Well folks, it’s a new year, and I have good news to report about our progress on assembling the collector’s edition! I have now completely finished editing and relettering the comics from Volume One! Whoo!

In theory, Volume One was always going to be the hardest because it needed the most work in terms of formatting, corrections, and relettering. It was originally only about 130 pages, but between shuffling the page order, splitting the truly wordy pages in twain, and bringing in some pages from Volume Two so that Volume One doesn’t end on such an expository note, we’re now up to 192 pages in Volume One! At this point Michael has about 27 pages left to do some additional art for (including four new chapter pages), and then he can start shading Volume One.

Meanwhile, I’m moving on to Volume Two, which is the other volume that needs a lot of work (the ones after that will all be easier). Essentially, it’s the same process as for Volume One, but hopefully it’ll be faster because I’ve got a finished script and a lot more experience at this point, and also I won’t be in a coma. I won’t be trying to cram all the original dialogue onto overcrowded pages anymore, either, I’ll just be going straight to splitting the pages, and that will save a lot of time and frustration. Those overcrowded pages completely killed my focus every single time.

But, all this work on the print collection does bring up a question, and we’d really like your input on it. When you get right down to it, Errant Story has kinda always been a print comic masquerading as a webcomic. Or rather, the webcomic has been its caterpillar stage, inching along and developing over time, but the finished collector’s edition books will be the butterfly stage (which I suppose makes this editing process the cocoon, appropriately enough). They’re functionally two different creatures, so the question is… what happens to the caterpillar version of the comic once the metamorphosis is complete? Webcomics are living things that exist best in the moment, growing and interacting with the readers and with each other. Errant Story has ended, so it can’t be that anymore, and while we do have plans for Errant Tales and a couple of actual sequels, those will be very much like Errant Story in that they are going to be print comics at heart. So what do we do with the website that best honors the webcomic that was while promoting the transformed version to new readers who missed out on the caterpillar process? How would you like to see us integrating those two aspects of the comic in future?

So, that’s where we are with the editing now, and a glimpse of where we’re headed, too. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

^-^’

So after two hundred comics, the project I started because I was burnt out has begun to burn me out as well.  What’s worse for me is that the comics themselves just aren’t that funny or interesting right now.  I intended this thing to be crazy and out there content-wise but it hardly ever does anything that really pushes the envelope of good taste or anything like that. And when combined with the constant trips to Alabama and caring for my wife Hilary, it’s been just another source of stress lately.

But this doesn’t really mean a hiatus or anything.  More like the comic is going to be changing over to an even more erratic update schedule than it’s already on. I’ll finish up these next few pages and then start just putting up comics when I have ideas that are actually funny to me or seem interesting.  I don’t want to be making comics just for the sake of making comics, and I could really use the down time to polish the comics I’ve already done for print.

In more cheerful news, the Errant Story Commentary Track will switch to updating five pages a week on January 1, 2013, since we ought to be far enough ahead by then.

Stuck in Alabama without any real internet connection.  Updates will resume next week.

Well folks, it’s a new year, and I have good news to report about our progress on assembling the collector’s edition! I have now completely finished editing and relettering the comics from Volume One! Whoo!

In theory, Volume One was always going to be the hardest because it needed the most work in terms of formatting, corrections, and relettering. It was originally only about 130 pages, but between shuffling the page order, splitting the truly wordy pages in twain, and bringing in some pages from Volume Two so that Volume One doesn’t end on such an expository note, we’re now up to 192 pages in Volume One! At this point Michael has about 27 pages left to do some additional art for (including four new chapter pages), and then he can start shading Volume One.

Meanwhile, I’m moving on to Volume Two, which is the other volume that needs a lot of work (the ones after that will all be easier). Essentially, it’s the same process as for Volume One, but hopefully it’ll be faster because I’ve got a finished script and a lot more experience at this point, and also I won’t be in a coma. I won’t be trying to cram all the original dialogue onto overcrowded pages anymore, either, I’ll just be going straight to splitting the pages, and that will save a lot of time and frustration. Those overcrowded pages completely killed my focus every single time.

But, all this work on the print collection does bring up a question, and we’d really like your input on it. When you get right down to it, Errant Story has kinda always been a print comic masquerading as a webcomic. Or rather, the webcomic has been its caterpillar stage, inching along and developing over time, but the finished collector’s edition books will be the butterfly stage (which I suppose makes this editing process the cocoon, appropriately enough). They’re functionally two different creatures, so the question is… what happens to the caterpillar version of the comic once the metamorphosis is complete? Webcomics are living things that exist best in the moment, growing and interacting with the readers and with each other. Errant Story has ended, so it can’t be that anymore, and while we do have plans for Errant Tales and a couple of actual sequels, those will be very much like Errant Story in that they are going to be print comics at heart. So what do we do with the website that best honors the webcomic that was while promoting the transformed version to new readers who missed out on the caterpillar process? How would you like to see us integrating those two aspects of the comic in future?

So, that’s where we are with the editing now, and a glimpse of where we’re headed, too. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

^-^’

So after two hundred comics, the project I started because I was burnt out has begun to burn me out as well.  What’s worse for me is that the comics themselves just aren’t that funny or interesting right now.  I intended this thing to be crazy and out there content-wise but it hardly ever does anything that really pushes the envelope of good taste or anything like that. And when combined with the constant trips to Alabama and caring for my wife Hilary, it’s been just another source of stress lately.

But this doesn’t really mean a hiatus or anything.  More like the comic is going to be changing over to an even more erratic update schedule than it’s already on. I’ll finish up these next few pages and then start just putting up comics when I have ideas that are actually funny to me or seem interesting.  I don’t want to be making comics just for the sake of making comics, and I could really use the down time to polish the comics I’ve already done for print.

In more cheerful news, the Errant Story Commentary Track will switch to updating five pages a week on January 1, 2013, since we ought to be far enough ahead by then.

Stuck in Alabama without any real internet connection.  Updates will resume next week.

Well folks, it’s a new year, and I have good news to report about our progress on assembling the collector’s edition! I have now completely finished editing and relettering the comics from Volume One! Whoo!

In theory, Volume One was always going to be the hardest because it needed the most work in terms of formatting, corrections, and relettering. It was originally only about 130 pages, but between shuffling the page order, splitting the truly wordy pages in twain, and bringing in some pages from Volume Two so that Volume One doesn’t end on such an expository note, we’re now up to 192 pages in Volume One! At this point Michael has about 27 pages left to do some additional art for (including four new chapter pages), and then he can start shading Volume One.

