EtherFuture’s lead project, Dance of Heart began back in June on the same day AnimeNEXT ’09 kicked off. Since then, KOU (artist) and myself (scriptwriter/director) have produced 25 issues of DoH as of today. Despite the hurdles of life, school, computer issues, and that nagging desire to evolve to a level of seamless, accurate production, we’re proud of each and every issue we’ve put out. To those who have given us feedback, waited patiently for the next issue, or just plain forgot about us until now, thank you for even checking us out. Because of you, we are making some changes that we’re excited to share and hope you’ll find worth reading on about.
We have decided to start a lighthearted, minimalist 4-koma series with KOU and I maintaining our respective roles as artist and writer. What we hope to achieve with this is to provide bite-sized, non-linear, random entertainment that we can drum up on a quick, consistent basis while we produce Dance of Heart. We like to laugh and poke fun at ourselves and the characters we love. At the very least, we hope you will find it cute enough to look forward to. As of now, we can comfortably assure one 4-koma strip per week. If we release more, we’ll be sure to tweet you about it.
To provide a more easy-to-consume narrative experience, we will be officially rescheduling the release Dance of Heart issues from weekly to a three-day-release basis. What this means is that once we have produced three or more issues of DoH, we will then publicly release each one after the other on a daily cycle. This way, readers can solidly expect a minimum of three day-by-day releases rather than being let down (and letting ourselves down with unforeseen circumstances beyond our control) week after week, AND receive a smoother reading experience that better suits this kind of character-driven storyline. Along with our 4-koma weekly releases, we do hope you’ll be able to stick with us a bit better and be encouraged to build community with other readers.
We’ll be using Twitter as our core means for getting update notices to you. Twitter is awesome for reaching out to many people at once and establishing a network of common interests. So we encourage you to sign up for an account. To get you started in the Twitterverse, you can follow me (ALEX), KOU, and, of course, Dance of Heart. I also follow other webcomic creators like Megatokyo / Fred Gallagher , Applegeeks’s “Hawk”, and Ananth.
Issue #026 of Dance of Heart will be released this Friday (New Year’s Day) in respect to our initial release schedule (Mon/Fri). The new release scheduling above will be enacted with the coming of the new year. We hope to continue to grow in our skills and that we’ll meet even more wonderful people along the way.
On behalf of our humble creative circle, EtherFuture, we wish you a happy New Year’s Day! Hope to see you in 2010!
_ALEX
Co-founder of EtherFuture