UK arts funding for comics – does it exist?

I must say that, in 20+ years of observing local culture between Birmingham and Manchester I’d only ever heard of one Arts Council small individual grant to an actual maker of comics — a young North Staffordshire lad developing a graphic novel. That was probably 15 years ago, and I think it was about £500 of development money. [...] Anyway, to be fair to the Arts Council England I searched Google for their Awards data (“awards” = funding) spreadsheets. site: “comic” “awards” Then the same for “graphic novel”. And downloaded all the resulting regular quarterly Project Grant spreadsheets. The resulting set of files ran from 2013-2022. Discounting the ‘stand-up theatre comedy’ type of comic, here’s the resulting list… . Four hits there, none specifically about graphic novels. ### Share this: ## Post navigation [...] I found one instance of the funding of international work. The South East had a huge £341,883 grant in 2017, to fund a exchange project that brought Baltic nation artists (Latvia etc) into contact with “the children’s illustration and comics publishing” scene in London. And of course London’s strongly left-leaning Cartoon Museum also had hefty Cultural Recovery Fund funding to keep it afloat during the lockdowns. It had more than one substantial tranche of funding there, I recall.