Well folks, it’s a new year, and I have good news to report about our progress on assembling the collector’s edition! I have now completely finished editing and relettering the comics from Volume One! Whoo!
In theory, Volume One was always going to be the hardest because it needed the most work in terms of formatting, corrections, and relettering. It was originally only about 130 pages, but between shuffling the page order, splitting the truly wordy pages in twain, and bringing in some pages from Volume Two so that Volume One doesn’t end on such an expository note, we’re now up to 192 pages in Volume One! At this point Michael has about 27 pages left to do some additional art for (including four new chapter pages), and then he can start shading Volume One.
Meanwhile, I’m moving on to Volume Two, which is the other volume that needs a lot of work (the ones after that will all be easier). Essentially, it’s the same process as for Volume One, but hopefully it’ll be faster because I’ve got a finished script and a lot more experience at this point, and also I won’t be in a coma. I won’t be trying to cram all the original dialogue onto overcrowded pages anymore, either, I’ll just be going straight to splitting the pages, and that will save a lot of time and frustration. Those overcrowded pages completely killed my focus every single time.
But, all this work on the print collection does bring up a question, and we’d really like your input on it. When you get right down to it, Errant Story has kinda always been a print comic masquerading as a webcomic. Or rather, the webcomic has been its caterpillar stage, inching along and developing over time, but the finished collector’s edition books will be the butterfly stage (which I suppose makes this editing process the cocoon, appropriately enough). They’re functionally two different creatures, so the question is… what happens to the caterpillar version of the comic once the metamorphosis is complete? Webcomics are living things that exist best in the moment, growing and interacting with the readers and with each other. Errant Story has ended, so it can’t be that anymore, and while we do have plans for Errant Tales and a couple of actual sequels, those will be very much like Errant Story in that they are going to be print comics at heart. So what do we do with the website that best honors the webcomic that was while promoting the transformed version to new readers who missed out on the caterpillar process? How would you like to see us integrating those two aspects of the comic in future?
So, that’s where we are with the editing now, and a glimpse of where we’re headed, too. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!
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