Hiroyasu Ike is a freelance professional artist who for nearly a decade has worked on all kinds of projects – concepts for indie films, art for board games, indie video games and book covers, and sold hand-crafted sculptures to earn their living. But they’ve never had the courage before to make works with their own stories and characters and offer them up for people to read – until now. “Knives and Cigarettes” and “Bastard Prince” are two original BL/shnen-ai manga they spend the last year writing and scripting in their spare moments. So everything’s all set – except for the artwork, which they’ll be doing alone. The thing is, they want to make the artwork as high quality as possible for these manga, which takes their time and attention to detail. They could really use some help while they make these. They believe even $1 a month to support their work would be both a great encouragement and a help to them. Times have got progressively tougher since they started work as a professional artist; their support would go towards allowing them to keep making art, and updating these two original manga as frequently as possible, while also making them available to read online, and eventually as printed volumes. If you choose to support them with a larger donation, there will be opportunities to see “behind the scenes” of the manga – how they scripted and created them, how they develop characters, how they make the art and prep it for publishing online, and more. For higher tier supporters there will be cool freebies offered, such as a free commissioned work per year of your own choice for your own personal use, limited signed artworks, or the chance for some one-to-one Q&A/teaching about art (or you can request tutorials on something specific if you’d like to know how they do things). You will also automatically receive signed 1st edition copies of the printed volumes of each of these mangas when printed if you become a top tier supporter. Even if you aren’t interested in the manga but would just like to support them as an artist, they’d be super-grateful for that, too! What’s so great about Knives and Bastard Prince? As much as they like BL manga, they always wanted to find more BL stories that had thriller elements to them, less predictable plots, and maybe less of the usual clichs. Guys who act more like guys, with all the issues guys tend to have, finding themselves in improbable and inextricable situations with other guys. So that’s what they’re writing here – something a little grittier – maybe a little more realistic, and hopefully enjoyable! 🙂 New pages for these two manga will be uploaded to Patreon first as a mini-issue of several pages, twice per month. They will be available after on Tapastic, once per month as a single update to the chapter. With enough support this could become more frequent, as they’ll then be able to dedicate their prime working time to these manga.
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