This year, we want to show the world what we’ve been gradually chipping away at for the past 2 years. It’s been a long time coming - welcome back.

CTC’s release date (and a rant about billboards)

As you may already know, we’ve been dangling “late 2026” in front of all of your faces for quite a while now. Some of you might already be getting extremely tired of this vaguery, so I’m proud to clear the air and announce that Episode 1 of Countdown to Countdown is coming to YouTube on December 21 this year!

We’re also going to be revealing more previews as the release date approaches, and we may or may not put Iris on a billboard. Again. Yes, we’ve dabbled with billboard advertising before. Specifically in the US, because it’s relatively inexpensive to rent billboard space over there. Even more specifically, Iris has been on billboards in Nevada, California, and New York.

We’re going to do it again. Our marketing budget is bigger this time.

No, we’re not going to advertise on that extremely large sphere in the middle of Las Vegas. Our marketing budget isn’t that big.

New KZQ updates incoming

Last year, we created a fictional record label for our vocal synthesizer projects (Tenshi and Kijo) under our actual record label and called it KZQ. Soon, Tenshi will be getting an update that adds support for additional languages!

We’re also working on new merch, because 7 out of 10 Kijo fans would burn down our office if stickers and keychains were withheld from them according to statistics that I made up in my head. Stay tuned!

New original comics

Studio Countdown is the new home for A Guide for Imagination, a comic series by independent author KimgKoi. The comic is already available on WEBTOON, and we’ll be helping bring it to more platforms.

We’re also working on another original comic called Binds, which may or may not be a trial run to help us figure out an art style before starting work on an animated series in a couple of years. Not much can be revealed at the moment, but here’s a pretty picture.

At the moment, our main focus is still on Countdown to Countdown. If you’re familiar with how animation works, you’ll know that it’s pretty time-consuming - and we want to make our first animated series the best it can be. So please keep in mind that because of the way team resources are allocated right now, we can’t really announce any release dates for our comic… yet.

SECTOR ZERO is in the works

We’re planning on bringing in plenty of new animation team members this year - for both Countdown to Countdown and SECTOR ZERO. Updates will come once they’re ready!

That’s a wrap - thanks for reading. If you’re looking for more news and updates, you can join the Studio Countdown Discord community for free or join our Patreon to support our work while getting exclusive perks!