Wasserbienchen

After a long time of announcing and never materializing, I have the pleasure of finally announcing that the website is LIVE.

www.haven-comic.com

Easy to remember, and easy to follow.

I am pleased to announce there are no ads, and there never will be! Therefore, the website isn't trying to gather data on you either!

The website will always have more content than other platforms. In fact, any chapter that is started on other platforms will be fully available on the website. In addition, the website will have a subscription that allows you access to pages as I finish them, and additional artwork, for a low price of £5. (This function will require some data-gathering, but on my end that's essentially your e-mail, and then Stripe gets everything else because... payment systems.) This means that currently, you can access the entirety of Chapter 2 on my website, and purchase the right to view Chapter 3, which is being updated weekly. Chapters will become available on the website once they are started on comicfury. As for the illustrations - currently it's a bit bare-bones; it has a few tidbits here and there, but I am planning on doing more with it in the future. (E.g. an interactive Character Chart, coding & friend connections permitting.)

I know people tire of subscription services nowadays, but it's not like you have to subscribe, and in exchange I am making it easy for you to consume without a lick of payment, in advertisement or otherwise. If you believe in me, the project, and my investment, then I ask you kindly to support me, and make it more likely that my endeavors end in success, and that you may see the end of it.

In fact, as a show of goodwill, I will give away three printed copies of the first chapter, to be shipped anywhere in the world where packages can arrive, with a personal thank you, to the first three people who subscribe. (I will contact you via e-mail, you are free to refuse this. If that happens, I will simply contact the next person in line.)

Yes, I do have a limited run of the printed chapter. It's not really an official thing, but they look gorgeous, I promise!

Truly, I believe that advertisement is toxic. Yes, it's nice to get some degree of payment just from traffic, but it detracts from the user experience, and makes me beholden to masters that I don't choose. I morally disagree with that compromise.

You should be able to choose who you support and who you do not, and companies that demand your attention and precious time are stealing from you something that doesn't belong to them.

Just one payment of £5 is probably going to be more than I would have ever gotten from your views on ad revenue.

Therefore, I won't steal your time.

Instead, I kindly ask that you donate in the name of free and independent art, if you can afford it.

If you don't care about subscriptions, you can optionally choose to donate once on Ko-Fi if you care. However, sharing the comic with your friends will also help me overall, so that's a much cheaper option to do so!

Either way, my readers all have my gratitude. Thank you very much, and hopefully you continue to enjoy!

TL;DR - I'm restarting the comic, with the goal of making it shorter and better.

Bullet points:

Goal is to shorten the project significantly. My new outline is over 50% shorter.

Characters have been altered, some significantly, and while story foundation is the same, lots of details will change.

Overall, story should go somewhere much faster.

Less Soap Opera, more coherent narrative.

A little bit of waiting on your part for the restart. Sorry!

Long Version:

I have made the decision to restart Haven: Revery of the Fallen.

The main reason is to make it shorter and more compact, which will ultimately mean that you are getting more, faster.

At the pace I was going, I was going to take many, many years to finish the story, and that was partially because the story was intended to be almost like a soap opera, where many characters were fighting for your attention.

I know you may have gotten attached to the current version of things, but trust me when I say that the new version is better while not sacrificing any of the plot that matters.

I've condensed the plot, and as a result a fair amount of characters were axed, their purposes merged, and given to new or other characters. And while it may start anew, we will get to 'this point' that we're at sooner than we did with the old story.

To illustrate:

Book 1 was shortened from 40 chapters to 25, which is almost a 50% cut. In addition, the entire story was shortened from 6 Books to a mere trilogy. So, Books were cut in half, but the books are also shortened significantly, with lots of extra bits trimmed away.

While that does mean that I'll be starting anew, almost everything will happen faster, and that should make up for the fact that I'm 'losing' 9 chapters worth of progress.

You will notice that the plot is a lot more serious from the get-go, to reduce friction and dissonance early on. You'll feel like things might be a bit jumbled, and that characters are a bit different to what you're used to. I've changed a few elements deliberately to raise the tension and to make things noticeably feel different. However, despite this, the story overall remains the same, it simply is told in a much more concentrated form, with some elements from V1 being reworked to fit this. Entire plot points will be missing - in fact, the entire idea that Astrid goes to 'school' is removed, which in itself will change a lot, and have a lot of consequences.

None of the changes are arbitrary - I've started from the 'barebones' of what's needed. The original version had a lot of baggage that I was too attached to, but I realized that many of the things either did not make perfect sense, or really only served to extend the story like filler.

I would not have made these changes solely as a response to 'oh, my art was bad back then, I'm unhappy with it'. These changes will profoundly affect the rest of the project, and ideally will save the audience a lot of time as well. That being said, my art IS better now, and I've made use of it with the upcoming rework.

