#lumsel

[spider-artdump]

[k25ff]

"Pick a card."

I was given the honour of doing some guest art for Foreach, so I went completely ballistic and drew an entire 22-card Major Arcana set over the course of less than three days, terrifying myself and lumsel. The cards themselves are spoilery in places, so here's a small sample that shouldn't hint at too much, just the protagonists of the comic. The rest of them can be found in the guest art section of Foreach's archive.

[txttletale]

I'm not really certain if totally abolishing IP would really help the working artist within the current capitalist system. Publishers would have no obligation to pay artists any kind of cut if they didn't need to negotiate the rights to republish a specific work. Artists-for-hire and the like would be able to freely distribute their works, but without the capital that is available to publishers, they would have little ability to make any kind of living off of it. Like, okay, maybe you are including abolishing capital when you say abolish IP but that's kinda burying the lede, isn't it?

not really! i'm pretty open about being a revolutionary communist -- 'abolish capital' is the implicit context for all my political positions.

& while i agree that totally abolishing IP law while leaving capitalism unchanged would not be all that much better, i do place a lot of value on the original creators being able to create things -- i find it difficult to believe that, for example, no game publisher or comic publisher would not see the obvious marketing value of distributing kurvitz' disco elysium 2 or publishing alan moore doing his own watchmen stuff, or that barring that that either of those projects would fail to explode on kickstarter.

that said, i have presented goals for what IP law 'should' look like under capitalism: instant entry into the public domain upon the death of the creator, outlaw work-for-hire, maximum IP sale duration of 10 years -- as well as direct legislative targets in the short term: rolling back the 1998 copyright extension act and the 1976 one to put US law back at lifespan+50 and implementing 'use-it-or-lose-it' provisions (already seeing niche use in the EU) which allow creators to file for reversion of copyright if the rightsholder isn't actively exploiting the IP

[irradiate-space]

Read Foreach

@lumsel has written, and is writing, a good comic.

[i-dont-think-thats-true]

I don’t think that’s true

There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...

[hauntedpurple]

tell me about. The Purple Project.

Vi is young witchlet who wants to follow her mother in her footsteps to become the town’s main coven’s member.

She with the help of her companion Penny are doing their usual help arounds, finding lost kid and lost angry senior troll among other things.

Will Vi be able to free herself from the strings of her mother, or will someone else start pulling those strings?

Currently in bit of a hold.

[andmaybegayer]

because assad was bad you might be tempted to think that a theocratic revolutionary government is good. do not do this.

[fipindustries]

@lumsel BUSTED!!! BUSTED!!! NOW EVERYONE WILL KNOW YOUR AN AFAB!!!!!!!!!!!

[phaeton-flier]

The worst part about the Sniper TF2 crossing the picket line during a strike is that he taunts you while he's doing it. Incredibly obnoxious, reactionary behavior, AND it's an insta-kill.

[k25ff]

A silly mech genre concept (and great character designs) from lumsel where the handler keeps trying to get the pilot to wear maid outfits and the like and the pilot ain't having any of it. (1825)

[artbyblastweave]

One thing I like about Worm is that in a media ecosystem that keeps claiming that they're gonna write about Supervillains before just chickening out and recreating Megamind from first principles, Worm instead leans full tilt into that one @lumsel post about how just because the cops are bad doesn't mean you should assume that the Mafia are actually secretly good

[epistemebabu]

I knew a polish dude who was literally in this kind of situation (soviet-era; he died in his 80s, a couple years back), but they were polish children (teenagers?), also. A bad time was had by all.

“I killed kids and now I feel sad because I Had To Do It” genre of movie but it’s from the pov of a Soviet soldier after a Red Dawn type scenario where he shot American child soldiers

[frankenfossil]

Guest art for Foreach by @lumsel!

[inverseaxolotl]

some guest art for @lumsel's foreach, a webcomic you should definitely check out here :p

[papaya-inspiration]

Foreach 2024 Reader Survey Results

So, my buddy @lumsel makes a lil webcomic called Foreach. I help 'em out with it sometimes. The comic's website doesn't have a comment section, so I thought it'd be fun to do a little year-end survey to see who was reading and what they think!

We had an incredible response, with 279 respondents to the survey--more than are in the Foreach discord server! So let's get into it.

Character Popularity Poll

Alright, let's start with the thing I know y'all are most excited about. As the comic creators, we love all our characters equally... but clearly you guys don't!

☀️ SUNNY SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!!! ☀️

Y'all REALLY like Sunny, eh? Don't worry, us too. In fact, 80.3% of you listed her in your top 3 favorite characters. Hell yeah.

The next top four characters are the four game protagonists, with Jiro ranking top, then Nix, Cliff and Coral. A lot of readers also mentioned Jiro as particularly relatable/lovable in the write in box at the end of the form. (Don't worry, I won't tell him y'all like him this much. Though with this many Love Warriors, Proteus won't stand a chance invading the island.) I was a bit surprised to see Jasper/Coral ranked as the lowest of the four protagonists! Given that the comic initially presents her as the "anchor" character and a jumping off point for the story as a whole--but that also means she's among the least unusual of the four protagonists, and thus stands out less? It's a hypothesis.

After that, we have Polyta (which makes a lot of sense, she's had some of the most page time of the side characters), then Mercy and Doctor Kree'zik. I wonder if some of this is recency bias, partiularly in Kree'zik's case, seeing as we haven't gotten much past xer character introduction yet. I'll be curious to see how these numbers shift if we run this again next year!

