Illustrated Novel (Updated Announcement)

As announced earlier this week (this is an updated version of that announcement), GFC's main comic will be changing to an illustrated novel style.

We've tried many things but the comic just could not continue as-is. The workload was infeasible; you may be aware of the sheer amount of art Eldrik produces every month and comics are MUCH more time-intensive than anything else he does.

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First, regarding bonus content:
- The Di-Sketches / bonus art will continue as before. They were a relatively small part of Eldrik's workload.  Some patrons have asked if changing the bonus art would help the main comic situation, but it would not so they're continuing as before.

- Regarding Minicomics: If we still have enough funding for them, they will continue. However, any comic where the submitter specified they desired Eldrik to be the one that does it will have no ETA.  I was considering pausing the voting process, but if there isn't a large funding drop I suppose we could continue as-is and use 1-time commissions of other (approved by submitter) artists to reduce the backlog.

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MAIN COMIC INFORMATION:

There's some sample writing in the patron discussion channel, and a later sample in the spoiler section. The illustrations themselves will be like colored Di-Sketch series (so image sets like The Wall / Maintenance Tunnel / etc) instead of comic pages), with Eldrik doing *on average* a comic page worth of images for the main comic... err, novel each month. We'll basically have two kinds of updates. Parts of the story where major sexual content is happening will use multiple updates worth of art as I feel it'd take 16-20+ images to maintain the level of sequence/progression quality you've come to expect from us for those. The other kind of update will be "transition" updates, which will be everything the happens leading up to the next major sexual content scene.  These will basically have one update worth of art for a much larger amount of text, and will allow the story to progress at about the same speed (possibly faster, actually) than when we did weekly updates.

I will also create some kind of repository for not-yet illustrated novel pages that the patrons will have access to. This means the novel will eventually be far ahead of the illustrated pages, which could give us some opportunities for the patrons to help determine how many updates we spend art-wise on certain future scenes.

Comments very welcome, this is a great time to give input / influence things before we've settled on our new work process!