Hey guys, there will be site maintenance going on either this Friday or Sunday. Namesake is getting fully redesigned by the incredible talents of Ran, co-creator of the comic The End. It's going to be BEAUTIFUL.

Hey guys! You can read the new short we did titled "Silver Button" on tumblr RIGHT HERE.

I’ve been wanting to a short comic inspired by Quebecois folktales for a while now, and as usual, Megan was more then happy to indulge me! So here is a modern version of a story I really liked as a kid, where the Devil tries to convince a girl to drop a blessed silver button to capture her soul.

Printed versions of Namesake and Knot are available in our store, as well as a printed version of Silver Button (order here). The printed version includes an English version of the original folktale.

I’m finally done! For Namesake's second book's kickstarter, I made hand-drawn bookplates (4x3 inch stickers added inside the cover) for every book purchased. I must have drawn a good total of 800. I finished the last ones before TCAF in a week, handing a box with 300 bookplates to Megan for her to finish sending out the Kickstarter orders!

Hahaha, that was a crazy large amount of bookplates.

Most were character portraits, so I colored a few for fun! And finally, the most important question is answered : What is everyone’s eye colors?



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can see them here.

Hi folks! You know you want something to add to your comic reading list, right? I admit I’m a little lax when it comes to recommending new comic series. That’s more Isa’s strength. That being said, I do have a new series gush about, and what a better time to do so than on the series' launch date?

Alice and the Nightmare is one of the very best Wonderland-related comics I’ve seen in ages. Misha is a longtime Namesake reader and creator of this pair of gorgeous paintings of Emma/Warrick and Elaine/Fred, along with this picture of the Chopper twins and this picture of Elaine. She gave me and Isa a sneak peek at the comic at MoCCA last month, and my first reaction was “why is this not online now?”

Misha has an absolutely lovely take on the Wonderland genre, and the world-building she is doing is exquisite. Her Alice is an enchanting mix of Lewis Carroll’s original, Belle from “Beauty and the Beast,” and the long-suffering cat lover.

The first seven pages were posted today, and the comic updates on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays.

If you like Namesake, definitely give Alice and the Nightmare a try.

Which, by the way, Isa is always recommending good stuff for me to read. What is on your reading list lately?

Hi folks! I made a couple significant text changes in Saturday's page, so I wanted to drop you a note so we're upfront about it.

The first one is the third panel. Emma's mother did give her daughter to One, as in Uncle Henry, as in our evil baddie - not to a Changeling. I realize how that could be read wrong, so we fixed it. It took a few hours because I wanted to run that line by Isa. The second is in the final panel to clarify the vernacular a bit. Hope this helped!

An incident last weekend regarding the "Knot" pre-orders, along with a partnership we'll be announcing in a couple of weeks, finally spurred me into testing a new backend for the Namesake store I've had my eye on for awhile. We also finally secured the domain for Fairylogue Press as our own, as our catalog of books has expanded from a single issue of chapter 1 of Namesake to four books and a fifth on the way!

This one really has a lot of improvements over the old store, including auto-delivery of any digital products and the ability to have size and price variation within a single item. We had to use four separate entries in the old store to list four different versions of Namesake (ebook, softcover, hardcover, slightly loved). If it was confusing for me, it had to be confusing for you! Also, adding prints was very much a pain in the patooey, which is why I wasn't updating them as often as I should. We can also offer multiple shipping options for the first time.

While Storenvy was a great, free option, and it served us well. But, now it's time to go play with the big boys. Well, at least steal the merry-go-round and stake it out for ourselves.

Here's what you need to know about the new store and the old.

• We are not fully closing the Storenvy store: We are pulling everything off but the print books. We want them to still be on the Storenvy marketplace, but our main store is now being run through Shopify.


• If you ordered through the Storenvy store, don't worry: We are still shipping out your orders as normal. This includes any "Knot" and "Silver Button" pre-orders.