We also got some minor character write ins! Several people said they enjoyed various Aveans, with two votes specifically for the Avean Captains and someone else voting for the avean grunt from page 106 who says "Thanks a bundle!" And I agree: they're pretty adorable. Another person listed "the author" as their favorite character which... you know what, it is a fairly meta comic, so I'll allow it. (Even though, hilariously, Lum is the only member of the creative team to have not had a character cameo in the comic yet.)

Also shout out to the person who wrote in that they almost listed the character cameos for Peri and Kiki (the rat and the rabbit from pgs 24-25) as their favorites. I see you and appreciate you <3

Game Popularity Poll

Not a ton to say about this. People seem to like cozy-ish indie games and furry aesthetics. Makes sense to me.

Comic Info

How are people finding Foreach?

As always, word of mouth is CRUCIAL for indie webcomics getting off the ground. You guys sharing and linking it to friends and communities is really the engine behind getting eyes onto our art--so thank you!

We got another big boost from joining the @spiderforestcomics webcomic collective. So far, it's been a great experience and we've been loving the community over there. So if you're in the market for more comics, definitely go check out some of theirs!

I should note that there is definitely some overlap between these categories. We let people mark multiple answers, so many people marked "Word of Mouth (online)" in addition to other categories like Tumblr and other discord servers. In that broader category, there where several places that people specifically noted finding the comic including:

Our reader Digamma has been tirelessly reposting the comic to the Something Awful forums, and it looks like quite a few people have been keeping up from there! Thanks, Digamma, you're a certified super-spreader!

Dan of @thewebcomicsreview has linked to Foreach several times!

People also mentioned finding it through various discord communities, including the Star Impact server, a server for puzzle games, Foxglove Comics, and others

Rilly had a cameo in @erinptah's webcomic, Leif and Thorne!

Several people discovered it directly through the Neocities discover page!

Cohost, Cloudhiker, and a fairly lukewarm substack review... which nonetheless garnered us a few readers. I'll take it!

Currently, Foreach doesn't pay for traditional banner ads of any kind. So everytime you tell a friend about the comic or share a link to it, you're helping us out a ton! Thank you!

How are people keeping up with comic updates?

Not too much to say on this. Lots of manual checkers, and it looks like we're getting good mileage out of that RSS feed. Excellent!

Readership Info

Discord Membership

We had more survey responses than people currently in the Foreach discord. But even more excitingly, only about one third of survey respondents are also in the discord. Which is exciting, because it means there's more of a readership out there checking the comic updates than we knew previously!

Additionally, I'm personally excited by this result because hearing from those quieter members of our reader base is precisely why I wanted to put out this survey. We have a lovely, active community in the discord, but as a side effect that means we're hearing a lot of opinions from just one, disproportionately vocal part of our reader base. My hope with this survey was that we'd get a chance to hear some voices that we don't usually get to interact with... So for all you silent majority readers out there: Hello! Thanks so much for chiming in!

Patreon Membership

Most of our readers don't back the patreon. Which is to be expected! We actually got a few new patrons signing up after the survey was posted, which is absolutely lovely of y'all. (Hi new patrons! 👋)

If you're wondering what the Patreon money gets used for, it's a mixture of funding extras the comic and supporting Lum's future creative endeavors. This year, we used a big chunk of the funding to commission the Love Bomb portraits for the new Cast Page, which were done by the talented Beajrb (go check out their work!) In the future, some of it may be used for commission work related to the comic, and also for the long term goal for Lum to take some time off their day job to draw comics/make games/etc.

We also asked what else people might like to see us do with the patreon. Right now, we post author commentary on pages with about a 2-chapter lag time, and people seem pretty happy with that over all. There were a few requests for bonus character art, pin ups, or character-asks, and we'll keep that in mind going forward. Since all of us are working full time, there's only limited time we have for making additional content, but who knows what the future holds!

Reader Geography

So where in the world are our readers? Well, I I thought it'd be fun to make this cute little map:

...which turned out to be a huge pain in the ass and a little misleading with the color ranges. So here it is another way:

Our reader base is very American-heavy. Honestly a little moreso than I was expecting? Maybe it's the magnetic charisma of Cliff Mason that keeps drawing them in?

But is it a good comic?

According to our readers, it's a 5.35/5 star comic. Make of that what you will :3

Final Thoughts

At the end of the form, we had an open response box for anything else y'all might want to say to us. And let me just say: y'all blew us away. Thank you so much.

So many of the comments were incredibly kind. People told us about characters they connected to, about how excited they were for to see what happens next. Some of them were sweet, some were horny, some of you compared Foreach to some of OUR favorite webcomics, (which was absolutely unreal to read!) Some of you guys wrote whole freakin' essays! I can't recap everything, but please know that we read every single one of them.

Thank you again for joining us on this journey. Here's to a great 2025--and another year of Freachin' it together!

[axollyon]

guest art i made for @lumsel's comic foreach!! featuring coral (in the style of night in the woods, holding a phoenix down), jiro (in the style of ffvi, holding a bandage), nix (in the style of super meat boy, holding the bfg9000), and cliff (in the style of doom, holding a baseball bat).

consider this a companion piece to some recent high quality rips that i may or may not have had involvement in!