Hey Chio Crew! We’re nearly halfway through 2023 already! How?! I guess it goes faster when you’re struggling to be able to update your own webcomic, but that’s changing soon!
What’s New?
Follower starts again this week! It’s been a long hiatus with my ongoing health issues, but I’m going to do my best to keep on schedule! I can’t promise that I won’t occasionally have to take breaks now and again, but I’m at least hopeful I’ll be able to maintain a small buffer.
If you’ve ever wanted to be part of Follower, like, so much that you’re in the comic – now’s your chance! Our Create a Chio project is open once again for takers on both Patreon and via Ko-Fi commissions. For $50, I’ll work with you to design your very own Chio character. You’ll get a custom character sheet with color references and information. This character will appear on at least one page of the comic as a side character. I’ve also added an extra upgrade option that will put your custom character on 3 pages of the comic, with the potential for a line of dialogue, too. Since I’m working on pages right now that feature a bunch of background Chios, the sooner you commission me, the sooner your character will appear in the comic!
What’s Next?
April had no takers for the Chio Club Sticker Tier, so I’ll be leaving it up with the same design for May. If it stays this way, I will probably end it and move on to other ideas. That said, if you’re interested, please check out our Patreon and Ko-Fi pages to join!
I’m still dealing with health issues and my schedule is pretty much a wreck week to week, so I haven’t been able to make a solid streaming schedule yet. I’d like to get back to streaming work on book pages, since I was making some decent progress there. As usual, follow me on Twitch to get updates on that.
Community News
Join us on Discord to get the latest comic updates and engage with other readers! The Discord is open to everyone, with special areas for Chio Club supporters.
Thanks For Reading
Thank you (yet again) for sticking with us despite this long comic hiatus! Here’s to more new pages!
It’s the end of yet another year, so as usual, it’s a good time to look back on everything that happened in 2022! I want to sincerely thank all of our supporters – whether you’re a member of the Chio Club, or just a regular reader of our comics, it means a lot. Delade and I couldn’t do what we do without you all.
So… let’s get into it!
A challenger approaches (it’s 2022, that was the challenger)
2022 presented a lot of challenges and difficulties for us. I spent a lot of the year assisting a family member with an ongoing medical issue – running with them to appointments and so on – which sapped a lot of my time and energy. Still, I did my best to keep up with pages until I just couldn’t. In February I injured the thumb on my drawing hand, and it’s been a persistent issue ever since. This has taken quite some time to deal with properly, but recently I’ve been able to buy a splint that allows me to work carefully, without further injuring myself. I’ve got some specialist appointments lined up for the very end of the year, and I’m looking forward to hopefully getting some answers and squaring away this particular problem so I can get back to normal comic updates.
Life in general has been pretty challenging as well. We were illegally evicted from our apartment in 2021 (which is an entire terrifying story all on its own) and while we’re in a safe and relatively stable place now, it’s going to take time to get back to a true state of “normal.” That said, I want to express how much the Chio Club supporters really helped keep Follower and our other projects online this year, as well as helped keep us fed on a few occasions. I can’t truly convey how grateful we are for this. It’s been a rough year, and that’s something that has really helped.
On to more positive news!
Becoming a Brave Chio
This year, I wanted to try and do more to cultivate the reader community around Follower. I’ve been in an introverted shell for a while, and it seemed like a good time to try and break out of it a little bit. I put some work into improving the Radio Chio Discord, and have seen a little bit of success. This is obviously something that is going to be an ongoing process, but if you’re a reader of our comics and want a friendly place to hang out online, you should come join us! I’d like to try and come up with more community events for 2023, but I definitely appreciate any input from folks in the community. Anyone can join us on Discord, but there is an extra channel just for Chio Club members, too!
One of the other things I’ve been trying out this year is doing more streaming, both of comic and art work as well as games. It’s been an interesting experiment! I was able to make the requirements to be a Twitch Affiliate, which means I can actually get paid when folks drop in to watch streams, and is another means to help keep our comics going. I’ve had to slow down a little bit in the past couple of months due to my hand injury, but I’m trying to fit in what I can!
You can join me on Twitch to hang out while I draw or play a game, and if you follow me there, you can get notifications for when I go live. If you just hang out while I’m on, I do get paid via ads that are shown during the stream, so it’s also an easy way to help support my comics. You can also subscribe to my channel to get fancy badges and Chio emotes!
