Pepper&Carrot is a free and open source webcomic series by French artist David Revoy. First released in May 2014, it is published by Glénat Editions, Ar Gripi, Popcom, Prikazka-Igra, and Outland Forlag.
The series consists of small episodes about teenage witch Pepper and her cat Carrot, and with stories without violence it aims to be accessible for everyone.
The webcomic’s free license allows remixes and reuse, including commercial use, resulting in derivative works such as animated short films, cosplay, fanart, a card game, a boardgame, several video games, and research projects.
It is fully or mostly translated into 28 languages, with additional partial translations in 40 more.
Revoy creates the series entirely with free software such as Krita, Blender and Inkscape, making the Krita source files for each image available for download.
In March 2024, Revoy announced he would bring the series to a close, planning on ending it on episode 42. However, in 2025 he retracted this statement, explaining that he would continue working on Pepper&Carrot.
Plot
Pepper is a young orphan witch disciple at Chaosah, the smallest of the six schools of magic on the magical planet Hereva. She is aided by her cat Carrot, and lives with her mentors Thyme, Cayenne, and Cumin in a house in the forest of Squirrel's End. Her peers are Saffron, Shichimi, Coriander, and Camomile.
Humans and various humanoids live alongside dragons and other mystical animals. After years of war between the schools of magic, there is a grudging peace. Pepper navigates the vicissitudes of growing up in a changing world and works hard to find her own place in it, but does so with a sense of humor. But there are happenings between the nations elsewhere in Hereva that may put a wrench in her plans.
Revoy aims for each episode to contain a small story arc where a character evolves and learns. The story bible is available on the website.
List of episodes
Since the first episode, around 0.344 episodes per month have been published (or 2.91 months between each episode). Episodes 6-24 were first drafted in French.
No. English title French title Dialog Release date PatronsThe respective comic pages on www.peppercarrot.com 1 The Potion of Flight yes 2014-05-10 0 2 Rainbow Potions no 2014-07-25 21 3 The Secret Ingredients yes 2014-10-03 93 4 Stroke of Genius yes 2014-11-21 156 5 Special holiday episode no 2014-12-19 170 6 The Potion Contest yes 2015-03-28 245 7 The Wish yes 2015-04-30 245 8 Pepper's Birthday Party yes 2015-06-28 354 9 The Remedy yes 2015-07-31 406 10 Summer Special no 2015-08-29 422 11 The Witches of Chaosah yes 2015-09-30 502 12 Autumn Clearout yes 2015-10-31 575 13 The Pyjama Party yes 2015-12-08 602 14 The Dragon's Tooth yes 2016-01-29 671 15 The Crystal Ball no 2016-03-25 686 16 The Sage of the Mountain yes 2016-04-30 671 17 A Fresh Start yes 2016-06-30 719 18 The Encounter yes 2016-08-05 720 19 Pollution yes 2016-10-26 755 20 The Picnic no 2016-12-17 825 21 The Magic Contest yes 2017-02-23 816 22 The Voting System yes 2017-05-30 864 23 Take a Chance yes 2017-08-10 879 24 The Unity Tree yes 2017-12-15 810 25 There Are No Shortcuts no 2018-05-17 909 26 Books Are Great yes 2018-07-28 1,098 27 Coriander's Invention yes 2018-10-31 1,060 28 The Festivities yes 2019-01-24 960 29 Destroyer of Worlds yes 2019-04-25 960 30 Need a Hug no 2019-09-03 973 31 The Fight yes 2019-12-20 971 32 The Battlefield yes 2020-03-31 1,121 33Spell of War yes 2020-06-29 1,190 34The Knighting of Shichimi yes 2021-03-31 1,096 35The Reflection yes 2021-06-18 1,054 36The Surprise Attack yes 2021-12-15 1,036 37The Tears of Phoenix yes 2022-08-03 1,058 38The Healer yes 2023-04-26 1,084 39The Tavern yes 2025-11-12 1,106 40 41 42
Funding
Revoy aims to change the comic book industry by eliminating intermediate steps in the production process. Though Pepper&Carrot is free, he encourages people to support him via crowdfunding in the form a small amount of money per episode that is released.
Patreon takes a commission of 5%, in addition to any credit card fees. This is significantly less than a traditional chain where the publisher, distributors and retailers each claim a part of the profit. People donating monthly some amount on Patreon to Pepper&Carrot – are named on the bottom of the comics. As of May 2019, 816 people donate a total of per month, allowing David Revoy to work full time on Pepper&Carrot.
In 2018, Pepper&Carrot was believed to be one of the more successful creative projects on Liberapay, a platform for recurrent donations. In February 2023, Revoy made €62.11 per week from 79 patrons and with the top public patron giving €8.23 per week. About starting an account on Liberapay despite already receiving funding via Patreon, Revoy said it provided "a stronger focus on privacy for the Pepper&Carrot audience" and offered lower transaction fees. Since 2022, also patrons on Liberapay can get their name in the credit written at the end of the webcomic.
Other methods of payment to support Revoy are Tipeee, PayPal, and wire transfer (which works worldwide and is free of charge within Europe)
Revoy suggests the business model allows the comic to stay independent and doesn't have to resort to advertising. On the webcomic's webpage he extensively explains his philosophy, the reasons for wanting to cut out intermediaries between artist and audience, and why he does not put any content behind a paywall.
