Five or six years ago, I joined Jonny Jimison’s Patreon page. If I remember correctly, he’d committed to redrawing his Dragon Lord Saga in color (having published books one and two in black and white), and the patreon was a way of inviting his readers into the process.
I was already a fan of Jonny’s comic strips and had backed the Kickstarter campaigns for his books, but it wasn’t until I became a Patreon supporter that I really understood how dedicated Jonny is to his work, and it’s that dedication of Jonny’s that’s really impressed me over the years.
A lot of folks who start Patreon pages come out the gate with a flurry of material for their backers, then eventually the excitement wanes and updates become few and far between. But not so with Jonny. Patiently and diligently his work continues to this day, a steady stream of new pages and comics every week. And that diligence has paid off in the honing of the quality and detail of his craftsmanship.
In the years since, it’s been a joy to go from watching Jonny work to working directly with him on a number of projects. He designed this year’s Hutchmoot poster. He designed our HutchDecks trading cards. He’s developed the Rabbit Trails comic strip. And he’s become an integral part of the wider artistic community surrounding the Rabbit Room.
It’s that patient, careful work ethic (along with our love of his humor and stories) that convinced us to bring the Dragon Lord Saga under the banner of Rabbit Room Press, and I’m so glad we did.
After years of painstaking labor redrawing and coloring Martin & Marco we were thrilled with the final product and so were readers. Folks have been clamoring for the next book for two years, and now we’re proud to announce that the full-color work on The River Fox is complete. It’ll be in readers’ hands this Christmas (unpredictable shipping woes notwithstanding).
I often describe the Dragon Lord Saga as Calvin & Hobbes meets The Princess Bride. It’s a story about two brothers and the zany adventure they get swept into. The books are filled with humor and memorable characters and an overriding sense of fun.
Book one, Martin & Marco is available in the Rabbit Room Store. Book two, The River Fox, is now available for pre-orders with a release set for November 19th (fingers crossed—everything in the production chain is unpredictable right now). We can’t wait for readers to feast their eyes on the fruit of Jonny’s work. It’s been a long wait, but The River Fox is, at last, coming your way in full color.
(And perhaps the best part of all of this is that, thanks to Jonny’s diligence, work on book three, Dragons & Desperados, is now well underway.)