• Shipping prices have changed: If there's one thing shipping all these Kickstarters has done, it's gotten me very familiar with the postal service and the best way to get our items to readers intact. Most international orders will now be shipped via Priority Mail. In some cases, it was just a dollar difference. I'll most likely refine these down into the different tiers (First Class International, Priority Mail, Priority Mail Express) at some point, but for now it's just a flat rate. Domestic orders will have the option of slower media mail or the faster Priority Mail option. All our shipping prices are weight-based, which is key when you have multiple volumes of books!

If you have any requests for the store or suggestions based off what you've seen so far, please let me know!

Hi folks! Just a small update I'm posting on site in case people didn't see their emails.

Some of you have been getting emails from Storenvy regarding your open orders. “Knot” and “Silver Button” are both pre-orders with “Knot” shipping within the next couple of weeks and “Silver Button” shipping in mid-May after its TCAF debut. Storenvy has been contacted, as these emails should not be going out since both books were marked as pre-orders on the site.

There’s a couple of you with Namesake orders that accidentally got in the middle of all the “Knot” orders. I’m going to dispatch those shortly.

There’s a couple more with you with posters in your order. Those supplies just came in and should be going out shortly.

If you have any questions, please comment or email me. I apologize for any confusion! You will get a tracking number when the comics go out.

Thank you so much for supporting me and Isa with our art! We just got the “Knot” books back from the printer. They look fantastic, and I can’t wait until they get into your hands!

So, I know many of you are fans of kickstarter. So here are some recommendations!

First off, you guys should check out the Sombulus book one kistarter by my very good friend Christina. It's the story of an immortal who wants to die, 3 more or less effective folks who try to help him and the terrible price it costs to change a destiny. If you like humorous tragedy, check it out!

Secondly, Fairy Quest! I have the first book, and i'd really like to be able to get the second. Again, the story of a bunch of fairy tale characters telling destiny to go to hell. I'm sensing a theme.

There's a few other projects that seem neat too, although I can't really give an opinion since I haven't read them. But definitively check the two above!

 

A very astute reader was wondering how we tag the character entries for each comic.

The character tags drive our cast page, which needs a bit of a touch-up with characters from the current arc. You click on the character and you'll be taken to a listing of each page that character physically appears. Not all the entries are tagged yet. There's still some pages that need the character tags fixed because a) I didn't get around to uploading the book version of the page yet (only affects earlier chapters) and b) I did change my tagging method. Originally, characters who spoke in a comic were tagged and the ones silent in the background weren't. I changed my mind on that. One of these days, I'll go through the archives and finish cleaning up.

One thing that hasn't been inconsistent though is how the name used for the character tag is selected. For example, in today's page, the new character (or rather her departure) isn't tagged. Bird is tagged as "Vanessa," but Nose is tagged as "Nose." What gives?

The new character has not gotten a tag yet because her identity has not been revealed yet. Once it has been, she'll get a tag.

Vanessa is the name of her character tag because she was first identified in the story by her real name long before she was identified by the moniker of "Bird." It's not a huge spoiler that Vanessa is a Calliope member that turned to the Rippers, sold her name and is now known as Bird. 85% of that material is provided in chapter 1.

How I choose the character tags is based off their role in the story and the likelihood that someone reading it for the first time will be greatly spoiled by reading the tags. Like, if you notice, we use "Nose" as a character tag but not his real name because that is a huge story spoiler for new readers. We want to preserve that reveal as much as possible for those going through the comic for the first time. Same thing goes for "One." Whereas the djinn was identified right away because it wasn't that big of a spoiler. Originally, Fred wasn't tagged in his earliest entries, though I've gone back and done so now that the story of Elaine naming him isn't such a huge spoiler. Likewise, this new character's first entries will be tagged with her name at a later date after her name is revealed. We want to make this as engaging for readers as possible, and that's by avoiding spoilers when we can.

There is a method to my madness. Truly.

So i've been posting most of my bonus art on deviant art/tumblr, and I always seem to forget to include a link on the actual comic page, silly me.

Today's bonus art is some Warrick sketches! CLICK HERE TO SEE.

My computer is in the shop this week. I needed a new Motherboard, so off it went.

