Revolutionary stuff, y’all. When the comic takes place, the concept of the card catalogue was still just a glimmer in the eye of the increasingly moribund French state.
BUT, MORE PERTINENTLY:
Beginning on Monday, April 5th (Easter Monday and the last or penultimate day of Passover, depending on your affiliations), pre-orders for the first print edition volume of Family Man will go on sale in my store.
Copies will start at $20 (+$5 s/h) for the basic model and go higher for increased fanciness! The book alone is going to be an 8.5×11″ glossy sepia beast.
The pre-orders will directly fund the print run, so if you’ve been looking for a way to support the comic, this is how to do it! I can’t print it unless I get an enthusiastic turnout from you, dear readers.
I’m aiming for a July release, with the book debuting for the general public at the San Diego Comic-con. Pre-ordered copies will go out as soon as I get ’em in, so if you want the jump on the rest of the world, mark your calendars for Monday!
…Christ, I’m nervous.
Here, have your update a day early. Huzzah!
Drawing all those cards was secretly the best thing ever. I don’t know why it was so enjoyable; it just made me happy.
Not much news this week from me! It’s strangely soothing to be coloring in book spines again, though. Also I expect this next little sequence is going to be popular with the librarians in the audience. (I know you’re there, ladies and gentlemen. I can hear you breathing.)
I’ll actually be speaking at a library (pre)conference this week in Portland, with studiomate Jeff Parker and others, courtesy my friend and occasional collaborator Sara Ryan, so I look forward to yammering at a group of my favorite information and public service professionals.
For my fellow residents of the Northern hemisphere, happy Spring!
This cup of coffee and I are currently recovering from a long but successful weekend in Seattle for the Emerald City Comicon. Thank you to everybody who came by and said hello! It was a much-needed morale boost for me, here at the tail-end of this Winter of Ultimate Suck.
Thank you especially to everybody who asked me (often aggressively!) when the first Family Man book will be coming out. The answer: as soon as possible. I’ve got several requests out for quotes, and as soon as I receive one that sounds good, I’ll kick into pre-press mode. It’s going to be a lot of work to get it into shape (Dylan of 2006 didn’t quite know what she was setting herself up for…) and I’ll be taking preorders/Kickstarter to help cover the costs.
On to other business:
My lovely friend, sometime-collaborator, and all-around champion YA author and youth librarian Sara Ryan is tackling an excellent project.
She’s in the process of writing a graphic novel to be illustrated by Carla Speed McNeil, and, being a good person, decided to ask all the artists at Periscope Studio about their pet peeves when it comes to comics writing.
I chimed in. I write for myself, I’ve written for others, and I’ve drawn scripts from other people as well, so I am just full of annoying advice!
My first item:
1) Don’t say “Have fun with this!” Unless the writer actually knows what I find fun. “In this panel, we see an elegantly-dressed 18th century intellectual riding a dragon” would, for me, be fun. For somebody else, eye-stabby.
Heeeey it’s a page. Another bruiser of a week, gang. April! April will be the month where things start to go my way! Oh well, at least Luther seems to be doing well for the moment. We can be confident that will end soon.
But, most importantly, I’ll be in Seattle this weekend at the Emerald City Comicon. Come visit me at Table F-07, right next to Erika and much of Periscope Studio.
I’ll have some snazzy new prints to sell – many featuring cute animals! You want them, I know you do.
And here is another page. There’s some more personal complication coming up – one surgery (not on me), the final dregs of a move (guys I own so many books and so many cats), the looming con season, several other projects which will come into maturity any moment now and demand all the attention, etc, but DAMMIT HERE IS A PAGE.
With a barn swallow. Or a bit of one, anyway.
In the meantime, because I’m too harried to come up with many salient words right now, I’ve been occasionally dropping interesting pictures in my long-neglected Tumblr account. If you enjoy pedantic imagery of the past, heave to!