The Book-ening.

Hey you lovely people.

As the webcomic reaches its end, it's time for me to jump into the "holy shit, I need to take almost a thousand drawings and ALL the text and convert this mega-vertical mess into an actual, normal-sized, spread-paged, physical book that someone can hold"... phase.

Now I could have jumped right to the "find a publisher" phase and then they would likely tell me that they have a team of graphic designers who do this exact work on payroll. But honestly...

This is my baby. This is my blood, sweat, tears, and life.

It just... doesn't feel right... handing that over to someone and saying "here, do what YOU want, YOU decide what art deserves to be big or small, YOU decide how the chapters are going to flow and play out page-by-page, etc..."

And that feels especially lazy and wrong for me specifically, considering I'm a mo-effing graphic designer! I didn't work my ass off in NY and put myself through night school (while navigating a relationship, working full time, selling vacuums on weekends, busking in the subway, and trying to close Elan) just to throw the kind of work that I can do myself at someone else.

Nah, hell NO.

I honestly tried not to think of this part when I was creating the webcomic because I did realize this conundrum would eventually happen. I felt like worrying about how my vertical art would fit into a rectangle was going to rob me (and the reader) of how the comic could grow and evolve using that vertical format. 

But yeah, here we are. Anyways, once I got passed organizing the sheer amount of files I have of this comic (some chapters alone are up to 22gigs in size) and the pain of separating each individual image into it's own file so I could move it around on the layout... I'm actually starting to have fun doing this. 

It's a LOT OF WORK. But... it's pretty cool seeing how this webcomic can live inside a completely new shape (see image above for a little taste).

Plus, going chapter by chapter and going through all the text is giving me a chance to take note of all the errors and typos. Fuck there's a lot! But here's a secret nobody else know about how I created this comic: I just steamrolled through chapter by chapter and never looked back. So as fucking crazy as this sounds: I've never actually read my own comic.

And by that I mean, once CH48 was done I was so focused on CH49 that I never looked back. But imagine that for every chapter since the start. I just didn't have time.

And to add to that, I'd say 98% of this comic was done on the first take. And by that I mean that... okay let me rewind for a minute. 

Here's how I made a chapter. I didn't WRITE shit, I remembered. So I'd sit around remembering for a few days (usually at night) and then I'd open up a photoshop document and start throwing photos into it (from sites like pixabay and pexels). So a huge part of this comic was browsing through photos trying to catch the vibe of how I wanted to present what I was remembering.

I'd arrange the photos (between 10 and 30 usually) into a timeline, then I'd start drawing them. This could take a couple weeks or more (because I was working full time and also have plenty of husband and dad stuff to get done).

So now I have my timeline in art form.

Then I'd pretty much just "stream of consciousness" over that timeline. And as I said before, probably 98% of what you read was what came out of my head on the first go. I once heard something about writing that said "great books aren't written, they're re-written" meaning that authors go back over and over again to edit and refine what their manuscripts, well...

Not your boy Joe. This shit came out and was done. And I'll be damned if I had the time to go back and nitpick at it. Again, I just didn't have time. PLUS, I'm making these chapters live the second I'm done with the writing. 

The "planning" of a chapter took about 10 minutes because it was mostly remembering and then deciding where the chapter would start (which was easy because I'd just ended one) and exactly what I'd write about.

Then it took a few days to find pictures.

Then it took a couple weeks or more to draw.

But to "write" a chapter... shit... only about an hour. It honestly takes longer to upload the damn thing and set up the mailchimp email.

Then it was onto planning/creating the next chapter.

So yeah, it's a pretty weird process overall that ended up working out somehow. More and more people kept finding the comic despite zero advertising on my part.  

But where was I going with this... oh yeah, so I never really had the time or patience to go back and start rewriting a chapter or deciding that some part should be taken out or changed. 

So I never looked back. 

So I never actually read my own comic. Even still. I'm just rearranging at this point. I'll probably read the thing from beginning to end in a couple months (hopefully) when I have this thing test-printed.

Pretty weird huh? Honestly, there was a TON of weird stuff that I noticed when I was making this thing. And I'll tell you more about that stuff soon. But I'll give you one example: the website stats would weirdly spike before I posted each chapter. Like... on the ESP shit. Seriously. At first I thought it was because I was dropping a new chapter on Fridays for so long, but at some point I started posting it on random days of the week and I'd still notice a bizarre spike almost RIGHT BEFORE I dropped a new chapter.  And sometimes the spikes would be huge. These would happen hours before I posted. 

Like, how did you people know? Is this "The Great Energy" linking us together. I don't know... but it happened waaaay too many times to be a coincidence.

Thanks for reading, I'm going to try to drop more of this behind the scenes stuff as we get closer to me putting this comic into your mailboxes and hands. Thanks again for everything!