Behind the Scenes (Patreon)

I've been spending some of my spare time recently working on the next TWB books, this time we're up to the "Longest Day" storyline. I'd asked about this a little while back, to see if you ladies and gents would prefer One Big Book, or possibly as many as four smaller books.

I'd very much like to work up everything to the end of the night at Howie's after the game day- that might well wind up being as many as four slightly smaller than normal books (roughly 100 strips, rather than the usual average of about 125) but that'll catch us up to late 2016. (The most recent book only brought us up to early 2014.)

If time permits, I may try- operative word there, "try"- to offer a One Big Book as an option, but I'd like to stress up front that doing so will very strongly rely on my having the time to both play with the files, run some test prints, draw an entirely new cover (on top of the three or possibly four I'm drawing now!) and see how my binding system handles a book that thick.

In any case, I thought you all might like to see a bit of behind the scenes. I'm working on laying out what will become Book 13, and as these strips were drawn close to four years after the last book of the original runs had been done, I'd been playing a bit fast-and-loose with the comic layout, since I'd kind of given up the idea that we'd ever see print again.

There's plenty of room on a monitor or even a phone screen if you scroll a bit, so I never worried if the strip wound up a few figurative inches longer than normal.

Well, now we're back to print mode, and I'm having to tweak a surprising number of strips to try and stay within my printable-area constraints. The last one I worked on this evening was the above strip, there the dialogue balloons in the first two panels went just a little too far outside my 'safe zone'. They'd print, but would get awfully close to the trim lines.

They also looked a bit off- turns out the text was at the wrong spacing and kerning- I'd probably had it set for some other piece of artwork, like a banner ad or something, and had forgotten to switch it back.

So I had to redo it. That meant retyping, redoing the balloons, tweaking the artwork in the first panel to better fit even the reduced balloon size, recoloring the sky, and a bunch of other very minor tweaks.

Keeping in mind I don't work with layers. :) (Not for any sociopolitical reason, I just never really learned how. I'm working on it, but for the time being, I have my little workflow worked out, and it... er, works, for me. :)

So I whipped up the above heavily-reduced animated GIF to illustrate the differences. Might not seem like huge changes, but it probably took a full three hours to tweak it to fit properly in the book.

Doc.