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- KC Newsletter! October 2024
KC Newsletter! October 2024
YEA BAYBEE
This issue: Volume 4 printing update, December postcards, new subseries announcement!
This month’s finances and what all got done!
The first half of October was spent traveling and then catching up on work I missed out on while traveling, then nursing my body back to working order after all of those disruptions, so the productivity numbers are abysmal this month. As always, thank you for hanging in there with me when we’re on the unfun part of the Feast Or Famine webcomic wheel. If you’re waiting on correspondence from me about something I haven’t forgotten you! This is just the first week this month I’ve been able to type regularly lmaooo
Anyway! My regular income is sitting at $824, we’re inching closer and closer to the first major goal of 900! New supporters have slowed down quite a bit after the last newsletter but that was totally expected, and also technically a good sign because we’re out of panic mode for now! Still: if you’d like to help make sure we stay out of panic mode and, ideally, help me afford some help making this monster of a story a bit faster, do consider pitching in. New postcards are coming out soon, so it’s a good time to hop on the train!
Finally, unrelated to anything, part of that work I was catching up on was a commission from a local convention to do their promotional poster for 2025. I am not open for commission work BUT I had a great time at their show this last year, and I’m still enamored with the novelty of there being an art scene in my town at all, so I really wanted to be part of it when the opportunity came along.
Neat!
All this October Stuff was the last big sponge soaking up all my time and stamina, so I’m relieved to be able to focus entirely on my own stuff again for a minute here.
Winter postcards!
It’s time for those again! This is why the newsletter is going out a bit early; if you’d like to be on the list for postcards in time to get the December set, please get your donation set up by October 31st! We’ve grown a fair bit this year so it’s even more important that I get a solid number going into making these next month, I gotta make sure I get enough of all the little pieces. Also, if your information has changed since July please make sure I have the right address for you, or that I have one for you at all if you’re subscribed through paypal! You can e-mail me here if you need to get me some new information, or double check to see what I have on file for you. If you’d like a reminder about the reward tiers you can check them here, and you can see all the different ways to support KC on the site’s support page!
I’m still working on getting around to retooling the Patreon page like I said I would too, perpetually behind on things as usual.
Volume 4 news!
We sold 99 whole entire books during the preorder period, holy shit! Thank you guys so so much, this is worlds away from what I’d hoped for. Considering December was going to be The End due to lack of interest we are doing pretty well I think, I can’t thank you enough for all your support.
I got the proofs in last week, and some deity somewhere is looking out for me because they didn’t need any major fixes, and now I have 20 books ready to ship out! I didn’t buy a box of paperweights! I don’t want to stagger the deliveries more than they already will be just by nature of the postal system, so they won’t start shipping until I have the full order here, but you can look at this photo I took in an Ebisu parking lot after we picked ‘em up.
HOT DAMN
I’ve placed the big order for the books and my printer tells me they ought to be done in roughly three weeks. I’ll keep y’all posted as well as I can. I’m so excited for y’all to get your hands on these! If you have any questions or requests or anything else like that, please feel free to get in touch with me over e-mail.
Traditional work!
I’ve decided I want to get more into working traditionally on the side! If I’m being honest a lot of the impetus for this was from reading Ryoko Kui’s Daydream Hour stuff, but I think something in my brain clicked this past year and, while I’ve always loved the concepts to death, I’ve been really into the One Piece color spreads in a stylistic sense too. I like the idea of seeing Kidd Commander stuff in the style of traditional manga, so I wanna learn! This would also just be a nice skill to have I think, it would make stuff like hourlies or drawing while I’m traveling easier, and the prospect of a little extra cash from traditional work doesn’t hurt either.
It’s incredibly early but I’m tossing around the idea of doing some process videos at some point. I think it would be neat to document my bumbling through learning this new skill, but folks also REALLY seemed to like that tiny process video I did when the Volume 4 preorders started. I didn’t think there would be so much interest in how I do things! Recording digital stuff is more complicated so I can’t do it too often, but hanging a camera over my work station for traditional stuff maybe won’t be so bad. I’ll see what I can do.
Speaking of that, I actually did two versions of the cover video. The one that made it to social media was chosen for various Social Media Reasons, but here’s this one for y’all in the newsletter. It’s significantly slower, if you’d like to get a better look at me creating unnecessary layers for an extra two minutes. (If it doesn’t work in your mobile e-mail client, try it in a web browser!)
