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The Margins store is back in business! Zora has recovered and is ready to ship your holiday packages. To celebrate their regained mobility (and Black Friday, we guess), everything on our Gumroad is 25% off with the offer code “2020.″ The sale will run through Tuesday, December 1!

✨Click here to head on over! ✨

Items ordered before Friday, Dec 4 will ship on Sat, Dec 5, and items ordered before Friday, Dec 11 will ship on Sat, Dec 12. The last day for US orders guaranteed to arrive by Christmas 2020 is Friday, Dec 11!

Thanks as always for your support!

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📣  SALE EXTENDED! 📣

Hey hey! The 2020 holidays aren’t REALLY over, so we’re extending this sale until the 2020 Christmas shipping deadline of Friday, Dec 11! That means the “2020″ discount code will keep working until then, and then all orders will ship out on Dec 12.

Thanks again, and stay safe this holiday season!

[dates-anthology]

Two days left! The sale ends at 8:00pm EST this Friday, so go get your books (or pins!) if you haven’t already!

[dates-anthology]

The Margins store is back in business! Zora has recovered and is ready to ship your holiday packages. To celebrate their regained mobility (and Black Friday, we guess), everything on our Gumroad is 25% off with the offer code “2020.″ The sale will run through Tuesday, December 1!

✨Click here to head on over! ✨

Items ordered before Friday, Dec 4 will ship on Sat, Dec 5, and items ordered before Friday, Dec 11 will ship on Sat, Dec 12. The last day for US orders guaranteed to arrive by Christmas 2020 is Friday, Dec 11!

Thanks as always for your support!

[dates-anthology]

📣  SALE EXTENDED! 📣

Hey hey! The 2020 holidays aren’t REALLY over, so we’re extending this sale until the 2020 Christmas shipping deadline of Friday, Dec 11! That means the “2020″ discount code will keep working until then, and then all orders will ship out on Dec 12.

Thanks again, and stay safe this holiday season!

[dates-anthology]

The Margins store is back in business! Zora has recovered and is ready to ship your holiday packages. To celebrate their regained mobility (and Black Friday, we guess), everything on our Gumroad is 25% off with the offer code “2020.″ The sale will run through Tuesday, December 1!

✨Click here to head on over! ✨

Items ordered before Friday, Dec 4 will ship on Sat, Dec 5, and items ordered before Friday, Dec 11 will ship on Sat, Dec 12. The last day for US orders guaranteed to arrive by Christmas 2020 is Friday, Dec 11!

Thanks as always for your support!

[dates-anthology]

📣  SALE EXTENDED! 📣

Hey hey! The 2020 holidays aren’t REALLY over, so we’re extending this sale until the 2020 Christmas shipping deadline of Friday, Dec 11! That means the “2020″ discount code will keep working until then, and then all orders will ship out on Dec 12.

Thanks again, and stay safe this holiday season!

[dates-anthology]

The Margins store is back in business! Zora has recovered and is ready to ship your holiday packages. To celebrate their regained mobility (and Black Friday, we guess), everything on our Gumroad is 25% off with the offer code “2020.″ The sale will run through Tuesday, December 1!

✨Click here to head on over! ✨

Items ordered before Friday, Dec 4 will ship on Sat, Dec 5, and items ordered before Friday, Dec 11 will ship on Sat, Dec 12. The last day for US orders guaranteed to arrive by Christmas 2020 is Friday, Dec 11!

Thanks as always for your support!

[dates-anthology]

Dates Volume 3 has been nominated for an Ignatz award!

We’re both so profoundly honored and proud of all our contributors. They poured their hearts into their stories and illustrations and made this book something that can stand alongside those other incredible names.

Voting for this award is open to the public, and ends on the 9th, so if you’ve enjoyed our tales of joyous historical queerness, maybe click this link to be sent a ballot! And if you haven’t checked it out yet you can do so here.

And of course thank you to everyone who backed this book on Kickstarter and helped bring it to life.

Much love,

Zora and Cat

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DATES 3 Update: Name requests out & status update!

Hey all! We just published an update for Dates 3. The tl;dr is: we’ve sent out surveys to collect backer names for the book! If you got one, please fill it out by Wednesday, 4/24 so we can get your preferred name in the book.

If you’re interested in proofing and layout updates, click through and read on!

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AAAAAND wrap! The Dates 3 campaign is over!

That’s it, that’s all, it’s over! We’re closing out the campaign at $36,573, which means we didn’t QUITE hit our second stretch goal, but we got close enough that we’re absolutely going to go through with the second page rate increase for contributors and… well, we’ll see what we can do about that bonus comic. 

Up next for us is prepping, proofing, and printing the book, as well as paying all our contributors once Kickstarter deposits the funds in our account! We’re also going to finish setting up our Crowd Ox page so that backers can add extra stuff onto their pledge and folks who missed the main campaign can slip on through before fulfillment. 

