Check out the lineup of packages that went in the mail this morning:
I piled them up according to the backers’ requested mini-prints. Hmm, wonder if there’s a trend.
The latest Kickstarter update has more details!
First shipment of Volume 2
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Books, books, beautiful books
The print copies of Leif & Thorn Volume 2 have arrived!
(Seen here under the glow of my new rose-tree lamp. Turns out that’s a thing, so obviously I had to have one.)
The post on the Kickstarter campaign has more info for all the backers who preordered Volume 2 then.
If you missed it, now is finally your chance to order Volume 2 via Gumroad (those books will be shipped once all the Kickstarter rewards are fulfilled), or get the Volume 2 ebook (those are instantly available to download!).
For that last one, you might want to join the mailing list first — I’m gonna be sending them a coupon.
Closed polls of 2019 (sandwiches, Scooby-Doo, surprise party guests, and more)
Just closed a bunch of the polls that have done their time below the Leif & Thorn comment sections. For posterity, here are the answers.
The poll about readers’ preferences for the Kolpovision-party storyline. Will any of you get your narrative wishes? Time will tell…
Best surprise guest to crash Thorn's Kolpovision-watching party?
- MAGICAL BRAM and his ADORABLE CHILDREN 26%, 35 votes35 votes 26%35 votes - 26% of all votes
- Future Thorn, pretending he's cosplaying 20%, 27 votes27 votes 20%27 votes - 20% of all votes
- President Romarin, having ditched her security detail 17%, 23 votes23 votes 17%23 votes - 17% of all votes
- All of the above? I honestly can't pick just one.* 8%, 11 votes11 votes 8%11 votes - 8% of all votes
- Holly and Cedar, for a magical intermission 7%, 9 votes9 votes 7%9 votes - 7% of all votes
- Geirölul Lilblomma, trying to explore Ceannic culture.* 7%, 9 votes9 votes 7%9 votes - 7% of all votes
- Agent Delphinium and the Woman in Black on a secret mission 5%, 7 votes7 votes 5%7 votes - 5% of all votes
- Kudzu's dog* 4%, 6 votes6 votes 4%6 votes - 4% of all votes
- Holly, Cedar and Ivy, due to a misreading of the situation.* 3%, 4 votes4 votes 3%4 votes - 3% of all votes
- President Romarin with her full security detail 3%, 4 votes4 votes 3%4 votes - 3% of all votes
Total Votes: 135
15 November, 2019
- 1 January, 2020
Voting is closed
Continue reading Closed polls of 2019 (sandwiches, Scooby-Doo, surprise party guests, and more)
You can tell this comic is cutting-edge because it has a Dark Mode now
It’s finally time to reveal why I’ve been breaking the Leif & Thorn layout all weekend!
I’ve been pulling the CSS for colors and images into a separate stylesheet from the rest of the CSS (i.e. the fonts, the arrangement of sections, the padding…so much padding), so I could have multiple color/image themes and give everyone the option to toggle between them.
Starting with a seasonal Northern Lights theme. (And only halfway through December!)
Settling on the palette was the easy part. (And the fun part.) The hard parts were:
- divvying up the properties correctly between the “Inkblot child theme” stylesheet and the color-scheme stylesheets, so nothing got duplicated, or accidentally dropped
- updating a whole bunch of non-transparent images that only worked on a theme with a white background
- combing through error-spawning code for the missing period/semicolon/curly-brace
- learning how to keep stylesheets from getting flagged as “insecure content”
- realizing the After Dark pages were going to try to load the default color-scheme stylesheet, so I needed a style that wouldn’t override it
- realizing that, while keeping the default scheme from overriding the After Dark scheme, I had prevented it on loading from a bunch of other pages at all
- giving the Firefox Code Inspector a workout
- giving the W3C’s exhaustive guide to CSS properties a workout
- giving Notepad++’s side-by-side document view a workout
- truly appreciating the WordPress Header and Footer and Real-Time Find and Replace plugins
- testing how it looks when you move an element 5 pixels to the left…then putting it back…then trying it 5 pixels to the right…
- sitting back and waiting for the server-side cache to update so I could finally see if the live results matched the previews
…and now, finally, it’s in a state where I feel ready to show it off.
