COMIC UPDATES - 8/1/24

Hello, everyone! This is the first in what will be monthly updates here on Patreon about whatever projects we are working on. First, if you missed it, please check out this post, in which we announce three new comics and explain our thought process behind doing these updates. For this initial update, I’m going put an emphasis on not just explaining what is happening now with our new titles but also explaining their creation.

Most of this will be written by me, Bryce. When Scott has something to talk about, I’ll make sure to note it’s coming from him so that it doesn’t feel too jarring. Now, let’s get into this month’s update! We’ll kick things off with the series everyone’s already familiar with…

KINDRED HEAVENS

We are currently working on Book Three of Kindred Heavens. The entire book has been written and storyboarded and the first thirty-two pages have been completed. Unfortunately, we can’t tease too much from this book without spoilers, but here’s a funny snippet:

Book Three has been an interesting journey so far. Many ups and downs! But it is progressing very well and we are thrilled with it so far. As we’ve mentioned before, Kindred Heavens was originally one book and when it came to breaking it up, we always knew this would be the toughest section, being smack-dab in the middle with no “perfect” ending point like all the other books had.

When I wrote the first draft for Book Three back in January, that was the biggest challenge—figuring out how to make it feel like a complete book all on its own, not dependent on just setting up future books or paying off prior ones. We wanted to avoid the sagging middle at all costs. Our solution? Add, add, add. This section unfortunately got gutted back when Kindred Heavens was only a single book and so we took this as an opportunity to flesh out the characters, the world, and add a whole bunch of new ideas.

Writing has been mostly done on Book Three for a couple months, but in July we did go back in to do two hefty rounds of revisions to the script. One of them was pretty simple—we had an idea that made a cool section even cooler. The other was a bit more complex and is hard to talk about without spoiling. In short, we realized the ending felt too…disjointed. It paid off all the original ideas, but none of the new ideas, and so I scrapped and rewrote the last forty pages of the book to have everything come together in a more impactful way.

Now, let's pass things over to Scott!

Hey all, Scott here!

Currently we’re on track to finish book 3 by the end of the year, which has been my goal for some time. It will require pushing myself, especially with all of the pages we’ve added, but it’s doable I believe. You can see the planned schedule laid out here:

Bright green is a finished page, medium green is penciled, and light green is not started.

(the entire book has been thumbnailed, though)

This month I’ve done 17-32, as you can see. The majority of these pages take place in night during the rain, which in of itself is not a challenge, but there was a specific effect we were going for which made it quite tricky to get right. As usual with my art woes, Echosaber helped me out. With no context, you can see what I mean, along with some other misc. panels from this month:

That’s all for now, August’s pages will be tough because there are a lot of backgrounds, but also we have two conventions planned, which means I will have less time than usual. Nevertheless, I will complete it!

Other than that, there’s nothing else for Book Three this month! It’s going smoothly!

CICI THE FOREST CRITTER

I don’t really know where to begin with Cici. This story has been in the works for many years and is very near and dear to our hearts. It began, initially, with this silly little message…

…and somehow, this is how we got the whole “stealing ice cream” idea…

This project began its life in 2018. Much like Kindred Heavens, it was originally written to just be one book and has spent most of its lifetime being shopped around to publishers who, for one reason or another, didn’t think it would “sell”. That experience was a huge part of what led to our decision to crowdfund Kindred Heavens and our future projects.

We don’t know exactly how many books Cici will be. We’re thinking five, maybe six. Everything is outlined and this month we officially dove into rewriting everything. As of about three days ago, I just finished writing Book One. It is very interesting returning to this series so many years later. When we initially worked on it, we were barely twenty. I had just gotten together with my Amy, Scott hadn’t even met his Amy, and both of us were broke. It was a rough time period for us—things weren’t going where we wanted them to, and people around us were starting to notice. We were feeling the pressure of needing to succeed or needing to give up.

Returning to it now reminds me why we wrote it in the first place. We wanted to convince people that sometimes you have to take a risk, even if it means losing everything, and wanted to encourage parents, families, and loved ones to support those risks rather than try to shut them down.

From a purely writing perspective, what has been fun is seeing how much my style has changed. The last time I worked on this story was 2021, so redoing this has given me a pretty clear-cut view of what I’ve improved on. Most notably, I think I’ve gotten better at writing comic books. I think I used to write my comics like novels, with lots of talking and not enough thought toward paneling. As I rewrote the first book, I found there was so much fat I could easily strip away and replace with fresh, unique ideas, and that has me excited to write Book Two, which I’m planning to do in the coming months.

HUNTER

Hunter began as a challenge. That sounds strange, I know. But we wanted to test ourselves and see if we could do a shorter, more condensed story. It initially ended up being eighty pages, then one hundred, then finally we settled on two books, each sixty-four pages. We wrote the initial drafts last summer, while walking and hiking together nearly every day, and I think that had a huge impact on the overall tone and message of the story.

We finished writing Hunter last year. The final drafts, when we split it into two books, were the last time we’ve had to touch them. Since then, Lonnie Garcia has been hard at work bringing it to life, and he is about halfway through the first book. Instead of rambling on, I’m going to let his artwork speak for itself, because his work is truly stunning:

THE GOOD GUYS BAD GUYS

Now, The Good Bad Guys is a bit different than anything we’ve done before, as it doesn’t have a set end-point. We plan for this series to be something we can come back to whenever we’re able and walk away from whenever needed. It is heavily inspired by things such as Lupin the Third, Laputa, and Dragon Ball, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we started work on it just the day after Akira Toriyama passed away.

With every series, we set out to achieve a goal. There’s always something we’re looking specifically to improve about our stories, styles, etc. With The Good Bad Guys our goal was to tighten up our writing and pacing in an effort to make things feel more “comic-book-like”, sort of the same thing I mentioned with Cici.

We plan for the first arc to be three books long. Across June and July, I fully wrote Book One and Book Two. Book Three we plan to write some time in August/September. Unfortunately it’s too far off to have any artwork to show you guys, but I will give you a brief peek at the script and the cast of characters you’ll be meeting. Our hero, Leo La’Chant, lives with a gang of misfits who are all just as bad as he is at thievery…

And that’s all for this month, everyone! Hope y’all enjoyed this. We’ll be back on September 1st with more updates!