As my own computer is currently being fixed up, i’ve been using my fiancé’s computer to relax rather then work. We’d been playing Broken Age (by Double fine), which is, so far, really cool. I love point and click adventure games. I’m not much of a gamer. But I love these. Maybe because the stress level is lower then real-time games… In any case, I started telling said Fiancé about my favorite point in clicks as a kid : the King’s Quest series. King’s Quest VII, a Disney-esque adventure titled “Princeless Bride” hit me right in the middle of my Disney Renaissance obsession, so you can bet it became one of my absolute favorites.

Going thru a Let’s play of it made me realize that King’s Quest VII may have settled nicely in my subconscious because it seems to have a couple of very “Namesake” like elements. Such as the cursor Symbol being a small white crown. And the protagonists travelling to magical worlds in a whirling portal. And one of the protagonists getting an extra life from a cat. And a bunch of other things.

See images here.

So i’m a bit taken aback by how something I played about 14 years ago still has a strong influence on my brain.

Now I just want to play it again.

Any recommendations for cons you'd like to see Namesake at in 2014? East Coast cons (U.S. and Canada) preferable, we wouldn't be able to swing West Coast yet financially.

Want to speculate on Namesake's plot without spoiling future readers of the story? Here's a home to do so! Just comment to this post. Beware that commenting means you're aware that spoilers are being discussed.

Remember, please be nice and courteous and have fun!

So, we apparently have a ghost issue with the last four pages of chapter 8, one that's puzzled me, Isa, and the IT folks for the past year and a half. Most people could see those pages, but for some reason a few couldn't. I finally sat down tonight and replaced those pages with the pages from the book version of vol. 2 to see if that fixed the issue.

If you were one of the folks who originally couldn't see those pages, please check now starting with this post. Please let us know if this didn't fix the issue. Sorry it took so long to squash the bugs!

Hi, folks! Isa and I wanted to chat with you a little bit today about Comic Rocket.

We have several readers who use this service wonder why Namesake is no longer listed. We don't have anything against Comic Rocket. Isa's been chatting with the folks for several weeks, and they're really nice. However, we've chosen not to be with Comic Rocket because Hiveworks is developing its own reader tools where all the profits go directly to the creators -- in other words, me and Isa and the other artists and writers who work with Hiveworks. Some of those tools include its own mobile app, where the ads on it generate money that go directly to Hiveworks' artists and authors.

Why? Are we being greedy? Things like this always sound like we're being greedy. But, let me clue you guys in on something brewing behind the scenes -- Isa and I are trying to figure out a way for both us to work on comics more. Isa recently took a new job, helping to run Hiveworks, that will give her more time to do art. We also want me to have more time to write Namesake. But to do that, we have to replace part of my income, as I currently work a second job outside of my day job and Namesake to ensure the cats don't murder me and my husband in the middle of the night. Because they will.

We have a ton of comic ideas. I spent several days in Montreal with Isa last week working on Namesake and laying out the groundwork for a couple comics: one is the Chiseri/Adora short story that's the Kickstarter extra and another is a comic scheduled to debut at TCAF next year if we're accepted. We also have a few other planned projects that are being guarded fiercely by both Alices with their swords. We want to do more cons. We love comics, we love telling stories, and we especially love telling those stories together. But, we also need the time to tell those stories, and that's a precious commodity right now because both of us are so busy supporting our families. Thanks to Hiveworks giving us the best ads they can and to them promoting us, they're helping to make a future possible where we can dedicate more of our time to creating comics.

But, we supported a Kickstarter that made a lot money. Doesn't that help you? It sure did. All that money went into the printing and shipping of the books. The Namesake printing costs alone was nearly $22,000, which was 3/4s of the Kickstarter money. All the extra money beyond that is going to creating rewards and shipping the books -- which got a bit more expensive thanks to the post office raising their rates this year. That money wasn't, and was never intended to be, something we actually live off of. Once all the Kickstarters are sent, the money from the remaining books will go to me and Isa.

We love you guys immensely, you all know this. I hope that those who had utilized Comic Rocket to read our comic will continue to do so despite the inconvenience, and none of this was taken with any malicious intent. I love the idea of both them and inkOUTBREAK, where Namesake is still listed. It's nothing personal, both Isa and I just want to be able to afford to keep telling the best stories that we can.