DOTU will be going into hibernation for a bit. The comic will continue on Patreon at the schedule determined by the latest milestone goal while I build up a buffer to hopefully post public pages at a better speed in the future.
DOTU has been running since 2011, and of the 265 pages I posted at a weekly rate or faster, all were done significantly below minimum wage. We’ve grown a huge amount since then, but I’m also in a different place now, both personally and financially, and I have to cut back on the comic to make more time for the work that pays the bills.
I reduced my schedule to twice-monthly pages last October. The per-page pay rate is now fair and sustainable, and a huge help toward those aforementioned bills. However, the current pacing of the comic isn’t ideal, and month-to-month patronage can be unstable at times. The only fix for these problems is to be able to post public weekly pages again.
The comic will return to the public when I can reliably post weekly pages (or faster) at a fair rate. This will happen when we reach either:
A 6-month buffer of weekly pages (which would take about a year to build on Patreon at the current speed, and I’d return to public hiatus after the buffer pages are all posted) AND at least 350 patrons to ensure stability
OR
The Patreon milestone goal for permanent 4x/monthly pages.
I encourage everyone who wants to continue reading the comic to pledge on Patreon. In addition to new pages, there’s nearly 4 years of bonus content in the archives. The next page is already up on Patreon, with another page coming in one week (8/13).
If you want to be notified if/when DOTU returns to the public, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Click the link for more info.
Sharing the public website with others, and voting on Top Webcomics, can bring in new readers and can help the comic return to the public more quickly. If you have a blog or website, feel free to link to the comic or talk about it. This is also a huge help.
Special thanks to this month’s Ad Sponsor patron, Mark M, for helping to keep the site free of tracking ads in August!