DESTROY all humans. That is the simple, loving message of Red Robot #C-63, a character in Diesel Sweeties, a web comic with 12 years under its belt, and over 3,000 instalments. The comic details the not-always-safe-for-work intimate relationships and bon mots of a cast of robots, humans, animals and malevolent inanimate objects, including an espresso machine.

The strip's creator, Rich Stevens, works alone for many hours a day in a large, empty building. He likes it that way. Nonetheless, when Mr Stevens wanted to buy himself the time to catalogue and produce electronic books of his strips, he turned to the community of readers who have supported him over the years, by buying T-shirts and stickers, and spreading the word of his oeuvre. Like so many artists and creators, he turned to Kickstarter.

As a one-man operation, even handling his own shipping, time is money and money is time. He set a goal of $3,000, which he felt had a neat symmetry with his 3,000 strips. He raised that amount in under 45 minutes after posting a link on Twitter, and exceeded $60,000 by the end of the 30-day project period. (Kickstarter disburses funds only if a goal set by a project creator is met. It keeps 5% and about 3% is retained to cover payment-processing fees.)

As more money flooded in during the project, he set intermediate goals. For instance, he wound up committing to eat two pounds of bacon, despite being a vegetarian (two donations of $666 each), and to produce hundreds of USB memory sticks that resemble his Red Robot character. He also pledged to drive a vintage Pac-Man arcade console from his western Massachusetts home to Wil Wheaton, an actor and writer living in California. (Mr Wheaton, best-known for playing a young starship crew member on "Star Trek: Next Generation", is a friend of Mr Stevens's.)

The strip's odd plot lines may seem mystifyingly opaque to many. A recent sequence involved a character faking her murder and pinning it on a cat, for instance. The style, too, is impenetrable to most non-geeks. Diesel Sweeties is drawn to resemble early colour video games, with stairstepped edges instead of curves, and a limited range of hues. Mr Stevens says his inspiration came, of all things, from the Macintosh's Users & Group control panel (way back in the 1990s). They also used "weird profiles" of generic faces as icons. Mr Stevens's T-shirts are more widely recognisable. Michael Cera even wears one in a scene in the movie "Scott Pilgrim vs the World". Each week a handful of Scott Pilgrim buffs purchase the garment for "cosplay", where fans dress as characters in comics and movies.

Mr Stevens is using the money he has raised to add colour to older black-and-white strips, fix errors and build a detailed database, prompted in part by some Kickstarter backers' request to allow them to create their own custom collections. Electronic collections of his works will be available to donors using Apple's iBooks Author, which creates titles in a special format that can for now only be read on an iPad. He eventually plans to produce the books in standard PDF format, as well, though he does not deny enjoying the iPad-only books' being perfect paginated representations of his work.

There are other hermetic web comics for geeks. Some boast a huge and devoted following. Xkcd is a favourite among maths and programming types. The Order of the Stick raised a staggering $1.25m in a Kickstarter campaign to produce an e-book and print collections. Penny Arcade has spawned conferences, a children's charity (which raised $3.5m in 2011) and an internet reality-television series. Mr Stevens is not quite there yet, and his success with this project has already heartened him and transformed his working life. But web users' seemingly insatiable appetite for vicious espresso machines give him something to strive for.