All this to say: Don't work with these people. I hope that Xell takes this as a hint that she should retire from the comics scene completely and we never hear another thing from or about her. If you see Xell starting a new comics-adjacent or creative collective or venture, RUN!

Even though they (eventually) got paid for & shipped to my house, I didn't get to see the print proof--it was sent to Isa & she didn't tell me she got it until I asked, was told she approved it weeks ago. Never got to see it! There were issues with the book that could have been fixed if I'd seen it!

I was told over and over that I would need to wait, excuse after excuse. It was like pulling teeth to do shit like get her to pay for some bookmarks or keychains, and then later the books themselves. In the meantime, I was in the dark about our books!

Keeping in mind that, going into the kickstarter I had the book basically done outside of a few bonus pages I'd set aside room for in our initial quote and finished over a couple of weeks, everything should have been good to go as soon as Xell sent the money to the correct vendors.

Not to mince words, the survey was shit, didn't ask anything useful, and as a result of what would follow, caused us basically endless misery for the next several years in regards to changing addresses, dead email addresses, unresponsive backers who I just wanted to give what they paid for!

When our campaign ended, I knew I had to send out a survey & was trying to figure out what I wanted to put on it so that I could get the info I needed re: some custom art tiers. So when I messaged Xell about what I should include in a survey, she was like "I already sent one out! You're welcome!"

With so many people needing to access the same account, it was impossible to keep track of alerts and messages. Questions were directed to all 3 of us, and the odds that we found out about them right away were basically zero, making all 3 of us look like total flakes.

Managing the kickstarter was immediately difficult, because there were two others happening at the time, Go Get A Roomie vol 1 had just wrapped, and Yamino launched Sister Claire vol 1 the second ours ended.

I set up the kickstarter, messaged Xell for feedback because I was unsure of the campaign's structure and formatting, and with a tentative date that I wanted it to go live. Her response was to launch it immediately, and not...actually tell me she had done that! Found out it was live hours later.

(Ironically, if we'd waited just a little longer, Kickstarter opened to Canadians soon after that and we could have handled everything on our own, which is what we both would have preferred)