I’m also trying to build up my subscriber numbers on Tapas! If you read comics on Tapas, please give us a sub there! It would really, really help us out in supporting the comic financially and helping to keep it going!
For the next week or so my entire itch.io shop is on sale! Get some comics, CSP brushes, and more AND help keep me alive and affording needed healthcare! There’s also a bundle of everything for just $20.24!
Also, if you like reading comics on apps, Follower is available on both Webtoons and Tapas! And if you subscribe there, it really helps me out, because I’m a little bit closer to being eligible for an ad revenue share.
I’ve had to make a few changes regarding Follower’s update schedule. It will be returning on February 21 to accommodate my health issues. More details are in the post below if you’re interested. Thanks for your understanding!
I’ve been working on new Follower pages and there are currently 3 previews up for Chio Club members! That means you can get 3 updates ahead of the current story, and be way ahead by the time regular updates resume in February!
Hey all! One of the projects I’ve been working on in the background while drawing has been difficult is building a shiny new website for Follower. As part of this, I’m going to be finally transferring the whole comic onto its own URL instead of living underneath messenger-comic.com. It’s a lot easier to give people a shorter URL that they might remember than the current one. After 10 years (!!) it’s finally time.
What does this mean for you? If you use RSS to subscribe to the comic, you’ll have to switch to the new feed URL. I will make sure to post about it well in advance so you’ll see something before the site moves. I’m planning to be relatively loud about it so it won’t go unnoticed, even after the move.
If you don’t use RSS (you should, though!) you won’t notice a big change since I am planning to make the old URL eventually automatically redirect to the new one. So when you visit the site, you’ll end up in the new place no matter what.
There will be a short transition period in between where both sites will be alive at the same time, just to make sure people see the change, but then it’ll become an automatic redirect after that.
I finally had it in me to actually draw something today. It’s been weeks. So I decided to make something that is both comic and blog post, about how things have been lately, because it certainly has been a wild and nonstop ride.
I’ve recently been diagnosed with POTS, which is a thing where your body can’t push your blood where it needs to be, so you get really dizzy standing up, have a hard time standing for a long time, and other “fun” and “exciting” things like being intolerant of heat. It makes your heart rate spike really, really high which can be terrifying, although mostly harmless. It makes it really hard to function! I have moments where I need to sit down, or I’m gonna fall down. This is depicted mostly in the last couple of panels. Still, I’ve got some things I’m working on with my doctors, which are already paying dividends in this department. It’s just one of those things where sometimes even if you do everything right, you’ll still get knocked flat. With the summer heat, that’s been happening a lot, unfortunately.
I’m also mid-diagnostic-process for finding out whether I’ve got Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, which is a lot more complex, but is looking more and more likely. This is a disorder where the collagen in your connective tissue doesn’t work quite right, so it’s very easy to hyperextend a joint (painful!) and easy to get injured, and I find myself dealing with a lot of hand pain because my fingers flex a lot more than a normal person’s and get sore very fast. My knees also hyperextend backwards, which is the purpose behind the knee braces *ahem* robot legs in the first panel. There are 13 different types of EDS that affect the body in different ways, and I’ll be working with a geneticist in the near future (after waiting an entire year) to find out the specifics of my particular case.
In any case, I just want to say thanks for reading and keeping up with my work. It’s been really difficult, physically, to make anything in the past year. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle problems like this in the future, because I absolutely do not want to quit making comics and art. But I have to find a way to balance it with my incredibly unreliable body, which is something I haven’t figured out just yet.
If you want to find out more about POTS and EDS, I recommend these links, and thank you for reading them! A lot of people don’t know much about these conditions, even doctors, so if I can teach even one person a little more about them, I feel like I’ve done some good.
I’m still working away on getting my webcomic put together for a print edition of volume one! Collecting everything together into a graphic novel is a lot of work, and can be complicated if you don’t stay organized. So that’s why I’m sharing one of my favorite organizational tips here – making a checklist spreadsheet! I’ve made a file with columns for each major fix I know needs doing from page to page, along with one for specific notes that don’t need to be changed on every page. I used conditional highlighting in Numbers on my Mac to make it easier to visualize how much work I’ve done versus what I have left, and even though I don’t use Excel or Google Sheets, I’m pretty sure you can do that with those apps, too.
Youtube has changed their guidelines for monetization, and it would help us immensely if you subscribed to our channel for free! We just need to reach 500 subscribers to be eligible, which would help provide monetary support for the continued creation of Follower and our other comics!
You can also help support the creation of our comics by joining the Chio Club, where you’ll also get rewards like previews of new pages and other behind the scenes sneak peeks!
