November 12th, 2007

Work on the book continues, and were it not for Hastily Fashioned Filler Month, said work would not do that. Whew!

Fun fact: I have no idea why I decided to play Tyrol myself in the fillers. If you think that’s a weird decision, wait until you see who plays Tigh! Anyway, I couldn’t have done this week’s and the next two week’s filler strips without my most excellent girlfriend’s help, so a big thanks to Melissa for (wo)manning the camera!

Also, my beard was only about two weeks old when these strips were shot. It usually looks a lot fuller than that. Just look at my Twitter picture!

All of the content in the book is written, drawn, laid out, and ready for print. All that is left now is the cover. Ideally, that will be done this week.

After that, I will generate a PDF, give that PDF one last proofread, and then send it off to ComiXpress. They’ll send me a proof, I’ll read through it and give my final thumbs up, and then my initial order of books will make its way here. Excitement!

Now that I’m just about done with this crazy project, I’m ready to start thinking about what went wrong so it doesn’t go wrong again.

1) I lost a LOT of strips in a disk crash a few years ago. I still had the Photoshop files (which contain the finished artwork) for most of them, so all I had to do for those was redo the lettering. That actually gave me an opportunity to rewrite some dialog in many strips. For a couple strips, though, I didn’t even have the Photoshop files. Fortunately, the files on the website are of a decent resolution, so for the two or three strips that forced my hand, I was able to use those without it looking like complete terror.

Regardless, having to re-letter fifty-odd strips added two or three weeks to the project. What have I learned? Back up your work!

2) Laying the strips out took forever. I spent two entire weekends pressing Command-D in InDesign to place the comic files into the pages. What have I learned? Lay out the comics in the book as you finish them! Don’t do it all in one shot!

3) PDFs are taking forever to generate. We’re talking almost two hours here, probably more. Part of this is because I’ve been placing my final Illustrator files into the book, which forces InDesign to rasterize those files every time I ask it to export to a PDF. What have I learned? Generate TIFFs from your Illustrator files ahead of time! Use those in the book!

4) Formatting has been a pain. Years ago, I hadn’t really expected to ever be making a book. Because of that, it never occurred to me to pick a comic size that would be easy to fit into print. Mind you, the strips look great in the book, but I did have trouble settling on a book format. What have I learned? Choose a web format that will also work as a print format! The new comics coming in December are sized the way they are for both pacing reasons and so that I can easily stick two on top of each other to make a single 8″x10″ page. Hoo yeah!

That’s all I can think of off the top of my head right now. If more occur to me, I’ll make sure to talk about them in my next post.

Next week, I’ll talk about the things that are going through my mind as I decide on the site design for the new tmabb.com!

CURRENT MOOD: Half Eaten