13 SHARES Share Tweet

Great Question!

So, we experimented with the idea of “Thieves Can’t Strip,” because that’s a pretty punny name and it seemed like a good idea. But those strips didn’t strike us as satisfying, didn’t feel like Thieves Can’t to us, and take way too long to make for what we were producing.

Thieves Can’t is going back to the page-format and we’re starting issue #3 soon™.

A lot of our readers have really good questions, though, and I want to do my best to answer them here.

What’s up with Issue #1’s kickstarter rewards?

I need to pay for a few more prints to take care of my signed copies, and we are still working on individual illustrations for the few who got that perk. Since there wasn’t a blank inside cover like we intended, we need to do inserts for those, and since I had to pay rent over the summer, I’m back to getting these things with my teaching paychecks. They’re coming as fast as I can.

There is also an electronic perk that I need to finish making — the advanced PDF. The extra content for it is a running commentary on the creation of the comic. That’s taking a bit longer than I expected. Massive apologies for the slow roll-out. If I use kickstarter again, I’m going to handle rewards differently.

If you think you should have gotten your KS reward by now and haven’t, hit me up in the comments and I’ll get the problem sorted ASAP.

Will there be an Issue #2?

Yep. It’s about 30 pages. There will be no KS campaign. We’re going to launch and sell it via Indy Planet. As in issue #1, we had a lot to convert over from our tall webcomic format over to pages. It’s going to look a lot better than issue #1 though, because we’ve learned a lot — and we started making traditional pages as we went about halfway through the process of making them, so a lot of the work that existed for issue #1 doesn’t exist for issue #2.

How are you working on all three of these problems at once…?

There are two of us. Zach is tackling issue two. When he needs me to tag in, I’ll take over. In the meantime, I’m solving a design problem with the advanced PDF for issue #1 and writing a raw script up for issue #3. I’m stretched just a touch thin, since I also teach full time and the semester started.

When will we see new Thieves Can’t comics?”

Comics? Another month, minimum. Two months, maximum. Content? Soon, I think. We’re handling the roll-out of issue #3 differently. We’ve learned a lot and we’re going to have a much more professional process for this third issue. Our Thieves Can’t Patreon Patrons are going to get to watch this process unfold — we’ll be uploading the script, edits to it, pages in progress, and final pages all to that Patreon feed, starting once I’ve got a final draft of the script in Zach’s hands.

In the meantime, we hope you’re enjoying Zounds — the black & white Ramen Empire spinoff that we’ve been running. It’s much faster to produce, and Zach and I are both enamored with that character, who — spoilers — will be rolling up a character in the Thieves Can’t side of the universe.

All the best, and thanks for reading!

Bart