January Newsletter: Hello 2024!
Well well! Here we are in a brand new year. Here’s hoping it brings good things!
We’ve had a nice little break during the holidays, which was well needed. We’re back and raring to the go now! So here’s what we’ve been up to for the new year, and the major shifts we’ve taken:
PATREON
First: we’ve updated our Patreon with some new tiers! Here’s what we now have:
- $5 — Off the Shelf: a standard tier that gets you early access to ALL of our comic pages, as they’re finished! This includes Paint the Town Red, Augustine, Augusteenies and anything else we’re working on!
- $7 — What’s in the Back?: the previous standard tier we had. This one also gets all the pages, but also plenty of behind-the-scenes writings and concept art. Winter has been working really hard writing lots of interesting tidbits of our workflow there! You also get a monthly 25% off code on our shop.
- $11 — Mail Order: this gets you everything listed previously, PLUS a special small thing in the mail every month! Most often this will be sticker sheets. The first sticker sheet if you sign up is our catblob one!
- $14 — Under the Table: this one gets you everything from the Off the Shelf and What’s in the Back tiers, with the added bonus of access to our saucier drawings. This can be explicit to pin-ups, and is usually posted once a week! We have the PTTR cast, mad scientist shenanigans, and some aliens, currently, if that strikes your fancy~
- $19 — Gimme the Goods: our final new tier gets you EVERYTHING. All the behind the scenes, discount codes, mail items and explicit art you could want!
Sign up to any of the mail tiers to get yourself some cute little cat voids to stick wherever you need ’em!
We also have some goals with Patreon, most especially to release exclusive content to there. We’ve reached the first goal, and have plans to do a little one-shot Lab Partners 18+ comic that will debut there on the spicy tiers (more on that later). Winter also works very hard on there! They’re always making really insightful posts about what we’re working on, along with all the background stuff! Of course, Patreon also has the bonus of, well, paying us. Which then helps us able to keep making stuff! Wooo!!
SHOP STUFF
So on top of Patreon, we’ve also been fussing around with our shop! We have some new goodies coming in, and more planned, but for the shop itself we’ve made a couple changes price-wise to our stock.
The most notable changes are:
- PDFs: now, ALL PDFs on our shop are a minimum of $5 (excluding the ones that were already a pay-what-you-want.) We wanted to make our digital items more affordable. There is the option to add on more, but $5 is all you need for digital copies of all our books! (We’ve also added the PDFs for almost everything now–including Augustine V1, the Prism Knights Anthology and Smoochquest.)
- Pins: we’ve lowered the price on most of our pins, especially the big sets like the Olympians. We are aiming to phase out a lot of our big sets this year. Pins have been great, and we still want to make them! But having such large sets for so long has been tiring. Our plan is to bring back the popular designs, slightly adjusted, but any slow-selling design will not likely come back once it’s out of stock. So–if you’ve been wanting one of our large pins, now is the time to snag it before they’re gone!
- Paint the Town Red Volume 1: We’ve lowered the price of V1 to $15! Now you can try out our lovely vampire x werewolf series at a lower price! Wahoo!
We also have a new addition in the shop–the Sleepy Eyes Shaker Charm!
Our first time doing a shaker charm, and it came out BEAUTIFUL. Yes, those little flowers shake around loose inside! It fits in nicely with our Eyes of Antiquity blanket and keychain~
We’re also waiting on some new tote bags that should be arriving very soon, so keep your eyes peeled. We’re always looking to add more stuff to our lovely shop, and we have plenty of plans! So, speaking of that…
DINO LOAFS
This year we’re gonna try our hand at some plushie designs! We’ve had these in the works for a couple years now, in fact… but we’re thinking this year is gonna be our year to give it a shot. Our first collection is called DINO LOAFS, which are planned to be 7×10″ sized beanie plushies of different dinosaurs loafing like a chicken. Because why not have a little loaf buddy on your desk next to you??
This is the final of the design we’re sending in, for our first design: the Microraptor!
We have FOUR designs planned for the campaign–Microraptor, Sinosauropteryx, Anchiornis and a mystery last one! We’re hoping to launch it in April, with also the option to get other related goodies, such as a sticker sheet and wooden charm.
We’ll keep you posted on how this one is going, and the prototype process!
COMICS
We of course can’t forget about comics. This is shaping up, so far, to be a bit of an interesting year for our stories. A lot of possibilities and new things, but it’s all dependent on a lot of outside stuff, too. Here’s what we’re looking at so far:
Paint the Town Red: we’re taking a break this year from it… sort of. Okay, we’re not kickstarting Volume 4 this year, but we do plan to still work on it, and we are also……… re-inking Volume 1. We’re not normally the type to go back and redo old pages, but the thing is, we’re really hoping to translate PTTR into french. Because we live in Quebec, and having a french version would be nice for our francophone audience. Ideally, a publisher would be great to handle this–but volume 1 looks so starkly different from the other volumes, since Winter and I hadn’t figured out our process yet when we made it. So… we’re fixing it up. The old version will still be available in PDF once the new one is done.
Augustine: we’re returning with Augustine updates January 30th! You should go catch up now! Augusteenies will also be back updating weekly the 29th.
Sanity Circus: Well… SanCirc is turning 10 this year. I think it’s about time this thing wraps up. That’s all I’m saying about it right now, but keep an eye out for its birthday.
Lab Partners: As mentioned above, we hit a goal on our Patreon, and we’re interested now in making a little one-off short with our mad scientists Eddie and Kline. This will be an adults only comic, ala Magic Word. We plan to release it on Patreon first, and then digitally on our shop afterwards.
The Curse of Blackwood Manor: this is potentially the candidate for my next published graphic novel. The script is mostly done, however I’m still waiting on edits. So until everything is confirmed, it’s sitting in the back. Of course, when things do get into motion, I’m gonna have to prioritize this one. So… if plans get skewed during the year, this is probably gonna be the culprit. But I’m excited to work on it, too. You can read more about it on my site.
The Farewell Tour: we talked quite a bit about this one last year. It’s still very much on our minds, and we have lots of plans for it. The real question is time. Again, depends a lot on the entry above this one if we’ll have the ability to work on it this year.
From Hell’s Heart…?: What’s this? Well, I don’t wanna talk about it much yet, for the above mentioned reasons, but we might have more discussion on it in future entries, as well as Patreon.
Winter is also hoping to get out some more prose this year, including maybe a new entry into the Myth Retold series. We’re still in January, so it’s hard to say if anything will be concrete. But rest assured, you’re gonna be getting comics from us this year, that we can always guarantee.
CONVENTIONS
Finally, we have a new roster of conventions this year, which is sure to grow as the year goes on:
Part of why this newsletter is going out earlier than usual is that we have one at the end of the month! We’ll be at the Marché Talents Locaux on just the 28th. This one is important to us as proceeds from this market go towards helping with the efforts in Palestine. We’re going to be donating 100% of any profits we make that day.
If you can’t make it, or don’t live in Montreal, consider donating or looking into one of these efforts to help the people of Palestine:
We’re also gonna be at the Maker’s Market in February! If you need something for Valentine’s day, we certainly have got your back.
Woof! That’s a lot of text in this one, and not many pretty pictures. Woops. Lots to cover as a new year starts! It’s both exciting and daunting. Thanks for reading, if you got through all of that, and a happy new year! Here’s to 2024.
-W&W
