Book Stuff

So here’s what’s up.

There will be an omnibus edition of Opplopolis. The current plan, subject to change, is for a 508-page soft-cover book with french folds, wrap-around cover — nice looking. In order to do it the way I would like, I’m going to have to do a crowd-funding campaign. The success or failure of the campaign will determine if the book costs around $40 USD and is available at retail, or if it costs significantly more and is available from the website only. Basically, it would determine if this is a self-published book, or a vanity project. Either way, an omnibus will exist.

As for a volume 2, I’m going to go ahead and say it’s not going to happen. I feel bad for anyone who bought the first volume hoping to get its companion someday, but I’d really rather do the complete edition. If you did buy it, and you’re upset about it, let me know and I’ll send you a drawing or something to make up for it. There are few enough of them out there that I think I can manage that.

As I said last week, there is still a lot of work to do putting this together and it is TEDIOUS. For the rest of this post, I’ll explain just how tedious it is because, I don’t know, it’s interesting to me.

This page has some good examples of the sorts of edits I’ve been making. First, you’ll notice that the gutters have been cleaned up and standardized. No more stray lines or crud. Second, the lettering has been redone in the new typeface. I made both fonts from my own handwriting, and while I like the old one, I think the newer one is easier to read — at least at print resolution it is. It’s a little thin here. At any rate, I don’t have access to the old font, so it kind of has to be this one. There are also a few small edits on the page. The “FUM” sound effect was redone, the “oof” balloon was changed to be more angular (all the balloons are redone, but I’ll talk about that later,) and the small panel in the corner with Carla’s head has been moved to try to fix the tangent where it looks like her wrist has a little face on it. These are the sorts of edits I’m making. Nothing major, just tweaking things here and there where it’s not too time-intensive to do so. (Looking at this now, that “oof” balloon is touching the panel border in a distracting way. I’ll probably go back and fix that.)

Here is a page where you can better see the revised lettering. Now, I’m sure some of you are going to say you prefer the old, sloppy word balloons, and you know, that’s ok. I kind of like them too. But the thing I’m going for here is consistency, and I’m willing to sacrifice a little bit of character to make the earlier pages match the more recent ones. Thing about those old word balloons, though — they’re on the paper. Actually, hold on, let me show you something…

The earlier pages of Opplopolis were done in three parts like this. Eventually I got a large-format scanner and was able to keep the pages intact, but I still kept up the three-tiered format until chapter 15. Of course, the last five chapters are all digital. Anyway, I haven’t had to re-scan these pages, thank goodness, but as you can see, the word balloons had to be shrunk. Which means I’ve had to carefully extend the artwork to fill in the extra space. So there’s your tedium. Also, see all those faint pencil lines on the originals? If you look closely, the darkest of them show up as crumbs on the line-art. So I’ve been cleaning those up as well.

As of this moment, half of the pages are ready to go. At the rate I’m going, I’ll be able to finish formatting all the comic pages by mid-June. From there, I’m going to do twenty black-and-white spot illustrations for the beginning of each chapter (those can be backer rewards, I guess), I’m going to do a painted cover (backer reward), and I’ll figure out something to do for the title page. May be an original piece, may be a collage, I don’t know. That should all be done in time to do a crowd-funding campaign in August, which is the comic’s birth-month. Eleven years. Not a round number, but oh well.

(Incidentally, November 2023 is the 20th birthday of this site. That is a round number.)

I’ll post again next Friday. It might be my promised postmortem or it might be about painting. I haven’t decided.