The Vow is a story about an unquestionably unhealthy relationship between two deeply flawed people who don't have the means to express how they feel about one another without digging their fingers into the other's raw wounds by accident. They hurt each other constantly. But making it was born purely out of the love I have for my partner.

This comic started off as something I wrote for Julian's eyes only, as a Christmas gift about these characters we'd made and loved for years. I was too sick to be able to write a full short story, so I punctuated prose with things like stage directions and screenplay dialogue. It was never my intention to turn it into anything else — by this point, I'd had to cancel Date or Die because my mental health was so abysmal. I had completely lost faith in my own writing; I didn't think I was ever going to publicly make anything else. But I wanted to make a gift for my partner, and love kept me going.

Julian was the one who said, "Hey, this is really good. Let me draw this." Julian was the one who believed in me. Julian was the one who encouraged me through the self-doubt of the miserable first drafts. Julian was the one who stopped me from sanitizing my own work because I was afraid of backlash; there's a scene in the full comic that still exists because Julian put their foot down and said, "If you take this out, I'm not drawing this anymore." I needed that push and that support so badly.

It's taken me years of therapy to push past my fears of making something dark, being labeled as "problematic", afraid something was broken inside me because all of the stories I want to tell are messy and nasty and weird and evil. Sometimes I still freak out, wondering if the full comic is going to be too much, wondering if people's goodwill is just because they haven't seen it yet. But the enthusiasm and excitement people have shown The Vow already just... means the world to me, truly. It does. I am overwhelmingly, deeply grateful for every pledge, every share, every kind word, no matter how small.

(But I am most grateful for @julian.)