Note from Janna: In this conversation, I’m talking with Elizabeth Jancewicz and Eric Stevenson, husband-and-wife creator team, about how their Instagram webcomic — about a stray cat named Pilgrim — unexpectedly built an enthusiastic audience of readers. They have more than 53,000 followers on Instagram and sometimes get hundreds of comments on their posts. Isn’t that what publishers want? A comic that’s already striking a chord with readers, with thousands of people waiting to buy the book?
Well, I’m their literary agent, and I helped them pitch the project to publishers. The interest we got from them was… zero.
So what happens when you pivot from pitching traditional publishers and take your webcomic to Kickstarter?
As of this writing, there are 18 more days to go on Eric and Elizabeth’s Kickstarter campaign, and they’ve already raised more than $41,000 against their $5,000 goal — almost 10x their target. We recorded this conversation before the Kickstarter began, and I think it’ll be really interesting to hear how they were thinking about things and how they got to where they are today.
Click below to view our full conversation on YouTube, or read the (edited) transcript below.
I went on your Instagram and looked at your most recent post — it had almost 12,000 likes and more than 350 comments, with lots of people asking when the book is coming out, whether it ships to Mexico, whether it ships to the UK. Tell me about the journey to getting to that post.
Elizabeth: When Pilgrim the feral cat showed up on our porch, I was in a bit of a funk with making comics. I was having a hard time getting motivated and I had a bunch of different projects I wanted to do, but I couldn’t get myself excited about any of them. When she showed up, I just thought it’d be fun to make some little doodles about her.
It was something where I could make this thing without any deadlines or any responsibility attached to it. It was just for me. We make jokes about how I’ll have all of these deadlines to do, and then here’s this thing over here that can take up all my time and doesn’t make me any money, and I’m like, “Ooh, let’s look over here.” The excitement of not knowing what the cat was going to do — whether she’d stick around or not — just helped me get out of that writer’s block or art block I’d been in. When I started posting them online, I had no idea people were going to connect to them so much. People love cats, people love a dramatic story. But I didn’t know it was going to be dramatic when I started. My plan was, at most, 30 comics about a feral cat — loosely connected, cute slice-of-life four-panels, each its own episode.
Eric: Even though they were kind of connected, I remember when she was starting out I said the algorithm doesn’t like connected stories. It wants a single thing people can consume in one sitting. A lot of webcomics have gone that way — they’re kind of like memes.
Elizabeth: Starting around 2020, I don’t know what shifted with the algorithm, but my follower count just started going down. Every time I made a post, I’d lose a hundred or more followers. When you’re already feeling down about your art and you put something online and lose a whole batch of followers, it’s just like, what’s the point?
So to have this project that was an ongoing story — not Instagram-friendly, where you kind of had to go back and read from the beginning — I think that really appealed to me. It was a little fight against the big corporation, this idea of not wanting to feed into it. I want to do my own thing and not care. I started posting very quickly too, every single day at first, just because I was excited to draw them. And that’s another thing where the YouTube videos all say, here’s a schedule you have to keep — and I wasn’t doing that. It was this kind of nice little rebellion against Meta and Instagram. It just made me happy.
You said originally you were planning to do around 30 comics. How many did it end up being?
Elizabeth: 150 exactly.
Wow. And you were publishing every single day at first — did it eventually settle into a routine?
Elizabeth: Yes. We went on tour and I wasn’t able to build as much of a backlog as I wanted, but I had enough to switch to every other day. Every other day is still a lot, but I kept that schedule so I could go and actually work on the projects that made me money.
Around when did you start the Pilgrim comic on Instagram, and when was the last episode?
Elizabeth: It started May 12th of last year — 2025. I’d started doodling a little before I was posting. Pilgrim showed up at our house about six months before that, in November. Once I had about five comics drawn I started posting. And then we ended it on February 13th.
So that’s roughly a 10-month run for the story. And I think it’s so fascinating that you said the conventional wisdom is that narrative stories don’t work on Instagram.
Eric: And it is true — the algorithm doesn’t favor them. But I think there’s something to be said for a story that unfolds in real time. You couldn’t binge it the way you can with a show that drops all at once. And in terms of autobiographical comics told this way over time, I’m not sure there’s really anyone else doing that. Part of it was also that the stakes felt real. People knew it was a true story. There was a point where we thought Pilgrim might die from medical complications, and in the comic world it was still slice-of-life stuff — we were like, how is this going to go? The medium, the real-life timeline, the format — it all came together into something really unique that Elizabeth just happened to fall into. And some people got mad about it. They were like, how dare you tell us the story piece by piece! Sometimes we’d post a new comic and just say, hey, we don’t know the ending to this story yet either — it’s happening. People felt they deserved an ending right now. It was a very unique experience for creator and audience alike.