Meanwhile, I’m moving on to Volume Two, which is the other volume that needs a lot of work (the ones after that will all be easier). Essentially, it’s the same process as for Volume One, but hopefully it’ll be faster because I’ve got a finished script and a lot more experience at this point, and also I won’t be in a coma. I won’t be trying to cram all the original dialogue onto overcrowded pages anymore, either, I’ll just be going straight to splitting the pages, and that will save a lot of time and frustration. Those overcrowded pages completely killed my focus every single time.

But, all this work on the print collection does bring up a question, and we’d really like your input on it. When you get right down to it, Errant Story has kinda always been a print comic masquerading as a webcomic. Or rather, the webcomic has been its caterpillar stage, inching along and developing over time, but the finished collector’s edition books will be the butterfly stage (which I suppose makes this editing process the cocoon, appropriately enough). They’re functionally two different creatures, so the question is… what happens to the caterpillar version of the comic once the metamorphosis is complete? Webcomics are living things that exist best in the moment, growing and interacting with the readers and with each other. Errant Story has ended, so it can’t be that anymore, and while we do have plans for Errant Tales and a couple of actual sequels, those will be very much like Errant Story in that they are going to be print comics at heart. So what do we do with the website that best honors the webcomic that was while promoting the transformed version to new readers who missed out on the caterpillar process? How would you like to see us integrating those two aspects of the comic in future?

So, that’s where we are with the editing now, and a glimpse of where we’re headed, too. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

^-^’

So after two hundred comics, the project I started because I was burnt out has begun to burn me out as well.  What’s worse for me is that the comics themselves just aren’t that funny or interesting right now.  I intended this thing to be crazy and out there content-wise but it hardly ever does anything that really pushes the envelope of good taste or anything like that. And when combined with the constant trips to Alabama and caring for my wife Hilary, it’s been just another source of stress lately.

But this doesn’t really mean a hiatus or anything.  More like the comic is going to be changing over to an even more erratic update schedule than it’s already on. I’ll finish up these next few pages and then start just putting up comics when I have ideas that are actually funny to me or seem interesting.  I don’t want to be making comics just for the sake of making comics, and I could really use the down time to polish the comics I’ve already done for print.

In more cheerful news, the Errant Story Commentary Track will switch to updating five pages a week on January 1, 2013, since we ought to be far enough ahead by then.

Stuck in Alabama without any real internet connection.  Updates will resume next week.

Well folks, it’s a new year, and I have good news to report about our progress on assembling the collector’s edition! I have now completely finished editing and relettering the comics from Volume One! Whoo!

In theory, Volume One was always going to be the hardest because it needed the most work in terms of formatting, corrections, and relettering. It was originally only about 130 pages, but between shuffling the page order, splitting the truly wordy pages in twain, and bringing in some pages from Volume Two so that Volume One doesn’t end on such an expository note, we’re now up to 192 pages in Volume One! At this point Michael has about 27 pages left to do some additional art for (including four new chapter pages), and then he can start shading Volume One.

Meanwhile, I’m moving on to Volume Two, which is the other volume that needs a lot of work (the ones after that will all be easier). Essentially, it’s the same process as for Volume One, but hopefully it’ll be faster because I’ve got a finished script and a lot more experience at this point, and also I won’t be in a coma. I won’t be trying to cram all the original dialogue onto overcrowded pages anymore, either, I’ll just be going straight to splitting the pages, and that will save a lot of time and frustration. Those overcrowded pages completely killed my focus every single time.

But, all this work on the print collection does bring up a question, and we’d really like your input on it. When you get right down to it, Errant Story has kinda always been a print comic masquerading as a webcomic. Or rather, the webcomic has been its caterpillar stage, inching along and developing over time, but the finished collector’s edition books will be the butterfly stage (which I suppose makes this editing process the cocoon, appropriately enough). They’re functionally two different creatures, so the question is… what happens to the caterpillar version of the comic once the metamorphosis is complete? Webcomics are living things that exist best in the moment, growing and interacting with the readers and with each other. Errant Story has ended, so it can’t be that anymore, and while we do have plans for Errant Tales and a couple of actual sequels, those will be very much like Errant Story in that they are going to be print comics at heart. So what do we do with the website that best honors the webcomic that was while promoting the transformed version to new readers who missed out on the caterpillar process? How would you like to see us integrating those two aspects of the comic in future?

So, that’s where we are with the editing now, and a glimpse of where we’re headed, too. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

^-^’

So after two hundred comics, the project I started because I was burnt out has begun to burn me out as well.  What’s worse for me is that the comics themselves just aren’t that funny or interesting right now.  I intended this thing to be crazy and out there content-wise but it hardly ever does anything that really pushes the envelope of good taste or anything like that. And when combined with the constant trips to Alabama and caring for my wife Hilary, it’s been just another source of stress lately.

But this doesn’t really mean a hiatus or anything.  More like the comic is going to be changing over to an even more erratic update schedule than it’s already on. I’ll finish up these next few pages and then start just putting up comics when I have ideas that are actually funny to me or seem interesting.  I don’t want to be making comics just for the sake of making comics, and I could really use the down time to polish the comics I’ve already done for print.

In more cheerful news, the Errant Story Commentary Track will switch to updating five pages a week on January 1, 2013, since we ought to be far enough ahead by then.

Stuck in Alabama without any real internet connection.  Updates will resume next week.

Well folks, it’s a new year, and I have good news to report about our progress on assembling the collector’s edition! I have now completely finished editing and relettering the comics from Volume One! Whoo!

In theory, Volume One was always going to be the hardest because it needed the most work in terms of formatting, corrections, and relettering. It was originally only about 130 pages, but between shuffling the page order, splitting the truly wordy pages in twain, and bringing in some pages from Volume Two so that Volume One doesn’t end on such an expository note, we’re now up to 192 pages in Volume One! At this point Michael has about 27 pages left to do some additional art for (including four new chapter pages), and then he can start shading Volume One.

Meanwhile, I’m moving on to Volume Two, which is the other volume that needs a lot of work (the ones after that will all be easier). Essentially, it’s the same process as for Volume One, but hopefully it’ll be faster because I’ve got a finished script and a lot more experience at this point, and also I won’t be in a coma. I won’t be trying to cram all the original dialogue onto overcrowded pages anymore, either, I’ll just be going straight to splitting the pages, and that will save a lot of time and frustration. Those overcrowded pages completely killed my focus every single time.

But, all this work on the print collection does bring up a question, and we’d really like your input on it. When you get right down to it, Errant Story has kinda always been a print comic masquerading as a webcomic. Or rather, the webcomic has been its caterpillar stage, inching along and developing over time, but the finished collector’s edition books will be the butterfly stage (which I suppose makes this editing process the cocoon, appropriately enough). They’re functionally two different creatures, so the question is… what happens to the caterpillar version of the comic once the metamorphosis is complete? Webcomics are living things that exist best in the moment, growing and interacting with the readers and with each other. Errant Story has ended, so it can’t be that anymore, and while we do have plans for Errant Tales and a couple of actual sequels, those will be very much like Errant Story in that they are going to be print comics at heart. So what do we do with the website that best honors the webcomic that was while promoting the transformed version to new readers who missed out on the caterpillar process? How would you like to see us integrating those two aspects of the comic in future?

