abstract
- Although many academic libraries have incorporated comics into their collections since the 1970s, there are sectors of the comics publishing landscape that remain underrepresented within them. One such area is crowdfunded comics. Crowdfunded comics present challenges for selectors because the act of purchasing them is speculative—supporters are funding an idea that has not yet come to fruition—and the titles themselves aren't represented in the tools librarians often use to curate collections such as “best of ” lists, book reviews, or mainstream vendor catalogs. This qualitative study uses survey data collected from academic and public libraries to look at where comics fall within library collections, how selectors choose which comics to acquire, whether selectors are able to purchase crowdfunded materials, what types of crowdfunded materials are purchased, and what barriers there are to purchasing crowdfunded and self-published works.