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- KC Newsletter! December 2025
KC Newsletter! December 2025
sorry we're late i was playing cars
This issue: housekeeping
This month’s finances and what all got done!
Seven page update! New Honest Work chapter! Finished drafting the introduction and first chapter of novel 2! it’s all happening
Paycheck decreased by exactly ten dollars this month but it was my own doing; as I’ve said before this is an immensely silly career, and it sometimes entails weighing your own hard-won stability against an extra few dollars a month. I think I’m getting better about making the executive decision though! All good now, sitting at 905 USD, which still covers the rent on our trailer at least.
Any KC News mostly amounts to things that I’ve posted and you’ve likely seen all that already, and I’m not feeling especially nostalgic for 2025 or anything so this letter will just be discussing various thoughts for the coming year I think.
Various Thoughts
The novel release was a really interesting experience after putting out comics regularly for so long. The activity has all but halted around Grist now, probably because I’ve swapped back over to comic work and I’m not pushing it so hard, and I’ve had some time to look over what all went down over the last three months. What I’ve observed so far:
People are much, much more excited about prose novels than webcomics, either in update format or in collected print editions, just full stop. People were posting in fandom tags, they were posting Bits They Liked, and a few of them even jumped over to my Ao3 account to comment on stuff over THERE. People wrote thoughtful reviews! They shared it with their friends and then I got emails from them about how much they enjoyed the book! I also had more friends and peers read this thing than have ever sat down with the comic in any capacity; across the board, this book generated more interest from everyone than twelve years of regular comics, which. Certainly feels a way, but:
I gained no new newsletter subscribers, no new financial supporters, and none of the folks who dropped by to send kind or excited messages about the work stuck around to follow any of my social medias, or even join the KC discord.
I have no idea what to make of this lmao. Kidd Commander has always been kind of an anomaly with regard to how its audience functions, we’ve always had a very tiny core group that sort of keeps things rolling but the ratio within that group of people who make an effort to contribute in material ways has been, comparatively, fucking insane. There are comics with way bigger audiences than mine that can’t even come close to the kind of support KC gets (yes, we’re talking about living off of a three-digit paycheck at the end of the day, but that’s just what working in comics is like so). On the other hand, KC completely fails at amassing those audience numbers. The visible fandom is almost nonexistent; since it started around 2018 the Ao3 tag has accrued around eight pieces that weren’t written by me, we get new fanart at a rough rate of once every six months, and there is no fandom posting at all outside the black hole of the discord. The prose is doing a lot better on that front, and even brought in a good number of new readers, but it isn’t translating to anything that helps keep KC alive. We’ve been lucky so far, but it’s very precarious. Stagnation makes you too-reliant on those core audience members, and if anything ever changes things would get bad quickly.
Genuinely I am not sure what to do about all this; ever since the novel came out I’ve felt like I’m dropping a ball somewhere, missing out on some sort of opportunity, but I’m hitting the same wall I always have: I make good work, people enjoy the work and some even enjoy it enough to help support it, but I can’t figure out how to get any of that to tip over into people feeling motivated to engage with it outside of the immediate thing itself. I feel like all the pieces are here, there is so much genuine enthusiasm, there are spaces for it to exist and we can occasionally find evidence of it, but I’ve never been able to motivate people to participate in ways that would help the community grow into anything other than its current insular form. I’m not actually sure this is a thing I can fix with my own actions, but that always feels like a cop-out, so I’m gonna keep chewing on it I guess. I have been chewing for years at this point though I’m not sure I’ve got the teeth for it.
All of that aside, I’m probably going to lean off of promoting Grist for a while as I get into the second book and jump back over to prioritizing the comic, since that’s going to be regularly updating with new stuff as usual. The first novel in a fantasy series is always kind of nothing, in my opinion. “I’m working on an unpublished fantasy series!” is ubiquitous, but right behind that is Only Having Book One, and no matter how good it is, I don’t feel like you’re really established as a long-term series creator worth investing in until you show you can commit by showing up with more than one installment. Y’all know I’m good for it, but my prose work is minimal right now, so I’m okay waiting until we build more of a backlog before I really start shoving it in people’s faces constantly the way I do the comic. You are already in the right place to keep up with everything I’m working on, but again, if you’d like to check out the prose-only tumblr blog you can follow Sprawlworks.
