Three new series of collected comics by Ctrl+Alt+Del.
Not ready to stop yet, I see. Alright then. If we get a little further, I'll give every Complete Book Set even more stickers.
I've got some shipping news that a lot of you have been waiting for, and it's exactly what you were hoping to hear. I've been crunching some numbers all weekend based on some rough estimates of where orders are coming from (based on the limited data Kickstarter gives me at this point), and I believe we have enough backers from Canada, the UK, the EU and Australia to arrange a shipment of books to fulfillment centers in each of those locations.
What this means is that the shipping costs for orders from those regions should now be less than the cost of sending a set of all three books from the US ($56 plus whatever your country charges in VAT/Import on your end).
Bear in mind that these are all still estimates, because I'm working with numbers that are still in flux. Until I know exactly what's been ordered and from where, and those orders are confirmed (ie, the campaign has closed and we're locked in) things could change (If have fewer people in those regions, the costs could be higher. If we have more people in those regions, they might be a bit lower). But here's a ballpark idea of what the new shipping charges could look like.
Note: These are estimates for a complete set of all three books, because that is the most common pledge. If you are ordering fewer books than that, your shipping cost would naturally be lower.
(Countries not in these regions will still be shipped from the US)
Bear in mind that these shipping estimates above include the VAT/Taxes from importing into your respective regions, so you wouldn't be looking at additional charges on top when your books are delivered.
I know that purchasing things internationally and the associated shipping costs is the biggest pain in the ass when trying to support things across an ocean, and so I'm incredibly happy that this project has been successful enough that it looks possible to mitigate some of that cost by sending product to multiple regions. And a huge thank you to my overseas backers who pledged despite the high shipping cost from the US, so that we could see actual orders from other regions and work out a better shipping option.
With that said, I now need to point out that this will be the only time I can offer better international shipping for these books. Orders placed during this Kickstarter, or immediately following on the pledge manager will inform how many books we send to different regions, and I will not be parking tons of extra stock in those places. I will send what's needed to cover orders there, and then going forward, all additional orders will ship from the US.
So if you are overseas, and want the lower shipping cost, this will be your window to back these books.
Good morning backers! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend! The campaign currently sits at over 200% funded, which is just amazing. We're making some books!
I wanted to dive into a slightly closer look at each of the three volumes we're making, beginning with The Starcaster Chronicles: Volume One.
As with all of the books, I've gone through and redone all of the word balloons, and created a common design language for them throughout each issue. It's a small touch in the grander scheme of things, but the five issues in this book span three years of comics, during which I sometimes changed how I approached things. So making sure all of the fonts are the same size, making sure all radio transmissions use the same style of word bubble, etc just ties everything together throughout the book and going forward.
Starcaster is easily the volume that I did the most work on in terms of creating new content specifically for the book. There's a fair amount of world-building that goes into a sci-fi series like Starcaster, but a lot of that fluff doesn't always make it onto the page, and so the Starcaster collected Volumes are a great opportunity to expound on the overall universe through pages designed to look like the Central Archive of the United Federation.
In this way I can offer you a look at things like the structure of the United Federation military and ranks, the Triumvirate, and profiles on some of the species we see throughout the issues. These were incredibly fun to do, because as I said, this is all stuff I come up with for the series, but don't always get to share if the story doesn't dictate it.
Finally, the other big addition to The Starcaster Chronicles: Volume One is the section dedicated to discussing what could have happened. While I'm publishing a Starcaster Chronicles issue, periodically the audience gets to vote on what the characters do next. These choices become canon and permanantly determine the direction of the story, but there is forever the question of "but what if we'd gone the other way?"
It would be impossible for me to draw every possible path outcome; a choice in "Issue 1" that diverges the story onto two unique paths, then ends that issue in two different places. Which means I now need to draw two different "Issue #2's" in order to account for the different directions the story took. And if there was a diverging path in those issues? Now I've got four different "Issue #3's" to make, and on and on.
However the books provide me the perfect chance to not only catalogue when and where in the story these decisions were offered, but to give you some insight into how our story might have gone a different way. "What if we'd chosen to dump the Vossium dust rather than deliver it?" "What if we'd gone to the casino outpost for repairs instead of the mining station?" "Would a character have died if we'd chosen differently?" This section of the book finally allows me to answer some of those questions and give a broader look at how much the audience votes can alter the outcome of The Starcaster Chronicles.
The Starcaster Chronicles is always a fun series to write, and a series that is consistently challenging me as an artist. I'm excited to see these first five issues collected together into a nice book along with all of the extras. And as I've just started Issue #10 on the Starcaster Patreon, it won't be long before I have enough content to start work on The Starcaster Chronicles: Volume Two to add to the collection!