Along with streaming, I’ve been experimenting with creating more video content this year for various formats. I put some more effort into making short Follower-related videos for Tiktok, and was pleasantly surprised by the response! I somehow posted one of the most-viewed things I’ve ever made on the internet when Dia’s story went kind of micro-viral, so that was pretty exciting.
In addition, I’ve been adding more content to our YouTube page, including previous stream archives, comic art time lapses, and more. I have more ideas about making some more “how to” style videos and some story time type chatty videos, but those will likely be coming in the new year. These are things I can probably produce pretty quickly while I’m making other things, since that’s what they’re about, so I hope you’ll look forward to that! You can find us on YouTube here.
Social media has seemed pretty tumultuous in the past few months, so I’m doing a few things with our content to help smooth that out. First of all, most of our major content will originate here on Radiochio.com (or on its own comic site, like follower.messenger-comic.com) first, and will trickle down to other platforms afterward. So if you follow us on social sites for updates, you probably won’t notice a big difference, but it’ll be helpful if or when any particular social platform drops off the face of the planet. You know, apropos of nothing.
Additionally, I’m combining our monthly newsletter with the monthly update post I put out for Chio Club members on Patreon and Ko-Fi. It’ll be free to view here, there, or in your email. This is mostly because a lot of content got duplicated between these two, and it makes more sense to keep it together. Plus, this means that you can also follow us on Patreon or Ko-Fi for free to continue to get news and updates. Regular Chio Club content will remain a paid reward for subscribers, though.
Last thing on this topic: I made a handy links page that points to every place you can find us online. I’ve been experimenting more with alternative social platforms, and it’s been kind of refreshing. Check it out and see what you might have missed!
On to comic news!
Comic news (the good stuff)
The biggest comic news we have for 2022: Follower won DrunkDuck’s 2022 Best Anthropomorphic Comic! This was a total surprise, and we’re really honored to have been recognized! Thank you so much to folks who nominated or voted for us.
Follower became available on Globalcomix, a relatively new comics site that’s really great for both creators and readers. Currently, most of the comic is available to read for free there, just as it is on the main site, and 3 issues with bonus content are available for purchase. More content will be coming in 2023, and the existing issues will get updated art, since that’s an ongoing project.
Throughout the year, I’ve been working on retouching and resizing older Follower pages so I can do two things: publish Volume One of Follower, and release our newly redesigned website to the public. Chio Club members can currently check out an early version of the site, but it won’t be complete without the retouched pages. The edits for Volume One primarily depend on making art fixes to chapters one and two, and text updates to the rest of the comic for readability and consistency. This has been a slower progress than I hoped due to my hand injury, but I’m getting there!
Follower remains on a hiatus for now. I’m hoping to get a small buffer of about 5 pages (or more) ready to go before I start updating normally again. Chio Club members have been getting early looks at new pages as I’ve been working through them.
Messenger has been more neglected than I’ve hoped for this year. I have a stack of half-finished pages waiting to be finished. I am not sure where this will fit into the schedule, but I’m really, really hoping to get to them in 2023. I’m as frustrated as anyone by how long it’s taken to get these updates made, but life has been wild, as you’ve seen.
Thank you for reading
So that’s where things stand around here. Again, I want to express how thankful we are for all our readers and supporters. We really wouldn’t be able to keep up a lot of what we do without you all. You keep us going, sometimes literally, and it means the world to both of us.
It’s almost July, and that’s when Follower’s ninth anniversary is! In celebration of this, we’re holding a Follower Meme-Off Challenge in the Discord! Make your own memes based on anything in the comic and submit them in the thread on the server by July 24, which (not coincidentally) is Follower’s ninth anniversary!
You can make and submit as many memes as you’d like. You can vote for as many memes as you’d like. The meme that gets the most votes wins, and the winning creator gets to request a new emote for the server which I will create!
Must be SFW (swearing is ok, because there’s swearing in the comic)
You can use any art from the comic, or Bug’s art, or draw your own
Post it to the thread on the server in the events channel
By posting, you’re agreeing to give other people permission to use your meme, and Bug & Delade permission to use it on the Follower site and related social media.
Include whatever name you’d like to be credited as, or none if you don’t want to be credited for some reason.
Vote for memes by adding the star reaction. (You can add any other reactions you want too, but the star is what will count as a point towards winning.)
You can vote as many times as you want, and you can vote for your own submission.
If you’d like early access to comic pages and other behind the scenes material, support us on Patreon! We are also planning to open a similar monthly subscription pack for wallpapers and other bonus content via Gumroad, so stay tuned!
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