So how are you feeling about it now?
Elizabeth: So happy. Working on these comics makes me so happy. Having work that excites me makes me so happy. I’m typically not someone who looks at comments — there can be negativity, and my mental health is already shaky enough without extra things pulling me down. But as the comic went on, Eric would be like, “You have to look at these comments — people are really connecting with this.” And then the DMs, especially from people who work with feral cats or in the trap-neuter-release space — I did not expect that kind of connection.
Eric: The whole point of making art is to connect with people. If you’re just making stuff in a vacuum, what’s the point? You’re expressing yourself to see if anyone else relates, to see if anyone will connect to what you do. Elizabeth met some really cool people through this story — cat rescues, cat comics artists — and there was a lot of talk in the comments about loss and grief, people connecting over their lost loved ones through a little story about a cat. And almost every post would have people posting pictures of their own cat saying, “This is my Pilgrim — I’ve had him eight years,” or “I lost my cat this year and they look just like her.” It really became a community in a way we weren’t expecting. When you’re making comics, you’re in a room by yourself. We try to have comic meetups and stuff, which really feeds the soul, but most of the time you’re alone. When that community comes through, it’s so powerful.
And something I was proud of: we did our research on feral cat care — TNR, getting Pilgrim neutered — and a lot of shelter and cat rescue organizations reached out and thanked us for showing a good way to handle a feral cat. That was encouraging.
I think what’s really interesting here is that cat comics themselves are sort of a meme genre. And yet the themes you’re dealing with here are kind of the antithesis of meme culture. Can you say something about that?
Elizabeth: I love memes. My friends and I send memes back and forth all day. There are great comic artists who make meme-style comics and it’s a wonderful way to connect with people. But I do think that since COVID we’re so much more online, so much more inclined to stay in and scroll. I think we’re craving community and real connection. An ongoing story can offer that. I had people saying, “I can’t wait for the next one — I’m invested in this story.” There’s a part of people that knows that scrolling for hours isn’t great for them and wants something a little more than that.
Eric: One thing I feel kind of proud of is that even though the story was happening as Elizabeth was making it — sometimes real life was only two weeks behind the comic — we realized we were telling a story in a way that’s pretty unique. It was very short-form, almost always four panels, over a long period of time. We live in a culture where shows drop all at once and binging is the norm. To tell a story on such a small scale but over such a long period of time through comics — I don’t think there’s really anyone else doing that in autobiographical form. That was partly why people gravitated toward it. In the world of the internet, it felt like a new way, even though it was slow.
I am your literary agent, and I thought the Pilgrim comic was amazing. We went out and pitched it to publishers and got some big fat rejections. Do you want to talk about that experience, or just jump straight to the Kickstarter?
Elizabeth: I want to acknowledge it, because I know there are a lot of other people who are also pitching and dealing with the frustrations. It is frustrating, even when you have what looks like a very successful comic on Instagram. You still get a lot of rejections. But for me, right now, this project is so exciting that it’s not hurting me the way it normally would. That feels like an important lesson for myself: have a project you’re excited enough about that when you get the rejections, you just pivot. How can we get this story published anyway? How can we do it ourselves? Because we’re getting so many people asking for a book — I want to get books into those people’s hands.
Eric: And there have been Kickstarter campaigns so successful that they later got picked up by publishers. That’s a possibility, which would be great. But we’ve been a DIY band for the most part, and it seems like what we’re talking about with connections and community, we get a lot more of that when we do things ourselves. Also — and Janna, you’re an amazing agent and were so positive even through the rejections — my advice would be for people to get an agent who truly believes in them. It makes a huge difference. The rejections are so much easier to take when you have a good team.
You’re making me think about a panel I’m organizing at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair called “The Artist as Entrepreneur.” I believe there’s a tendency among artists to look for external validation — to feel like they’re not really good enough until they’ve gotten that book deal. I’m such a firm believer in having agency in your own creative career. Could you speak to how you’re able to remain so constructive when rejection is so hard for so many people?
