July 2025 update about accessing my comics on itch.io

What started in my drafts as a quick update about access to pdfs has grow significantly in post size, so I’m sharing something new to Patreon backers on their version of this post.

Last year, I was a guest speaker at the Center for Cartoon Studies to talk about my career, and during my time I touched on my experience making adult comics for anthologies like Smut Peddler. This topic was apparently of such interest to that cohort that I was invited to call back this year and do a virtual presentation focusing on that, answering student questions, and suggesting best practices.

As of this week, though, some of the information for how to distribute 18+ comics is out of date. Two online platforms that primarily distribute games and digital material, Steam and itch.io, have been pressured by their payment processors to tighten restrictions on the content that they can distribute, and the result of this has been that over the weekend, much of the material that had been tagged by creators as “nsfw” or for 18+ users has been delisted, meaning that they cannot be searched for in the platform and that payment disbursement for those sales was in jeopardy. Since then, itch.io has released new terms of service that clarify what is and isn’t now permitted for sale, which isn’t great for reasons I’ll go into below.

But here’s what this means to you, since itch.io is my current platform for distributing comic pdfs. To my knowledge, all of my comics currently distributed on itch are still available to download, though anything I had tagged to signify it was for adult audiences has been delisted from the search page. This means, for example, that if you are a $5+ patron and wanted to download your free copy of the Lambda-winning Miles & Honesty in SCFSX!, you can do so from the link on my pdf master post, or from the link on my itch page, but you can’t search for it directly in the itch.io dashboard. I don’t believe anyone is barred from directly buying it at this time, either.

But this is a big blow for comic artists, who have primarily come to rely on platforms like itch for distribution and discoverability of this type of work after other platforms have folded or made adult work unwelcome over the past decade. Itch’s updated content policy, which may be read here, is especially troublesome in what it now excludes, which is any discussion of sexual violence, coersion, or other transgressive themes. Looking at my reading list of the last year, several exceptional works explore these themes by nature of what they are doing – Home by the Rotting Sea by Otava Heikkilä, Boy Skin by Seosamh, and Objects of Affection by Taylor Titmouse, and many others – and they are no longer in compliance with these new policies. What I find especially distasteful is these creators in particular demonstrated very good practices by tagging and outlining precisely what readers might expect from these works, without hiding behind euphemisms, and it is this candor that caught these works in the shadowban. It goes without saying that Adversary would have absolutely been impacted by this policy change, and I am fortunate that the year in which its sales made up 60% of my itch revenue was not 2025.

It is also worth a reminder that these works are legal to sell and distribute. The pressure comes entirely from payment processors – Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Paypal, etc – who take advantage of their monopoly over their services to strongarm platforms into refusing sales of certain material arbitrarily, creating an ever-tightening net of censorship. It’s also worth a reminder that a corporation’s definition of “transgressive” can change at any time to include other legal expression and behavior. Quite frankly, I am treating my time on Patreon as finite and planning accordingly – it’s very possible that platform will be in the crosshairs sooner or later.

If you’re still with me after all of this and would like to know what you can do, there is collective action taking place against these payment processors! Details on how to participate are outlined here. Thank you for your support of my art over the years, the work continues, etc, etc.