David Revoy (who created the (awesome) Pepper and Carrot cartoon, which is both freely licensed and the source is released) was recently interviewed on the Libre Lounge podcast (and another one in French). In the Libre Lounge episode they covered this, he essentially uses the Patreon model and when big publishers publish his work they do it under the same Creative Commons license everyone else can and in addition they fund his work using Patreon too, even though they are not obligated to do so. The episode is quite interesting in several ways.

https://www.davidrevoy.com/article771/podcasts-interviews https://librelounge.org/episodes/36-david-revoy-on-pepper--c...