Comicsgate Consumer Sentiment Analysis - Ethan Van Sciver EBAY Store Report February 14-24, 2025

in Ecency7 days ago

JUST THE DATA

Tabulation of the public inspectable data collected from Ethan Van Sciver's EBAY store identified 84 items sold, with a value of $2,923.22 (including shipping).
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COMICSGATE CONTEXT

Ethan Van Sciver is a former professional comic book artist at Marvel and DC Comics, and now self-publishes through his ALL CAPS Comics brand, typically through self promotion on his YouTube Channel under the nominal theme of #COMICSGATE. Comicsgate may alternatively refer to Van Sciver's trademark, the loose affiliation of other comic book crowd funders associated with Van Sciver, or the fans and purchasers of Van Sciver's comic books and merchandise. In a Tweet on October 18, 2024, Van Sciver claimed his EBAY stores generated approximately $1,000,000 a year in sales. It occurred to me that Van Sciver's EBAY sales could potentially be a proxy for Comicsgate sentiment.

THE EBAY STORE DATA

I constructed a spreadsheet with every publicly visible item listed on Van Sciver's EBAY store and recorded the data for sales on February 14, 19, and 24 - 2025. Tabulation of the public inspectable data collected from Ethan Van Sciver's EBAY store identified 84 items sold, with a value of $2,923.22 (including shipping. A ten-day collection period presents a fuller picture, but perhaps too short for speculation. Approximately $300 in sales per day would produce a bit over $100,000 in sales over a year.

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COMICSGATE CROWFUNDING DATA

Major campaigns for #Comicsgate affiliated projects were tracked using Indiegogo.com, FundMyComic.com and https://www.backerkit.com/backertracker. The number of backers shown in the columns is the cumulative backer count as of that day. During the time period three new campaigns were launched by Ethan Van Sciver (Dark Harvest), Matt Martin (Snowman 2), and Bosch Fawstin (Pigman). Van Sciver had the top project with 655 backers, and the total of backers across the index of projects was 1,276. This is approximately 127 backers per day for Comicsgate affiliated projects. Jon Malin's repackaged "Graveyard Shift Volume V Variants" garnered 180 backers during the period. Backer numbers will fluctuate depending on the on the popularity and how recently a campaign was launched.

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CONCLUSIONS WITHHELD

The data collection periods are still too brief to draw strong conclusions about Comicsgate sentiment. The current backers number do appear to be less than the highest totals of Comicsgate campaigns in 2024. Van Sciver's current current rate of EBAY stores sales would not produce a $300,000 or $1,000,000 per year as he has claimed for past periods.

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The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the people( @alohaed ) sharing the post on Reddit as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com. Otherwise, rewards go to the author of the blog post.

Are these eBay consumer data reports of Ethan van Sciver a point of interest of yours… or part of your work somehow?

Years ago I did metrics and promotions for Indie Comics as a hobby. My education was in Business Management and Analysis, and part of my work as a project manager was developing our internal tracking tools for costs and market analysis.

I'm retired now - but analysis stuck with me. Van Sciver is a bit of an unpleasant person, from my interactions with him, but one of the things he harped on was how much money he was making versus other indie comic book creators. He kept boasting about his sales on EBAY. I think around late 2024 October he claimed $1,000,000 a year from that. When I started poking around in the numbers and published my initial findings, he revised the claim down to approximately $300,000 a year.

My general thesis for a lot of public sentiment is that there is often some useful marker or some quality that we can measure if we can determine what it is. This is one of the reasons I've started tracking local grocery prices now - I'm curious if it will have some impact on local and state-level elections in my area in 2026.

For Van Sciver my thesis is that his audience has diminished, and he has exhausted the purchasing power of that existing audience. If the Ebay sales started picking up or slowing down that could give me some marker of sentimentality.

It also gives me a vehicle to expose a non-Hive audience to Hive, with a show don't tell mechanism.

Oh, I get it. Almost a watch dog energetic. Transparency as a mechanism to create change.

In terms of food pricing and comparative costs in general. I often have used this site to get a feeling for places to go before heading. So I can make sure the family budget can handle our choices.

https://livingcost.org

The increase in numbers made this research even more interesting.

@alohaed, I paid out 0.262 HIVE and 0.074 HBD to reward 2 comments in this discussion thread.