The Kickstarter goes live on MARCH 4th!

The Western Deep team is proud to announce that the Kickstarter for our Volume 2 hardcover printing will go live on Wednesday, March 4th–but you saw that already in the big text right above!

To kick things off, we’re sharing the first of FOUR planned guest prints that will be appearing in the brand new, never-before-seen extras section of the Volume 2 hardcover. The actual pencilwork for this piece, by Lackadaisy Cats creator Tracy Butler, will be available as one of our brand new reward tiers.

That’s right: you could own these pencils (signed by Tracy Butler herself)! We’ll be sharing more rewards with you as we get closer to the launch date, in addition to some very cool additional materials that I think long-time readers and newcomers alike will appreciate.

A quick aside–back in July of 2015, Tracy did an impromptu sketch of Quinlan and posted it on her social media. Our readership numbers EXPLODED by an order of magnitude, and I knew then our comic had a lot of growing left to do. Even now, all these years later, I know there are lots of people out there discovering the comic for the very first time.

I imagine with this Kickstarter, we’ll find even more new readers, so it feels appropriate that to kick off this brand new journey with all of you, Tracy is helping us launch it with a brand new Western Deep piece!

WHAT STUFF ARE WE PLANNING FOR THE KICKSTARTER?

The first campaign we did was a huge success for us, and we’ll be sticking pretty close to the model we used last time, with a few minor twists. That means a standard matte cover version of Volume 2, and a Kickstarter-limited version with a cool black-and-white spot gloss cover with gold foil text and black-painted page ends.

We’re also planning to print a new run of standard Volume 1 hardcovers, if the price is right. We’re looking at folding it into the main campaign currently, but it might wind up being a stretch goal. We’re still waiting on the quote from the printer, so we’ll update folks the moment we know for sure.

We’re also going to have a BRAND NEW ENAMEL PIN. Art isn’t final yet, but I think you can imagine who we might to have as a pin after Quinlan and Dak got their day in the sun in the first campaign. I’ll give you a hint: he’s the only character to show up on BOTH Volume 1 and Volume 2’s covers!

We’re only planning one enamel pin to start, but if we hit a certain stretch goal tier, we’re likely to turn that into a two-pin set with a certain super-mad-otter-dad. Again, more details to come.

There will of course also be an updated bookmark, and we’re thinking of adding our cool new WESTERN DEEP STICKER to physical reward sets:

We’ve got a LOT of cool stuff planned for this Kickstarter, as you can tell! We’re all incredibly excited to share it with you and give you a first look, and we hope that you will all help us by spreading the word as we get closer and closer to the launch.

We’ll be posting Abyssal Dunes pages over the next few weeks with some Kickstarter update news as it becomes available, and then we’ll begin sharing even more stuff in the lead-up to the actual campaign (including an early look at the full campaign video).

See you all next week!