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Murky Water page 89 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read page 93.

This is crossposted with my newsletter. 

Hey all! Right now the final volume of Cautionary Fables and Fairytales is crowdfunding! You can grab yourself a copy on Iron Circus Comic’s homegrown crowdfunding! If we get to 30k, we are going to send everyone who got a physical reward a cute Lizard Prince pin. Look at this little guy! And if we get to 75k, we’ll do a Spanish edition.



I’m super excited for this volume to come out and the series to complete. If you don’t know, this story grew from me deciding to adapt Bisclarvet into a comic back in 2010. At the time, I was in the middle of redrawing Sorcery 101 pages (because I save the first couple of hundred the wrong resolution for print). I need a break/something different and I found this French folktale. When I finished, Kate Ashwin and couple of cartoonist I knew at the time expressed they had always wanted to adapt a fairytale but never had a reason/something to give them that little extra push. So Kate and I started this series. 

Now here we are, 10 years after the first volume came out. It had its ups and downs, but I’m super proud of what has grown out of that little seed of an idea. I get kids at every con being super interested in it! And thanks to Iron Circus keeping the books in print as the series continued, we are in book stores and libraries. And at ECCC, I had several kids who already knew about the series. The Lizard Prince is full of great stories! I think it’s a great closer to the collection. 



I’ve always liked fairytales and folklore. Recently, I was chatting with some other comic creators about how it’s becoming more and more common for writers to say that their book started as fanfic for something else. We got to talking about what media is baked into the DNA of our work. Some of them are probably easy for a reader to pick up on. Like I watched Buffy while it was airing and was maybe too young to be watching it. And I’ve had people correctly guess that there’s a lot of Yu Yu Hakusho in Misfits of Avalon. But not as many people would guess the miniseries The 10th Kingdom (probably because less people saw it). While talking with friends, I ended up having to explain it. This prompted me and several other cartoonists watching it at Emerald City Comic Con after dinner. Since we were all having a good time, I asked folks to draw me the character Wolf. I ended up getting a little bit of a collection going. I’m gonna add more to it at a later date.



Another thing I’ve been talking to friends about is social media stuff and fan interactions. I’ve mentioned in the past that I kinda hate it. I’m just not super built for using it as often as self promo needs me to use it. Like Spike is great at twitter because when she finds something she thinks is cool, her instinct is to tell everyone about it. When I find something I think is cool, I usually send it to the person I know will like it and only them. Trying to think of stuff to post more than once a month exhausts me (which is why right now this newsletter is my favorite form of online promo.). This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that I need social media to promo stuff and keep my work in people’s mind.



Anyway, while talking about other alternatives, it was suggested that I make a discord chat. I do like using discord and engaging in conversations rather than shouting into the internet void. I’ve seen some people use them as patron exclusives. But I was a little worried that my patreon doesn’t have enough backers and there wouldn’t be enough activity with that limitation. So I’ve made one for anyone who enjoys my stuff to join. Click here to join! You won’t be able to post right away until you do a thing that is in the rules to prove you read them. This link will work for a week. If you are reading this later, drop me a link and I’ll give you a new link. If enough people are interested, I’ll start arranging events on there like movie nights or q&a streams. 

This month I’m mostly gonna be working on finishing Murky Water (I have 11 pages left to draw) and working on my story with Ryan North for Iron Circus’s Failure to Launch anthology. 

I’ll check in with ya’ll again next month. Thanks for your support as always!

Murky Water page 88 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read page 92.