Elizabeth: There’s a couple of things. I know Eric’s laughing because he calls it a mental disability. There is something about certain brains — maybe it’s ADHD — where you just have to be creating, have to be moving and working with your hands. But beyond that, you have to take care of yourself physically, emotionally, mentally. Go for walks, talk to people, keep your baseline stable. The work is extra on top of that. Hustle culture says you can do everything yourself all the time, but it’s a lot better when you also find that balance and avoid burnout.
As for work — work on stuff that gets you excited. Don’t make what you think other people want you to make. I’ve done conventions where I had to fill a table with things that would sell, and those things never actually sell. But if you pour your passion and love into your creativity, people see that. They see through it and get excited too. There’s no guarantee anything you do will get attention, so if you’re able to do what you want to do — and Pilgrim, even if it had gone nowhere, I would still have been so happy I made it. That feeling can’t be bought with any amount of money.
Eric: And I’ve been thinking about this too — there’s this idea in the arts that “if I get published, if I get a record deal, if I make it, all my problems are solved.” But then you do it and you think, well, what’s the reward? The reward is you still do the thing. If you’re making the comic, making the art — even if you get successful, you’re doing it so you can do it more. But you’re already able to do it now. The most satisfying thing you can do is just work on the art. If your mind isn’t satisfied with the creative process of what you’re doing, the business side is going to be far more miserable than if it’s something you believe in.
You guys support yourselves entirely from your creative work and yet you prioritize the creative work. How do you manage?
Elizabeth: A couple of things. First, we live very simply. We talk to young artists a lot, and the first thing we ask when someone asks for advice is: what are you willing to sacrifice? If you’re not willing to sacrifice some things, then maybe you do have to keep your day job. But if you’re willing to sacrifice eating out, takeout, more expensive groceries, a nicer place to stay — you can make it work. For me, one thing I wasn’t willing to sacrifice was our cats. So we work hard so our cats have good lives.
The other thing is we have our hands in so many different creative pots. I’m not just making money from the Touring Test, not just from the Pilgrim comic. Right now I have a commission from my local town for a coloring book for their 250th anniversary. That’s a paid job, but it’s art. We lead comic workshops at libraries. We play shows at libraries — our first published book opened up those library connections. Then there’s merch sales, music streaming, commissions, freelance work. Right now I’ve got a coloring book, a school workbook, a children’s book, and we’re on Patreon. At any given time, I’ve got at least a dozen jobs I’m working on. Pilgrim will make us money through Kickstarter, but for its entire run it made me nothing — and it was the thing I was most excited about. So it’s almost like all of those other freelance gigs are my day job, and it all comes down to budgeting.
It’s feast or famine. There have been times where I didn’t know if we were going to make rent. But we had a kind of “burn the boats, no plan B” mentality, and we always figured it out somehow. And I don’t want to pretend it was easy — a lot of people have helped us. The reason I have the coloring book job right now is because I joined a knitting group at the library and someone there saw my work and told someone else. It’s stuff like that. When we’re on tour, we’d sometimes go onstage and say, “Hey, we need a place to stay tonight — if you’re looking for some kind people to sleep on your couch…” and we’d meet someone and go stay there. We’ve saved tens of thousands of dollars on hotel rooms that way. It comes down to being open to community, being open to help, and being okay with asking for it. That can be tough with pride sometimes. But making art is all about connecting with people, and it all circles back around.
You mentioned asking for help — great segue to the Kickstarter. You’ve been considering it for some time, but fairly recently made the call that you’re doing it on a specific date. How did you get to that decision?
Elizabeth: We talked with you and hadn’t gotten any publisher bites. I had about ten comics left in the story and we started realizing a publisher wasn’t going to happen — at least not right away. And we kept getting comments: “I want this as a book. Can we get this as a book?” The iron was hot. If we couldn’t do a publisher, let’s just do the Kickstarter. We’ve done a couple of Kickstarters before with music, and I’ve self-published some comic collections, so we knew the format and knew what we could handle. It was a bit of a scramble to pull everything together quickly, but —
Eric: We wanted to dive in while people were still paying attention. With a publisher, the book would come out in 2027 at the earliest. We can get it done before the end of this year. The story just ended, there’s a community, people still want it — why not?
Elizabeth: And honestly, having been published before, we can see a lot of the downsides, and it suddenly makes you look at being independent differently. It’s really nice to have the freedom of knowing we can do whatever we want with this book and keep 100% creative control. I’d say that’s a privileged position to be coming from — we have the experience of being published, of having an agent, we can see both sides. But it also comes from over a decade of working in the arts and making connections.