Sweet Christ I gotta get GTS done
I wanted this arc done before the end of 2025 uuuugh. Every time I get down on myself about how long Green Thousand Sing has been running Lee aggressively reminds me that 2020 happened, we had three people die, I had to deal with my father’s estate, I had three separate surgeries, and then we moved across the country; I know there are justified reasons for this and I should consider myself lucky that we haven’t gone the way of many other webcomics, but I Am Still Frustrated. I am going to do everything I can to get it finished as fast as possible. I don’t have an exact pagecount for you, but once we finish the Quicksilver chapter it’s JUST the clean-up left and we’re out of the Caravan and on to new places. Thank you so much for hanging in there.
It’s not fun to think about, but I feel this is all pretty indicative of the merits in finishing out KC’s comic run with arc 5. Ignoring my own complicated feelings about that, I do worry this is just how long things are going to take now; real-life circumstances aren’t getting easier, I’m not getting healthier, and it’s pretty obvious KC isn’t going to suddenly start drumming up some magical wellspring of new support. I don’t like it! But I like the thought of Kidd Commander ending as a defunct website that stops in the middle of a story before eventually going offline even less. We’ve got a good ways to go before any of this is something to immediately worry about, but as I’ve said before, if we start anticipating this early maybe the eventual impact won’t be quite so catastrophic. I dunno how I’ll handle all that, like, emotionally, but right now I’d just like to do the work that’s in front of me, so I’m going to keep doing that.
Part of which is retooling all my support methods,
It’s on the to-do list, still, but especially now since I’d like to integrate the novel work more into the presentation of What I Do. I gotta make a new “patreon” video, even though I don’t really ask people to use patreon any more (ko-fi is a much better deal for both of us so far), it’s a good thing to have. Hopefully I can get something written up and filmed by this summer.
Honestly, I don’t think I have any delusions of finding some crazy new status of success this coming year; I would just like to be able to keep us fed and housed in our trailer while making KC.
In lighter news that sale went really well!
You can look at the final tally here! That went way better than i was expecting and the person in question got all paid up. One of the things I want to add to that support page redecorating I just mentioned is some kind of thing that helps me put away some money so I can pay my official editor something decent next time around. Maybe like an ongoing tip jar? That’s a different sort of goal with a finite end so I’m not sure it’s something that I could easily integrate into what I’ve got right now, although I think I did see that ko-fi has some kind of functionality related to that I’m intending to look into. Maybe I could just run regular sales or something and dump the money from it into The Editor Fund. I dunno! We got time to figure it out, but the earlier we start the better his pay will look, and that’s good news for everybody because y’all do not want my unedited books.
To be very fair: Lee also did a ton of free work for me on this book, but they signed a legally binding contract to help me with things forever so they’re fine. If the book does well I will take them out for ice cream.
State of the artist
After updating so much around Christmas I pretty much took the liminal space at the end of the year for myself, hopefully it was restorative and I can get some steady work done here for a minute. Periodically I go through phases of obsessing over games where you drive around a lot to accomplish Tasks; I blew through Easy Delivery Co last week and jumped straight into Pacific Drive. I have no affiliation or anything to gain from talking about Pacific Drive here, but I am enjoying it and it reminds me a lot of Sprawl Logic and KC design sensibilities, perhaps y’all would also enjoy it.
OTHER things you may enjoy: Lee started a twitch channel where you can watch them sew things! And while we’re on the topic of my partner being cooler than me, their work will be featured as end of the week prizes at Awesome Games Done Quick 2026!! We adore GDQ in this house and we’re so fuckin’ stoked to be able to contribute, go check it out and consider donating if you have the means!
Thank you for reading, please take care.
-Aria