The Scanning times

The best thing in the world is having your own book. The worst thing, however, is MAKING that book. See, the problem with making a collection of your early work is that it's likely you had NO IDEA what you were doing at that time.

For me, that means I didn't regularly save hi-res files of my comics until I had over 400 comics to my name. You know what that means? RE-SCANNING ALL THE OLD STUFF! WOOHOO! What you see above is my current progress against the comics that still need scanning. (Hint: The to-scan pile is the one four times the size of the scanned pile.)

Let's take a look at some of my stupidity: I used RED pencil for the first seven strips, meaning my current scanner fought them angrily. I used larger templates for the first 27 strips - that is, when I used templates at all and didn't try drawing my own. (Each time I did it was a disaster.) When I did switch to my current templates, I originally used the small pads of 14 strips. (I now buy them in packs of 100.) Problem with those pads? Turns out THEY WERE ALL MISPRINTED, with the comic area slightly tilted. That is maddening for someone who is used to simply scanning and dropping a comic into the Photoshop template. I also was a mess with my panel sizes. Here's a secret: Currently, my comics are a quarter inch smaller than norm in order for all panels to come out the same size. I figured that math out around strip 40, and it took a while longer before I figured out how to implement it correctly.

And let's not forget that re-scanning means re-fixing all the mistakes I made in the originals! Not only can it be time-consuming, but I have to remember where those fixes happened. I *think* I got 'em all so far, but I can't be sure. Editing shall come. The good news is that a decent amount (less than a hundred - maybe way less) of those strips do exist on my hard drive in hi-res form, so I don't need to rescan those. I just need to locate them on my hard drive and re-number them so I know what I have.

And once I have these comics scanned, I then have to resave them one by one into TIFF format and upload them to the bosses. And then it's on to working on book features, like commentary and the bonus storyline. Oh, and I really should work on actual Precocious at some point too. Yeesh.

But let's not forget this: I AM MAKING A BOOK! A book is the best thing ever, and worth all the pain!

Edited for some clarity: I am *helping* with the book by providing material. The awesome folks over at RCSI are doing the meaty brave stuff. I'm being the ditz who is not enabling them properly to do their job - but I am trying to make up for it the best I can!