BUY (OR DOWNLOAD) THE REDRAW/REWRITE OF "IN THE BLACK" HERE!

hi, happy homestuck day to all who celebrate. so. i started making this in 2018 and only finished it last year. originally intended to be a print run, this .pdf is pay-what-you-want with a suggested price of 5 dollars. this was funded by patreon donations. thank you patreon donors! without you i could not have broken the first rule of webcomics: don't redraw your old pages.

the old pages would have been impossible to print: general artistic ineptitude lead to the original pages being too dark to print with too much information crammed into too small of a space. so the choices were to eat shit and print a bad comic after making unskilled edits to the brightness and contrast, or to re-draw it with the 2018 skill set that made my work significantly more "readable". redrawing it gave me the opportunity to split pages for better pacing, tweak the dialog to be more in line with jack and maxine's established personalities, fix the speech bubbles to be more readable, add some consistency in the gutter sizes, fix the page sizes (?! they were all like a quarter of an inch off of the contemporary page size?!), and gave the art the best facelift possible for 2018. at the time, i was hoping i would be able to run a small kickstarter to help pay for house expenses. then covid happened lol. well. this time maybe it can help pay for my taxes. being sick really kicked the shit out of me.

the thread of artistic ineptitude continues to run through this recreation: i knew i wasn't at the ideal skill level i would have preferred when i started, but it wasn't really so much about making the pages "better" (although this was secretly part of it) so much as making them "accessible". i wanted a version of the story i felt like i could charge people money for without feeling like i was robbing them. a version that i could show people without instinctively cringing. the art definitely gets better, at least, but it has new types of problems now. which is just sort of how it goes, you know.

i've been extremely unsure what to charge for something like this. patreon donors have already paid for it a million times over. most people do not have fun money to drop on things willy-nilly. and i had to really sincerely ask myself what i thought a realistic and reasonable price for a webcomic is.

anyway here's what it looks like. consider a download. show it to a friend. ill be pushing this a few times over the next month.

BUY (OR DOWNLOAD) THE REDRAW/REWRITE OF "IN THE BLACK" HERE!