Wooden Update - Introducing Fake Monday (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

The Patreon has been growing steadily so I figured it was time for another update. I've been on a bit of productivity-high since 2021 started after months of grief (for Balthazar) and lack of energy, so that's nice. There are some long-overdue things on my to-do list that I plan to finally get around to, some of them involving you. Yes, you!

NEW INTERN
For the past half year, I've been working on my own. I don't mind, but having in intern takes a lot of weight off my shoulders and is just more fun in general. I'm happy to announce that I'll have a new intern starting next week. Her name is Sarah and her style fits perfectly with the Wooden Plank style. Working together from home will probably be a bit weird (because of covid), but at least we'll be able to do a lot more than I have been able to do in the past six months. I'll introduce her properly next week.

PATREON PORTRAITS
As mentioned, one of the things that has been on my to-do list FOREVER is the portraits a lot of you are entitled to. I started working on them early 2020 and then covid happened and personal stuff messed up my schedule even more, yada yada. Now we're in 2021 and I still haven't made them, for which I apologize. The first thing Sarah and I will work together on are these portraits. Because a lot of you probably changed a bit since I first asked for photo reference, I'll resend the request so you can all get up-to-date portraits!

HIDDEN DETAILS WINNERS
I FINALLY counted all the Hidden Details you guys found in 2019 and 2020. The winners (Zoe Kunz and John Hattan) have been notified and they can choose a shirt from our store which they'll receive free of charge. Speaking of the store: we discovered shipping costs to the US was 20 bucks, which is absurd. We don't know exactly why this happened, but we'll try to fix this as soon as possible. We might have to move to another provider, which will be a lot of work, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Ideally, I want to have different reward-tiers for Hidden Details winners. It's a bit unfair for all the other people who participated but not reached first place to receive nothing at all. I imagine something like: 10th place to 6th place get a mug, 5th to 2nd place get a t-shirt and the first place gets... a signed t-shirt or something, I don't know. Something cool and exclusive. We'll let you know what we come up with.

FAKE MONDAY
The most fun part of this update. Ever since reaching the 750 dollar threshold I thought we should start doing something extra as a reward. That combined with the new intern, I decided to add a new day to our upload schedule: Fake Monday.

On Fake Monday, we will upload a Fakemon (Fake Pokémon), based on prompts by Patrons. Patrons (you guys) will be able to suggest/request a Fakemon for the following week. Anything goes. Examples might be: an evolution to Dugtrio, or a pre-evolution to Heracross. Or a Pokémon based on Mitch McConnell, or the Beatles, or a new Eeveelution. I'll choose the most interesting/fun one every week and we'll create a Fakemon based on this prompt and upload it on Mondays on our usual channels.

So the upload schedule will be:
Fake Monday
Tuesday Chooseday
Webcomic Wednesday
(maybe someday we'll have the time and money to come up with stuff for Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday as well)

Since a lot of you are huge Pokémon fans, but there isn't much relevant Pokémon stuff to make comics about right now (until Snap and the rumoured Diamond/Pearl remakes), I thought it would be nice to at least give you some Pokémon content every week with these Fakemon. Also, I really like Patron interactions. Which brings me to my next point:

PATRON PROMPTS
I want to extend the Patron interaction in Fake Monday to Tuesday Chooseday and the Wednesday webcomic as well. So, when I upload the request for prompts (on Mondays) I won't just ask for a Fakemon suggestion, but also:
- the subject for next week's Tuesday Chooseday (just the subject, not the choices, although I'm always open for suggestions. Subjects are more likely to be chosen if they're relevant or based on some major release)
- an item, object, character or animal to hide in the webcomic

We'll see how this goes, but it would be really fun if Patrons could influence every single upload in the schedule on a weekly basis. I will upload the first post asking for prompts next Monday, and you can just comment with your Fakemon suggestion, TDCD topic and comic cameo. I'll credit the Patrons who suggestions I picked, of course.

To kick off Fake Monday though, I need some suggestions RIGHT NOW. So if you're dying to see (our interpretation) of an imaginary Pokémon, please comment!

Okay, I think that's it for now. Thank you all once again for all your support and kind comments. I hope 2021 will be a good year for us all :)

Cheers,

- Abel