Five years on Patreon, and plans/goals for year 6... (Patreon)

It's hard to believe I started this Patreon five years and a week ago, but here we are. The site has certainly turned out very differently from what I'd originally planned, and my apologies to the animation fans as I moved away from doing that over the last couple of years, but the attempts just made me realize I'm a comics guy at heart. 

So, here's a few things I have planned for 2022:

1. Annual Subscriptions starting in January. I decided to wait until the beginning of the year to implement this to make it easier to measure the impact on my income from year to year, and to try and keep from paying a chunk extra in taxes. I'll go into more detail in January when it goes live, but it's totally optional and will include a discount.

2. Merchandise store goes live Spring 2022. Another thing I decided to wait on for tax reasons, afcombat.com will relaunch this spring with t-shirts, Hoodies, posters, phone cases and more for your favorite characters and stories. My ultimate goal is that when I have a story finished, the PDF version will include a code that gives you a discount on any related merchandise.

3. 2022 Summer "Event" Month. My main goal for this year is to be able to take a month off and still get paid for it, because, well, I'm greedy😉. I could never work far enough ahead to get the next part of a monthly story ready to publish, but I could get an 8-10 page short story done in advance for each tier and run that for the month instead. And what I thought could be really cool is if the four stories were somehow connected, where you still got a complete story if you just read one, but they could still be part of a larger whole. Which brings us to Sorcerer:

The basic plot for Sorcerer (also called Wages of Fear in some countries) is this: "Four unfortunate men from different parts of the globe agree to risk their lives transporting gallons of nitroglycerin across dangerous Latin American jungle." It's a very good movie, and one of the things it does is it starts with 4 5-10 minute "vignettes" telling the story of how each man ended up in that jungle. 

So, what if I used that structure for a small boxing tournament, where the winner could get enough money to get a fresh start? Each story for the "event" month would follow a fighter as they hit rock-bottom, and then next month or the month after the main story would start in one of the tiers.

Anyway, I've written way more than I'd planned on, so enjoy the poster and thanks to all of you for your support over the years.