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- KC Newsletter! July 2026
KC Newsletter! July 2026
Announcement announcements
This issue: A considerable amount of studio news!
This month’s finances and what all got done
There was some very slight forward motion again, my paycheck is sitting at roughly 940 USD each month. Thank you so much for helping me keep this one thing steady while everything else has been so unstable.
I have another vague health update I’ll get to, but this month I did manage to get back to working on the novel draft, I got all those postcards in the mail, and got started on another thing I’ll talk about…
…right now!
New website (soon)!
Originally, the novels were treated as companion material to the actual canon of the webcomic, sort of like the Specials. That changed dramatically over the course of writing the first book and most of you watched it happen in real time, so I don’t feel like it’s useful to go into how exactly we got here. It’s still a good distance away, but since we’re sort of settling in with the idea that Kidd Commander is going to eventually finish out as prose novels, there’s going to be a point where the story only exists in prose, and I don’t want there to be a paywall where the comic stops. If Kidd Commander’s prose is considered mainline canon, then it needs to adhere to one of KC’s core principles: it needs to be freely accessible.
So I’m doing that! Starting (soon), Grist to the Cannon is going to be posted to its own site a little at a time, just like other webnovels, and we’ll keep moving forward from there through all the novels I have planned. As the main Kidd Commander story it will remain free for anyone to read as long as I’m able to do that through reader support. That model has worked with the comic so far, and I don’t feel any differently about what I want for this story’s accessibility than I did at the start.
You’ll be able to read the novel as it updates on its website, but I’ll be mirroring it over on our very own Substack so you can get the updates sent directly to your email without having to remember to check a site each week! You might remember I was hesitant to do this sort of thing with the comic for two reasons: the big one is that I’ve been making KC for a long time, and I’ve outlived a lot of platforms entirely or watched them deteriorate as advertisers shut out people making weird things like queer anti-christian comics. It isn’t uncommon at all for platforms to pull the rug out from under their creators, and I didn’t want to risk setting up shop on what could turn out to be a sandbar. Substack has been around for quite a while already, which is a positive, but the big thing is if this email subscription model works I can just take my subscriber list elsewhere should something necessitate it. I still need a little more time to get everything in place for the launch, but if you’d like to go on and sign up for those updates you can see the page here.
The other thing I was worried about was how comic mirrors would fracture the reader community, which is something KC has always struggled with regardless of my efforts. Remember that forum I launched a couple months ago? I didn’t push it too hard at the time because I wanted to see if it was functional at all, but now I can reveal the ulterior motive: instead of comment sections scattered through the novel updates, the novel site will be using a forum for its discussion. Forums are much, much more flexible than individual comment sections, or even a discord; my aim is to provide you all a space where the community can grow organically as the series goes on, and this seems like a good solution.
The biggest draw is that a forum is public, as opposed to something like the discord that isolates the community in a way that makes it intimidating to join and difficult to browse as an archive. It can host comic discussion as well, or function as a really specific space for people reading both the comic and the prose, and it keeps all these different readers in roughly the same place so it’s easy for everyone to interact if they want to. The comment section on the comic site will still be there, and so will the discord! But obviously those things aren’t quite cutting it, so I wanted to try something different with the novel site. It might still be slow to start while things get moving, but the forum is fully operational and you can check it out over here.
I’m not quite finished with the prose site yet, and I still need to do the work of dividing a 400 page novel into practical updates, but I’d like to get this up and running alongside the comic as soon as possible. You all in this newsletter are hearing about it first but I’ll make some announcements elsewhere once we’re ready to start appealing to people who don’t already go here. Do feel free to share the substack link though! This should be a great entry point for those friends you haven’t quite been able to convince yet, and I figure having any subscriber count at all will help us look better when new folks come looking.
Postcards are on the way!
We cut it real close but they’re all on their way out! Thank you very much for waiting a little longer this time. Here’s hoping things are calmer by the time December rolls around
State of the artist
A bit more than normal to talk about here:
Right now I’m on roughly my third month of morphing into a complete disaster either physically or emotionally every two weeks. I’m losing almost exactly half of my month to some miserable bullshit, you could set a watch by my breakdowns. After a truly absurd sequence of events I’m seeing a specialist early in August who will, the way things have been going, run some more tests and tell me to wait around a few weeks for my bloodwork to come back clean. The mental impairment I was dealing with more recently has mostly passed, but that was awful enough to make me feel aggressive about seeking treatment again despite how useless it’s been both in the past and for most of this year. To be very honest I’m not sure this is a thing I can get help for, or how long it’ll take to see any results, but it’s not like I’m getting much else done in the meantime and I’m tired of sitting around watching myself fall apart constantly. I am very, very sure this is a hormone problem, a progression of what I’ve already been dealing with for years, and if this doctor continues the trend of not giving a shit I do have other plans for how I might be able to mitigate the issue.
I haven’t been able to use my Cintiq for more than about twenty minutes at a time since sometime in June. It’s not my hands, surprisingly! I’ve been getting pretty bad spells of nausea and vertigo and sitting at my work desk makes it worse, for some reason I still haven’t pinned down. My symptoms in general have improved dramatically since we got our air conditioning fixed a couple weeks ago, but this particular issue never got any better, so I’ve moved the Cintiq out of the office and I’m using a completely different setup for work now. As long as I keep an eye on my posture typing is very comfortable! But I’ve swapped over to a pen tablet without a screen and I’m still struggling to get used to it (which is part of why the postcards took so long to finish). I would prefer if it hadn’t happened at all, but it would have been nice if this whole thing had occurred before we had that whole ordeal with replacing the faulty one last year, h a h a. None of what I said before about the Cintiq being essential to my workflow has changed, unfortunately, and visual art is going to be slow for a while. All the pieces are here now at least, it’s just a matter of getting healthy again and getting used to some new tools.
I am still planning on attending my scheduled conventions this year; it’s possible I’ll be a little slower than usual depending on where the fucking hormone roulette wheel lands, but unless I’m hospitalized again or something I should still be able to sit behind my table and talk to you about anime for a couple of days. Lee will be there too and they can do math if the calculations prove too complex for me, which admittedly happens to me even without brain problems.
I think that’s about everything I have for you today! Hopefully I’ll see you again sooner rather than later.
-Aria
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