Crowdsourcing Helps

I can definitely see why somebody be intimidated by crowdsourcing. For a lot of people, this is going to be the most amount of money they've ever had to deal with in their entire lives and be responsible for it. On top of that, this is definitely going to be taking the first step towards doing some hardcore business for a lot of people. 

That's fine. 

Don't get too intimidated and dive straight in. For you, as a writer, there's going to be three major advantages here:
1) You're going to be able to figure out who is your audience. 

2) You're going to figure out just how much you have to print to make people happy.

3) You're going to level up as a marketer.

Let's take that in reverse order. First off, as far as marketing goes, you're going to have to figure out new ways to increase your marketing of your book somehow, because obviously you need this to be a success. You're talking about selling a lot of these to your local bookseller, even selling a lot of these online, and just getting rid of a lot of these books. That's a major step for some, and that's something you're going to have to embrace. 

Another part is that you're going to establish what your audience is. This is an important part in and of itself. You need to figure out just how many people are interested in your book, and the only way to really do that is either by polling everybody or by sending out your materials to various sources; "Here's my book, I'm doing pre-sales, are you interested?" Crowdsourcing is definitely set up well for that. That's pretty much the major advantage to it, especially with doing a multiple-issue comic where you want to get a general feel for how big the numbers are going to be. This is gonna help you a lot more than print on demand sites. 

It's also going to tell you exactly how many books you need to print and you'll be able to get a general idea when you actually start seeing a response. This also the supplemental materials and postage. There are a lot of moving parts to keep in mind. But at the same time, this is something you're going to need to establish yourself as an actual business to use your capital in order to actually do something big, and crowdsourcing is how you do it.