It's your favorite time of the month! The time we heave our armored, primordial bodies from the muddy banks of the river we live in to write our Dungeon Crawler Carl: CROCODILE update!!
💚 PROGRESS REPORT
As you know, we like to keep it honest around here. To that end: the entire DCC: Crocodile creative team, plus everyone at Vault Comics and Aethon are as beautiful as they are brilliant (in a word, extremely). It's wild that we all happen to work on the same book. What's that? Wrong kind of honest? okay, got it. Sigh. You want accountability. FINE.
We remain on track for early book completion on DCC: Crocodile. The comic is REALLY off to the races. The final scripts are buttoned up, Brett has been drawing his arm off, and we're closing in on the halfway point of completion on inks. We're also excited to share our 100% final colors with you, hopefully for the next update.
We remain on track for early physical reward production on DCC: Crocodile. Your very own project Zev (the one writing this update) wants you to know that our priority is to have all physical and digital non-book DCC items produced by the halfway point of this year! We deeply want to get you your rewards to you as soon as those DCC: Croc books come in.
We're continuing to reach out to custom-reward backers. We've already started the info-collection process for many tiers, so thanks for your replies! If you're in an audio tier, you're next on the list, so keep an eye out for an email from us.
Brett has completed the DCC Webtoon Campaign-only Editioncover! As a reminder, this item is only available for this campaign, and when we original posted it (minus art), it looked like this:
inspiring (no)
...and here's the exclusive Brett Bean art we got in just yesterday!
This is the raw, unprocessed art... we'll be dressing this up soon (ie: adding important info like, you know, the title), but we wanted you to have the first peek!
A repeated reminder on the DCC Webtoon editions, also published by Vault Comics: we'll be shipping Campaign-exclusive books (with the Brett Bean cover shown above) to those who ordered one along with your DCC: Crocodile book rewards. However, the regular-degular DCC Webtoon with the standard edition covers will be in shops in late May 2026. So don't get surprised if you see those in shops--yours will be coming shortly!
If you somehow missed that we were offering exclusive covers, you can still add items to your order. Adjust your order via your Pledge Manager, or if you were originally not a backer, check out the Pre-order Store. You'll be able to adjust your pledge until we lock orders, which won't be for a few more months.
💚 UPCOMING FREE COMIC BOOK DAY
Did you know about this?? On May 2nd, head to your participating local comic book shop to pick up comics for absolutely free. And Vault Comics will be participating! On offer for this year is none other than DCC Webtoon #0, featuring original art by Yoshi Yoshitani. If you like free DCC stuff, mark your calendars now so you don't miss out, because we expect these free copies to fly off the shelves.
Free Comic Book Day 2026 DCC cover preview
Vault Comics will also offer a webstore-exclusive version of the DCC Webtoon #0 FCBD cover, featuring art by Nathan Gooden. This will be a nod to comic book fans... does anyone know what this new cover will homage? Here's a visual hint for you savvy-types:
Free Comic Book Day 2026 DCC (Webstore/ DCC: Croc backers only) cover preview. What could it be??????
If you're interested in picking up a webstore-exclusive FCBD cover, we're going to make it easy for you... we'll be setting aside copies for this campaign specifically and adding this webstore-exclusive cover to the DCC: Crocodile Pledge Manager store and Pre-order Store. We'll break our once-a-month schedule to let you know when those are up!
💚 PAY-AS-YOU-GO UPDATE
Pay-as-you-go folks, just a quick update to let you know that you're good, and not to worry! There have been a few questions about whether having chosen pay-as-you-go will affect anything from submitting custom reward info to availability of add-on items. We're replying to those questions as they come, but generally speaking, the answer is 100% that you're good and we are happy to accommodate any needs for extra time getting info or orders to us.
If you need to reach out, you can always do that at [email protected].
The definitive power fantasy LitRPG The Primal Hunter comes to crowdfunding with this Collector's Edition release. Get the deluxe box set, along with exclusive merch and rewards.
Definitely worth a follow, in this humble fish's opinion! This campaign is being run by our incredible collaborators at Vala, who also supported our success on DCC: Crocodile, and you know there are going to be a lot of goodies in store for die-hard fans of the series. This campaign launches next week... click here to follow!
💚 REBORN AS A DEMONIC TREE CAMPAIGN
Progression fantasy fans are eating good this month! Another extremely popular series Kickstarting right now. Xkarnation's Reborn as a Demonic Tree is an Isekai LitRPG Adventure that's been published as a webnovel, in chapters on Patreon, as an ebook, audiobook, light novel, print book (there's even a physical cd available in case you know anyone who still owns a cd player).
The story has earned a horde of loyal fans across all of these formats, and it's finally time for Demonic Tree to assume it's final form, as a feature-packed true collector's edition.
And, we've got one more message from our buds at Renegade Games:
💚 COMING SOON! DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL: RPG
Lovers of Dungeon Crawler Carl might be interested to learn our friends at Renegade Game Studios are launching the official role-playing game soon, right here on BackerKit.
Play as a familiar face, such as 🧨 Carl, 👑🐈 Donut, 🐊 Florin, 🐐 Prepotente, or build your own unique crawler, complete with a customizable class and race (if you survive to the third floor)! Entertain your viewers, gain followers, and survive an onslaught of horrors that will make your tootsies curl. This full official TTRPG lets you become a crawler in the brutal, televised labyrinth known as the World Dungeon. Enjoy expansive character creation rules for your own custom crawler. Choose from dozens of backgrounds, create your own skills, choose a race, a God to worship, and a class for a nearly infinite number of combinations!
And... a final note from us, we might have a very special bonus gift for DCC: Croc backers who also back this RPG project. More on that later.
💚 CONGRATS TO BRETT BEAN!
We're nearly done with this big update, but we wanted to give one more shout-out... Congrats to Brett Bean for his success on the comic D'Orc, which we previewed to all DCC: Croc backers last year! If you've enjoyed all the art we've shared with you so far, you'll surely love his work in D'Orc too. Go grab a copy at your local comic book store if you haven't already.
💚 BACKER-ONLY CONTENT TIME!
We'll, we've shared a lot of love, and we have a lot more love to come in the coming months. Now that we're at the end of this monthly update, why not close like we usually do, with a bit of a reward for backers?
Backers, you know the drill... Backer-only content is below the cut, for your eyes only, featuring Brett's original sketches for the DCC Webtoon Campaign-exclusive cover. Not to be missed!