So, that’s where we are with the editing now, and a glimpse of where we’re headed, too. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

^-^’

So after two hundred comics, the project I started because I was burnt out has begun to burn me out as well.  What’s worse for me is that the comics themselves just aren’t that funny or interesting right now.  I intended this thing to be crazy and out there content-wise but it hardly ever does anything that really pushes the envelope of good taste or anything like that. And when combined with the constant trips to Alabama and caring for my wife Hilary, it’s been just another source of stress lately.

But this doesn’t really mean a hiatus or anything.  More like the comic is going to be changing over to an even more erratic update schedule than it’s already on. I’ll finish up these next few pages and then start just putting up comics when I have ideas that are actually funny to me or seem interesting.  I don’t want to be making comics just for the sake of making comics, and I could really use the down time to polish the comics I’ve already done for print.

In more cheerful news, the Errant Story Commentary Track will switch to updating five pages a week on January 1, 2013, since we ought to be far enough ahead by then.

Stuck in Alabama without any real internet connection.  Updates will resume next week.

Time for another update on the books from your friendly neighborhood overworked editor!

At this point, Volume One has been expanded from about 140 pages to 192 PACKED pages. My part, the page layouts and editing and lettering, is now done on all 192 of those pages. About thirty of the pages are still waiting for some extra panel art from Poe, and all of them need to be shaded. They also need to be numbered and resized, because I foolishly decided to change the book proportions AFTER I’d already finished the first volume. Fortunately, that can be more or less automated.

Volume Two has been transcribed courtesy of Graybeard, and the first editing pass is done. Now I’m making sure that pages end up on appropriate sides of the book and that any excessively wordy pages I didn’t split on the first pass are getting split. I’m about halfway done lettering the first chapter of Volume Two, which now starts here. I’ve done a few additional pages from later in the volume, too, I was jumping around for a bit there because I was focusing on the split pages first.

Volume Three and Volume Four have also been transcribed. I need to finish the first pass editing, and then figure out how to rework the page counts because there are a LOT of split pages in Volume Three. Thank you, paedagogusi, your inane babble makes life so busy for the rest of us. Fortunately, Volume Three has already been lettered, so aside from the split pages it should be very light work.

So, at this point, I’m coming up on about the halfway mark editing-wise, and about the 1/3 mark lettering-wise. Thank you all so much for being patient while we work through this. I’m really not the fastest editor or letterer out there, and I’m sorry to be taking so long.

^-^’

Well, the good news is that Poe is home. They didn’t actually wait to even get all the test results before discharging him, they just sent him the moment he was stable, but he is stable and he is home.

Apparently, what happened is that he was sick (probably with this year’s particularly virulent flu, though we’ve yet to see results from any of his flu tests), that taxed his immune system, and then he got a pretty aggressive infection that worked its way into his kidneys. They shut down. He was also extremely dehydrated, which didn’t help. In theory, treating the infection and drinking tons of water should flush the system and put his kidneys approximately back to normal. So, they loaded him up with IV antibiotics and fluids for a while, and then ran some tests, and then sent him home with a prescription for a heavy duty antibiotic and instructions to drink at least half a gallon of water a day.

I am thrilled that Michael is home and that his condition is apparently reversible, but I am also really nervous about them sending him home so fast after having organs quit. In my experience, organs quitting is generally not an easily resolved issue (though I’ll admit my experience is a bit unusual and not entirely attached to reality, as magical multi-dimensional high speed hospital trains are not part of everyone’s organ failure experience, I’m sure). This is a very good hospital, though, and if they thought he was safe to leave he probably really was, it just… makes me nervous. “Acute renal failure” is a scary set of words, it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that gets fixed by drinking lots of water and getting plenty of rest, not even with mega-antibiotics to help.

At the very least, Poe is going to need follow-up appointments, and now that he’s been sent home it’s going to be really hard to get him to actually go to them. Fortunately, Michael’s mom got here to provide reinforcements, so between the two of us I imagine we can get him to drink his water, take ALL his antibiotics, eat regularly, and at least schedule a follow-up appointment. It’s a start.

^-^’

Edit: We finally got the results. Apparently, it was not the flu. That’s… weird.

Wow… people are appearing from the mists of time to wish us well, that’s amazing. You guys are awesome, thank you!

I guess I hadn’t realized, in writing that last post, that not everyone was actually aware of what has been happening in our lives the last couple of years. I guess we didn’t say all that much about it at the time, and people just thought we’d gotten out of the habit of updating regularly. I don’t want to be depressing or whiny and distract from what’s happening right now, but maybe it would be good to provide a cheat sheet, so here’s a rough timeline of what’s been happening the last couple of years.

Summer 2010 - Our house decides it hates us, and Poe has some kinda nasty though not dangerous health experiences.

June 2010 - I’m diagnosed with primary dysmenorrhea. This is the beginning of a lengthy diagnostic and treatment process which to this day has not been concluded.

November 2010 - Michael and I get a horrible flu which I guarantee everyone in Cincinnati remembers as that week where nothing stayed in their bodies. Ours lasts two weeks, sequentially.

December 25, 2010 - We get the call that Michael’s dad has died. Michael’s his next of kin, so all of a sudden we’ve got his affairs to settle. This includes a house packed full of a couple generations worth of stuff. In addition, I’m preparing for a diagnostic surgery.

January 2011 - I go in for the first of many surgeries, a laparoscopy to check for endometriosis. It’s negative, and I recover well, though it’s a couple of months before I’m back in physical shape to deal with all the new problems in Alabama. Poe is still pretty out of it.

February 2011 - Poe’s honorary stepfather dies of lung cancer. Also, his uncle died that same month. Also our good friend’s father died that same month. It was a really crappy month.

April 2011 - My Grandma died. We couldn’t go to the funeral, but at this point I can’t remember why.

June 2011 - I start getting occasional weird, sharp pains and feeling sick all the time. Among other things, this causes me to miss most of Akon, which is unfortunate both because it leaves Poe the hearing-impaired introvert handling the table by himself, and because there were people I wanted to talk to but couldn’t. I still regret not getting back to the Studio Foglio table.

August 2011 - Sick time and the estate stuff in Alabama has left us stretched too thin. We have to shut down all aspects of the business that aren’t the comic while we try to catch up. The plan is to do the catching up over the fall, and come back better than ever. Still working on that.

