IT'S BEEN FUN...
...BUT THESE THINGS COME TO PASS.
We never wanted to write this post.
After some recent discussions, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop producing any new content for this Substack, effective June 30, 2026, though previously scheduled articles will continue until the end of the year. Every article, video, and interview that was previously behind the paywall will now be free, permanently. If you’re a monthly subscriber, your billing stops June 30. If you’re an annual subscriber, you’ll get a prorated refund based on when you signed up.
Two things drove this difficult decision:
First, we couldn’t grow our Substack the way we had envisioned. We started over two years ago hoping to build a real community around visual storytelling, but that never quite materialized — engagement and subscribers plateaued, and it remained flat for months. That’s on us, not on you. Our skill at marketing and audience-building never caught up to our skill at the actual craft. It was a lesson well-learned and hopefully it’s useful somewhere down the line.
Second, the ground shifted under the entire visual storytelling industry since we started this. The fields this Substack covers — comics, animation, and especially storyboards and film — are all facing real external pressures right now, and we haven’t been immune to it personally. We don’t want to turn this into an essay on why; that’s a much longer conversation. But the climate at the beginning of 2024 isn’t the same climate in mid 2026. We wanted to be a steady light through it. Eventually the waters became too rough and even we were short on answers.
Thank you to everyone who showed up for this — every comment, every share, every conversation it sparked, here and on our Beyond The Process YouTube channel. And a special thank you to everyone who saw the value in what we were doing and supported us financially. We couldn’t have done it without you.
Be well.
Lance & Shane
Thank you for all the terrific articles and videos. I suspect we've been in a subscription saturation point for a while now. There's now an app advertised that tells you all the subs you've forgotten about, so you can prune them. I know I have more than I can read by far. So don't see it as a personal failure; what you produced was great.
Sorry to read this, but the best of bests for the two of you going forward. I'll miss this place dearly.
Admittedly, I'm being selfish since I personally gained much from tuning into y'all for the past year or so. I hope we can cross paths one day as I'd like to shake your hands and buy you something caffeinated or even boozy one day.
Parting note, I personally think there's something about this site that might be at fault starting with the name of the site itself. For some time I avoided Substack in general due to confusing it with Stack Overflow which I associate with corrosive shutins that have nothing better to do than point out what's wrong with how a question is asked.
In addition, having 'stack' in the name, Substack seemed to be a place for coders not content creators. Anyway, this weird foible of mine was reinforced twice (at least) when I talked to friends (not coders who would know better, but online layman like myself) who had similar confusion about Substack.
My estimation is that quality influencers like yourself should have blown the roof off the house, but even the likes of some mega-influencers elswhere get less than 100 likes per posting here despite the millions of subs they have on Youtube or TikTok.
In short, Substack is a very cool, but it's an unknown entity to most, so I hope you don't put too much weight on yourselves about any of this. Y'all have been awesome.
~Cheers