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M9-15
Posted on 2025-01-25 by Zabetta Cragley

Thanks for reading the Minor Niner preview! I'll know an exact release date this August. I'm hoping to have it coincide with the actual season this comic takes place in.

Comic notes:

  • Bon Echo is a real provincial park! The Group of Seven liked painting Mazinaw Rock. I drove up to the park a couple years ago to get a bunch of photos and video for reference and to use as promo materials. The comic doesn't quite capture the scale of the cliffs. I grew up near-ish so we went here a lot as kids.
  • October 19th at Bon Echo probably wouldn't be as colourful as this or as warm. Usually all the leaves are off the trees but doing the fall colours looks prettier than all grey everything.

This is the origin story of the origin story! How did the pirates become friends? What was Ivanhoe like in school? After getting expelled and denied entrance to a private high school, Ivanhoe Scott gets sent to Black River Secondary where he meets his future best friends who later become the π-rates. Ivanhoe is approached by an older student named Kingston, who convinces him to dig up some "treasure" buried and abandoned by some gangsters. What follows is the camping trip from hell...

Minor Niner releases September 2025 as a digital download or print edition. The comic is 48 pages long.

Alpha of the North – Available Now!

Posted on 2023-11-27 by Zabetta Cragley 
Ivanhoe and his crew of wannabe pirates head into the wilds of Northern Ontario and run afoul of some shady ship builders. The pirates owe the ship builders a significant sum of money for a boat they destroyed, which leads them on a chase across the North and ends in a brawl on a train in the middle of nowhere. When the dust finally settles, Alpha finds himself stranded in the middle of the night hoping for a miracle...
Alpha carrying an axe at night with a train behind him.

Alpha of the North is finally available in both digital download and print edition! It’s available on Ko-fi (print and digital), Patreon, and Globalcomix. Print edition is $12 USD and ships to Canada, USA, and the UK. If you are outside of those areas, please send me a message and I can get a quote on shipping. Digital edition is $6.50 USD.

To read a preview of Alpha of the North click here. Use the “older post” link to navigate back through the comic.

Status Update – January 2025

Posted on 2025-01-03 by Zabetta Cragley

Happy New Year!

I am busy plugging away at inking chapter 3 and Minor Niner at the moment. This post is mostly for me to track my progress on things

  • Chapter 3
    • 45/75 Drawn
    • 14/75 Inked
    • 1/75 Flatted
    • Digital Cover Page: Complete
    • Print Cover Page: Not Drawn
  • Minor Niner
    • 48/48 Drawn
    • 24/48 Inked
    • 6/48 Flatted
    • Print Cover Page: Not Drawn
  • Chapter 2
    • Print Cover Page: Drawn
  • Chapter 1
    • Print Cover Page: Flatted
    • 40/75 Reformatted
  • Chapter 4
    • 27/?? Thumbnailed

I’m planning to start publishing Chapter 3 to coincide with Webtoon’s 2025 contest, so that should be on March 15th. That requires a really substantial panel count for each update. Because of this 1/3 of Chapter 3 will be done by June.

I want to get a 15 page preview of Minor Niner published before March just so it doesn’t screw with the order of posts. You may notice that the comic is a little easier to navigate now. I rejigged some of the dates on my posts so that the chapter 2 epilogue falls after chapter 2 and the Alpha of the North preview isn’t in the middle of other updates.

Speaking of rejigging, I’m still working on reformatting chapter 1 to be a bit more consistent. This has had the added bonus of forcing me to doing some layer management in photoshop. I’ve got a good system now, but I had no fucking idea what I was doing during chapter 1. I’ve been fixing some minor typos and visual things that were annoying me. This is getting me set up to print chapter 1, which I’d like to work on post-Minor Niner. BTW I’ve finally managed to get a fucking cover page drawn for the comic. Yes, this will be shaded.

Chapter 2’s cover page follows similar ominous Sulphur Tongue imagery. The rather plain cover pages I do for the digital version will get used in the print versions as interior cover pages. Chapter 3’s digital page is already done. You’ll see it around March 5th. I had a plan for Chapter 3’s cover page, but I had to abandon it because I cut that particular scene.

I’m REALLY excited to drop Chapter 3. I think I’m going to have to up my rating on Webtoon to mature. RIP to the under 18s reading the comic on there. (I’m not going to tell anyone what to read, but based on my demographics from some sites, the under 18s aren’t reading this anyways LOL)

I’ve once again had to edit the comic on Webtoon because Ivanhoe diving into the Hudson naked was too spicy for them. I also had to change the bit about him meeting Marina as a 17-year-old because that was a no-no, too. Surprise! This is kind of an important plot point! It sets a rather important storyline into motion that we’ll revisit in Chapter 6/7. I hope people are paying attention to what’s going on in this comic because I’m dropping foreshadowing throughout. Reminder, I never post censored pages here, GlobalComix or ComicFury (my newest mirror)