September 2011 - It turns out I need to have my gall bladder removed. The surgery is scheduled for October 3.

October 2011 - I get my gall bladder removed. Everything goes EPICALLY WRONG. Poe has to spend every single day at the hospital so that he can consent to treatment for me.

November 2011 - I’m still in critical condition in the ICU. At the time Poe made this post, they only thought I was awake, in fact I was still hallucinating really badly and only occasionally got the data around me, with no comprehension of the actual situation.

December 2011 - I finally get out of the ICU and into a rehabilitation hospital. Poe gets sick, but because he’s always keeping me from freaking out at the hospital, he doesn’t get a chance to recover.

Time becomes glacial, but on the 28th I finally get to go home to be sick in my own bed, with kitties to keep me company. Poe no longer has to commute, but with no nursing staff that doesn’t mean much of a break for him.

January 2012 - I was still relearning that whole walking thing. I spend most of the month obsessed with becoming strong enough to stand up from the floor without assistance. The rest of the time I spend feverishly attempting to figure out how to pull us out of our now much-advanced tailspin. Poe is still so busy taking care of me that he has no time for anything else.

February 2012 - The months of stress catch up with Poe, leaving him severely depressed. I start trying to talk him into seeking some help with it.

April 2012 - I’m feeling better and am back in physical therapy, Poe is getting treatment, and things are optimistic enough to try to let you guys know what’s going on.

May 2012 - Poe’s uncle dies. My physical therapy runs into constant issues with my insurance and financial aid that to this day I haven’t had the energy to sort out yet, even though I think they actually are supposed to give us back some of the copay money.

July 2, 2012 - My best friend commits suicide. I am shattered, and accomplish nothing for three months, and to be honest not a whole lot since, either. Poe spends a lot of time taking care of me instead of being able to do anything. Again.

October 2012 - Semi-truck retread shreds the underside of our car, forcing us to rent one for about two weeks while it’s repaired.

November 2012 - Poe gets a cold, I get it nastier. It goes away mercifully quickly, but cancels some of our plans regarding finishing the stuff in Alabama.

January 2012 - I get another nasty cold thing, just on New Year’s Eve. It keeps me from breathing to the point where I go to the doctor. On the way home, the car that we just repaired gets banged up by a hit and run driver. It’s drivable and we’re sick of putting money into it, so we haven’t even filed a claim because we can’t spare the deductible again so soon. Poe catches my nasty bug thing a day or two later, kicks it, and then catches another one right on its heels, not realizing that he isn’t just taking a long time to get better. Also, I have another surgery, this one to remove my thyroid so that in theory I can breathe again and get my voice back. Guess who takes care of me?

February 8, 2013 - Poe finally goes to the emergency room after weeks of nagging from everyone he knows. He is admitted with acute renal failure.

So now you’re all caught up. I’m sorry it took so long, but, well… I guess that’s kindof the point, isn’t it? I really do wonder whose luck we’re balancing with all this, and I definitely wish we could someday get to make a list of spectacular lucky things that happened that isn’t really just a litany of, “It could have been worse.” Maybe we could accidentally discover a cure for cancer, or learn that Poe’s ability to speak with his eyebrows has won first prize in the secret intergalactic talent competition, and now we get a TARDIS. Something, ANYTHING. We just need to catch a fucking break.

-_-’

Edit: Oh, there were links to some newsposts in there, but it seems they don’t show up. I’m too tired to fix it, they’ll highlight if you mouse over them. I’ll give you an update on Poe’s condition in the morning, when I’m not so tired and pissed off at the universe that I can’t see straight.

Sorry, but today’s page is a bit delayed.  A mouse somehow kicked all our asses today.

Time for another update on the books from your friendly neighborhood overworked editor!

At this point, Volume One has been expanded from about 140 pages to 192 PACKED pages. My part, the page layouts and editing and lettering, is now done on all 192 of those pages. About thirty of the pages are still waiting for some extra panel art from Poe, and all of them need to be shaded. They also need to be numbered and resized, because I foolishly decided to change the book proportions AFTER I’d already finished the first volume. Fortunately, that can be more or less automated.

Volume Two has been transcribed courtesy of Graybeard, and the first editing pass is done. Now I’m making sure that pages end up on appropriate sides of the book and that any excessively wordy pages I didn’t split on the first pass are getting split. I’m about halfway done lettering the first chapter of Volume Two, which now starts here. I’ve done a few additional pages from later in the volume, too, I was jumping around for a bit there because I was focusing on the split pages first.

Volume Three and Volume Four have also been transcribed. I need to finish the first pass editing, and then figure out how to rework the page counts because there are a LOT of split pages in Volume Three. Thank you, paedagogusi, your inane babble makes life so busy for the rest of us. Fortunately, Volume Three has already been lettered, so aside from the split pages it should be very light work.

So, at this point, I’m coming up on about the halfway mark editing-wise, and about the 1/3 mark lettering-wise. Thank you all so much for being patient while we work through this. I’m really not the fastest editor or letterer out there, and I’m sorry to be taking so long.

^-^’

Well, the good news is that Poe is home. They didn’t actually wait to even get all the test results before discharging him, they just sent him the moment he was stable, but he is stable and he is home.

Apparently, what happened is that he was sick (probably with this year’s particularly virulent flu, though we’ve yet to see results from any of his flu tests), that taxed his immune system, and then he got a pretty aggressive infection that worked its way into his kidneys. They shut down. He was also extremely dehydrated, which didn’t help. In theory, treating the infection and drinking tons of water should flush the system and put his kidneys approximately back to normal. So, they loaded him up with IV antibiotics and fluids for a while, and then ran some tests, and then sent him home with a prescription for a heavy duty antibiotic and instructions to drink at least half a gallon of water a day.

I am thrilled that Michael is home and that his condition is apparently reversible, but I am also really nervous about them sending him home so fast after having organs quit. In my experience, organs quitting is generally not an easily resolved issue (though I’ll admit my experience is a bit unusual and not entirely attached to reality, as magical multi-dimensional high speed hospital trains are not part of everyone’s organ failure experience, I’m sure). This is a very good hospital, though, and if they thought he was safe to leave he probably really was, it just… makes me nervous. “Acute renal failure” is a scary set of words, it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that gets fixed by drinking lots of water and getting plenty of rest, not even with mega-antibiotics to help.

At the very least, Poe is going to need follow-up appointments, and now that he’s been sent home it’s going to be really hard to get him to actually go to them. Fortunately, Michael’s mom got here to provide reinforcements, so between the two of us I imagine we can get him to drink his water, take ALL his antibiotics, eat regularly, and at least schedule a follow-up appointment. It’s a start.

^-^’

Edit: We finally got the results. Apparently, it was not the flu. That’s… weird.

