COMIC UPDATE 9/1/2025

prior update

Happy September, everyone! Can you believe 2025 is almost over? Anyway, we got some stuff to yap about, so let's get right into it!

KINDRED HEAVENS

Hello all! Scott here.

Now that the yuri comic has concluded, we're back on the KH4 grind! Here we have the new schedule laid out for work, although as always I hope to finish ahead of schedule. I am considering cutting back from 3 twitter posts every week to alternating between 2 and 3, this would give me room for an extra page every other week. Hopefully over time, that will add up, as well as keep my battery fresh for post ideas. I only was able to do a few KH pages in August, so there isn't much to say. However, please enjoy some art!

TALKING ABOUT WRITING

Hey everyone! Bryce here.

Last month I talked at length about the changes Scott and I were making to our writing style and, really, our entire approach to comic-creating. To sum it up, we realized that the original drafts for Kindred Heavens Book Four and Book Five didn’t feel very much like comic books—they felt like moves. I broke down all the reasons why and went more in-depth into it in last month’s update.

But I’m happy to report that since then, I have finished the scripts for KH4 and KH5 and I think we’ve achieved our goals. They’re packed full of content and move at a pace I’m much more comfortable with. Most importantly, they feel like comic books, and I’m immensely proud of that. I can’t wait for you all to read them!

So, what did I spend most of August doing? Working on something new! Scott and I, wanting to continue practicing this new style, started working on a new graphic novel, and today I'm finishing the final draft of Book One, which is 56 pages long. It has been very interesting plotting something from the very beginning with this new style in mind.

One major process change I made was that, before I even started writing, I went through and plotted out not just every page, but every single panel. Mark Pellegrini, the writer of Kamen America, once told me to 'treat every page like it is an idea' and that is something I took to heart. A few months ago, I started pre-plotting our books like this:

And then I would go straight into writing. But for this book, I took that a step further and started trying to really think of every panel as an idea. The point being that I'm never showing something that the reader doesn't 100% need to see, never wasting their time. So for this new story, the page-outline looked like:

This allowed Scott and I to spend a lot of time pouring over each individual panel without all the descriptions cluttering our headspace. It allowed us to just look at the framework of the book, the bones, and move them around however we saw fit. We spent a lot of time in this phase, constantly cutting pages, and panels, and reworking them, and adding new ones in. So much so that by the time I got to writing...

...all I had to do was go in and make everything pretty!

If I had written this book a few months ago, I'm certain this page alone would have been 2 or 3 pages. Hell, I'm sure the book would've been a 100+ pages. Right now it's at 56 and I think it's much more captivating in the new style than it would've been in the old style.

Here's another little example (mind you, the dialogue here is unfinished):

This is a scene where our main character talks to her older brother and in the old style, I would've broken this up 6 or 7 panels featuring lots of closeups of character's faces and only 1 or 2 dialogue bubbles a panel. But, since I plotted each panel from the get-go, I was able to see that if I did that, each panel wouldn't be an IDEA but rather the SAME IDEA done a handful of times in repetition. So, what would have been an unruly:

FAIDRA GIVES HER BROTHER A GIFT

FAIDRA TALKS ABOUT THE GIFT

FAIDRA TALKS ABOUT THE GIFT

FAIDRA TALKS ABOUT THE GIFT

ATTICUS ACCEPTS THE GIFT

FAIDRA WARNS HIM

Becomes a much more manageable, comic-booky:

FAIDRA GIVES HER BROTHER A GIFT AND TELLS HIM ITS PURPOSE

ATTICUS ACCEPTS THE GIFT

FAIDRA GIVES HIM A WARNING

That does the exact same thing but in a way that I personally think is more pleasant to read and, very importantly, let's Scott's beautiful artwork really shine and take center stage.

And that's it for this month! We'll be back soon with more updates. As always, thank you to everyone who supports us!