We’ll be updating backers as we go, but stick around here and follow our twitter for quick little tidbits, previews, and photos as we go along!

Thank you all again for all your support—Dates 3 is incredible, and we can’t wait to share it with the world!

[dates-anthology]

The Dates 3 Kickstarter is live!

Speeding trains, galloping horses, long nights in the woods. All the trappings of adventure are waiting for you in the third volume of Dates! An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction!

We Kickstarted Dates 1 in 2015, and Dates 2 in 2017, and now we’re back for round 3! With over fifty contributors and more rip-roarin’ adventure than ever before, Dates 3 is 300+ pages packed with comics, illustrations, and prose. All the stories feature queer characters living their lives to the fullest, and—best of all—there are no tragic endings.

Check out the Kickstarter page for more information and previews—and to learn about all the cool rewards you can get for supporting the campaign! We’ll also be posting more process work right here on our blog and our facebook page, and you can follow our twitter for daily previews and creator features. And even if you aren’t able to back the campaign, a reblog or share can make a real difference!

Are you ready? It’s time for an adventure.

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IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN! There are just minutes left to back Dates 3—the campaign ends at 8:00pm EST!

Want more info? Check out our: Previews • Process tag • Bonuses

Back Dates! An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction now!

[dates-anthology]

The Dates 3 Kickstarter is live!

Speeding trains, galloping horses, long nights in the woods. All the trappings of adventure are waiting for you in the third volume of Dates! An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction!

We Kickstarted Dates 1 in 2015, and Dates 2 in 2017, and now we’re back for round 3! With over fifty contributors and more rip-roarin’ adventure than ever before, Dates 3 is 300+ pages packed with comics, illustrations, and prose. All the stories feature queer characters living their lives to the fullest, and—best of all—there are no tragic endings.

Check out the Kickstarter page for more information and previews—and to learn about all the cool rewards you can get for supporting the campaign! We’ll also be posting more process work right here on our blog and our facebook page, and you can follow our twitter for daily previews and creator features. And even if you aren’t able to back the campaign, a reblog or share can make a real difference!

Are you ready? It’s time for an adventure.

[dates-anthology]

The Kickstarter for this 300+ page volume of queer historical fiction comics, illustration, and prose ends at 8PM EST on MARCH 28th! You can still pick up some amazing bonuses and help us hit some stretch goals—back Dates 3 now!

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With JUST UNDER 47 HOURS LEFT, we’ve unlocked our first stretch goal—spot gloss on the cover and our FIRST CONTRIBUTOR PAY INCREASE! At $37,000 we print the bonus comic & increase contributor pay again—help us get there!

Back Dates! An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction, Volume 3 now!

[dates-anthology]

The Dates 3 Kickstarter is live!

Speeding trains, galloping horses, long nights in the woods. All the trappings of adventure are waiting for you in the third volume of Dates! An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction!

We Kickstarted Dates 1 in 2015, and Dates 2 in 2017, and now we’re back for round 3! With over fifty contributors and more rip-roarin’ adventure than ever before, Dates 3 is 300+ pages packed with comics, illustrations, and prose. All the stories feature queer characters living their lives to the fullest, and—best of all—there are no tragic endings.

Check out the Kickstarter page for more information and previews—and to learn about all the cool rewards you can get for supporting the campaign! We’ll also be posting more process work right here on our blog and our facebook page, and you can follow our twitter for daily previews and creator features. And even if you aren’t able to back the campaign, a reblog or share can make a real difference!

Are you ready? It’s time for an adventure.

[dates-anthology]

The Kickstarter for this 300+ page volume of queer historical fiction comics, illustration, and prose ends at 8PM EST on MARCH 28th! You can still pick up some amazing bonuses and help us hit some stretch goals—back Dates 3 now!

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Dates 3: Finals!

We’ve got just four days to go in the Dates 3 campaign, which means we’re in the home stretch! And to celebrate the home stretch, we bring you: the final covers from every single story in Dates 3 (plus the book’s front cover, to make them line up all nice)!

Click through the images to see lists of credits, or head over to our contributor feature thread on twitter to see each cover even bigger, and paired with the story’s first page! You can also see some Dates 3 thumbnails, pencils, and inks in our process tag, or check out the Dates 3 bonus stuff right through here.

Go back Dates: An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction, Volume 3 on Kickstarter now!

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Dates 3: Cover Process!

Erica Chan, our cover artist for Dates 3, is just… absurdly powerful, and since we’re been lucky enough to have her do our cover illustrations three books running, we wanted to dig in and let you get a glimpse of her process!

We started out by brainstorming, and then Erica brought us a whole bunch of thumbnails that covered a couple different environments and adventurous actions (trees and mountains; climbing and sailing), before we ultimately decided that we wanted to lean into forests and exploration—and that we really wanted to have kids on the cover this time. Then, Erica worked up a rough sketch, did a ton of research, and refined the figures. And after that, it was a long, careful process of inks, colors, and… many tweaks. So many tweaks. Until, finally we had our cover!

