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Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen and co-founder Yancey Strickler were trying to save Arrested Development, the smartly funny, critically acclaimed and ratings-deprived Fox comedy series starring Jason Bateman. As anyone with a TV knows, they failed. But the friendship flourished as did the ongoing conversations on the challenge of living the creative life and how difficult it could be to make a living at it let alone fund a project. What would happen if there was a way for artists to use social networking media to go directly to their audience to request donations to fund whatever project they were pursuing? What would it look like? How would it work? Could it be done?

After three years the answers can be found at Kickstarter.com. The brainchild of Chen, Strickler and several others, Kickstarter uses the Internet to create the apparatus to help artists fund their projects by sidestepping the film and TV studios, and venture capital funds, to solicit donations from ordinary people.

It works like this. Artists propose a project, come up with a fundraising goal and make their case to Kickstarter via letter, video tape or web site. If Kickstarter accepts the proposal, they issue a formal invitation to the artist and they create space on the website for artists to execute a fundraising campaign. The artist is responsible for soliciting donations. Kickstarter provides the web space and connection with Amazon for the handling of pledges. Otherwise, it's the artist's project from start to finish.

"They get to create their own commodity and price everything. They set the parameters on their own," says Strickler.

Kickstarter's not a charity. If the campaign succeeds, Kickstarter gets 5% of the money raised for each project. And although "there's definitely an audience of Kickstarter backers looking for cool things to pledge to," Strickler says, artists are responsible for generating their own support.

Artists offer donors a variety of incentives--from T-shirts, access to blog updates on the project's progress or their names mentioned in the acknowledgements of a book or film credits to a copy of the book or film, etc.--all based on the amount donors willing to donate. People can donate from anywhere around the world although they must have a U.S. bank account in order to use Amazon. As with all campaigns, there is a deadline. Artists must meet their financial goal by a designated date to keep the pledges. If they come up short, all pledges are cancelled and the artist goes empty-handed.

In other words it's sink or swim. But, with or without funding, the artists keeps control of their work and Kickstarter takes no ownership of the artistic work.

"I think it's draconian that you have to trade the rights of your work for the privilege of its existence," says Strickler who's had a successful career as a journalist and editor. "I think it's incredibly strange. I knew I would never do that."

The concept has seen tremendous growth since its inception in April 2009. They've recently marked 500 successful projects. According to Strickler, three Kickstarter-funded films will premiere at the SXSW film fest and one of their artists managed to play music fest Lollapalooza. And cartoonists have also gotten the word. Such highly regarded cartoonists as Ted Rall, James Kochalka, Josh Elder and Jamie Tanner are also currently using Kickstarter to attract funding for their own comics projects

Another cartoonist who has turned to Kickstarter is Chicago-based comics artist Charlie Spike Trotmann. Trotmann, better known in the comics world as Spike, funded her comics project Poorcraft: A Comic Book Guide to Frugal Urban and Suburban Living! through Kickstarter. Poorcraft is Spike's comics how-to manual for living frugally.

The book was inspired by her own, now thankfully past, experience as a starving artist. These days Spike makes her living from sales of her award-winning web comic and three volume graphic novel series, Templar, Az, the story of a quirky, alternate universe town called Templar, AZ; as well as from web-advertising, sales of related merchandise and other artwork. She visits about 12 comics conventions a year to ply her comics and comics-related wares. Before that, however, she was an art grad school drop-out marking time behind the art store cash register while scrambling to pay the rent.

This was a far cry from the Spelman graduate's childhood in the well appointed Washington D.C. suburbs with her physician father and homemaker mother. After switching her undergraduate major from pre-med to art--and freaking out her parents--she graduated with a fine arts degree and enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago's graduate art program where she lasted one year. Her graduate school instructors dismissed her figurative artwork, so Spike left school and began working on Templar, Az., which ended the worst of her financial problems. But the memory of her struggle stayed with her, especially when she met folks at comics conventions.

She says fans would come up to her and say, "Gosh I'd really like to try that [making a living as an artist] but I could never make a living on an artist's salary.' But Spike says, "I'm very skeptical of people who are convinced they can never make a living doing what they want to do." Poorcraft aims to dispel the misconceptions about what constitutes a successful life. "You don't need credit cards, you don't need a car. Maybe you don't need to live in the suburbs. Maybe living in a studio apartment with a futon is just fine," Spike says.

The funding she got from Kickstarter is helping her get the word out. Typically, Spike draws and writes her own comic but for Poorcraft she hired artist Diana Nox to do the drawings. Since she wanted to pay Nox "a living wage," she created a video to promote herself and present her case to Kickstarter and they accepted her project.

"With her it's a no-brainer," Strickler says of Spike's proposal. "You just look at her work and you can see her passion. She really put herself into it." Spike approached Kickstarter with a fundraising goal of $2,500. She wound up making $13,000. Currently, Spike has 1000 pre-orders for Poorcraft. She'd planned to do a minimal printing of 2000 copies. Now her first printing will be closer to 3000 copies. Her first-run printings for Templar, AZ, which is up to volume 3, are usually 1500. Poorcraft will have approximately 125 pages and is expected to retail for about $10. The fundraising really made the price workable for her, she says. Production is expected to be complete in time for a late summer or early fall release date.

Spike's vocational choices are something Strickler wants more people to be able to make. "We've been moving from this consumer economy to a creative economy," he says, "but there hasn't really been any infrastructure to support it. If you're the kid that makes really good YouTube videos where do you go?"

Now that kid has the answer. "We want more projects," Stickler continues. "We want people to use Kickstarter creatively. It's been really great. We crossed 500 successful [projects] like a week and a half ago. When we first launched I think for me what I thought constituted success was even one project getting funded. To see so many people able to find success is amazing."

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