I think early on I did somewhat overstate the idea that quality wasn't as important as quantity. While I still think that it's important to have fast updates when it comes to quantity, I think I've come to the conclusion that a certain degree of quality is necessary.

I'm working on getting a website running and doing some other things before publishing, but overall I think I'm on the right path. I was considering waiting a lot longer before finally 'admitting' this - especially since I still have loads of pages I COULD publish - but I think I owe it to you guys to be honest in this regard.

To be clear, I have material already. I've been working on this, taking a long time to properly write down everything and tackle each aspect and its necessity. This means I have a coherent outline of things, and I've started work on the art, a happy side effect of me having been so far ahead of schedule. Here's a blurry screenshot comparing some of the last V1 pages to the new ones:

However, i'd like to make sure I'm on the right path, and have enough material before I publish, just like I did with the first version, and I'm in the middle of getting a website done, so things are probably going to move onto there at some point. In short, there's going to be changes, and I hope that the fact that I'm doing this doesn't immediately deter you.

I will be publishing the rest of what I had - in whatever pace I feel is adequate, probably more or less the same schedule - but do look out for the new, improved and hopefully overall better version!

To those who enjoyed the old version... I'm very sorry! However, it is in no way a capitulation or a sign that things are getting scrapped. In fact, the very opposite. I've been having a lot more motivation recently, knowing that I've genuinely fixed some serious issues I had with the story. I hope that when I start releasing the new version, you can see how it really gets to the heart of the story much better.

Thank you very much for reading and supporting. Y'all the real MVPs.

TL;DR:

I will be uploading Monday/Thursday/Saturday for a total of 3 updates per week, starting next week, in an attempt to make my work more sustainable and manageable in the future.

Long form:

I love doing Comics. I've been working on the comic for about a year now, including planning etc, and my pace has definitely picked up from the early days. Since about October, when I started my comic, I've been fuelled by passion and drive.

That being said, I can tell that things have been taking a toll on me. Keeping up with 4 updates a week, and oftentimes surpassing that, has physically strained me, and while I'm doing my best to negate things, there's also factors of stress and similar rather annoying things.

Now, that doesn't mean I want to slow down significantly. No, this is my passion. But I need to lessen the stress I put on myself. I went on a holiday and ended up working through most of it. I feel anxious and worried when I take a break for even a few hours which I could be spending on art. I've made a lot of progress, and I need to take a step back and think about sustainability, and be relaxed enough to actually take breaks. Because, frankly, I may have had one or two days 'off' since October.

You see, as much as I don't want to care about my health, I know that if I don't take care of it, one day you'll see a post here akin to 'guys I can't move my arm any more, it's over'. And that's the worst thing that could happen.

So I'll hope that you can forgive me for making an executive decision to try to prioritize a way to make this slightly more sustainable, and because I want to give people a bit of time to adjust, we'll do this starting next week. My idea is to upload Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays - essentially random days, it really doesn't matter that much to me but I did notice that Sundays and Fridays tend to do pretty poorly for metrics, so ~eh, half-assed attempt to optimize schedule. You'll probably also notice that I'll be uploading very slightly later in the day, to maybe appeal to the 'merkanskis, since those are a pretty big target demographic given the English language. Other than that, nothing serious should change.

Yeah, I'm sorry that the story will be a lot slower, but I don't think it can be helped. :/ I hope y'all forgive and remain interested in Haven.

PS. This means I'm pretty damn far ahead in terms of weeks now. Regardless of what happens, you're still in for a lot of comic. Ideally, <i>years</i> of work is still ahead!

Slowly.

So, recently I got my comic printed, and I noticed immediately that the images were incredibly dark. Some panels were really hard to make out, and generally it was just not up to standards.

I'd always known that my screen was a bit brighter than most others, but boy, did I not realize the extent of the problem.

So, I'm aiming to fix the issue. But slowly.

I'm gonna have to go through every page and edit some of the values, on a screen that is still too bright. I'm gonna be trying my best, slowly, as I'm also still working on actually progressing with the comic, so bear with me as I try to edit stuff.

So far, the cover and prologue have been edited.

If it so happens to please or displease you, let me know!

Link here.

If anything, the positive about that website is that the quality of the pages is pretty high. If you've been frustrated at the small images on dA, I can recommend subscribing on Comicfury instead.

After a lot of frustration with getting someone to competently program a comic site, I'm at least temporarily setting up a Comicfury thing, given how generally good the customization is. Only thing that sucks a little is that the url sucks a bit, but you can't really do much about that with a website like that.

Not 100% how much I'll do with it, and how I'm going to keep the update schedule - for now, there is the same amount of content here and on Comicfury.

I'll keep you updated.

P.S.: I am also going to start asking for tips/donations. I ask you kindly to enable my artistry.