We’re incredibly happy with how it turned out and so excited to hold it in our hands! We hit our base goal for Dates 3 yesterday, but if we reach our $30,000 stretch goal, we’ll be able to get some spot gloss on this gorgeous cover (AND increase our contributor page rates by $10/page). So back the book now—there’s just one week left!

Support Dates! An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction, Volume 3 here!

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Dates 3: Inks!

Inks are the second-to-last checkin we schedule out for our artists, and just like pencils and thumbnails, everyone does them differently. Some folks make really heavy use of spot blacks (Sonia and Sparklenaut, the first and fourth images), and others mostly just outline shapes and plan on doing the bulk of their rendering with tones. Regardless, inks are when we see pages start to really firm up and settle into their final form, which is always super exciting for us as editors!

The pages above are from stories by (in order): @sonialiaoart, @ametalias, @fawnprinceling, and @sparklenautarts & @basaliskwrites. 

You can see some Dates 3 thumbnails and pencils in our process tag, and dig into our contributor feature thread on twitter to find the final versions of some of these pages! And, since there are just 10 days left in the campaign:

Go back Dates: An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction, Volume 3 on Kickstarter now!

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Dates 3: Pencils!

We’re two weeks from the end of the Dates 3 Kickstarter, so It’s pencils time! While working on Dates, we have contributors turn in pages at each stage of the comic-making process—thumbnails, pencils, inks, and finals! Pencils are always extremely exciting, because they’re when we get to see the story and characters really take shape! It’s also really cool to see how many different ways creators go about building out their pages—none of the pages above use the same strategies, and everyone uses different shorthand to communicate with their future selves.

The pages above are from stories by (in order): G.C. Houle & Taylor Robin, @callmekitto & Cait Kay, @makkineart​, and @neepawus & @shainadoesart​.

Check out some Dates 3 thumbnails right through here, and go hunt down the final versions of some of these pages in our contributor feature thread on twitter. And, of course:

Go back Dates! An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction, Volume 3 on Kickstarter! 

[dates-anthology]

The Dates 3 Kickstarter is live!

Speeding trains, galloping horses, long nights in the woods. All the trappings of adventure are waiting for you in the third volume of Dates! An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction!

We Kickstarted Dates 1 in 2015, and Dates 2 in 2017, and now we’re back for round 3! With over fifty contributors and more rip-roarin’ adventure than ever before, Dates 3 is 300+ pages packed with comics, illustrations, and prose. All the stories feature queer characters living their lives to the fullest, and—best of all—there are no tragic endings.

Check out the Kickstarter page for more information and previews—and to learn about all the cool rewards you can get for supporting the campaign! We’ll also be posting more process work right here on our blog and our facebook page, and you can follow our twitter for daily previews and creator features. And even if you aren’t able to back the campaign, a reblog or share can make a real difference!

Are you ready? It’s time for an adventure.

[dates-anthology]

The Kickstarter is HALFWAY DONE, with 14 days left and a little under $5,500 before we hit goal—and some phenomenal stretch goals!! Have YOU backed yet?

Also—we’ve been posting process shots and bonus content info here, but we’ve also been spotlighting all our incredible contributors over at our twitter! Go check that out! Tell your friends!

Back the Dates 3 Kickstarter here!

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Dates 3: Thumbnails!

We’re almost two weeks into our Kickstarter campaign for Dates 3 and that means it’s time to turn our chairs around and talk about “the process.” We’ve got thumbnails here from stories by Alan Capes & Shauntae Ball, Isabelle Melançon & Megan Lavey-Heaton, @erysium & Paloma Hernando, and @adamicoarts to give you a little taste of how they all do their thing! Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting more previews from each step of the process so you can see how these amazing stories transformed from sketchy jpeg caterpillars into 600 dpi grayscale tiff butterflies.

Support Dates! An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction, Volume 3 on Kickstarter! 

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Dates 3 Bonus: The Intercontinental Postcard set!

Dates stories take place all across the world: from windswept heights to cozy valleys, and from nearby balconies to far flung plains. This is, of course, because queer stories stretch across all of these places—and we wanted to celebrate that!

For this postcard set, we invited seven Dates artists from Volumes 1 and 2 to create illustrations set on each continent… including Antarctica and (ahem) Oceania. Our incredible artists are:

Val Wise (Europe, Dates 2) • Noella Whitney (Asia, Dates 2) • Ingram (Africa, Dates 1 & 2) • Imas Esther (Oceania, Dates 1 & 2) • Grace Park (North America, Dates 1 & 2) • Dante Luiz (South America, Dates 1 & Dates 2 bonus) • Ayanna Johnson (Antarctica, Dates 1 & 2)

The postcards will be printed on glorious thick cardstock, and will have brief descriptions of the settings and postcard detailing on the back so you can mail them out if you so choose. Get ‘em as part of the Dates 3 Kickstarter, running until March 28th!