Anyway! I might talk about that here in the newsletter if there’s interest, but I might also just corral all of it to a channel someplace, we’ll see. It’s unfortunately not a huge priority and it turns out traditional art supplies are expensive so there might be pretty big gaps between updates. For now, here’s a Toulouse I did when preorders ended. He’s a bit clumsy, but I felt really good while I was working on him, and it’s nice to see him happy for once so I’m very fond of it.
baby boy, baby
Might be fun to look at this again in a year!
KC Detour!
I’m not working on enough shit yet so I’d like to announce another thing to add to the Kidd Commander pile! KC Detour is, essentially, the prose analogue to KC Special*; shorter, self-contained stories that are technically canon compliant, meant to help fill the void where a populated AO3 tag normally would. The stakes are low, the characters are studied, and the fans are serviced.
I like to take breaks from working on KC by, working on other KC stuff, so the intention is to keep these light and simple. There won’t be big preorder events for the physical copies: I’ll just order a big stack, send them out to book club folks, then whoever else wants one can get it in their own time. I’m assuming the demand for physical copies won’t be huge since .epubs will be right there too, and I’d like for this to just be something fun I can do on a whim whenever I feel like it and drop without too much fuss.
I’m planning on these generally being pretty short (we’ve been calling this one The Goosebumps Book around the house), and I’d like for them to be available in both cheap pocket paperback and cheap DRM-free .epub so you can consume them as you like. I’ll talk about the design decisions more in-depth later, but the intended vibe here is “old weird science fiction anthology paperback you found in your uncle’s house”. I have four ideas on the list right now, and if the Specials are any indication that number will spiral cheerfully out of control pretty soon. The first one isn’t quite finished yet, I really wanted it to come out alongside Volume 4 but it just wasn’t working out that way. It IS mostly done though, it just needs an ending then I gotta get the actual book designed. I’m aiming for early 2025!
Lightning-fast Q&A
Q: Are you going to keep posting stuff on AO3?
A: Yeah!
Thank you for coming to the Q&A.
So, I thought these would be fun for their own sake BUT I also thought this might be a good thing to do leading up to the novels, partially so I could get some practice doing polished prose and partially so I have more of a body of work for folks showing up for the novels to look at. But now that I’ve figured out exactly what I’m trying to do with these, I’ve run into a weird problem: this is fic writing, not canon writing, and those are WILDLY different. To me, at least, and now I’m a bit worried promoting these as examples of my novel prose because they aren’t. Does that make sense? I dunno! I’m probably overthinking it because I’m nervous about trying a new thing! That’s a stupid reason not to do something though, so I’m gonna do it anyway. Just keep in mind, these are fun excuses to hang out with the characters and settings a little more beyond the comic, rather than Kidd Commander at full tilt. Even if you find you’re not as into these, you might still enjoy the novels!
*This would have been a great time to promote the Specials, but I’m almost entirely sold out of them right this second because of the preorders lmao. You can still look at their listings here tho if you want.
(also i swear more specials are coming, #3 has been completely thumbnailed for like a year now augh)
State of the Artist
I’ve been managing a small bout of chronic pain that cropped up while we were traveling and got exacerbated because, uh, I didn’t eat enough this month again. I’ve done this thing before where I got exhausted and it translated to just not eating anything substantial for days at a time, I think I caught it earlier this time tho so hopefully all the easy groceries we got will help fix up this incredibly stupid problem quickly; I’d been doing pretty well before! Executive dysfunction is the dumbest shit in the world, jfc. I think part of it is just because like, I enjoy my work so much it doesn’t always FEEL like work, so I don’t realize I’m worn down until my body refuses to do anything. This isn’t cool, I don’t advocate for overworking yourself!! We should all be taking breaks whenever we need them!! But: it’s hard because I’m excited about everything all the time.
I also got new glasses! They got diagnostic machines here I’d never even seen in Tennessee before and my prescription has been Extremely Incorrect apparently! Maybe this will fix some of my migraine issues, and also perhaps the quality of this comic will increase now that everything in my perspective isn’t always very slightly blurry.
Eat something! Take a nap! Thank y’all!
-Aria
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