scarygoround

Mini Q&A: Bad Machinery volume 7

Added 2021-12-09 16:42:52 +0000 UTC

John C. Kirk writes:

"I’ve recently read through “Bad Machinery” (which I enjoyed). I noticed that vol 7 was in portrait mode while the rest of the series was in landscape. I remember you mentioned something about formatting Steeple in vertical panels for Webtoon; was that a similar experiment?"

The answer to this is maybe a bit too prosaic for the Q&A but I'll have a go. Volume 7 (The Case Of The Forked Road, a more complex time travel story) was designed for the pages to be cut in half to facilitate landscape print production. You will see that with the exception of pages produced specifically for the book, they all have a split halfway down the page. But the resultant hypothetical book was 240+ pages long and I was going cold on the large format we'd been using for several reasons, so we kept it portrait at a smaller size, then used that same size (rotated through 90 degrees) for the landscape Pocket Editions that replaced the large editions.

240 pages at the size of of the original large Bad Machinery books would have been a heavy old book, expensive to buy, expensive to ship. Dragging the volumes to a convention in a suitcase didn't leave much space for anything else. And those big books were frequently damaged in shops and returned. I'd often see them hanging three inches out of graphic novel section shelves, "dinged to shit" next to Batman, if you will pardon my French. Drawing Bad Machinery landscape format was a silly mistake I rued many times over. It made my job very difficult sometimes. Live and learn!

The Webtoon style Steeple thing was just an experiment I did as a post for this Patreon around the time it launched.

Please keep sending in questions!!