Bloom County Goes Patreon
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Berkeley Breathed let his Facebook followers know that The Bloom County Boys will be moving to Patreon:
Opus, Bill, Steve and your Bloom County family are moving!
…To a new home more expansive than social media. We invite our readers to join us for the gang’s continuing adventures, plus behind-the-scene peeks at 45 years of scandals, secrets, unseen art, animation, custom sketch offers and my memories stretching from Hollywood to the pre-gilded Oval Office. But the death of the newspaper comic page means we’ll need some small support from you or we’ll have to exit. We’ll still post here on occasion, but my full stories and extras will be at Patreon for $3 a month starting January 12.
The Bloom County Boys By Berkeley Breathed Patreon page.
Breathed revived Bloom County as a digital comic on Facebook ten years ago, mixing new material with older strips, now he is taking the next step with Bloom County. Supporters will be getting the regular comic strip and plenty of bonus material (“lots of extras folded in”).
Heidi MacDonald at The Beat interviewed the cartoonist.
THE BEAT: First one is simple: why? You had a big, solid audience on Facebook so why switch to Patreon?
BREATHED: I’ve published ten years of Bloom County on FB and Instagram [links added], together claiming over 800,000 listed followers. Great fun but… it’s essentially Cartooning for Free. Now, one can create as a gift to the fans for a while, as could Taylor Swift, but eventually reality does a check. As does California property taxes. Patronage is a great way to fold the supportive relationship of a creator back into the fan’s hands, as once a comic page did. I now work for them. And it’s a wind behind any creator’s back.
If just one percent of those 800k followers subscribe to The Bloom County Boys Patreon at $3 that’s $24,000 a month, if ten percent subscribe that’s nearly a half a million dollars a month. Who can blame Berkeley?
Heidi asked why he didn’t go back to newspaper syndication:
Syndication now? To what? I’m actually not sure a paper comic page still exists. But building a readership is wholly different than moving it from newspapers to social media and then finally to Patreon. I’m not sure I’d try the former.
Then there is the immediacy of Breathed’s social and political commentary reaching his audience.
As Colleen Doran said recently:
I lasted long enough for my backlist to start paying the bills. Most people never last long enough for their page rates to go up or for their works to start making royalties…The Patreon and Substack is evidence of the backlist paying off: if I hadn’t worked for years to create value, no one would be supporting my future work.
And Berkeley’s reputation of comic cleverness and his backlist of award-winning comics will certainly help get his Patreon off to a good start.
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