Book 2 is FINALLY Being Printed... and Why the Delay

It's taken seven years, but last night Peter is the Wolf 2: Life in the Doghouse FINALLY went to the printer. Tomorrow or Monday, the adults-only version of the book will follow, and after that a short-run reprint of the adult version of Book 1. After that the official PDF of Book 2 will be made available on the WLP online store and emailed out to those who preordered it via IndieGoGo or otherwise.

Obviously I want everyone who ordered it to make sure their mailing addresses are up to date, and I'll be sending out emails about that before long. For right now, though, I want to explain why it took so long.

When we first ran the IndieGoGo project back in 2013, the basic pages of the comic were in place... but not print-ready. Quite a few pages needed redraws of some sort, and many of the pages hadn't been shaded/colored. The artist, Ben Rodriguez, said he'd work on it, and I was really optimistic about the time it would take to finish getting the book ready for print. But, as of 2014, I had no reason to believe the delays would be any big deal.

What I didn't know was, even as the IndieGoGo was running, a split was developing between Ben and myself, a split founded in political identity. I don't want to go into any details about that, except to say that by 2015 it was already becoming obvious that Ben had lost enthusiasm for Peter is the Wolf. Despite this he resisted my offers to get help with the shading, saying he had a cousin who could work on it and that he wanted to do it himself. 

As time went on, contact between the two of us faded. I'm not a chatty person by nature, but even I noticed how many of my emails and Facebook messages went unanswered, and my gentle nudges for progress not just on getting Book 2 ready but producing new pages of the comic received no responses whatever. Eventually I asked Ben to drop doing new pages at the end of Book 3 and just focus on getting Book 2 printable. 

Ben's last page of Peter is the Wolf posted to the website in January 2017. By August of that year I had had no further updates of any progress on the comic and didn't even have all the high-res pages in hand to give to a colorist. It became apparent that our political differences were growing ever more extreme, and that Ben was not so much tire of Peter is the Wolf as he was tired of working with me, personally. In August events spurred me to demand that he give me all the print-quality pages in whatever condition they were in and cease work on a job he clearly no longer wanted to do. 

To be clear, Ben Rodriguez is an incredibly skilled artist. Peter is the Wolf literally would not exist had he not encouraged me to create a werewolf comic for him to draw. And I know that most of you would strongly prefer that he return to drawing the comic- to the point that I've had people ask me to throw out the Book 4 pages drawn by Padunk and Mischa cel Frumos and have Ben redraw them.

But neither he nor I are the same people we were in 2002 when we first began planning the comic, and today I dread even the thought of contacting him, in no small part because I know the feelings are more than reciprocated. In fact, the last couple of years of our working relationship were so bad that I have seriously considered just dropping Peter is the Wolf altogether, and might have done it except for my IndieGoGo obligations and my desire to see a story, so close to the end, brought to its planned conclusion. In any case, Ben doesn't want to work with me, and I don't think I can work with him, so that's a closed issue.

Anyway, by October I finally had all those pages in hand, so that work could resume on making them printable. Unfortunately, in the meantime, my finances had taken a nose-dive, mostly due to automotive issues.

In October 2016 my money on-hand and my debts were about the same, and if I'd had the book in hand then I could have sent it to the printer at once. But between November 2016 and January 2019 I had three van transmissions replaced, then the van itself replaced when diagnostics showed the transmission was about to fail for the fourth time in two years... and then the replacement van transmission failed while I was hundreds of miles from home. Every time I thought I'd dug myself out of one disaster, another struck. 

All of these incidents led to massive repair bills, lost income from inability to travel to conventions, and greater debt. I was only able to keep money in the bank to cover bills in December and January of each year, when I have no income to speak of. The money from the IndieGoGo was wiped out. I increased my income through building up business and Patreon and other donations, but that money all went to debt service or to reinvestment in the convention side of my business, which was the only thing keeping me afloat.

All of this left no money to hire artists to finish Book 2, never mind printing it.

(By the way, the majority of the money donated to the Peter is the Wolf Patreon went to pay the artists working on the comic at the time.)

Over the past year, despite things like COVID-19, I have begun righting the ship. A little at a time I got the shading work finished. This book would have gone to print in April or May had not COVID frozen my convention income. As it is, I did eventually qualify for COVID emergency aid to get through the year, and I'm using part of that to finally get the IndieGoGo project cleared.

And now, at last, the books are going to printer. It's taken too damn long, and I'm sorry about that, but short of refunding everyone's money I don't know what else I could have done. I couldn't force an unhappy artist to work faster, and I had to prioritize meeting bills and maintaining my main sources of income when money became tight. 

Will Book 3 see print? All I can say is, I'm not going to announce any more Kickstarter/IndieGoGo books until the finished, print-ready artwork is all in hand and ready to go. And the Book 3 pages will need a lot more work than Book 2 did. Ben got more than two-thirds of the way through the redraw and shading project before work stopped. Practically nothing has been done with the Book 3 pages- they are as you see them on the website, half-finished.

But Book 2 will be in print probably by the end of the month and will ship out during November. And I'll be posting updates soon on where other benefits from the IndieGoGo project stand. And that was the main thing for me, even more important than finding an artist to complete the last three chapters of PitW.

Thanks to all of you for your patience and loyalty. I'm very damn sorry you had to demonstrate them for this long. Next time, if there is one, I'll know better.