Monday Diary (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

Monday reports are a thing now, until I forget to keep doing them.

Swords: Cut the Deck is 1276% funded, with 17 days to go
Thank you for everyone who has been supporting the campaign. Things to do this week:
- Keep promoting every way I can come up with
- Keep making new episodes (they help the campaign a lot)
- Finalize the last few guest artists
- Update the art of the Crowdfunder Sword
- Update the swordscomic.com archive for every character a guest artist has been involved with

Quest Sprout returns to Makeship in 3 days
He will be the same design as last time!
Unfortunately, an excited person has tipped their hand and showed me a very obviously fake Quest Sprout plushie this week. If his tummy dots are both 3 on top and 2 on the bottom, and his shape is a little off - he's fake! If you are one of the people who purchased it from prosparty, please buy a real one from Makeship and tell your friends to do the same.

In both cases, I would really appreciate people reaching out to their local nerdy retailers and asking them to stock our products.

Working on some other Makeship stuff:
There are two other products in the works for later in the year. I will decide if I go ahead with the third one based on how well Quest Sprout 2.0 does.

Changes to the format:
I've decided to jump on a lot of feedback I've received over the last few years and made the following changes:
- The comic border for regular episodes is now red. Quest Sprout episodes will be green. Kargob episodes will be blue.
- The episode title now appears on each update of Webtoon and Tapas
- The series title "Swords" no longer appears in Reddit posts
- The comic frame is now *slightly* shorter so on Webtoon it resizes to 800x1000 instead of 800x1001 like it used to, which bothered nobody but me
- URLs will no longer appear in episodes
- The copyright information is smaller
- The font is generally slightly bigger, where possible

These things have already all had a positive impact on the series reception. I'm not currently certain how I will reconcile that against my offer to let Patrons vote on weekly polls. Before anyone suggests it - I can't offer a raffle for drawing peoples ideas, that is against Patreon's terms of service.

As I've explained before, the reason for doing weekly sets of three comics was to appease my rep at Meta, who urged me to create a more regular routine. They've dropped their support anyway, but I think being more spontaneous and loose gives me more freedom to come up with funnier material. It's always been a hard line to tiptoe.

Research:
I indulged ever so slightly and used some of your support money to buy The Sword : Myth and Reality by Thomas Laible, which just arrived today. I'm going to endeavour to learn more so that I can make more informed design and joke choices.

The Absolute Chronology of Swords
Now that Swords is branching into other mediums, I need to be able to effectively communicate important plot information to other people, so I'm finally putting together a true chronological timeline of the series in descriptive text. If you are brave of heart, you can take a peek at the first section in the link above.

As always, thank you for your support!