Bittersweet Candy Bowl

It’s surprisingly big and thick! (that’s what Paulo said) Plus this version is about 50 pages short of what the real one will be. The one I have is 260mm. This is not going to work with $4 large letter postage.

I’m not allowed to show you the cover, unfortunately. It was an old idea that I got Veronica to do a quick sketch for, and she’s embarrassed about the sketch part.

I’m mostly happy with the quality, the paper is kind of blindingly bright though. I’m disappointed in the printing of the cover, it seems like it was done on a consumer laserjet—sure, it’s glossy, but it fucks up gradients and looks cheap up close. The interior, which I submitted at 300dpi because I had trouble compressing the PDF otherwise, really doesn’t look that great and needs 600dpi to work, I think. Also, while it’s to be expected, the summer vacation and newer chapters look so much better than the box comics.

I’ll continue testing - the next book will be a 30-page short one, testing different level and dpi options for the nicest interior pages.

It’s kind of a way to get all the old stuff out of the way so all the other volumes can be beautifully Photoshopped :-[

Yes, the cleanups you see on the site are the best you’re going to get. It’d take far too long, and frankly BCB has always been a comic that has been tied pretty deeply to the author’s development as an artist. I know it kind of sucks, but you’ll have to wait for whatever comes after BCB to see something that’s going to be professional from the start.

I thought that getting the first comic redrawn, the first four after that re-lettered and fixing a crucial chapter (Confrontation) was the best way to fix the major problems, and that was dutifully done for the website relaunch.

My worst fear for this printed edition relates to the fairly poor quality of a lot of the comics inside it, but there’s not much that can realistically done!

It is pretty weird that you can tell that that is Up.

Oh, of course. That’s the sort of thing I made this to check. The bit you’re talking about is the gutter, and now I have a good idea of how wide a gutter I need to work around. I’m also better able to work out how to deal with pages that don’t fill the space provided.

Yeah, plus it’ll have bonus stuff in it. It’s just a means of monetising webcomics, a lot of artists do it.

Not quite sure yet, but I’d be aiming for $5-10.

It’s kind of sobering when you think that even if we sold a few hundred it wouldn’t be Real Money. Such is the plight of the artist

In terms of “pre-orders”, I’m kind of wondering if I should take advantage of the miserable AUD exchange rate right now - at the moment, US dollars are worth a lot more than they usually are! But the book is two months off at the earliest. I’m getting the design together, but we still have at least two more versions of the book between now and the final one. Also, Veronica basically needs to set enough time to do a chapter’s worth of content to add to it, and that takes time.

No. I don’t think we’ll use fan content at this stage.

No.

Any space for fanstories/incentive comics will just be used for original content.

We will do preorders when I have the first real proof copy done. That would require Veronica to draw some stuff, and so far she hasn’t drawn anything for it.

Samantha, sure. We’ll only buy a certain amount to personalise and might run out, but the plain version will always be ready for shipping.