The End Of An Era

Dear friends, we have a difficult announcement to make:

We have decided to end our official attempts to finish Cottonstar. This was a painful decision and was not made lightly. However, we have our reasons, which are laid out below.

Firstly, and this was a big one for a long time, we simply didn’t have the capacity to work on it. Between my neural issues causing me to not be able to edit lines or do flats or background painting anymore, and Ben’s need to do full-time paid work as well as commissions so that we would be okay financially, we simply couldn’t keep it up. There weren’t enough hours in the day; nor was there enough energy to go around. 

During this time of hustling and full-time employment (and in my case, having to radically step back from work), we grew as people and as creatives. To be blunt, we have outgrown the comic, at least as things stand right now. We were unable to finalise the script going forward, and not having a script meant we didn’t know what to draw. As time went on, the divide kept increasing, until it felt impossible to get back to it.

This arrangement carried on throughout Ben’s last three jobs. Now that he has a really great job with a prestigious studio, things are more stable, but we still depend heavily on commission money. However, it has opened up a little more time for personal work.

We really did intend to follow through with our comic in black and white format, but quickly realised that the same problems as before kept cropping up and preventing us from working on it. But now, these problems were in addition to the big divide springing up between us and our beloved webcomic.

The final straw that pushed us into making this announcement is the realisation that worrying about it has been keeping us from working on other comics projects. The guilt overwhelms us when we think of making other comics when Cottonstar is still sitting there unfinished. It’s always there in the back of our minds, and the cumulative effect is a potent inspiration killer.

Trust us, no one is as disappointed as we are in making this decision. We love Cottonstar, we love the characters, and we love everything it led to for us. But the bottom line is, we can’t carry on like this. We have to shelve it indefinitely. It’s possible that a bolt of inspiration will strike us someday in the future, and we may return to Cottonstar then. We had so many things we wanted to do and show. Maybe those things will still happen. But we can’t make any promises. Maybe we will recycle the as yet unseen characters and ideas for other projects, who knows?

As for what will happen to the site: We’re going to leave it up for the foreseeable future. We worked hard on it and still want people to have the opportunity to read it and enjoy the art that we and others made for it. The facebook page will be closed down, but we’ll hang on to the twitter account, just for the sake of having the name belong to us. You never know what might happen in the future.

So, there you have it. We’re really sorry to those who were holding on to hope that this project would be completed. And to those people we also say: Thank you. It’s because of the readers,  fans, and those who supported us at expos and cons and online that we even made it this far. Thank you for believing in us and our little comic, which had no clear direction but a lot of heart. The things we’ve learnt working on and publishing Cottonstar are worth much more than money to us. The experience alone was worth it; the fact that all of you came along for the journey with us was a glorious, wonderful addition. We cannot overstate our gratitude for your support, patience, excitement, and love. It has humbled us that something we made could be this important to others. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts, and the cast and crew thank you as well. The time we spent with you, and them, and all of this, was time well spent.

Thank you, and good night.

With the most sincere love

Ben & Danelle

PS: If you are interested in keeping up to date on any of our new projects, please follow us on any of the platforms below:

Ben: Instagram, Patreon, Twitter

Danelle: Instagram, Patreon, Twitter