Skook Words (and Pictures) #9

Posted on by

These Days –

I deliver a lot of so-called junk mail. There’d be very little mail without it and I wouldn’t have a job so I don’t hate the stuff. What I don’t like is badly managed junk mail. Most of the time I just deliver it and forget about it but this week I felt compelled to contact the sender so they could hopefully improve their return rate. This was my email –

Hi Folks,
I’m a mail carrier and I’ve delivered your mailer on my route recently. I don’t normally contact the folks behind mailers but you’re also my dental team and I like you guys.

Whoever is in charge of, or sold you, the addresses for your mailing, needs to update that list. The actual addresses are fine but so many of the names on mailer are wrong. A quarter to a third of the names are those of people who don’t live at those addresses anymore. Many of those people haven’t lived at those addresses for more than five years.
I’m not a marketing professional but it seems that customers are more likely to pay attention to something addressed to “occupant”, “neighbor”, “future smiling person”, etc. than something that’s got the wrong name on it. A generic address is a commercial. The wrong name means the mail was meant for someone else.
Just a thought. See you at my next cleaning!
David Ingersoll

I got a thank you back from the dental office. I don’t enjoy going to the dentist but these folks make the experience as tolerable as possible.

Billi 99

I seem to be making good progress on updating the Billi 99 pages. Some of that has been fun. I’m finding out how to do things in Photoshop that I’d never thought of doing. I’ve learned how to make Actions to streamline the work. I got a lot done on Sunday. That felt great. Sarah got contact information and production guidelines from the publisher. I now have an idea what they expect and people to talk to when I have questions.

As I wrote last week, Tim Sale did the original Billi illustrations on Duoshade art board. Doing comics using Duoshade was popular for a time in the late Eighties and early Nineties. I used it myself when I did Misspent Youths. The fellow who had been the designer for this book had told me that once we figured out the moire issues on the Billi pages we could use the technique to do a nice reprint of Misspent Youths. While I appreciate the thought, it wouldn’t work. Tim used the smallest hatch pattern available. That’s probably why we’re getting the moire pattern. I used a larger hatch pattern for Misspent Youths that doesn’t seem to moire when I reproduce it. But that’s an aside.

Duoshade was designed to be used for illustrations printed on newsprint. Before comic artists rediscovered it during the black and white boom it got a lot of use in newspaper illustrations and comic strips. The board has a hatch patern printed on it that becomes visible when painted with a developer. When it’s printed the result is a graytone, or a couple of graytones, depending on the type of board. The actual illustrations have a brown cast to them. Below is my scan of page 27 of the 4th issue of Billi 99.

This page, when printed, came out with hatching patterns that register as shades of gray for most people.

The moire pattern is barely noticeable on this page. Most people reading the book wouldn’t think twice about it. Our previous designer was much more OCD (that’s a good thing in a designer) and he looked for ways to diminish or, better yet, eliminate it. One solution would be to simply rescan all the original pages. We’ve got a few pages but, unfortunately, the rest of the art is scattered to the far corners of comic book fandom.

Below is my first pass at revising the art. I was inspired by the warm quality of physical Duoshade art. Billi 99 takes place in a sort of retro future and giving the illustrations a sepia tint seemed to work.

Each individual page is being converted. Then I’m going over every page to make sure the borders and gutters are white. There are a few pages with weird artifacts inserted when they were originally scanned that need to be corrected. A few of the pages are much darker than the others. That will need to be corrected for.

I also need to figure out a way to convert the lettering from its current raster state to a vector one and make sure it’s all solid black. Tim did all the lettering himself directly on the page. These days the vast majority of comics are lettered digitally. The publisher who will be putting out Billi wants the lettering their books to be done as vector art on a separate layer from the rest of the illustrations. Frank Cvetkovic extracted the lettering and put it on its own layer. Tim had a font designed of his own lettering (based on his Billi lettering) but it’s … standardized. We could use that to replace his Billi work. But the Billi lettering is a bit more organic and eccentric than what the font provides. We want to preserve that.

Kickstarter?

On Wednesday we went to a meet-up with Oriana Leckert, Kickstarter’s comics advisor. She was in town for Emerald City Comic Con and Rob Salkowitz had arranged a dinner for a few folks before the con. We’ve had a number of people advise us to run a Kickstarter to fund the Billi Special Edition. None of those people have actually run a Kickstarter so we wanted to talk to someone who was more involved in the process.

Oriana was very encouraging. Rob was encouraging. We came away with a lot of ideas for what we could offer to supporters of a Billi Kickstarter. Because we were up late for the meeting and then I worked yesterday we haven’t really had a chance to talk out the pros and cons. We’ll be doing that this weekend. I’ll let y’all know what we decide next week.

I hope your week is a good one with as much rest or excitement as you need. Balance is everything!

See you in seven!