Deep Dive -- This Year's Projects

I'll probably be making a few of these over the course of the year as it progresses because we like to keep things a bit nebulous until they go officially public but I wanted to kinda skim a bit what we're working on this year (and give myself a bit of a reference point to keep us on task as much as possible).

Here's what we're kinda spitballing for the year now that we're making headway through January and have a better grasp of how quickly we're hopping back into things.

I'm gonna break these down a bit more into what's Certain vs Things We'd Like To Get To This Year.

What's For Certain

• Finishing Sanity Circus
• Finishing Augustine Chapter 2
• Starting Augustine Chapter 3
• Get to 50 Augusteenies
• Script & Thumbnails for PTTR V4
• Reinks for PTTR V1
• Issue 1 of Lab Partners
• Merch: Dino Loaves Plushies
• Merch: Vampires Vs Werewolves Boxes
• Merch: The Universe Collection
  

What We'd Love To Get To

• The Curse of Blackwood Manor
• Myth About Myths Redux
• The Farewell Tour (Scripted & Thumbnails started)
• Myth Retold: Icarus
• Start A New Webtoon (From Hell's Heart)

So this is all good and well. You all know about SOME of these but let's do a bit of a Dive here on what some of these entail.

(from here on out things are gonna get DENSE so if you want a TL;DR you can skip to the end!)

Finishing Sanity Circus --  feels pretty self-explanatory but I don't think we've talked about What That Means. Tas and I have talked about Sanity Circus a lot in the last couple years. It turns 10 this year and Tas has been struggling with the comic for some time (mostly outgrowing a lot of its themes and story) but we wanted to figure out a proper goodbye for it that's just as special. We're enlisting the help of some of our friends to illustrate different scenes, snippets and portions of Tas' final script and those will be posted with the script come May. We're still deciding how this is going to roll out and will have a bit more info in the coming months about steps and progress. Get ready to say goodbye to this bad boy! She's had a fantastic run. The two of us MET because of this comic so we really want to give it the send-off it deserves. <3

Finishing Augustine Chapter 2 -- We're spending most of January/February/March?? Finishing up this chapter for posting online and hopefully will be getting around to printing the second volume of the series this year! The script came out to 128 pages vs Chapter 1's 75 so its a bit of a hefty-er project this time around but we are SO excited. I've got the thumbnails for the next scene drafted already and Tas has been getting back into sketching pages again. This project is probably us at our most comfortable. Pages just kind of roll out smoothly.

Starting Augustine Chapter 3 -- I only have a bit of an outline for this one ready. We know where the story is leading towards I just need to sit and write it out. We'll be doing our usual little hiatus in between chapters 2 & 3 like we did for 1 & 2 so we'll have to see where Chapter 2 really lands update-wise publically to figure out how that one's break this year! God I'm itching for that chapter though. It's going to be absolutely wild.  After chapter 3 we will be at the halfway point of the story officially!! Which means we will be taking a planned hiatus from the comic (similar to PTTR's year-off) so that we can hash out the details of the second half more concretely, reread our previous chapters, make sure we're wrapping up character arcs and plot points in a way that feels satisfying <3

Get to 50 Augusteenies -- Aha-yeah. We originally started Augusteenies as a bit of a test run for pulling in an audience with something a bit more spontaneous and silly. It's not worked the best but we've been having a lot of fun making them. We're giving ourselves about 50-ish strips (give or take) we're learning a lot about making strips, comedy and short-handing with this one that's been absolutely invaluable knowledge. That's not to say we WON'T make any more Augusteenies after these 50, but that'll be our stopping point for now (maybe we'll make a bit more once the main story has progressed a bit further and we're not in too much danger of spoiling bigger events).
But WHY 50? Is a funny little question. We're hoping to generate enough comics to keep the main Augustine website from going silent & dead for our hiatus. Unlike PTTR, Augustine is being uploaded as we make the books so we don't exactly have a massive buffer or backlog for our break. Augusteenies will be the filler on the main site in that interim~!

Script & Thumbnails for PTTR V4 -- You thought we were ACTUALLY taking a break from this guy-Kidding! We've been off Paint The Town Red since we finished the volume back Last-May so the hiatus on this guy is mostly in that we aren't crowdfunding this volume until 2025! We're hoping this time we will have a greater portion of the comic completed (hopefully we'll be at LEAST halfway through sketch & inks by the time we get there) so that when we crowdfund it we aren't keeping people waiting on it too long. We've also spent a great deal of time brainstorming PTTR this year and really crunching up the story into where we want it to actually go going forward. We've been talking a lot about less volumes at a slightly bigger page count. Some of you might have asked us about this before & we've mentioned PTTR being planned at 9 volumes, but with printing costs being a bit of a snag on this front (and we're learning a lot about managing a comic series at this scale) we're looking into making it 6 volumes, tightening it up while trying not to sacrifice pacing. That means each volume might wean towards 200-250 pages instead of the usual 100-150. It'll also save people on shipping costs giving them a bit more bang for their buck for physical copies of the book!
ANYWAY that's a whole lot of personal book-nerd prepress shoptalk but that's where my brain is at on the beast!

