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In other news, You are the Chosen One started it’s second chapter recently. If you’re unfamiliar with You are the Chosen One, 23 kids get the same prophecy dreaming telling them they are chosen to stop a dark power. Since the second chapter started up recently, now is a good time to back my patreon and catch up with the comic. It updates every Friday for anyone who subscribes for at least a $1. Chapter 2’s covers is the main image of this month’s newsletter.
In May, I mostly focused on editing the next Cautionary Fables and Fairytales. It is almost done and will kickstart this July. The new volume will be focusing on North America and all the artists knocked it out of the park. Kate and I and our guest editor for the volume Alina Pete are building the kickstarter this month.
Speaking of stuff I’m working on this month:
So, if I were to, say, do a book podcast/twitch show with my pal @kellhound, who would be into that? Because that may be happening… pic.twitter.com/zya9Q3lsOv— Molly Muldoon (@passingfair) June 3, 2021
My pal Molly Muldoon and I are gonna do a podcast/twitch show together. It’s called Trading Paperbacks. The premiss is I pick a book series she hasn’t read and she picks a series I haven’t read. We go through both series together and discuss them. We are gonna record them live on Twitch every other Thursday at 7pm PST. It will air on both my twitch and Molly’s. The first episode is going to review the Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. We start June 24th. Episode 2 is gonna be The Selection by Kiera Cass on July 8th. So stop by it you and read along with us!
The rest of this month I’m gonna focus on making assets for my twitch, new images for my twitter, and a copy of other internet icons over all. My work set up is a little limited at the moment because be my laptop is currently getting repaired. It should be fixed soon but the repair bill is $400. So um, please back my patreon or buy something from my store!
Thanks everyone! I’ll check in with you next month.
Hey all! Newsletter is a little late because I distracted by the election and just hitting refresh repeatedly on the results. But the delay also meant I got info about holiday shipping from White Squirrel (who handles fulfillment of my store.)
I’ve been continuing to finish Stars Hide Your Fire. It’s mostly done and ready for Iron Circus to send out for reviews. Joe and I are pretty pumped of it. We hope folks like it because we worked hard on it.
Last month, I mentioned getting into Crusader Kings 3. I’m pretty busy with work and haven’t had a lot of time to play it on my own but still wanted to explore it. To make time to play but also not go over board (when I play a videogame I tend to play it for the whole day/night), I am keeping to a playing schedule. Bones Leopard and I have been streaming playing Crusader Kings 3 on twitch every Thrusday from 7-10pm. We are then saving them to Youtube. Come relax with us on Thrusday evenings if you want to see us attempt to rule the Medieval world. We are playing a campaign start where the goal is to spread a matriarchy government through out Africa. The above picture is the character we played the longest so far. Despite having leprosy, she ruled for 35 years and conquered several neighbors.
If videogames aren’t your thing, Joe and I are still streaming Wednesday morning/afternoons. On stream I focusing on You are the Chosen One now. That’s about 20 pages in now. If you haven’t started reading yet, nows a good time to back my patreon and catch up. Like I said above this year has been tough and every little bit helps. Backing for just a dollar lets you give You are the Chosen One and Stars Hide Your Fire a read.
This month Spike, Amanda, and I have still been keeping up with our podcast Dirty Old Ladies. This month we did an episode called “Show and Tell” which is us talking about comics we have enjoyed lately. I talk about Love is War and Beastars. Both of which I’ve talked about here. Our other episode for the month is “Hindsight is 2020” where we talk about mistakes we have made in the past/stuff we would have done differently. The big one for me is I saved the first 400 pages of Sorcery 101 a size too small to print, so I had to redraw them before putting out those giant books I eventually released. Ya know these ones.
As for some stuff I’ve been enjoying besides Crusader Kings 3, Amanda and I have been watching Yashahime together (remotely). It’s a sequel to Inuyasha and watching this show together feels very comforting. The plot is basically Sesshomaru has two daughters and they team up with Inuyasha and Kagome’s daughter to fight a demon lord that is messing with time. Inuyasha’s daughter is kinda a disaster person that is delightful to watch.
And for the non-anime inclined folks I also enjoyed the Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. I watched it and the Haunting of Bly Manor. I enjoyed both, but Bly Manor seems less focused than Hill House so I preferred that one. Hill House uses the ghost story as a metaphor for childhood trauma that works rather well. They are both worth checking out.
That’s all for this month. Thanks everyone for your support each month! Enjoy your November.
Hey all! Last month I talked about how The City Between being print first leaves my Patreon at a disadvantage when it comes to rewards. Well as both a thank you to the folks who have supported me while all the cons are canceled and in an attempt to try new rewards, I’ll be posting two new comics on my Patreon. They will both be for anyone that backs my patreon.
