State of the Comic
Been reading about some concern that the whole thing was abandoned. Going to go ahead and put everyone’s minds at ease. No. We’re still very much here. The writer’s been going through the first two scripts and has been hacking away, re-writing them. The current story line has subsequently jumped from 89 pages to a whopping 272 pages.
The next story line, Princess of Persia, was originally 14 pages, and is now up to 119 and is still being worked on.
The major reasons for the rewrite goes back to the old adage; show, don’t tell.
“Show, don’t tell is a technique often employed in various kinds of texts to enable the reader to experience the story through action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the author’s exposition, summarization, and description. The goal is not to drown the reader in heavy-handed adjectives, but rather to allow readers to interpret significant details in the text.” (Wikipedia)
There were large sections where the story was going over critical information via narration rather than allowing the audience to experience it along with the characters. By taking this out, it elongated the story and allows for better character development. On top of that, there have been several characters who were either cut in early development or were meant to show up in later stories, that have been added. This allows for foreshadowing into future events in later stories, primarily in The Voyages of Sinbad.
Because of this expansion, it will take a bit longer to get to the Sinbad stories, but it will help develop several characters and show many events that are relevant to Voyages.
Strips
A new strip up will be up sometime next week if not the week after. We don’t have a clear date yet mainly due to technical issues on the artist’s streaming service as well as weather (and the inherent fact we all have lives outside of the comic).
We will be trying out a new format for the comic. Betsy has expressed interest in moving towards a more standard full page format (Tales #10, Tales #11, and Tales #12) rather than the usual 3-4 panels across the screen. We were planning on moving to that format for Voyages, but we’ve agreed that it might be best to switch to it sooner rather than later.
Thank you to everyone who has patiently waited.
Fundraisers
We are still having fundraisers. It does not mean we are in any kind of financial troubles. Privately funding is expensive, and there are a few options open to us;
1. Turn this comic into a pay-per-view comic.
2. Start selling merchandise.
3. Continue fundraising.
Since we’re still new, we don’t have enough of an audience to sell merchandise. We tried that once at Maltese Fur Con, and unfortunately, merchandise sales didn’t do anything. There are no plans in the immediate future to begin manufacturing and selling merchandise, however, this may change.
We don’t want to move to a pay-per-view website, and it wouldn’t be a popular move. Keeping the content free allows for a wider audience and more readership.
The only other option is to continue fundraising through asking for donations. We aren’t asking for people to individually donate thousands of dollars to us. Any spare change helps, and all the money goes into the comic.
We have a donation button on the front page, as well as a Patreon page and a GoFundMe campaign.
