The inspiration behind Buddy and Friend
about 1 year ago – Sat, Feb 04, 2023 at 08:33:01 AM

Hey there, wonderful backers!

A lot of exciting things are happening this weekend!

First of all, Buddy and Friend is over halfway funded! Huzzah!

And tomorrow....

Yep. Tomorrow I turn the ripe old age of 38. I would really love to get Buddy and Friend funded by then, but we'll see what happens!

So speaking of Buddy and Friend, where did I actually come up with the idea for it?

A lot of folks who've read it as a webcomic back in the day have said it felt like a D&D campaign gone horribly wrong. Surprisingly, I hadn't started playing D&D at the time that I was working on Buddy and Friend and I actually didn't give it a try until a year after in 2014.

While I love the fantasy genre, I also love making fun of the fantasy genre. It's something that takes itself so seriously sometimes that it's really just begging to be made fun of. One of the biggest inspirations for Buddy and Friend is my love of RPGs - specifically the kind of RPGs that give you choices on how you want to handle quests. Think of things like The Elder Scrolls series or Dragon Age, where there are different ways of completing a quest and some of them are just straight up terrible.

I tend to play those kinds of games obsessively a few times over and study the different outcomes of each quest. I'm eternally fascinated with consequences and seeing a domino effect set in motion when completing a quest a certain way changes how other quests happen later on, or what characters decide to stick around versus who turns against you.

I've always been the kind of player who loves being "chaotic stupid" and trying to see how horribly I can complete a quest without actually failing the quest. "Oh, there's a hostage that needs rescuing? Whoops, my bad. I got him killed." "Oh you want me to stop a group of werewolves? Too bad, I totally just befriended them all and now they're coming to kill the 'good' guys." I can't help it. I love making my characters make bad decisions and seeing what happens down the road.

That mentality has also traveled into how I play D&D. Make dumb decisions and see what happens. I can't help it.

Buddy and Friend is my love letter to any game that allows me to be the stupidest version of myself that I can possibly be. Why be a hero when you can be an idiot amirite?

Thank you so much for joining me on this ridiculous journey! I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed making it!

Have a great weekend!

-M

But wait! There's more! Here's some other cool campaigns to check out!

Night Wolf Voodoo Doll 12" Plushie & 6 New Connecting Covers

I had the pleasure of co-hosting the Explain Yourself Podcast last week and interviewing Rob Multari of Night Wolf. It was a really fun interview and you can check out the replay here if you're interested!

Anyway, Rob has a campaign going for a cute, cuddly werewolf plushie and you can also catch up on books 1-6 of his Night Wolf series! Win/win!

You can check out the campaign here! There's just five days left!

Superheresies Showcase 1971: Golden Age Heroes Get Diverse

In many ways, comic books of the Golden Age in the 1930s and 1940s were groundbreaking, giving us tons of new characters in a brand-new genre: superheroes. However, in those days comics weren't very diverse, so superheroes tended to be white, straight, and mostly male. But what if they hadn't been? In SUPERHERESIES SHOWCASE 1971, public domain comic book heroes from the 1940s are reimagined as nonwhite, women, and/or LGBTQ+ 

Click here to check out Superheresies!

What a great first day!
about 1 year ago – Fri, Feb 03, 2023 at 08:29:09 AM

Hi there, wonderful backers!

Thank you so much for giving The Misadventures of Buddy and Friend a chance <3

I've been nervous about launching a new series because I wasn't sure if a fantasy/comedy that made fun of all the tropes was something people would be interested in, but the fact that so many people have shown up to support it on day 1 puts my mind at ease.

For those of you who are just tuning in, allow me to properly introduce myself! I'm Matta Sorcier and I'm a self-taught artist and writer. My path towards comics has been a pretty unconventional one, to say the least. 

I grew up in an extremely toxic home environment and I spent a lot of my life as a transient soul, drifting around from one terrible minimum wage retail job to another, as well as enduring a gauntlet of dead end unpaid internships. For the most part, I believed that I wouldn't amount to anything. All signs in my life were pointing that way. I always wanted to tell stories and make comics, but I didn't really know where to begin.

After going through a particularly rough patch that lasted almost 5 years, I started Buddy and Friend on a whim back in 2013 and posted it online as a webcomic. Working on Buddy and Friend helped me work through some severely debilitating depression and gave me a reason to crawl out of bed, even if it was at 3pm. I'm pretty sure it saved my life. 

I can't say it was like a switch was magically flipped and everything was happy and awesome when I decided to start making Buddy and Friend, but it helped me establish a routine and gave me something to look forward to in a time where my life had completely fallen apart. I kept Buddy and Friend going for a good 7 years before life got in the way and I had to stop. 

I never really stopped thinking about Buddy and Friend since I went on hiatus, though. I always wanted to keep going, do something with it and see it through until the end. 

After learning a lot about drawing and writing over the years and successfully publishing my other comic, Sacrimony: A Tale of Love, Life and Death - In No Particular Order on Kickstarter (it's totally available as an add-on in both pdf and physical book form, btw), I decided to dust off Buddy and Friend, make it better and try my hand at getting it out in the world through Kickstarter. 

I'm so happy that you all decided to join me on this wonderful, silly journey and I hope that Buddy and Friend brings you as much joy reading it as I felt while working on it. 

If you can help spread the word about the campaign and get more people to read this humble little comic, I'd greatly appreciate it!

Here's a handy dandy link to share it on twitter!

Here's a handy dandy link to share it on facebook!

Thanks so much for your support! 

-M