HISTORY: Shades and Angels #1
1997 was a busy year. Shortly before we put out CANDLE LIGHT PRESENTS there was SHADES AND ANGELS #1. This was printed through an outfit called Defcon-something or other. It was a company that was comprised of workers at a large web-press printer that allowed them to use off-time to print comics. They were great right up until the time to send our art back. That took some doing. I have no idea why some printers think you don't want your art back. Crazy.
The story is the first 48 pages of what is now NUMBERS. This version was hand-lettered by Jeremy with the Ames lettering guide and everything. You still see copies pop up occasionally. Jer and I signed random ones and for fun we numbered them suggesting that this copy was only number 4 of 23, or 1345 of 2200, or some such silliness. Instead of a glossy cover, we opted for a heavy non-gloss paper to make the black cover really eat up the light of its surroundings.
Things we learned with this book:
1) Lettering slowed Jer's output considerably. (Solution: I started doing the lettering electronically)
2) There had to be a better way than allowing printers to shoot directly from the art. (Solution: beef up the computer and learn at that time CorelDraw, later it became Freehand.)
3) Estimating the Diamond order for a book by two unknowns in the pre-Blogosphere days is actually pretty easy. (Now it's probably even easier.)
We always seem to do a book in close enough proximity to a convention to make our hearts race a bit. This one was no exception. We had a small press booth at the Chicago Comicon in 1997 to promote 3CG's ED (a book which had already been hamstrung by Marcos Guerra, which you can read about on our sister blog here.), and we saw a chance to have both books there. Well, we got the books the day before the convention; the art wasn't included with them, which started a whole round robin of odd conversations between myself and, eventually, the head of DefCon's girlfriend (the man himself became very very unavailable) about why they weren't included. Whatever was going on, either sloth and avarice, was in the end easily solved by explaining 1) keeping the art is theft and reportable to authorities, and 2) his bosses at the major printing company would not care to be made parties to this. Boom, FedEx next day. He'd "sent" the art (or promised same) more than five times, only to say "Oh, it came back for some reason" or "Shipping didn't do it". That's well past the end of patience. In situations like that, I frankly don't care if it's an honest mistake or not.
So we'd run through one more short-run printer. We'd found Harold Bucholz, but he was an all-ages printer, and NUMBERS ain't exactly that. So we plowed on ahead and looked for a way to publish numbers. For fun we made a gigantic minicomic of NUMBERS with covers made from the backing board of Strathmore pads and really large three-ring binder rings. But it wasn't until we met the folks from Unbound Comics that it all started to happen. So there was a fairly long period of time in which we were working on NUMBERS without any idea what published form it would take. We just knew we wanted to do this story, and we knew that quitting wasn't an option. We believed in the book, and what you do in this world is act on your beliefs.
I'll talk more about the eBook versions of NUMBERS another time. That's a whole story unto itself.
--John
The story is the first 48 pages of what is now NUMBERS. This version was hand-lettered by Jeremy with the Ames lettering guide and everything. You still see copies pop up occasionally. Jer and I signed random ones and for fun we numbered them suggesting that this copy was only number 4 of 23, or 1345 of 2200, or some such silliness. Instead of a glossy cover, we opted for a heavy non-gloss paper to make the black cover really eat up the light of its surroundings.Things we learned with this book:
1) Lettering slowed Jer's output considerably. (Solution: I started doing the lettering electronically)
2) There had to be a better way than allowing printers to shoot directly from the art. (Solution: beef up the computer and learn at that time CorelDraw, later it became Freehand.)
3) Estimating the Diamond order for a book by two unknowns in the pre-Blogosphere days is actually pretty easy. (Now it's probably even easier.)
We always seem to do a book in close enough proximity to a convention to make our hearts race a bit. This one was no exception. We had a small press booth at the Chicago Comicon in 1997 to promote 3CG's ED (a book which had already been hamstrung by Marcos Guerra, which you can read about on our sister blog here.), and we saw a chance to have both books there. Well, we got the books the day before the convention; the art wasn't included with them, which started a whole round robin of odd conversations between myself and, eventually, the head of DefCon's girlfriend (the man himself became very very unavailable) about why they weren't included. Whatever was going on, either sloth and avarice, was in the end easily solved by explaining 1) keeping the art is theft and reportable to authorities, and 2) his bosses at the major printing company would not care to be made parties to this. Boom, FedEx next day. He'd "sent" the art (or promised same) more than five times, only to say "Oh, it came back for some reason" or "Shipping didn't do it". That's well past the end of patience. In situations like that, I frankly don't care if it's an honest mistake or not.
So we'd run through one more short-run printer. We'd found Harold Bucholz, but he was an all-ages printer, and NUMBERS ain't exactly that. So we plowed on ahead and looked for a way to publish numbers. For fun we made a gigantic minicomic of NUMBERS with covers made from the backing board of Strathmore pads and really large three-ring binder rings. But it wasn't until we met the folks from Unbound Comics that it all started to happen. So there was a fairly long period of time in which we were working on NUMBERS without any idea what published form it would take. We just knew we wanted to do this story, and we knew that quitting wasn't an option. We believed in the book, and what you do in this world is act on your beliefs.
I'll talk more about the eBook versions of NUMBERS another time. That's a whole story unto itself.
--John
posted by John Ira Thomas at
11:20 AM
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