickstarter. How is running a comic book Kickstarter different than a novel Kickstarter?
JON: The overall campaign dynamics of a comic book and novel Kickstarter are largely the same in terms of when people are backing, dead zones, etc., but the main difference is that with comic books, you have a lot more visual material to use to help promote your campaign.
You can have your first several pages of the comic right on the campaign page, and that can show a potential backer who likes the hook of your book enough to back. And then of course you have your covers and other panels of the comic that you can reuse really effectively (I’ve re-lettered one of the issue one pages that has a good set-up and delivery all on the same page to help promote the campaign in a funny way).
For a novel campaign, you have your book cover and that might be it in terms of visual material. You really need a great cover and a hook to get people scrolling down to click through to a preview of the book, and then hope that they come back to the page after they’ve read the preview to back the campaign.
You can also commission additional art (like character art, locations) and maps, to add some more visual flair to the page. Those things can also be added as swag to reward tiers or as add-ons.
Another big difference is the rise of novel special editions. These are really high-end versions of a single book, sometimes going for upwards of $80 or $90, with lots of bells-and-whistles, like sprayed edges, ribbon bookmarks, full-color end pages, and faux leather covers. Whereas with a comic book campaign, your average pledge amount will tend to get higher as you put out more issues, for these novel special editions, I’ve seen lots of authors fund in the high five-figures with just a single book.
CALEB: Speaking of novel Kickstarters, do you think big celebrity campaigns like Brandon Sanderson’s Four Secret Novels Kickstarter impacted the viability of novels on Kickstarter? Did any of that success trickle down to you? Did it change how you approached Kickstarter?
JON: I’ve definitely seen an influx of novel campaigns in the last 3 years, since Brandon Sanderson’s $42 million record-breaking Four Secret Novels campaign. When I did my first novel campaign, for a special edition of my first urban fantasy novel in January 2021, most indie authors I knew were not looking at Kickstarter. It was a bit challenging to find other campaigns to do backer update swaps, because there weren’t so many running at the same time in the same genre. But in the lead up to Sanderson’s big campaign, more and more authors were learning about Kickstarter and doing their first campaigns. I think that Sanderson’s campaign certainly accelerated the timeline of more authors using Kickstarter, and it certainly brought new readers into the Kickstarter ecosystem. About 80,000 of 185,000 backers of that campaign had never backed a Kickstarter before. Between those two things, and the awesome work that Oriana Leckert, the Head of Publishing at Kickstarter, has been doing, the category is in a whole different place now.
In terms of how that has affected my campaigns, I haven’t run a fiction campaign since summer 2022, so I mostly watched this wave from the sidelines, as I have been focusing on comics for the past few years. For my next novel campaign, I’ll definitely be looking at what has worked well for these newer campaigns and how I can incorporate that into my campaign, such as different formats and price points.
CALEB: Your comics drip with world building. I love how intricate the lore and magic of the story is. What inspirations are you drawing from for that kind of storytelling?
JON: Thank you! I love reading fantasy series with fully-realized worlds, secrets, and mythology that builds over time. One of my favorite things about Sanderson’s Mistborn novels is how he used opening chapter epigraphs to just tell a completely different story that by the end of the book dovetailed into the main narrative. He also does a great job building out his magic systems. In the Mistborn books, you learn almost everything you need to know about allomancy (a magic system where people get special abilities by eating various metals, and yes I know that sounds kind of weird!) in the first third of the first book, but then there are two more magic systems that factor into the plot in the rest of the first trilogy whose details are revealed slowly in conjunction with the story. I don’t have as scientific a magic system in my books and comics, but I try to make sure that any time the characters are using some particular kind of magic, it’s introduced earlier and not revealed as a deus ex machina at that particular moment to advance the plot.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is similarly a masterclass in world building, with its detailed footnotes that sometimes just go off and tell these complete tangential histories that suck you in. That inspired me to write these side stories of secondary characters to help both flesh out the world and so that these characters feel more real when they appear in the main story.
In terms of comic inspirations, I love Jonathan Hickman’s intricately structured plots, world building, and mythology, and his data pages in the X-Men books really add to the narrative on the comic page. I did a little spin of that in issue 1 of Blood of Atlantis, where I wanted to introduce some more backstory without it feeling like an info-dump. I’m hoping to incorporate some more of those design/data pages in future issues.
I had the benefit of Blood of Atlantis taking place in the same world as my urban fantasy novels, so I already had a lot of world building and lore (and existing characters) to draw upon when I was writing the comic. The challenge is making sure that everything was accessible to a brand-new reader who had never read my books while also providing an extra layer of depth for someone who had read those books.
