Comix Cleric: A Review
I signed up as a Kickstarter backer with early access rewards for Comix Cleric in fall 2025, and almost a year later, the Early Access period is here! While I'm not exactly in the target audience for Comix Cleric (I already have a website that works for me, and I'm more than happy to write code myself) I believe in the Comix Cleric mission: to make starting a webcomic on your own website as easy as possible for as many people as possible.
Frankly, my first impressions of the Comix Cleric demo during the Kickstarter was that it's not for me. I didn't play around with it much, but the design of the demo didn't appeal much to my aesthetic sensibilities. That said, I feel the same way about the default layout of ComicFury, another webcomic hosting site, and plenty of people leverage that software to make beautiful sites and webcomics that I enjoy. While aesthetic customization for Comix Cleric isn't at the level of ComicFury, it's on their roadmap to add more options, so I'm hopeful for the future of the platform in that regard.
Early Access
When I first accessed Comix Cleric and began working to set up my site, I ran into an issue caused by not reading the instructions, where I didn't realize there was an action I needed to take on an email I received - Since I spun up my site, the development team has added a notification to the Comix Cleric admin to notify/remind users to check their email and complete that action. I encountered a few other bugs during my test of the software, but I've found the developers to be very responsive to my bug reports and all of the issues I identified were resolved before the end of the early access period.
Once I'd gotten into the admin, I began setting up my comic settings. It looks like they've designed it so that in the future they might allow multiple series on one site, but that feature isn't available yet. I ran into a few bugs during this setup, but they were resolved by the team. That's normal for a new platform, since it's hard to test as rigorously as users will use your software. Overall, it was very easy to get pages uploaded and content set up. My one complaint is that there's no bulk upload, but I don't know that there's any comic CMS (content management system) that allows that, so I'm not too torn up about it. It's only an issue when migrating platforms, not when starting a new comic. I'm pleased that there's backdating, draft, and scheduling functionality as well.
After getting some updates loaded in, I moved on to the theme and styling. I'm less happy with this section. Like I said before, the default theme isn't really to my taste, and the customization at this time is limited to colors and fonts - not page layout and functionality. That said, additional customization options are on the roadmap. I'll have to revisit this review in six months to a year to check back in about theme changes. My biggest complaint here is that it's not possible right now to change what the home page CTA is. I'd like to have multiple options (Go to First Page, Go to Latest) and to be able to customize the banner image, rather than pulling the latest thumbnail.
Final thoughts
The two places where I see the most room for improvement with Comix Cleric are theme customization and user documentation. I hope they are able to produce some video walk-throughs and expand their documentation and on-page user cues in the admin in the future - I think that will really enrich the on-boarding experience.
Overall, I'm happy with the software. I won't be switching over my comic since I'm happy with my current site, but I would absolutely recommend it to cartoonists looking for a no-code CMS to host their webcomic. There's an active community and passionate development team supporting the project, so any questions not answered by the limited documentation are answered very quickly by submitting a help request.