Dear Insane Children, 

Font Lord here.

Just letting you know that once again we have run out of art print shelf space so have retired a bunch of prints to make space for new future awesome ones.
Let’s all press F to pay our respects!

The 4 prints in this post are now no longer available individually and I have created a couple of “Double Tube” products on Mysterious for the last 5ish remaining stock of each. Click here to see…

* Surprise Guest + Flamingo
* Card Guard + White Rabbit 

As you can imagine, when they’re gone, they’re gone so snap up these double-bargains while you can!

– Big hugs from my 37 degree room in Shanghai… phew!

Dear Insane Children, 

For those of you who didn’t want to click on the previous post (because spoilers) but felt left out because you didn’t get to see some awesome art… 

I got you covered!

Here’s a new illustration from Joey of a Giant Alice with CAKE in hand… 

Joey says:

Alice holding a piece of disgusting cake in her hand, she is huge right now, her house shattered into pieces, black tentacles dancing behind her.

Indeed. 

So… have your illustration and eat your cake too!

From Shanghai with Love, 

-American 

Dear Insane Children,

I don’t know if you know this (I think many of you do) but the Alice series is extremely cathartic for me. Because, as a child, I was abused in many ways – psychological, physical, and sexual. And by a wide variety of people – family members, caretakers, and strangers.

(trigger warning – sexual abuse stuff)

Last night, I had a nightmare about one instance. And I woke up this morning feeling angry, sad, and generally upset.

I thought back to a few years ago, this particular abuser resurfaced when a family member visited Shanghai. Over lunch, and quite casually, she asked, “So, did John (alias) get to you too?” John was her step-brother. He’d abused me on multiple occasions as a child but I never said a word about it to anyone. To hear her ask this question… my blood ran cold. 

He’d abused her. He’d abused me. And he’d abused many other children… She thought I knew I wasn’t alone. I did not. It didn’t make me feel better knowing there had been many others. In this, I’d have preferred to remain alone.

But she let me know that he’d finally (at age 50) gone to prison forever. Convicted of a rape-murder apparently. Many years too late… but justice at last. 

So when I sat down to review recent images from the Alice: Asylum pre-production team, I had a dark laugh at the latest from Adam (main image above – awesome work, Adam!). 

For those who’ve read the Narrative Outline, you’ll recognize this as the End Scene. 

For those who haven’t… well, spoilers! 

Simply put… The ending of Asylum has Alice turn into a child predator hunter… using her Wonderland powers in the real world and tentacle mind raping them to death. The “Little Black Book” she takes from Radcliffe serves as a map, guiding Alice on her missions of vengeance. And when she finds her prey… woo, boy. Watch out! 

Seeing stuff like this… makes me happy. At least as happy as you can feel about this sort of thing. And I hope that others out there who share in this sort of terrible history can also find some solace in witnessing vengeance served to those who most deserve it.

Omri did a fine rendition of the End Game dress. 

From Shanghai with Vengeance, 

-American

Dear Insane Children, 

As Martin mentioned in the last update, we are “free” – but some of us are freer than others. While it’s true that we have freedom to move around the city… I’m lacking in a certain critical freedom unique to our household: Freedom to Sleep! 

I guess you could say I am free *from* sleep. I don’t even know if I am making sense. What I’m trying to say is, Leeloo is keeping us awake all day and night. Compared to Lucky, she’s a handful (multiple handfuls). But we’re hoping this phase passes quickly and we can get back to our regular sleep schedule. 

Speaking of schedules, yeah, we might be back to our regular Live Stream schedule soon. Mainly up to Martin… he has to decide when he’s ready to commit to visiting our house… and potentially ending up trapped here if there’s another sudden lockdown. 

Meanwhile…

The Alice: Asylum pre-production team continues to crank out tons of great art.

This is a character simply referred to as “The Lord.” You get to kick his butt… but in his brain. I don’t want to say more because (spoilers). But if you’re interested in knowing where he fits into the Asylum narrative, you’ll find him in Narrative Outline (right at the end). 

Alice does some freaky Otherlands stuff to him. Don’t worry… he deserves it. Awesome art by Adam. 

And speaking of Otherlands… the creature sketch above from Norm is an idea for the sort of monsters we’ll find lurking inside the mind of Radcliffe. 

A top hot guy with pens for legs who spews money. What did you expect to find inside the mind of a lawyer? 

And when you run into these kinds of monsters… you’ll need weapons and AMMO:

Those are ammo ideas from Gareth (yeah, he’s doing art on Asylum again!). These would be projectiles used by the Croquet Mallet weapon. 

Ok, that’s it for now. I need to go drink more coffee. 

From Shanghai with Zzzzz, 

-American 

Dear Insane Children, 

Font Lord here.  
It’s been a while since we chatted   🙂 

Just letting you know that now Shanghai lockdown is pretty much over, we are all trying to get back on top of things, which of course means clearing the backlog of Patreon rewards.

So those of you who have been waiting on the last few months of prints (that you can see in this post), and also those of you at the 3x$35 level, do not fret, we’ll be sending these out in the coming week or so! Which means that they will probably start arriving with you mid to late July.

We’re also going to be getting back into the swing of Live-Steams again in the not too distant future, likely to be mid-late-June, so please look out for updates about that.
I hope we can still remember how to be entertaining in front of the camera for 2 hours  😉

From Shanghai with freedom

– Cheers

Dear Insane Children,

You’ve heard of Chekhov’s Gun… 

…a dramatic principle that suggests that details within a story or play will contribute to the overall narrative. This encourages writers to not make false promises in their narrative by including extemporaneous details that will not ultimately pay off by the last act, chapter, or conclusion. (link to quote source)

And if you pay attention to TV and film, you’ll notice that when “a terrible threat to humanity” is proposed (Thano’s Snap for example), at some point, the film has to pay it off… no matter how awful the consequences. And it’s often during the return journey from this darkest of places (the nadir) that our hero proves she’s mastered her hard-earned lessons. 

So you know how we’ve created Shadow Alice – and how she threatens to destroy Wonderland and everything it represents?

Yeah, well, that’s a thing and it’s going to get paid off. And it’s not supposed to be pretty. But you can take some solace in the fact that heroes (almost) always rise from the darkest depths to reclaim their kingdoms. 

In the meantime… 

Shadow Alice is going to have her night. 

And it’s going to be a dark, dark night. 

And the best part? 

You get to PLAY her during this sequence! 

Some truly amazing art from Adam Narozanski for these scenes. You can follow him on Instagram to check out more of his work. We’re really fortunate to have his art included in the Design Bible. And even more fortunate to have YOU supporting Adam and the rest of the Alice: Asylum pre-production team. 

Today is 6/1/2022 in Shanghai. We’re officially OUT of Lockdown after 60+ days (we have some friends who were in lockdown 70+ days!). Yay for that! 

We’re also now around 6 months from the delivery of the finished Design Bible PDF (and related materials, etc). The next 6 months will be filled with lots more great art, design, and project updates. 

From Shanghai with Freedom, 

-American