Okay, I’ve rested up, and now I’m ready to talk about some of the other weird things we’re doing when it comes to editing and lettering Errant Story. Remember before, when I said the thing you needed to know is that Errant Story is all in-house? Well, that goes double for this part, because we’re definitely not doing this stuff “right.”

And here’s why: Errant Story is put together backwards. Also, it’s alive.

See, Errant Story is a finished webcomic, and on the web, it’s even already been published. But that didn’t happen in a clean step by step process the way it does for print comics, it happened one page at a time over a period of ten years. Poe took shortcuts, learned things on the fly, and made things up as he went along. In effect, Errant Story wasn’t made, it was grown.

Now, however, we’re trying to take this organic, pulsing thing, and put it into books. And it didn’t grow for books, though it’s obvious that’s where it should be. It grew on the web, for the web, and some of the things Poe did way back when… they don’t work anymore. So in editing Errant Story for print, we’re not starting from scratch and building forward the way regular comic books do, we’re starting with a giant, fully-grown tree and trying to prune and replant it so that it comes out still looking like the same tree. Just better, and in a different spot.

What, specifically, are we doing differently?

Well, Step One of any comic should theoretically be a script, but Poe never wrote one. Instead he thumbnailed panels and jotted dialogue down in a sketchbook one page at a time, drew the pages, and then typed up the dialogue and lettered the comic roughly an hour before posting a page. Worse, he overwrote the dialogue in the same file every single time he lettered a new page, and for many years rasterized the text into pixel data in the art files, making it impossible to simply edit. This created a problem, namely that printing Errant Story would require relettering every page, and that leads to the first backwards step in our convoluted process. We had to start by creating a brand new script from the existing pages. We have a few amazing transcribers who painstakingly copy down the text from each original page into the script (did you know that there’s about 17,500 words per volume of Errant Story?), and the result is the base script that gets chopped up for all the editing.

In a way, this is also the first thing we’re doing wrong (aside from kindof the entirety of Poe’s initial approach to lettering). The industry standards for formatting a script vary between the major houses, but they consistently want you to output a script in Word. Guess what we did not do? Instead, I found an amazing program, called CeltX. I love this program, it has features that as an editor I simply could not function without. Formatting is done automatically with key commands, it recognizes pages of the comic as units and has a view where pages act like index cards that you can actually shuffle and rearrange, it offers color coding by plot arc (or in my case, by chapter, since that’s how I prefer to use it), it handles multi-script projects, and has built-in management for script elements like characters or settings. It can export as text, and can automatically reformat the script (which looks more like a movie script when you’re in editing mode, which is good for me because that’s what I’m most familiar with) into a PDF chart that breaks down each page by panels. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to script in Word when they could be using CeltX instead. It is now the only thing we use in-house, but, if we ever wanted to work with anyone else in the industry, we’d have to take all that lovely functionality and toss it in favor of a script formatted by hand in Word. That’s the price you pay when you need to be able to standardize across an entire industry… it’s very slow to adapt.

We, on the other hand, are small and flexible. So, once the script has been created in CeltX, it’s time for the next backwards thing. I go through the script and make corrections to the text, note formatting issues, and basically make the text letterer-friendly. On the face of it, these are fairly normal things that usually happen to a script before it goes to the artist, but that’s exactly why this is backwards. All this text is edited in relation to existing art… mostly.

It’d be nice if this process were that simple, but in addition to the basic cleanup, there are some more editorial decisions being made at this juncture. One of these is that Poe wants a more focused approach to the story in the books than happened when the story grew as a webcomic, so I’m shuffling some of the scenes to keep the main storyline at the forefront throughout each volume. This means that page counts and chapter breaks are changed. In a normal process, these decisions should definitely be made before any art is created, because the artist will justifiably kill you and defile your body if you attempt it halfway through… but that isn’t the case for Errant Story, home of the runaway text. Many of the pages don’t actually have room for all the text Poe originally crammed onto them, so unless we want to start hacking away dialogue, they have to be split. That means finding a natural break in the dialogue, determining how the existing art should be repurposed on the new pages, and deciding what new art is needed and where it should go. Fortunately, I’ve had a lot of time to get a good feel for how Poe lays out a page, so I’m able to keep this fairly consistent with his style as I visualize the finished pages. I also try to keep in mind which side of the book each page will go on, so that scenes break in ways that make sense within a chapter. Combined, these changes amount to approximately thirty extra pages of art per volume (which is why attempting this with any artist who isn’t the original creator would result in that artist defecating into your open wounds after slicing you up with a rabid koala).

Having finally wrangled the wily scripts, though, I do yet another thing backwards. I reformat the original art for print, make whatever edits and page splits are called for, and letter the page despite the blank space where new art will go. After all this editing is done, I then I print the page on bristol paper so that Poe can work on it using the same tools he used for the original pages. How is that backwards? In a normal book, writing and editing goes first, art second, and lettering comes last, but Poe is very resistant to understanding that words take up space. Giving him pages where the lettering already exists helps him to account for it when he creates the new art, and puts the new art in context with the rest of the page it will appear on, which helps keep it somewhat more consistent. Remember, some of these pages are a decade old, and it’s really hard to go back in time as an artist, so the art guide helps reset his eyes for his old style.

Oh, and this is yet another thing that we’re ultimately doing wrong, because all of that editing happens in Photoshop despite there being a million better ways to do it. I would love to learn to use those tools and switch, but Photoshop is comfortable, the files are already formatted for it, and we’re short on time so don’t want to spend a lot of it needlessly converting the pages to a format for tools we’re less adept at using. For this project, we’re just going with what we know, and since we’re working in-house we can get away with that.

Ultimately, after all this backwards process, we end up with page after page of revised lettering and art, all divided into new chapters and new volumes. If we’ve done our job right, most of those pages won’t appear to be much different at all, and a new reader would never know we’d done anything. So why go through all this? Why spend all this time and energy doing absolutely everything backwards and wrong? Because when we do, Errant Story comes out right. This method would never work if we were creating new books from scratch, everyone involved would be going insane, but for Errant Story and the kind of evolution and growth we’re trying to bring out of it, this is the approach that takes what the comic was, and turns it into what it wants to be. To us, that’s worth it.

^-^’

After chattering about this subject a bit on Twitter, I thought I’d take a moment to discuss some of the things we’re doing differently in lettering Errant Story, and why we’re doing them that way. Before I get into this, I’d like to recommend reading Nate Piekos’s article about comic book lettering conventions, because it’s really important to know about the industry standards before you decide to go around subverting them.