Given that you’ve self-published before and done Kickstarters, what is it about this one where you’re like, “this time we’re going to do X, Y, Z differently”?
Elizabeth: I’m very excited about trying to achieve better book quality — paper, cover, all of that. We’ve been talking to other self-publishing comic artists and getting sample packs from different printers. I’m excited about this project and I want to put good work into creating a physical product I’m proud of. We even talked about doing a hardcover, just to be fancy.
We’re also doing a lot more to gear up for the Kickstarter. I’m making some new Pilgrim comics to build momentum leading into the campaign launch. We’re doing this interview, we have a bunch of other events and interviews lined up. We’re doing a digital tour — the idea is to appear on a podcast, live stream, blog post, or something every single day, just to get the word out on a budget.
Eric: We’re also avoiding spending money on Meta. We poured money into advertisements for years and saw very little response. The best feedback we ever got was just from Elizabeth making comics and posting them. So we’re trying to use Instagram as a tool without actively giving them money — and using resources we would have spent on ads to support artists or to advertise through the cat and comics communities instead. The idea is to find ways to make it a win-win. We’ve been in touch with some TNR organizations and cat shelters, trying to figure out how to approach that in a way that genuinely helps them too.
Are there specific ideas you’re kicking around for how you can help the shelters?
Eric: We’re thinking about doing live streams or interview-style things with them. One thing a lot of TNR organizations told us was that what we did with Pilgrim was the right thing — getting her neutered before releasing her back into her environment — and they wish more people knew about it. If we can bring awareness to that and also use our advertising money to donate to those shelters, maybe encourage our followers to donate too… Another angle some of these organizations work on is supporting the unhoused people who care for feral cat colonies. If we can help those people with their needs, they’ll have the tools to help the cats. It’s all circular.
We were also thinking about doing Instagram takeovers or live drawings on shelter channels. We’re still fine-tuning exactly how it all works. But something that got us thinking about it organically: before we’d even considered any of this, someone reached out independently and said, “Hey, I’m doing a big adoption event at the shelter I volunteer at — would you mind if I put up a display about Pilgrim and your Kickstarter?” And we were just like, yes, please. That speaks to this whole idea that we’ve done our own thing and not a lot of people know about it, but those who get it really get it.
That’s a really good sign when someone is saying, “Would you mind if I give you this massive boost?” Are you familiar with the 1,000 True Fans concept — Kevin Kelly?
Elizabeth: Yes.
Eric: I actually kind of disagree with it, or at least have complicated feelings about it. The idea is that if you have a thousand fans who each give you $10 a year, that’s a sustainable income. But the translation just hasn’t always worked that way for us. For years with the Touring Test webcomic I had tens of thousands of followers and not a single penny translating from them — no new Patreon followers, no one buying anything, no one coming to events. I’d always be asking myself why.
But with Pilgrim, when Elizabeth started having health issues, we suddenly started getting hundreds of Patreon subscribers at one dollar apiece. We went from maybe 70 or 80 Patreon followers to over 300 paid, maybe 550 or 600 total including free. In the grand scheme of things it’s still small, but it keeps us alive. And what I’ve been thinking about through all of this is: I don’t have the follower count that big publishers want to see. It’s funny because depending on who you’re talking to, 53,000 followers is either really impressive or completely negligible. I’m perfectly average by internet standards.
Elizabeth: Sometimes I feel like I’m right in the middle — not big enough for grants and scholarships, but not big enough for publishing deals either. I saw a cat comic on Instagram the other day from someone I’d never heard of and it had 3 million likes. And I’m like, I’m a cat comic artist — how had I never heard of this person? The whole internet world is strange and confusing. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not personal. Even with the publisher rejections — the publishing industry is in a complicated place right now, and a rejection isn’t someone seeing your work and consciously thinking, no thanks. It’s algorithms, or how the publisher was feeling that day. There’s so much that is just not personal. When I started to understand that, it made playing the business side of art so much easier.
And yet, here’s the paradox: the more personal you went — the more you leaned into the story you cared about most — the more people responded and said, “Can I please give you money?”
