Hey everyone, remember how you’ve always been able to donate $10 to have yourself appear in one of our comics? Well, we’ve decided to put together a system that will allow you even more chances to contribute designs to The Fourth! Here are the details:

  • $10 will still get you a cameo of your human self in the background of one of our comics! All we need is a picture and you’ll be featured. However, this will be a very limited
    appearance; typically you’ll just be standing around. You can pay for this reward just once, so make it count!
  • $15 allows you to design a Lurkin or Flish (or perhaps a demon or ghost, in some cases) of your very own! Again, limited to mostly just standing around, but you can help us populate Castle Skärva. Just remember: Lurkins are always supposed to wear their uniforms and can’t have much (if any) hair showing in the Castle, so if you want those details included you’ll have to wait a bit longer. We’ll allow resubmissions of this reward tier (i.e. if you want to design another Lurkin, you just have to pay another $15 and let us know).
  • $25 gets you a character who will interact with one of the main characters once. You can either provide a picture of yourself or design a Lurkin/Flish. Keep in mind that we can’t always feature every type of character. Again, we’ll allow resubmissions on Lurins/Flish/other minions but not yourself.
  • $35 gets you the chance to design a recurring Lurkin, Flish, etc. This character will be seen frequently in backgrounds and may even be used for small dialog (such as delivering a message). Unfortunately, no human characters – it would be a bit weird to have a specific person show up frequently at this price point. Resubmissions allowed in this case as well.
  • $50 lets you design a recurring Lurkin, Flish, etc that will also have a personality of your choosing. This means your character will show up perhaps a bit more frequently and will likely have a minor role in the story. A good example would be one of Gilly’s friends, or some as-of-yet-to-be-determined minor characters. Keep in mind that we’ll have to approve your personality choice, and you won’t get a chance to actually write any of the dialogue – although if you’re very specific with the personality, we’d be inclined to make it work. No resubmissions here, by the way. We don’t want you guys to design all our characters!
  • $100 lets you include yourself as a minor recurring character! Expensive, yes, because we don’t expect anyone to do it really. I honestly don’t know how this one would work, given that we don’t have many chances for human characters to recur, but we’ll cross that bridge when someone donates $100! This one would work similarly to the $35 Lurkin/Flish/minion reward. No resubmissions on this one, for obvious reasons.
If you’re interested in donating toward one of these rewards, PLEASE email me first: victor [at] thefourthcomic [dot] com. We just want to be sure we’re all on the same page before money gets exchanged.

Of course, if you just want to donate money you can always do that. Your characters also don’t have to appear right away – in fact, there’s a good chance we won’t be able to include them right away unless the timing is perfect. For example, we could really use Lurkins, Flish, and ghosts for the upcoming fight scenes in Castle Skärva, but later arcs might not allow us to include certain character types. If you decide to donate toward one of the rewards, just give us your specifications and we’ll include the character when the time is right. We’ll also allow you to design more character types as more become available. We do reserve the right to change our minds about any of these reward tiers, either by altering the description or changing the price in some way. We’ll be reasonable with any changes, though, and try to work with you should any problems arise.

Remember: any money you donate to The Fourth will go right back into the site, either to help pay operating costs or to help fund ad campaigns. If we somehow make more money than we expect with this, maybe some will go toward more art tools and the like, but I doubt that will come up. Keep an eye out once summer starts, too, because Courtney will probably open up general commission rates as well!