Fantasy comedy about a magic knight trying to have a romance in his second language
Yuletide, the annual small-fandoms fanfiction exchange, is open for sign-ups again!
I collected all the webcomic fandoms in the tag set (plus all the characters you can request for each one), and added links to where you can read them online. Fandom tags are in the order/format AO3 puts them, which is why they’re not totally consistent, but all the actual titles seem to be right.
If you feel like getting involved, Yuletide sign-up instructions are here.
The Leif & Thorn Volume 4 campaign is cruising along, so it’s poll time again: Which art should I use for the exclusive mini-print that goes in every book?
Don’t worry about the exact sizes — they’re all high-res enough for these prints, and I’ll adjust them to look good at the right dimensions. Just focus on picking your favorite(s).
Continue reading Voting time for the exclusive Volume 4 mini-print
So, uh, wow. The extra prep and early promotion I’ve been doing for Leif & Thorn Volume 4 has paid off — 24 hours from launch and we’re 57% funded.
Also, got that Project We Love badge from Kickstarter right out of the gate. Nnnnice.
Continue reading The big launch of Volume 4: Blazing Stars (or, The (Fire) Saga Continues)
Been a while since I’ve done a roundup of polls, huh? I try to keep the “end of the comments section” poll reasonably fresh, but people are still curious about the results of the older ones.
So here’s a bunch I just closed.
This post doesn’t include the “potential heartsword-quiz questions” polls — I’ll gather them up separately at some point.
For the most part, I’ll leave a poll up until it gets at least 100 votes, then replace it not too long after. Usually they last 2-4 weeks. Here’s one that soared to over 200 votes after being up for just 10 days:
It’s the Fantasy Eurovision book, it’s the one where things keep going up in flames, I will be making so many Fire Saga jokes.
Here’s the new cover! With the earlier 3 lined up below it:
There’s a “making of” post on Patreon, where you can see the entire process from “sketchy pose tests” to “adding the last specks of flame.”
And the Kickstarter has a pre-launch page, where you can get notified when it goes live!
As usual, I’m doing Early Bird rewards — the first 15 backers who pledge over a certain amount get to prompt me for a Leif & Thorn sketch, which goes in the final version of the book. You don’t want to miss out.
A post to showcase the kinds of cool stuff you can get by supporting Leif & Thorn on Patreon.
Note: Almost all the posts are worksafe! There are a handful of 18+ posts, and there’s no way to just mark those posts (it’s a big feature gap on Patreon’s part), so you’ll get generic “this account is 18+” messages on everything. I’ll give you a real warning if I link to anything actually NSFW, don’t worry.
Patrons get exclusive wallpapers, of course — a new one every month, so I get to talk about those regularly. Most months I alternate between BICP and Leif & Thorn.
But Did You Know(TM), there are also…
Any Leif & Thorn strip that gets a lot of rearranging, I might make a post about the process. Like in the “Thorn tells Leif about his dragon injuries” Sunday arc:
There’s also a lot to say about thumbnailing some of the larger Sunday strips.
And about the art and the new coloring techniques used in the Kolpovision party splash panel:
Alt versions of strips, like these from 2020, that were completely finished before I decided to change something:
There’s a group of alts that are all just from Plus Ones. Some storylines are like that.
And a whole cut strip from Training Wreck:
So many roundups of deleted scenes! I’m not posting the previews for all of them, they’re such a regular thing. Sketches that start with pre-launch stuff from 2015, and sketches and deleted scenes from 2016,and unfinished illustrations from 2017-2018, and sketches plus deleted panels of 2019, and unfinished sketches through the start of 2020…
Most recently, a bunch of deleted scenes and alternate strips came out of Borrowing Trouble:
Backstory! Progress sketches! Notes that might or might not make it to canon, in the final reckoning. Here’s the one about creating Atarangi:
A follow-up on Atarangi in the post revealing Thorn’s new knights, Kokum and Senna.
There’s also this whole post about the Woman in Black.