The picture above is from the first page of Stars Hide Your Fire. Andrea and Darra are friends with different views of the future. Darra is anxious about what the adult world has in store, while Andrea sees it as an escape from their mundane little town. But the hunt for a rumored ghost pulls them towards opposite ends of a supernatural conflict that’s been unfolding for 100 years.
I mentioned it last month. I wrote it, Jose Pimienta drew it, I colored it, and lettered it. It comes out from Iron Circus Comics in 2021. Until it’s released, I’ll be posting a page each Monday. This means only the first half will go on Patreon. This comic is also what Jose and I work on while streaming each Wednesday.
Pages will go up every Friday. They will be for Patreon backers only, until my patreon reaches $1200 a month. Then it will start posting my website and the patreon version will just be however many pages ahead. The milestone after that is I’ll update The City Between or You are the Chosen One faster.
Those two comics are where most of my focus has been the past month. That and I finished up some commissions. In June, I got edits on a commission, a freelance gig, and then the rest of the month I’m just continuing work on these.
I am also happy to announce that Dirty Old Ladies, my podcast with Spike Trotman and Amanda Lafrenais, is back to updating. A new episode about unions went up today. We have a decent buffer, so it should regularly update every other Wednesday from now on.
As for stuff I’m watching, reading, and enjoying, mostly it’s been new volumes of comics I’ve already talked about. I got myself a new volume of Beastars and Vineland Saga. Beastars is starting to get into world building more. I think it’s doing a good job of teasing out background info for the world, then circling back to it once it’s important.
That’s it for this month. Everyone thanks for your support. Please stay safe.
This month I’ve been playing catch up on things that fell to the wayside because of the pandemic. I’m also figuring out what to do since all the cons are canceled for the year. Well, not all of them just yet but San Diego Comic Con was canceled. So I think it’s just a matter of time until ECCC’s rescheduled date and all the August cons are canceled. Then probably the September ones too. So I’m rethinking what to do with the rest of the year.
I mentioned last month that I was planning to kickstarter Murky Water (next The City Between book) in September. But I’m debating on if that is a good idea. Partly because I got a lot on my plate. Right now I have:
3 different Cautionary Fable books in various stages of editing
some freelance editing jobs for Iron Circus Comics
I’m starting drawing You are the Chosen One
I need to color and letter a book I’m doing with my pal Jose Pimienta called Stars Hide Your Fire
I’m drawing Murky Water
Cleaning up a pitch package to send to publishers for an untitled sci fi book
Several commissions like this one.
The idea was to do Murky Water first so I would have a new book in 2021. But with all the 2020 cons canceled, that means most shows never saw The Dead Deception. It is probably safe to skip having a new book in 2021. Also, when I started The City Between, I was doing two experiments business wise. Basically, all of them have been print only first, then gone up online. The idea was if someone was impatient for an update they could buy the book or PDF. It mostly worked, but I think at the expense of my patreon. I handicapped one of the easier patreon rewards a webcomic can do, reading pages early. Anyone who was only backing to get pages early, probably just bought the book. That, plus it being safe to not have a new book, and my workload being kinda heavy means now is a good time to switch back to web first. But I’ll decide closer to the end of the year.
But speaking of Jose Pimienta and our book Stars Hide Your Fire, him and I have decided to start streaming weekly on twitch. We will be around Wednesday at noon PST. We did our first two already. The first is mostly a sound test and isn’t much to share, but the second I’m drawing the commission I showed part of above while Jose and I talk about tv, anime, and musicals. Twitch is set to save them for about two weeks before they get deleted. If people really like them, we’ll start saving them to Youtube.
One of the things we talked about is Love Never Dies. It’s a musical and a sequel to Phantom of the Opera. Each weekend Andrew Llyod Webber is posting a different one of his musicals free on youtube for just the weekend. Last weekend was Love Never Dies. The plot is the Phantom survived and escaped the mob at the end of Phantom. He started a very successful freak show on Coney Island. Now it’s 10 years later and the Phantom wants to show Christine how cool and awesome he is now and that she should have stayed with him. It is kinda a trainwreck. And was written right after Andrew Llyod Webber got divorced from the actress who originally played Christine in Phantom. I watched it in sync with a few friends while we were all in a discord chat. It was the quarantine version of getting drunk and watching a bad movie together.
After watching that very bad musical, I decided to watch a musical I heard was good. That is The Death Note Musical. This is a musical I had already heard the soundtrack to because my good friend Molly told me about it a few years ago. I recently learned it’s on youtube. The Death Note musical has a fun development backstory. Molly told me about it because I rather like the Jekyll and Hyde Musical. The composer of the Jekyll and Hyde musical was hired to write a Death Note Musical even though he didn’t speak Japanese and didn’t know anything about Death Note. So he wrote the whole musical in English, recorded a concept album, then sent that to Japan to be translated into Japanese before it was performed. Anyway, both the concept album and the musical are on youtube. The above picture is a shot to show off how they show people’s lifespans on stage. An effect I thought was cool.
