Look what just arrived!

Ordered from RA Comics Direct, and could not be happier with the product (THEY. ARE. SO. PRETTY.) or the customer service!

They'll all be signed in July at SDCC when Susan and I meet up with Jerry and Peng-Peng, and then they will be shipped out (along with the patches and any other rewards specific to your donation level!) direct to you!

This is also your first look at the cover! What do you think?

ARE YOU AS EXCITED AS WE ARE? :D 

You may have seen us squeeing on Twitter and Facebook last week over the proof copy of the comic arriving in the mail, for it was glorious!

We were going to post photos for you all to see, but the more we looked at the cover the more we realized the logo needed tweaking. There are some things you only realize when seeing it in print, which is why things like proofs even exist, right?

So we spent some time further tweaking the new logo, in order to get it to look as good as possible with the excellent cover art from Jerry Gaylord and Bryan Turner. We also decided to upgrade the interior paper from what we'd initially selected, because we want to be sure we're giving you folks the best possible product.

That's going to cost a little more, but we're going to foot the bill for it because we really think it'll make for a better end product.

All of that was taken care of today, so we're just waiting to hear back about when the print run will start and when we might expect them to arrive. 

We'll keep you updated! And once again, THANK YOU all SO MUCH for all of your support! :)

Sorry for the delay in getting more updates here for you folks! We've been incredibly busy trying to get everything ready for this project.

If you don't already listen to the weekly news show (This Week in Pendant) for our podcasting company, Pendant Productions, you might want to start. Not only are we charming and hilarious (and so, so modest), we've been mentioning updates to this project as we go along.

I'll try to cover the things we've mentioned there, to be sure you're all up to date. Firstly, the physical Brassy Battalion flight patches are in and I have held them in my hand (see photo below!) and they are unbelievably gorgeous. I hope you all love them as much as we do!

ALL art is now in for the book, including lettering and colors! We spent several days this week designing the credits page (which will be the inside front cover) and the special section where you lovely donors will be listed as good Not-A-Nazis (which will be the outside back cover). I believe you all received the emails Susan sent clarifying the name you wanted listed, and we're just waiting on the last couple of responses from you folks to finalize that page.

Unfortunately in the course of laying out the outside front cover, we realized that the "Dixie Stenberg and Brassy Battalion" logo that we'd used for the original audio show for years was sadly just not suitable for the comic. It didn't fit well with the cover art and it was tough to read on a thumbnail. That meant we had to do a redesign on it, and that took us a couple days to work through. I might post some of the absolutely horrible early iterations of the new logo, when I was just trying out different looks and ideas (if any of you are interested in seeing those, let us know!), but some of them are pretty bad. Thankfully we worked up to something that I really love, much more than I ever loved the old logo. It fits the book and the character perfectly.

And to clarify, we mean just the text portions of the logo. The patch is still 100% the same as it's always been.

Also, sort of by accident, when designing the back cover with your good Not-A-Nazi credits, we accidentally finally designed a real logo for Umket Industries. I say accidentally only because we didn't plan to do that at this stage necessarily, but we needed something to tie the image together on the bottom and it actually just grew very organically. We both really love it, though! See for yourself below, and let us know what you think!

Meanwhile, all we need is to hear from the last few of you about your name spelling/listing for the back cover, and we'll be sending it off to print!

Today we received a scan of the first-ever produced First Brassy Battalion Fighter Squadron patches, and they're amazing!

The run is in production now, and should be delivered to us in the next few weeks. We should have the patches in-hand before the comic itself is even done being printed!

These are SO COOL. Are you as excited as we are?

Thanks again to everyone who donated and helped us reach the new goal, so that we could bring this awesome extra to you!

Heard from the company producing the patches for us, and they say we should have a visual sample of the actual patches sometime in the next 2-3 days! If all looks good, we'll be sure to post it here for you all to see.

In the meantime, have your first taste of some of Peng-Peng's awesome art for the Umket ads!

I love this guy! He's so perfectly old-timey Average-Joe-y!