DATA SUMMARY
Between February 14, 2025 and February 19, 2025, Ethan Van Sciver's EBAY store - had a visibly observable total of 17 items sold, for a total value of $494.48 (including shipping).
CONTEXT AND METHODS
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.
Individual offerings on Van Sciver's "Cyberfrog9" EBAY store were recorded on February 14, 2025 with their inventory name, price, shipping, and current number of items sold. The process was repeated on February 19, 2025 and sales were calculated.
The data points for each offering were inspected and manually entered into a spreadsheet. A sample offering "RARE! CYBERFROG BLOODHONEY Blue MAGA Variant!! MAGA MONDAY SPECIAL!", is shown below with title, price, number sold, and standard shipping rate highlighted with red boxes.
OBSERVATIONS
A five-day sampling period is too short to draw meaningful conclusions, and I will continue periodic data collection of Van Sciver's EBAY store. The most recent addition to the EBAY store was on January 20, 2025. During the tracked sales period Van Sciver launched a new crowdfunding campaign "CYBERFROG: DARK HARVEST. LAST CHANCE! 7 DAYS!", with three days remaining the campaign page reports 355 backers. A Van Sciver associate, Jon Malin who proclaims himself to be #Comicsgate, and makes frequent appearances with Van Sciver on YouTuber, also has an open campaign on Indiegogo, titled "Graveyard Shift VOL V VARIANTS!" reports 296 backers after running for 30-days. In contrast a variant campaign run by Jon Malin from November 26, 2023 through January 6, 2024 (CG TRIPLE THREAT VARIANTS!) reported 658 backers.
The performance of comparable campaigns and relatively low EBAY sales (for the monitored period) suggests that Comicsgate consumers demand may be temporarily saturated. Additional data collection may facilitate quantification of limits or range of limits
for Comicsgate demand, in terms of number of consumers, and their aggregate purchasing capacity.