Other than watching a bunch of musicals, I’ve been relistening to the audiobooks of the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire. If you are unfamiliar, October Daye is a half-fairy detective who works on fairy crimes. It’s got an awesome cast of characters and puts a lot of thought into how folklore would interact/clash with the modern world. I highly recommend this series as well as anything written by Seanan McGuire.
That about sums up my month. I want to end by once again thanking everything for backing my Patreon right now. With cons continuously getting canceled money has been tight, but I’m doing okay mostly because of your support and orders in the store.
Firstly, I want to give a big thank you to everyone who backed my patreon or bought something from my store in March. Emerald City Comic was canceled roughly a week after I sent out my last newsletter and you all helped soften the blow of losing that income. Things are rough for a lot of people, so I do super appreciate you all helping me out. More and more cons are getting canceled, so I would appreciate it if ya’ll stuck around. But I understand if you can’t.
Because of the new patrons, my patreon made one of its goals. Right now, pencil versions of each finished page get posted a couple of days after the finished version. I also just added a new patreon reward level though. I was gonna add it in June. But an influx of new folks and few backing more than the current higher level ($5 a month) made me decide to launch it early. So as of now folks who back at $10 a month will get to be in crowd scenes. This is a reward that won’t happen every month, but when I have a street scene or need some background people, I’ll check to see who is a backer at that level. Right now, the next thing I’m gonna draw is Murky Water, the next book for The City Between.
Speaking of which, I finished scripting Murky Water and started to thumbnail it. Have look!
It’s a little longer than other City Between books. I was originally gonna kickstart it in June, but now I’m thinking September is a safer bet. Maybe I’ll do it in August. But not enough of it will be done in June for me to feel good about hitting go. Right now my work is still mostly management related stuff. Like I’m prepping Cautionary Fables and Fairytales: Oceania for its Iron Circus version to come out and I’m working on the beginning parts of organizing Cautionary Fables and Fairytales: North America. Oceania is getting rereleased next year and then North America is slated for the year after. It’s a lot of answering emails and organizing stuff.
Once that is all set, I have some commission to do for folks that asked about them last month. If you are also interested, I charge $75 for a black and white character drawing. Add $25 per extra character. Backgrounds are extra and will depend on how complicated they are. I like drawing backgrounds, they just take a long time. And for color the price basically gets doubled.
So once editing and commissions are all set, I’m gonna move on the drawing Murky Water. Once it’s all penciled, then I’ll start making the kickstarter. Which is why the outlook is looking like September.
Besides stressing out about money and working on editing and writing, I did a couple of new things. My pal Alison Wilgus has been making mini podcasts on her patreon. She interviewed me about werewolves and had me explain why werewolves are great. You can give it a listen here. The short answer is they are the proletariat of urban fantasy creatures.
Speaking of werewolves being the proletariat, I rewatched The Order on Netflix. If you have not seen The Order, it’s about werewolves eating the rich. Well, not really. But that’s kinda what it’s about. Basically in it, there is a secret society of magic users called Order of the Blue Rose that recruits people via ivy league schools. It’s very Skull and Bones vibe to it. Main character wants to join for revenge reasons. One of the high up members of this society did something to his mom which isn’t explained in detail until late in the show. While on his revenge mission he is recruited by a secret group of werewolves that have been fighting the Order of the Blue Rose for basically forever. Since the magic users are very Skull and Bones mixed with the Illuminati, werewolf mission statement comes very close to basically being “eat the rich”. Just the magic rich. It’s not a good show per say. But it’s clumsily dealing with some interesting themes and worldbuilding. The last couple of episodes were a lot better than the rest of the season, so I hope that means season 2 will be legit good rather than clumsy but interesting.
Also on the wolf front, I recommended Beastars last month. The anime got put on Netflix shortly after I got caught up on the manga and sent out my newsletter. I am basically obsessed with it now and have told multiple friends to watch it just so I could talk about it with them. This led to Jay Edidin replying to my text with “I will watch this vore romance cartoon. Because I love you.” It is very very good. Here is the opening credits. It has some very cool stop motion animation
More wolves (sorta), I also got Animal Crossing. So like every cartoonist on twitter I’ve been building myself a nice island. My mission for the island is to fill it with wolves. The island is called Awooo. Also, I’m very good at fishing in the game. Not so good at catching bugs.
Like last month, my Patreon is going to bills because all the conventions are getting canceled.