First and foremost, here’s the important thing to know about Errant Story: this is a work that is entirely handled in-house. That means that we do everything up until the files go to the printer, all the writing, all the art, all the lettering, all the editing, everything. Because we do that, and we don’t have umpteen different people putting their hands on this project who need to all be communicating in the same standardized language, we have the freedom to do things our way, even when our way isn’t the industry standard (or even, necessarily, the best way of doing something).

When I came in as an editor and started looking into editing Errant Story for the collector’s edition, one of the first things I did was draw up a style guide. Basically, this is a document that lays out how to handle all the little lettering quirks that might come up in the course of lettering the pages. When I did this, I made a few decisions that ran counter to the way comic books are traditionally lettered, such as…

Breaking Bubbles

Because the pages of Errant Story are small and dense, there’s not a lot of negative space for large bubbles with a lot of text. Instead, text is routinely broken up into phrases so that the bubbles can be moved and distributed around the art in what little negative space there is.

However, this runs into a lettering issue. Traditionally, dialogue which trails off and begins in another bubble ends in ellipses in the first bubble, and starts with ellipses in the next. I scrapped this, because the result was a whole lot of ellipses needlessly taking up precious page space and introducing unnecessary visual pauses into the dialogue. Instead, dialogue which trails into the next bubble ends with ellipses, but the subsequent bubble begins without them. I figure our readers are smart enough to follow that, especially since it’s pretty close to literary grammar.

Double Dashes

I eliminated the double dashes in Errant Story for the same reason I eliminated the secondary ellipses: to save room, and bring the lettering back towards a literary standard of grammar. I’m sure the original reason for the double dash had to do with the difficulties inherent in hand lettering, and I’ve done enough of that to sympathize, but Errant Story is not hand lettered. The ideal in moving to digital lettering is to mimic the feel of hand lettering, but without slavish devotion to the restrictions it created. Errant Story doesn’t have a seventy year history of lettering style to match, so I feel no remorse whatsoever about bidding the double dash adieu.

Captions

In Errant Story, we only ever see one type of caption, for locations or times. These always appear in a shadowbox, in a specific font, in mixed caps.

At one point in the story, Sarine is going to spend a ridiculous amount of time talking about the past. These are not, strictly, narrative captions, so they’ll appear in their own unique format to indicate that they are voiced over the art.

Crossbar I

Traditionally, the letter I only appears with crossbars when it is a personal pronoun or part of an acronym. This is one of those comic book lettering conventions that I understand from a lettering perspective but loathe from an editing perspective. In this case the editor in me teamed up with my lazy side and won, and consequently anytime an I is capitalized in Errant Story it appears with the crossbars. To do otherwise would require either manually dropping the letter into lowercase anytime it would be required, or routinely typing it in lowercase within the script. Neither is something I feel to be an acceptable use of my time.

Emanating Dialogue / Off-Panel Dialogue

Traditionally, dialogue that isn’t coming from a character on screen (as it were), ends in a tail to direct the reader’s attention off panel or to the point from which the dialogue is originating. Again, Errant Story has small, dense pages (because in Poe’s head letters don’t take up any space, much to my continued annoyance), so there’s usually no room to do this. Instead, any dialogue bubble that can’t be directed to the character doesn’t have a tail at all. There are a couple exceptions, but generally we assume the readers are smart enough to figure out who’s speaking and follow the dialogue without that little cue.

Overlapping Bubbles

Errant Story has small, dense pages, and all the art is against a black page background. Butting bubbles up against borders (which is preferred for most books) makes no sense in that context, so all bubbles in Errant Story break the borders of the panels. I feel that keeps the eye moving across the page better, as well, though I might feel differently if the pages were on a white page background and had a lot of negative space to play with.

Quotation Marks

There are all kinds of rules about how and when to use quotation marks in a comic book, and they’re good rules… but rather than pay them any attention, I have done my level best to eliminate quotation marks from Errant Story dialogue altogether. I personally think they’re ugly and there’s no very good reason to include them in dialogue lettering, as we rarely speak with them in life. The exception is when a character is speaking in a way that clearly calls for air quotes. Everything else, I’ve found a way to work around that I think is just as clear.

Talking Foreign

The traditional approach to indicating dialogue in another language is to enclose it in chevron brackets. I kept that, but also decided that in Errant Story, the elves are hoity-toity enough to demand their own special font, which is something that is not always done. I then spent hours swearing and trying to find a font that was both arrogantly old fashioned and still legible as a dialogue font.

In Errant Story there is also a special font dedicated to reading or rote recitation. This appears without brackets, because it’s meant to only indicate a change in the character’s tone.

Telepathy

Telepathy in Errant Story is kindof a nightmare from a lettering perspective, but mercifully one that doesn’t come up a lot. I eventually settled on an italicized dialogue font inside a bubble with a drop shadow and a bracket of smaller (also drop shadowed) bubbles. The drop shadow is color coded to the “speaker.” This is nothing like the usual telepathy bubbles you might see, but I think it manages to be clear.

The above list is the only set of lettering changes you’re likely to see on the page, but we’ve also made a lot of non-conformist decisions about our editing and lettering process. For now, though, all this rebellion has about worn me out, so I’ll have to talk about those process decisions in another post.

^-^’

Sorry, but today’s page is a bit delayed.  A mouse somehow kicked all our asses today.

Okay, I’ve rested up, and now I’m ready to talk about some of the other weird things we’re doing when it comes to editing and lettering Errant Story. Remember before, when I said the thing you needed to know is that Errant Story is all in-house? Well, that goes double for this part, because we’re definitely not doing this stuff “right.”

And here’s why: Errant Story is put together backwards. Also, it’s alive.

See, Errant Story is a finished webcomic, and on the web, it’s even already been published. But that didn’t happen in a clean step by step process the way it does for print comics, it happened one page at a time over a period of ten years. Poe took shortcuts, learned things on the fly, and made things up as he went along. In effect, Errant Story wasn’t made, it was grown.

Now, however, we’re trying to take this organic, pulsing thing, and put it into books. And it didn’t grow for books, though it’s obvious that’s where it should be. It grew on the web, for the web, and some of the things Poe did way back when… they don’t work anymore. So in editing Errant Story for print, we’re not starting from scratch and building forward the way regular comic books do, we’re starting with a giant, fully-grown tree and trying to prune and replant it so that it comes out still looking like the same tree. Just better, and in a different spot.

What, specifically, are we doing differently?

Well, Step One of any comic should theoretically be a script, but Poe never wrote one. Instead he thumbnailed panels and jotted dialogue down in a sketchbook one page at a time, drew the pages, and then typed up the dialogue and lettered the comic roughly an hour before posting a page. Worse, he overwrote the dialogue in the same file every single time he lettered a new page, and for many years rasterized the text into pixel data in the art files, making it impossible to simply edit. This created a problem, namely that printing Errant Story would require relettering every page, and that leads to the first backwards step in our convoluted process. We had to start by creating a brand new script from the existing pages. We have a few amazing transcribers who painstakingly copy down the text from each original page into the script (did you know that there’s about 17,500 words per volume of Errant Story?), and the result is the base script that gets chopped up for all the editing.

