24 Oct 20 - Issue 7 reflection

Issue 7 and the long March.

Hey guys, I’m pretty sure you’re sick of waiting or our excuses but here’s the honest to god deal with Issue 7.

We REALLY were hoping to get the prologue and Issue 1 recolored sooner so that we could get a revised Tim- Lim Virgin Variant out to you . That was the plan. What happened? Well Raven took up other commissions in between that ate up time. Which something you guys need to know about creation in this method, is sometimes colorists gets 0 work while the inks are done, or while books are being shipped. So there’s this very tiny window where we can pay them, ship books and get Luigi to still draw. A very careful balancing act that’s on a razor’s edge. So, should we pay colors and inks ahead of time? Well yeah so. So again, the plan internally was thus –

· Step 1 Get Issue 6 and its 3 variants out super quick in order to -

· Step 2 use the in the time and money in between the last issue being shipped out and Issue 7 being complete, we were going to use those funds to ensue that both Raven and Luigi got paid their rates. And we could have all the work for issue 7 paid up and sorted out ahead of time and hopefully get the extra stuff knocked out.

While our two-step plan DID work, a combination of 2020, COVID and other personal things stalled progress more than we liked. Mostly the combination of life and COVID lead Luigi and Raven taking on more work than normal. Also with Luigi becoming a father in March. We gave him a few weeks off because 1, he’s not our employee and there’d be nothing we could do to stop him. But to also allow him some time to bond with his son. Parents know what I mean by this.

Which let’s talk the difference between Retail and complete for a quick moment.

Some of you are confused as to why we released Issue 7 R(etail). And its because the way the story was scripting, this final leg of the initial Journey is about 56 scripted pages. The retail version ends on page 49 of the initial script. Which means we still needed to work on pages 50-56. So what’s taking so long with only 14 pages left?

Wait Brian, you just said 50-56 that’s six pages!

Yes, I know. We’re about to address that. Again these pages 50-56 had not been laid out. So when AP began pressing us to hurry up and finish, well, we planned everything up to page 49. And turned that in. Those days were some extra long days /nights and both Luigi and Raven were close to burn out. So after these initial pages were complete, we simply gave them a month break (thus the month of nothing but simple pinups) before we got back to scripting the final complete pages out. Now, the last bit, as you’ll read in the attached script, is that the last few pages were allowing Luigi to flex his creative muscle and not have the noose of my super strict guidelines. Mainly, to just let him have some fun drawing some zombie pages. So, as you can see, he did go wild and he did have fun.

So anyway, this all means that unfortunately we have to push some things to the right more than we’d like. In a perfect scenario, we’d be showcasing Sailor Ragowski pages by now and negotiating pricing on a hard cover trade. We’re gonna roll with the punches and soon as this beast is put to bed we’re going to get right back on track.

Those who are waiting on the Timothy Lim Virgin Cover, the only reason why that hasn’t been shipped out is that I’m waiting on the Revised colors to be done. I know there’s some frustrations about this one and I completely understand, but I REALLY want this project looking consistent. Its just the one thing that bugs me over-all.

For the Trade, we have 2 pages from issue 3 we still need to reintroduce so all-in-all that should end up being a directors cut. Anyway as always I appreciate your patience and understand in all this. I know its been slow. But the finish line is so close…sooo fucking close. I can taste the Muffins.