CALEB: You work full time in addition to making comics and novels. How do you find time for your creative work?
JON: That’s a great question! For my novels, it’s all about consistent writing, finding pockets of time (hopefully every day) to get words down on paper. That all adds up over the course of the year if you can stick with it. I try to carve out that time in the morning before my workday starts, as I find that by the end of the day, I’m mentally exhausted, and it can be hard to get in a flow state. For comics, thankfully, a single issue script does not take months and months to write like a novel. I also find that comics writing uses slightly different writing muscles, so in the evening it’s a bit easier to write or outline pages versus trying to write prose.
With multiple projects going, I’ve started blocking out weeks on a writing calendar template I made in Notion, where I will work on one project for that week only and then the next week, I will switch from a book to a comic script, and then flip back the following week, depending on upcoming deadlines.
CALEB: What’s next? Will you go back to novels at some point, or are you all in on comics?
JON: After I wrap the Blood of Atlantis #1-2 campaign, I’ll be going back to my urban fantasy series for my next campaign. I’ve been working on a shorter novel that takes place in-between books 2 and 3 of that series that tells a standalone story with mostly new characters – think the Triwizard Tournament but taking place in New York City. I’ve written it as a new entry point for book readers while also adding some more story elements that will pay off in book 3. I plan to launch that campaign in the fall, while Fran is working on issue 3 of Blood of Atlantis. Then we can hopefully launch the issue 3 campaign in the first quarter of 2026 and then the campaign for book 3 of my novel series the following summer or fall. I had a good number of backers come over from my novel campaigns to the comic campaigns, so I’m interested to see how many comic backers cross-over to the novels.
An Interview with Tyler James
by Caleb Palmquist
Tyler James is a mainstay in the Kickstarter comic book world. He’s been launching comics on the platform for years, and helping other creators through his ComixLaunch podcast and masterclass. I had the chance to chat with him about the current state of Kickstarter. Here’s what he had to say:
CALEB: You’re a veteran Kickstarter creator, and you’re a teacher in the space. What do you see as the biggest challenge facing Kickstarter comic book creators today?
TYLER: Great question. In the early days of launching and working with a lot of creators on their first projects the biggest challenges were usually fear based… fear of the unknown, fear of failing, fear of putting stuff out there, fear that it will actually work. And for the creators who have yet to launch, fear is still probably one of the biggest things standing in their way.
But what’s different today is that most of the projects launched in comics each month are from veteran creators. I think like 3 out of 4 new comic projects are by creators who have launched before. And while those creators may still feel a bit of nerves when launching, the challenges they face are usually different. They’ve been to the mountaintop. They know what it takes to get a project funded. And the reality is, it’s a lot of time and passion and energy and focus… and sometimes it gets hard to get up for each new launch. Because now we have higher expectations than we had when we first got started, and the process isn’t new. Bringing the same passion and energy to your 10th campaign as your first is hard to do. So, I think a lot of the challenges veteran creators face are related to breaking through plateaus and leveling up.
CALEB: Kickstarter has been making lots of changes this year. What change are you most excited about? Does it scare you with Kickstarter making so many changes these days when in the past they played it very safe and consistent?
TYLER: Updates to the Kickstarter platform have been coming at a dizzying rate over the past couple of years. From what I’ve been told, the old guard at Kickstarter was very reluctant to make big changes to the platform, but under new leadership, they’ve taken a “let’s just give the people what they’re asking for” attitude, and have been steadily rolling out new features. Some, like FEATURED REWARDS and SECRET REWARDS, which were just rolled out, are nice to haves, but don’t fundamentally change how Kickstarter operates. Whereas things like Late Pledges, and what they’ve teased with their new post-launch pledge manager have fundamentally changed some of the core ways that Kickstarter works.
For the most part, I’m not that worried about their rate of changes, other than having to keep up with them! They have seemed quite receptive to feedback when something new is rolled out, and seem to fix show-stopping bugs with changes relatively quickly. While I don’t think there’s a single thing they’ve changed that I’m against, I will say that the downside is that it does seem like every time I set up a new Kickstarter project it takes a bit longer than the the last time… and that’s not something that you would expect to happen the more you do something! But the additional features, reward options, project images, decision points, etc. all really have made it so setting up a Kickstarter Project in 2025 is more time-intensive than it was in 2015.