The one about Kudzu has early design sketches and a bonus strip (it’s not in the online archive, but it will be printed in Volume 4):
The post about Marula got so long…
…that I had to make it a 2-parter.
Other times, a range of bonuses get bundled together. The post with development notes about the Quarantine With The Vampire servants also has deleted scenes of 2020.
Sometimes the architecture needs love too, you know? Which is why there’s a whole post about [finally] creating a consistent floor plan for Tansy and Larch’s house:
And that kinda leads into the post about plotting the end of the Kolpovision party (with bonus notes about Hermosa, Dr. Glazier, and Pascentia).
There’s also a layout post for Hermosa’s medical room — although I didn’t tell readers exactly where it was yet. (I try to keep these posts light on Actual Spoilers.)
Some of the Patreon-exclusive art posts are Fanservice with a capital F. I’m not sharing any of those previews here; have a link to the whole NSFW tag, and (assuming you’re at least 18) enjoy.
Other times the bonus art is just cute.
Some posts aren’t exclusive forever; patrons just get the first look. Like this timelapse of the 2020 Christmas special.
Or this Tamaputian height chart, which patrons got to see back in May. It’ll be on the site…probably in September? But as of this writing, you can’t see it anywhere else:
If you’re really lucky, once in a while, you’ll get some bonus fiction. Like this flashfic about Tiernan’s daily routine. (Maybe I’ll put that in a book one day.)
Sometimes the update is just “check out the Kickstarter that just launched,” but there’s meatier stuff too. In the middle of the Volume 2 Kickstarter, I did a post with behind-the-scenes details of the process.
There’s another about the re-coloring I did in Volume 3.
Patrons also got the Volume 3 cover reveal first.
And since we’re only a few months away (!!) from the launch of Leif & Thorn Volume 4, the next Cover Art Preview is coming up soon. Like, within the next couple of weeks, soon.
If that sounds like the kind of thing you don’t want to miss…new subscribers are always welcome.
Edit, June 22: Wrote a batch of updated mini-profiles, now on the cast page. Currently there are no spoiler-cuts, but the length is a bit longer than Style 2, shorter than Style 3.
…for the main and secondary characters, anyway. Tertiary characters are probably going to get the “half-dozen words, max” treatment. (Anyone more background than that just doesn’t appear on the cast page.)
Also! These descriptions are built into the character tags themselves, so if you follow a tag to get all of a character’s appearances, you’ll see the mini-profile at the top. Is that useful, or what?
Backstory behind the readmore:
Continue reading Well, as long as I’m updating the cast page…
There are So Many different components of “accessibility,” no webcomic site built by a single person is going to hit them all. And, well, if you’re using a hosting service like Tapas or Webtoon, you won’t even be able to hit a lot of them.
But if you’re looking for ways to improve — or you aren’t even sure where to start? — here’s a list of some of the things I do. Both here on Leif & Thorn, and on But I’m A Cat Person.
(This is part of the “how do I webcomic?” series, with useful information on all kinds of comicking-related topics.)
Originally written for this Twitter thread; I’ve added/expanded some points here. Also, arranged them in a couple of loose categories…
Continue reading Making Your Webcomic Accessible: a grab-bag of tips & tricks
Leif & Thorn is going to have some characters speaking Tamaputian in the next few months. It’s come up before in the comic, but never in long-ish conversations…so I’m thinking, this is the time to get decisive about fonts.
Way back when Mata and Pato first appeared, they got the occasional line of dialogue in Tamaputian, which was typed in Comfortaa. Very plain, not a lot of character…easy to read, but probably hard to distinguish at a glance from some other fonts.
In the Kolpovision storyline, I gave the singers from Tamapoa a few of their own lines in Tamaputian, and typed those in a version of Ænigma Scrawl. Definitely has its own distinct vibe! …Not sure I actually like how it looks in wordier speech bubbles.
So I’m thinking about switching it again. But to what?
This post has tests of half-a-dozen finalists. Click through, scroll around, tell me which one(s) you like best.
Light spoilers, in the sense of “new background characters will exist, here are some of their faces.”
Continue reading Font tests for a new(ish) language
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