In a way, this is also the first thing we’re doing wrong (aside from kindof the entirety of Poe’s initial approach to lettering). The industry standards for formatting a script vary between the major houses, but they consistently want you to output a script in Word. Guess what we did not do? Instead, I found an amazing program, called CeltX. I love this program, it has features that as an editor I simply could not function without. Formatting is done automatically with key commands, it recognizes pages of the comic as units and has a view where pages act like index cards that you can actually shuffle and rearrange, it offers color coding by plot arc (or in my case, by chapter, since that’s how I prefer to use it), it handles multi-script projects, and has built-in management for script elements like characters or settings. It can export as text, and can automatically reformat the script (which looks more like a movie script when you’re in editing mode, which is good for me because that’s what I’m most familiar with) into a PDF chart that breaks down each page by panels. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to script in Word when they could be using CeltX instead. It is now the only thing we use in-house, but, if we ever wanted to work with anyone else in the industry, we’d have to take all that lovely functionality and toss it in favor of a script formatted by hand in Word. That’s the price you pay when you need to be able to standardize across an entire industry… it’s very slow to adapt.

We, on the other hand, are small and flexible. So, once the script has been created in CeltX, it’s time for the next backwards thing. I go through the script and make corrections to the text, note formatting issues, and basically make the text letterer-friendly. On the face of it, these are fairly normal things that usually happen to a script before it goes to the artist, but that’s exactly why this is backwards. All this text is edited in relation to existing art… mostly.

It’d be nice if this process were that simple, but in addition to the basic cleanup, there are some more editorial decisions being made at this juncture. One of these is that Poe wants a more focused approach to the story in the books than happened when the story grew as a webcomic, so I’m shuffling some of the scenes to keep the main storyline at the forefront throughout each volume. This means that page counts and chapter breaks are changed. In a normal process, these decisions should definitely be made before any art is created, because the artist will justifiably kill you and defile your body if you attempt it halfway through… but that isn’t the case for Errant Story, home of the runaway text. Many of the pages don’t actually have room for all the text Poe originally crammed onto them, so unless we want to start hacking away dialogue, they have to be split. That means finding a natural break in the dialogue, determining how the existing art should be repurposed on the new pages, and deciding what new art is needed and where it should go. Fortunately, I’ve had a lot of time to get a good feel for how Poe lays out a page, so I’m able to keep this fairly consistent with his style as I visualize the finished pages. I also try to keep in mind which side of the book each page will go on, so that scenes break in ways that make sense within a chapter. Combined, these changes amount to approximately thirty extra pages of art per volume (which is why attempting this with any artist who isn’t the original creator would result in that artist defecating into your open wounds after slicing you up with a rabid koala).

Having finally wrangled the wily scripts, though, I do yet another thing backwards. I reformat the original art for print, make whatever edits and page splits are called for, and letter the page despite the blank space where new art will go. After all this editing is done, I then I print the page on bristol paper so that Poe can work on it using the same tools he used for the original pages. How is that backwards? In a normal book, writing and editing goes first, art second, and lettering comes last, but Poe is very resistant to understanding that words take up space. Giving him pages where the lettering already exists helps him to account for it when he creates the new art, and puts the new art in context with the rest of the page it will appear on, which helps keep it somewhat more consistent. Remember, some of these pages are a decade old, and it’s really hard to go back in time as an artist, so the art guide helps reset his eyes for his old style.

Oh, and this is yet another thing that we’re ultimately doing wrong, because all of that editing happens in Photoshop despite there being a million better ways to do it. I would love to learn to use those tools and switch, but Photoshop is comfortable, the files are already formatted for it, and we’re short on time so don’t want to spend a lot of it needlessly converting the pages to a format for tools we’re less adept at using. For this project, we’re just going with what we know, and since we’re working in-house we can get away with that.

Ultimately, after all this backwards process, we end up with page after page of revised lettering and art, all divided into new chapters and new volumes. If we’ve done our job right, most of those pages won’t appear to be much different at all, and a new reader would never know we’d done anything. So why go through all this? Why spend all this time and energy doing absolutely everything backwards and wrong? Because when we do, Errant Story comes out right. This method would never work if we were creating new books from scratch, everyone involved would be going insane, but for Errant Story and the kind of evolution and growth we’re trying to bring out of it, this is the approach that takes what the comic was, and turns it into what it wants to be. To us, that’s worth it.

^-^’

After chattering about this subject a bit on Twitter, I thought I’d take a moment to discuss some of the things we’re doing differently in lettering Errant Story, and why we’re doing them that way. Before I get into this, I’d like to recommend reading Nate Piekos’s article about comic book lettering conventions, because it’s really important to know about the industry standards before you decide to go around subverting them.

First and foremost, here’s the important thing to know about Errant Story: this is a work that is entirely handled in-house. That means that we do everything up until the files go to the printer, all the writing, all the art, all the lettering, all the editing, everything. Because we do that, and we don’t have umpteen different people putting their hands on this project who need to all be communicating in the same standardized language, we have the freedom to do things our way, even when our way isn’t the industry standard (or even, necessarily, the best way of doing something).

When I came in as an editor and started looking into editing Errant Story for the collector’s edition, one of the first things I did was draw up a style guide. Basically, this is a document that lays out how to handle all the little lettering quirks that might come up in the course of lettering the pages. When I did this, I made a few decisions that ran counter to the way comic books are traditionally lettered, such as…

Breaking Bubbles

Because the pages of Errant Story are small and dense, there’s not a lot of negative space for large bubbles with a lot of text. Instead, text is routinely broken up into phrases so that the bubbles can be moved and distributed around the art in what little negative space there is.

However, this runs into a lettering issue. Traditionally, dialogue which trails off and begins in another bubble ends in ellipses in the first bubble, and starts with ellipses in the next. I scrapped this, because the result was a whole lot of ellipses needlessly taking up precious page space and introducing unnecessary visual pauses into the dialogue. Instead, dialogue which trails into the next bubble ends with ellipses, but the subsequent bubble begins without them. I figure our readers are smart enough to follow that, especially since it’s pretty close to literary grammar.

Double Dashes

I eliminated the double dashes in Errant Story for the same reason I eliminated the secondary ellipses: to save room, and bring the lettering back towards a literary standard of grammar. I’m sure the original reason for the double dash had to do with the difficulties inherent in hand lettering, and I’ve done enough of that to sympathize, but Errant Story is not hand lettered. The ideal in moving to digital lettering is to mimic the feel of hand lettering, but without slavish devotion to the restrictions it created. Errant Story doesn’t have a seventy year history of lettering style to match, so I feel no remorse whatsoever about bidding the double dash adieu.