There’s a couple of new buttons in the left-hand sidebar that will let you switch between Northern Lights and the original theme, Blue Castle. Check them out.
The buttons are supposed to set a cookie in your browser that remembers your chosen theme when you visit different pages…but I can’t seem to get that part working. If anybody can take a look at the source code and figure out what’s missing, it would be much appreciated!
And in general, if you run into any new problems while browsing the site, comment here and let me know. Gotta tackle them while my debugging mojo is still flowing.
First look at the Volume 2 proof
The proof copy of Volume 2 has arrived!
To keep creator expenses down, Whitlock sends these unbound, so what I got in the mail was a big stack of loose pages and an un-cropped cover. Check them out:
All this is well ahead of schedule — last year’s Volume 1 proof came on December 15.
As usual, I’m going to take a couple days and look through it, make sure everything came out okay. It’s hard to tell in this photo, but the cover printed a little dark — I’ll probably adjust the values and send the printer a new source file.
And then we go to press!
Thanks to the Volume 2 backers
This is the post where I credit everyone who backed Leif & Thorn Volume 2!
Without these people, the book wouldn’t get to exist — so browse the list, click some links, and shower them with appreciation.
Behind-the-scenes on making Leif & Thorn Volume 2
Now, if we can also pass Volume 1’s record ($3,211) before the deadline on Friday, I’ll start handing out extra prints.
In the meantime, as we head into the final 48 hours, I wanted to share some backstory about how this volume came together.
Going back to the very beginning…
2011
…okay, maybe we don’t have to go quite this far back.
But 2011 is when I drew the first sketches for what would eventually become the Leif & Thorn cast, and I did put those in Volume 1, so technically it counts.
Continue reading Behind-the-scenes on making Leif & Thorn Volume 2
Choose your own mini-print adventure
With two weeks left in the Volume 2 Kickstarter, it’s time for a poll!
Every paperback Leif & Thorn book includes a campaign-exclusive postcard print, right? But I don’t have a top favorite “gotta print this one!” illustration. So I’m leaving the choice to you.
Don’t worry about the size of the images here — they’re all high-res enough for these prints, and I can tinker with them if necessary to make the dimensions fit. Just follow your heart.
Here are the options:
Glamorous Agents 
Garden Parry 
Stripes and Blades 
GothPrideProblems 
Gone Floating 
Anniversary
And here’s the poll! You can vote for up to 2 choices:
Which illustration do you want as a mini-print with Leif & Thorn Volume 2?
- Glamorous Agents 26%, 23 votes23 votes 26%23 votes - 26% of all votes
- GothPrideProblems 24%, 21 vote21 vote 24%21 vote - 24% of all votes
- Stripes and Blades 16%, 14 votes14 votes 16%14 votes - 16% of all votes
- Plant Anniversary 14%, 12 votes12 votes 14%12 votes - 14% of all votes
- Gone Floating 10%, 9 votes9 votes 10%9 votes - 10% of all votes
- Garden Parry 9%, 8 votes8 votes 9%8 votes - 9% of all votes
Total Votes: 87
Voters: 52
27 September, 2019
- 12 October, 2019
Voting is closed
Closed polls: Holly’s replacement, Volume 2’s bonuses
The comments-section polls are back on random rotation for a while. A couple of them have been retired because the answers were time-sensitive — and here are the results.
I’d been planning for a while now that the team’s new mage would be Tamaputian, because it’s been too long since I’ve had a regular excuse to draw Tamaputians. But this is the reason why Atarangi is a fire mage:
Continue reading Closed polls: Holly’s replacement, Volume 2’s bonuses
Tech support update (the detailed version)
The short version is: it’s fixed!
If you have any currently-cached Leif & Thorn pages from the past week, you’ll still have a stuck version. But once you reload them — or if you clear your whole cache one more time — it should be smooth sailing from here on out.
And if you’re on Reddit, please go give some upvotes/awards to this comment, which provided the pivotal clue that helped catch the culprit.