Title : A Confectionary Wrap-up-- Books, One-off Books, and Floppy Books
link : A Confectionary Wrap-up-- Books, One-off Books, and Floppy Books
A Confectionary Wrap-up-- Books, One-off Books, and Floppy Books
Sean Michael Robinson:
Greetings all!
With Paper to Pixel to Paper Again done (excepting a few addendum single-topic posts), I'll be returning to more round-up-style posts, addressing whatever's on my desk at the moment, or any thoughts or topics at the top of mind at the time of writing.
This is going to be one of the former, as there's a lot to get caught up on!
Jaka's Story, and the Other Un-Printed (But Restored) Books
Despite what you might infer from the August Previews catalogue listing, the restored Jaka's Story has not been printed, and will not be printed until all of the existing stock is exhausted. There was some confusion about this, by at least two people, if my email inbox can be believed, due to the way that Jaka's Story was listed.
The very short version—each month Diamond chooses two back-catalog books by each publisher to spotlight in Previews. For whatever reason, the last time that Jaka's Story was printed (way back in 2008 or 2009 or so by Lebonfon), someone at Diamond appended the words "New Printing" to the name of the title in the Diamond ordering system. Now that we're updating the books, that obviously could leave to some confusion.
Yes, the major restoration work on Jaka's Story is completed, but no, it won't go to print until the existing copies are sold. If you want to purchase copies for your store, or for some of your friends, or even for your local libraries, I hope you will! But it won't be the restored volume, at least not for a while.
The same goes for Minds, and for Church and State II, both of which are also restored and could be a week away from delivering to a printer when we get the word go. But when these titles are actually ready for a new printing, you'll hear about it here first, not in Previews.
I'll be putting together a graphic for AMOC sometime in the next week to help keep things straight. If in doubt, you can always check with me at cerebusarthunt at gmail dot com.
Cerebus the Hardcover!
Well, sort of...
We're very close to the finish line now for the very first official Aardvark/Vanaheim Cerebus hardcovers... with a print-run of one.
Readers with long memories will recall that at the tail end of last year, long-time Super Patron and aardvark enthusiast Tim F helped A/V out tremendously with a $20,000 donation that enabled A/V to, among other things, cover the massive printing bill for the new printing of Cerebus Volume One. In exchange for this, Dave offered, how about your favorite two Cerebus books, in hardcover, original art-wise?
And, slowly, that's what we've done!
The legwork for this has been accomplished in baby steps. Just finding a printer in San Diego that will deal with such short runs, and can follow basic instructions, was quite the challenge, to say the least. Even with the printer I ended up with, I had to go through three rounds of proofs before they would do what I asked from them in the first place: don't downsample the files, and use your tightest screen possible.
But, as they say, third time's the charm, and now they're ready for the finished files for the interior. I've finished the layout, so save a few pages that will need some de-screening to keep the tiny little tone from creating moire, we're ready to go.
As you can see from the above, I also did some experimenting with how to approach the layout/bleed and gutter in Indesign this time around, as the job has some peculiar quirks. The printer won't be doing the binding--that will be handled by an outside bindery, which has specific needs as to the gutter area of the printing (needing at least .75" of space on the interior margin in order to get the binding nice and tight). This, along with the borders present (or not present) in the scans themselves, has led to some rather limited choices on my part in terms of cropping etc.
While the layout work is fairly tedious, the design aspect is a nice diversion. Last week, I spent some time putting together some really rough cover "sketches" for different dust jacket options, to get a basis of discussion with Tim on what he's looking for in a dust jacket. No surprise, Chip Kidd was a big touchstone in our previous discussion, so I spent some time looking for images to "Chip Kidd-ify" for each book, that would still represent the interior fairly well.
As I said, these are extremely rough, but hopefully communicate some of the possibilities and are at least a jumping off point for further discussion. Hard to not get caught up in all the myriad possibilities when things are so open-ended--almost better to arbitrarily pick and image or set of criteria and then start working from there to arrive at the finished design, as the "polish" portion can really change things aesthetically.
Note that the below images are the full dust-jacket, spine, flaps, FC, BC, and all.
So, will there be more of these one-off hardcovers? It depends! Are you interested in one of your own, for your own favorite Cerebus book? Would you also like to be a mega-patron? Then contact Dave via phone (519/576-7820) or fax (519/576-0955) and let him know.
This entire process of restoring the books one by one, and keeping them in print, has been an extremely difficult one, one that involves lots of up-front work (and therefore upfront money) with much longer tails on the payouts. It's people like Tim F, and the Kickstarter supporters, who have made this work happen, week after week, month after month, and in return we're trying to give you all what it is you want, some value and some paper for your money.
A deep thank-you to all of you who continue to make this happen.
Cerebus in Hell?
If you haven't noticed from the post above this, The Death of Cerebus in Hell? is now available for preorder from your local comic store! Get it now while the Hell? is hot!
Speaking of Cerebus in Hell?...
Are you currently looking at the above poster and thinking, "Gosh, that would make a SWELL Cerebus in Hell? cover!" Then we need your brain! We're putting together a very special CIHell? and we need your help/jokes/cover gag! Send any and all ideas to cerebusarthunt at gmail dot com or post them in the comments, and we'll take a look at all we receive in a future post.
Lastly, also related to Cerebus in Hell... do you have a beat-up copy of any issues of the original Official Marvel Handbook? Do you have a scanner? Oh goodie! I'm looking for 300 ppi at-size color scans of, say, ten random pages of your Official Marvel Handbook. Anyone up for it? For the first two people who come through, we'll work your name into the resulting issue.
More (much more) next week...
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