Reinks for PTTR V1 -- okay I know this SEEMS backwards, working on an old volume of PTTR while talking about trimming down the rest of the series. The thing is we're looking to translate her in French because we live in a bilingual city & a mostly Francophone province and our readers are just lovely & we want to make it easier for some folks to read them. That being said, french pubs here are uh well... Particular about the quality of work being presented. We're hoping to get the artwork in Volume 1 matching up with the other 2 volumes. Volume 1 was entirely inked & illustrated in clip before Tas and I developed our current workflow so it seemed right to give it a refresh. We will still be keeping the older version in PDF on our shop because I understand a lot of folks just like the charm! We still have a sizeable amount of Volume 1 physical books in storage so she's not gone YET but if you wanted yourself a copy, she's still 30% off on the shop all month long~!
I'll of course be posting process of the re-inks and setting them alongside older pages for you all to see because I think its pretty wild how the style for this series has developed hehe.

Lab Partners Issue 1 -- Hehehehehehehehe--okay I have been excited about this since last year when we've started talking about turning some of our funny little Mad Scientist OCs into one-off mini comics of a more err... erotic variety. I'm not gonna lie to you, these are going to be horny with a very small smidge of plot and a lot of funny little banter. You might have seen the script preview I posted earlier this week~ The plan for this is to have comic pages going up by the time we hit March for a little funny event we're dubbing Mad Science March. The comic will be posted here first to our NSFW tiers (Under the Table & Gimme the Goods) and will be available later this year, or early next year on our shop as a PDF download~!

MERCH -- We're doing a lot this year! We've had a few plushy designs floating around for a couple years we're looking to make a reality this year we've lovingly dubbed Dino Loaves (think a cat loaf but if they were raptors hehe). Those will be Kickstarted in April & all throughout May. We'll update here with a preview link for folks interested.
In June we're starting our Merch Boxes wherein we design merch based on themes we've been spitballing. This year we thought that since we're not gonna have much PTTR going on we're designing 'team werewolf' and 'team vampire' merch in the form of hats, totes, bags, lanyards. We're still working out what TYPES of merch we want to add into these boxes but these are focused on accessorising & wearables and will hopefully come with a mock-fashion-mag we're designing ourselves (we're putting stories in a box & just overall having Fun With It).
In September we are launching the Universe merch line which is expanding on my set of Solar System pins with a proper pin banner, a card deck?? A blanket??? Something else we're still working on as we go.
Semi-related but we are also adding a few items to the shop as we go to our existing merch lines: Eyes of Antiquity AND Bonebed are both being chipped away at for folks interested in dinosaurs & ancient antiquity aesthetics~

Alright now for some of the stuff we've still got in WIP mode and are going to be chipping at this year but arent main priorities and are dependent on outside circumstances (time & greenlights). I'll try to be a bit more concise here.

The Curse of Blackwood Manor -- Tas' new YA graphic novel is still on the script stage we're still waiting for word back from their editor on the project. Once this thing is greenlit a lot of our other work has to shift around this beast of a project.

Myth about Myths (Redux) -- It's an older project I've had for about as long as Tas has had Sancirc. I would like to one day do it justice because the concept was really fun for me but it IS a great deal of work. Maybe I'd like to complete a couple more sets: underworld? titans? heroes? to really sink the project into a proper place on the roster once something else clears up!

The Farewell Tour -- its still in its early stages and we're doing a lot of concept work and worldbuilding to make this world feel Lived In. And also to make the comic-writing process easier! I'd LIKE to get scripting and thumbnails done or started this year!

Myth Retold: Icarus -- truth be told I have a LOT of Myth Retold ideas bouncing around in my brain but another draft has overtaken my consciousness a lot these past few months of a more original story. I would very much like to get another Myth Retold on the table though!

New Webtoon: From Hell's Heart -- so... this one snuck up on us out of nowhere. Tas has been posting some of our funny little whaling OCs we've been doodling and toying with on the side and its gotten a fair amount of reception in  the last few weeks on social media we'd like to tap into. We're also curious about the webtoon model and would like to see if we can get a wider audience interested in our work so we can really go hogwild in the future (always the dream always). This would be a fun story to really show you how we develop from the ground up because we're still in the Research phase hehe. We're trying to fit this one into our schedule its still very new and we've only just started hashing out a plot but we've been itching to do something a lot more loosey goosey in the last little while~! As always though, the stories we have ongoing are priority!

TL;DR This sounds like a LOT of work but that's just what happens when you work for yourself! In between all that we have conventions and events to prepare for! As always feel free to let us know which stories you're most interested in! Things like that always keep us going and motivated to keep these projects up to snuff when people express they're into the work that we do.

But like, you are all ALREADY here on Patreon so we KNOW you love what we do and we couldn't do it without folks like you!

I'll be back soon with more artwork and hopefully PAGES for some of the stories I've mentioned above!