When the publisher Glénat reached out to Revoy about publishing Pepper&Carrot, he declined their offer of a traditional contract with royalty payments in favor of keeping the Creative Commons attribution license, something that caused confusion in the legal and financial departments of the publisher. Glénat then offered to be the top patron of the webcomic, and Revoy retained the copyright and creative control over it. He considers Glénat's published books as just one of many other derivative works of the webcomic.
About working on the webcomic, Revoy said in 2015 that it was a dream come true and that "Every artist I know would love to make their own comics. Would love to get paid for making it, and to keep the control of it".
Origin and production
Revoy aims for each episode to contain a small story arc where a character evolves and learns.
Reviews of the text in the speech balloons, and the translations, are performed in GitLab using Markdown.
Translations
, the webcomic is translated into the following 28 languages with a coverage of 90 percent or higher:
Catalan Chinese Danish German English Esperanto Spanish Finnish French Scottish Gaelic Galo Indonesian Italian Japanese Cornish Lithuanian Mexican Spanish Dutch language Norwegian (Nynorsk) Norwegian (Bokmål) Persian Polish Brazilian Portuguese Romanian Russian Slovene Toki Pona Vietnamese
For another 40 languages, the coverage is less than 90 percent.
The web page has an open invitation to contribute to translations, and detailed instructions on how to do it."Translate the webcomic", peppercarrot.com.
License and derivative works
All artwork is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC-BY). The free license permits the work to be remixed and reused, even for commercial purposes, which has led to derivative works such as animated short films, cosplay, fanart, a card game, a boardgame, several video games, and research.
Revoy often publishes links from his blog to derivative works and has expressed excitement that his work is re-used, saying "I'll never regret making Pepper&Carrot so open." and that he is happy to see other people making money from it.
He attributes some of the success of the webcomic to the release of its source, and highlighted the many translations into other languages.
In 2022, one derivative (a publication) had removed content (a panel) and added dialog to episodes that originally had no dialog. The publisher had been very honest to the audience about the changes by publishing preview files of the content of the books. Revoy saw it as a good opportunity to question his decision to choose a free license for his work, but in the end he affirmed his decision, concluded that it was part of publishing his work under such a free license, and also that part of the work of a publisher is to adapt the content to its audience. He hoped that the derivative publication would help that audience discover his original work. Revoy congratulated the publisher on their successful crowd-funding campaign and welcomed the financial support that the derivative work would bring to his own project of producing future episodes of the webcomic.
Publication
In 2016 French publisher Glénat added a bundle with episodes 1 through 11 to their catalog, to print and distribute the comic in France. Revoy was consulted to ensure the colours and quality of the print are as he envisioned it. The publication has no effect on the license of the webcomic. In April 2017 the second volume of the book, including the episodes 12 to 21, was published by Glénat. There is also a printed version of the Bretonic version of the first ten episodes by publisher Ar Gripi, as well as a German printed version by publisher Popcom, and a Bulgarian version by Prikazka-Igra.
In 2023, Revoy particularly highlighted the Nynorsk publication of episodes 1 to 29 by the Norwegian publisher Outland Forlag, who also sponsors Revoy's work.
Animated films
In 2016, the Morevna team started a crowdfunding campaign for a motion comic version of episode 6. The animation was done based on the original source files with free software like Krita, Blender, Papagayo-NG and RenderChan. The film was released in June 2017 under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Revoy was not associated with the production, but appreciated the project.
Video games
In 2021, Pepper was made a playable character in the free kart racing game SuperTuxKart 1.3.
There are at least four different video games based on Pepper&Carrot in development.
Board game
Loyalist Games created a board game based on episode 6 of the comic. Just like the webcomic the game is available under a free license, and its rulebook has instructions in English, Dutch, French and Spanish.
Role-playing game
In October 2019, Witchcraft: Magic of Hereva was released. The role-playing game used the Dungeons & Dragons rule system."Witchcraft: Magic of Hereva (5e)", drivethrurpg.com.
Image gallery
Footnotes
Notes
References
David Revoy. "About", peppercarrot.com, retrieved 5 February 2023. "peppercarrot.com" (button "All 63 languages"), peppercarrot.com.
"36: David Revoy on Pepper & Carrot and Free Culture" (mp3), Libre Lounge, 17 April 2020.
"SuperTuxKart 1.3 release available!", blog.supertuxkart.net, 31 August 2021.
Jason van Gumster. "Liberapay: How creators of open content get funded", opensource.com, 7 May 2018. Erik Moeller (via Ryan Merkley). "The case of the witch and her cat: crowdfunding free culture", creativecommons.org, 17 July 2015. "Passionate Voices Episode 2 - David Revoy" (at 27m48s), Passionate Voices on YouTube, 2 June 2015. Paul Brown. "Free Software Artists and their Tools — Part I: David Revoy & Krita" (archived), Open Content & Software Magazine, 28 May 2016. "davidrevoy" (archived), liberapay.com, retrieved 5 February 2023. "Patronage:", davidrevoy.com, retrieved 5 February 2023. "Scientific Paper: Sketch to Line-art by Waseda University", davidrevoy.com, 2 July 2018. Edgar Simo-Serra, Satoshi Iizuka, Hiroshi Ishikawa at Waseda University."Mastering Sketching:Adversarial Augmentation for Structured Prediction", arxiv.org, 27 March 2017. "Pepper&Carrot (heavy) derivation: the case of the succesful [sic] Bulgarian book publishing by Prikazka-Igra", davidrevoy.com, 7 October 2022. "Pepper&Carrot Wiki", peppercarrot.com, retrieved 6 February 2023. "Tag: derivation", davidrevoy.com, retrieved 8 February 2023.