Eric: Right, but those are two different things. When I say “it’s not personal” I mean the algorithm isn’t personally snubbing Pilgrim — those millions of people who liked that other cat comic don’t dislike Pilgrim, they just didn’t see it. Or with publishers — with our other book we got so many publishers saying, “This is great, but it’s not a fit for what we already have, bad timing.” That’s impersonal. But between creator and audience, it absolutely is personal. You need to keep your emotions in check, continue to be personal in your work, while not taking the business side personally. If you mess up that balance, burnout comes very quickly.
I want to make sure we cover the big picture — you have a band in addition to making the Instagram comic. This is a funny time in the interview to ask this, but can you go back to the very beginning and talk about how you started working together?
Elizabeth: Eric has always been into music, so he started a band and wanted to go on tour. We started dating and I wanted to come along. I’m not musical at all, so I suggested I do live painting on stage — we were familiar with some bands that had done things like that. We decided to try it, went out on tour, and made money, which surprised us.
Eric: Very small amounts, but enough to cover the gas costs of the tour. That’s partly because she paints on stage and we auction off those paintings afterward, which is a huge financial benefit other bands don’t usually have. We found this little corner of performance that was unique to us.
Elizabeth: So we decided to quit our jobs and do that. That’s been our life since we got married. When I started the webcomic I called it The Touring Test, because of going on tour — it initially started as “here’s what it’s like for us to go out on the road.” We travel the whole country, we’ve been to every single state, and we typically do multiple tours a year. We’ve played nearly 1,200 shows at this point. For the longest time that was the main bread and butter. But from there, someone at a show would get one of my paintings, or nearly win it, and then reach out later for a commission. And that leads to something else. I used to knit between shows while Eric was driving, making socks we’d sell at the merch table. Little extra ways to make a few bucks here and there.
Eric: And it’s because we were out in the world, meeting people face to face, building community. Through that, she’d get a painting job here, do some knitting there, I’d write a song for someone, we’ve got our Patreon. That’s how we built up this group of different arts that keeps us afloat. Most bands we know, the other members have day jobs. The two of us were able to do it full-time because we’re married, we share finances, and we were both okay with sleeping in the car for a while. We had shared principles, shared finances, shared goals. We were able to make it work.
What percentage of your workday is spent on actually being creative versus all the administrative stuff?
Elizabeth: Eric does a lot more of the administrative stuff. He’s much better at talking with people and getting the details sorted. I’m mostly the creative side, and sometimes Eric will just say, “We need to have a meeting,” and I’m like, I don’t want to. Even recently it took us a few days to sort through some Kickstarter logistics because I’m sitting at my desk drawing, and Eric is like, “We need to figure out the Kickstarter details,” and I’m like, “Give me a second.” And then he needs specific artwork assets and I’m like… it’s a weird dynamic. But we’re lucky that we have each other so I can spend most of my time on the creative side and he can handle the logistics. If it was just me, it would be a lot harder.
Eric: For me it depends on the season. If I’m booking a tour, I’m at the computer quite a lot. In between tours, maybe I’m writing a lot of music and doing more creative things. On the road, most of the day is just driving and then doing whatever it takes to put on the show each night. I actually find it nice that it changes. Neither of us is anti-routine, but if things are too routine for too long, it starts to feel like you’re wrapped too tight and just need out. It’s nice to have the on-tour/off-tour rhythm, the creative/administrative rhythm. And then you try to keep a life — friends, walks, keeping your mental state in a good place.
Elizabeth: Because if you don’t have a life, you don’t have anything to draw from artistically. I think this is a big thing with comedians — they start making jokes about being in the airport because that’s all they’ve got. You need to have a life to pull from. I mean, that was the whole Pilgrim thing. We had two cats, we didn’t need another cat. But this one started hanging around, and it became an interesting story, and now she sits on our lap.
Where can people find you and the Kickstarter?
Elizabeth: We’re on pretty much every social media platform — Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky. If you can remember “The Touring Test” (T-O-U-R-I-N-G) or “Pocket Vinyl,” you’ll find us. We’re definitely posting about the Kickstarter. If you go to Kickstarter and search “Pilgrim Comic” it’ll pop right up. And honestly, the link is right below this video.
Eric: We’ve also made a movie, we have multiple albums, and Elizabeth has a graphic novel — 300 pages about how we broke a world record by playing a show in every state in the fastest amount of time. There are too many things for anyone to reasonably check out. Just remember Pocket Vinyl or The Touring Test. You’ll find it.
Support Elizabeth & Eric’s Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pocketvinyl/pilgrim-the-complege-saga
Follow their webcomic: https://www.instagram.com/thetouringtest/?hl=en
