Tales of the Abyss transform into… Tales from the Cosmic Depths!
one big change before our Kickstarter concludes
Hello, everyone!
Just a couple of days before our Kickstarter campaign finishes, we've decided to go ahead with one big change: our comic book horror anthology Tales of the Abyss is now renamed to Tales from the Cosmic Depths. What does that mean for all of our backers? Nothing! You'll still get the same copies of our anthology that you paid for, only under a slightly different name. But if you're curious to know why we've decided for such a change… then keep reading!
As Tales of the Abyss was our very first Kickstarter campaign, it mostly serves as a way for us to gain experience and learn about how to promote our work. And one thing this campaign has definitely taught us was to always check whether the name you want to use for your project is actually available.
Now to be fair, we do take these things pretty seriously. So much so that a couple of months ago we actually contacted EC Comics to ask them if our anthology (with its name, cover, and the general theme) isn't too similar to their horror comic book anthologies Tales from the Crypt and Epitaphs from the Abyss. Needless to say EC Comics said that it's all good and gave us their blessing.
But unfortunately we were so preoccupied with this that we've failed to actually run "Tales of the Abyss" through Google, which would take about 5 seconds. Because if we had done that, we would have discovered that there actually is a video game from 2005 called Tales of the Abyss, as well as some anime and manga adaptations.
When we realized this a couple of days ago, it presented us with an interesting dilemma. On one hand, the original Tales of the Abyss IP seems to be pretty well known in some communities, not to mention that its trademark applies not only to video games, but also to comics. On the other hand, our Tales of the Abyss is an extremely small project that has nothing to do with the original, which is a fantasy JRPG, while ours is a horror comic book anthology. We couldn't fathom any fans of the game confusing our Kickstarter with the original IP, not to mention the game developer coming after us with legal action (since they would have to even notice us first).
But! As I said at the start, this whole Kickstarter is about learning and experimenting. And since we want to not only learn, but also take all of this seriously (we are asking for your hard-earned money, after all), we've decided to change the name of our anthology. And after throwing some ideas back and forth between Jean-Marc and myself for a while, we've landed on Tales from the Cosmic Depths: a new name and a new logo for our project!
Two things that we weren't able to change in our campaign were the URL address and the descriptions of individual tiers, but other than that… that's it. That's all there is to it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. And if you haven't backed Tales from the Cosmic Depths yet, don't forget you only have until Thursday, June 26 before the campaign ends!