Of the new features announced, I’m not sure that any will be as game-changing as the roll out of prelaunch pages and add-on support have been to the platform… but their new Pledge Manager has a shot to be. I am a big fan of Backerkit’s Pledge Manager for larger campaigns, and do think it will be a challenge for Kickstarter’s new tool to match up given Backerkit’s decade head start. But if they are able to compete, I love the idea of saving time and money by not having to use a separate pledge management tool. So, that’s the one I have my eye on.
CALEB: What is one thing you wish Kickstarter would change to benefit comic creators?
TYLER: Probably the simplest thing they could change that would do the most good for comic creators would be to give creators the ability to message project followers during their launch. On every campaign dashboard, Kickstarter prominently displays how many people are following your campaign and what % of them have backed the campaign… but there’s nothing you can really do with that information. Backerkit Crowdfunding’s update and messaging tools give you the ability to put messages in front of anyone who put a hand up to say “I’m interested in this!” and it seems like a no-brainer for Kickstarter to do the same.
CALEB: There have been lots of discussions over the last couple of years about large companies and huge name personalities coming in to the comic book space on Kickstarter. How do you feel about those creators? Does their presence on the platform help or hurt the little guys?
TYLER: We’ve been having this discussion since the early days of Kickstarter, and the reality is, the platform has only gotten better for all comic creators as bigger and bigger stars and publishers have launched on there. I’ve always thought a rising tide lifts all boats and the hardest pledge to get someone to make is that first Kickstarter pledge. When big creators, publishers and IPs launch on the platform, all the data shows they bring plenty of first time backers along with them… and a big percentage of those backers stick around and back other projects afterwards.
Now, the prevalence of major publishers and top-tier talent on Kickstarter does compel indie creators to up their game, and do their best to put together an attractive product offering. But that’s always been a necessity, and there never was a time where mediocre comics dominated on Kickstarter. In fact, in the early days, more comic projects failed than were funded. A benefit of big names on the platform that I don’t know that indie creators fully appreciate is that their presence helps continue to legitimize Kickstarter funded books and eradicates any stigma of crowdfunding content being inherently inferior.
CALEB: What about NSFW books? They are increasingly becoming a larger share of the profitable projects on Kickstarter, and not everyone is thrilled about it. Where do you stand, and what advice would you give to creators not engaging with NSFW material?
TYLER: Oh, the wacky world of NSFW comics. On the one hand, I’ll admit, I don’t completely get how it is that in a world of limitless free porn there are that many collectors and customers out there throwing their money at these projects. But this does seem to be the world we live in, and it does seem that the NSFW route can be a bit of a cheat code towards upping one’s funding totals.
But that doesn’t mean that NSFW is the only path to victory. None of the 37 odd projects I’ve launched have been in that category, and the reality is most of the projects funded each month aren’t either. Most creators I’ve worked with do not fall into the category of just trying to make a quick buck on Kickstarter, so I’d encourage anyone to keep moving forward with the story they want to tell. Passion and quality storytelling can sell, even if it’s not boobilicious!
CALEB: Last, one big question: do you think the comic book category on Kickstarter will continue to grow? Will Kickstarter continue to be a viable option for indie comic book creators?
TYLER: Given where we’ve been over the past five years, it would be hard to argue that Kickstarter isn’t the MOST viable option for indie comic book creators right now. When pencils went down during Covid, many creators were posting all-time personal best crowdfunding launches. And the growth in total projects funded, total dollars raised, and project success rate, year over year, has continued to climb. So I wouldn’t bet against Kickstarter at this point.
I know that with the current global uncertainty and a political climate that’s promising tariffs and trade wars, many creators and consumers are increasingly nervous about what the future may hold. While I don’t think that Kickstarter is immune to broader economic trends, it’s probably less impacted by them than many other options indie creators might have. So, I’m still bullish that crowdfunding will continue to be one of the core ways indie comics reach the masses and creators sustain their endeavors.
Tyler James currently has a Kickstarter live for an incredible tool for Kickstarter creators that has long been in the works. It’s called the Comic Book Crowdfunding Planner, and you can grab a copy for yourself here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/comixtribe/comixlaunch-planner
Signing Off
by Curtis Clow and Caleb Palmquist
Thanks for checking out the seventh issue of Ink to Table. If you have a suggestion for an amazing comic book coming up, or you have a comic you’d like featured, please feel free to contact us and let us know! We now have companion podcasts for each issue where we chat with the creators of the comic we’re covering. Don’t forget to subscribe!
This issue’s featured comic was Blood of Atlantis #2. It runs on Kickstarter until Thursday, May 15th. If you’d like to check it out, here’s the link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jaauerbach/atlantis2
Until next time,
Curtis & Caleb