Captions

In Errant Story, we only ever see one type of caption, for locations or times. These always appear in a shadowbox, in a specific font, in mixed caps.

At one point in the story, Sarine is going to spend a ridiculous amount of time talking about the past. These are not, strictly, narrative captions, so they’ll appear in their own unique format to indicate that they are voiced over the art.

Crossbar I

Traditionally, the letter I only appears with crossbars when it is a personal pronoun or part of an acronym. This is one of those comic book lettering conventions that I understand from a lettering perspective but loathe from an editing perspective. In this case the editor in me teamed up with my lazy side and won, and consequently anytime an I is capitalized in Errant Story it appears with the crossbars. To do otherwise would require either manually dropping the letter into lowercase anytime it would be required, or routinely typing it in lowercase within the script. Neither is something I feel to be an acceptable use of my time.

Emanating Dialogue / Off-Panel Dialogue

Traditionally, dialogue that isn’t coming from a character on screen (as it were), ends in a tail to direct the reader’s attention off panel or to the point from which the dialogue is originating. Again, Errant Story has small, dense pages (because in Poe’s head letters don’t take up any space, much to my continued annoyance), so there’s usually no room to do this. Instead, any dialogue bubble that can’t be directed to the character doesn’t have a tail at all. There are a couple exceptions, but generally we assume the readers are smart enough to figure out who’s speaking and follow the dialogue without that little cue.

Overlapping Bubbles

Errant Story has small, dense pages, and all the art is against a black page background. Butting bubbles up against borders (which is preferred for most books) makes no sense in that context, so all bubbles in Errant Story break the borders of the panels. I feel that keeps the eye moving across the page better, as well, though I might feel differently if the pages were on a white page background and had a lot of negative space to play with.

Quotation Marks

There are all kinds of rules about how and when to use quotation marks in a comic book, and they’re good rules… but rather than pay them any attention, I have done my level best to eliminate quotation marks from Errant Story dialogue altogether. I personally think they’re ugly and there’s no very good reason to include them in dialogue lettering, as we rarely speak with them in life. The exception is when a character is speaking in a way that clearly calls for air quotes. Everything else, I’ve found a way to work around that I think is just as clear.

Talking Foreign

The traditional approach to indicating dialogue in another language is to enclose it in chevron brackets. I kept that, but also decided that in Errant Story, the elves are hoity-toity enough to demand their own special font, which is something that is not always done. I then spent hours swearing and trying to find a font that was both arrogantly old fashioned and still legible as a dialogue font.

In Errant Story there is also a special font dedicated to reading or rote recitation. This appears without brackets, because it’s meant to only indicate a change in the character’s tone.

Telepathy

Telepathy in Errant Story is kindof a nightmare from a lettering perspective, but mercifully one that doesn’t come up a lot. I eventually settled on an italicized dialogue font inside a bubble with a drop shadow and a bracket of smaller (also drop shadowed) bubbles. The drop shadow is color coded to the “speaker.” This is nothing like the usual telepathy bubbles you might see, but I think it manages to be clear.

The above list is the only set of lettering changes you’re likely to see on the page, but we’ve also made a lot of non-conformist decisions about our editing and lettering process. For now, though, all this rebellion has about worn me out, so I’ll have to talk about those process decisions in another post.

^-^’

Sorry, but today’s page is a bit delayed.  A mouse somehow kicked all our asses today.

Okay, I’ve rested up, and now I’m ready to talk about some of the other weird things we’re doing when it comes to editing and lettering Errant Story. Remember before, when I said the thing you needed to know is that Errant Story is all in-house? Well, that goes double for this part, because we’re definitely not doing this stuff “right.”

And here’s why: Errant Story is put together backwards. Also, it’s alive.

See, Errant Story is a finished webcomic, and on the web, it’s even already been published. But that didn’t happen in a clean step by step process the way it does for print comics, it happened one page at a time over a period of ten years. Poe took shortcuts, learned things on the fly, and made things up as he went along. In effect, Errant Story wasn’t made, it was grown.

Now, however, we’re trying to take this organic, pulsing thing, and put it into books. And it didn’t grow for books, though it’s obvious that’s where it should be. It grew on the web, for the web, and some of the things Poe did way back when… they don’t work anymore. So in editing Errant Story for print, we’re not starting from scratch and building forward the way regular comic books do, we’re starting with a giant, fully-grown tree and trying to prune and replant it so that it comes out still looking like the same tree. Just better, and in a different spot.

What, specifically, are we doing differently?

Well, Step One of any comic should theoretically be a script, but Poe never wrote one. Instead he thumbnailed panels and jotted dialogue down in a sketchbook one page at a time, drew the pages, and then typed up the dialogue and lettered the comic roughly an hour before posting a page. Worse, he overwrote the dialogue in the same file every single time he lettered a new page, and for many years rasterized the text into pixel data in the art files, making it impossible to simply edit. This created a problem, namely that printing Errant Story would require relettering every page, and that leads to the first backwards step in our convoluted process. We had to start by creating a brand new script from the existing pages. We have a few amazing transcribers who painstakingly copy down the text from each original page into the script (did you know that there’s about 17,500 words per volume of Errant Story?), and the result is the base script that gets chopped up for all the editing.

In a way, this is also the first thing we’re doing wrong (aside from kindof the entirety of Poe’s initial approach to lettering). The industry standards for formatting a script vary between the major houses, but they consistently want you to output a script in Word. Guess what we did not do? Instead, I found an amazing program, called CeltX. I love this program, it has features that as an editor I simply could not function without. Formatting is done automatically with key commands, it recognizes pages of the comic as units and has a view where pages act like index cards that you can actually shuffle and rearrange, it offers color coding by plot arc (or in my case, by chapter, since that’s how I prefer to use it), it handles multi-script projects, and has built-in management for script elements like characters or settings. It can export as text, and can automatically reformat the script (which looks more like a movie script when you’re in editing mode, which is good for me because that’s what I’m most familiar with) into a PDF chart that breaks down each page by panels. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to script in Word when they could be using CeltX instead. It is now the only thing we use in-house, but, if we ever wanted to work with anyone else in the industry, we’d have to take all that lovely functionality and toss it in favor of a script formatted by hand in Word. That’s the price you pay when you need to be able to standardize across an entire industry… it’s very slow to adapt.

We, on the other hand, are small and flexible. So, once the script has been created in CeltX, it’s time for the next backwards thing. I go through the script and make corrections to the text, note formatting issues, and basically make the text letterer-friendly. On the face of it, these are fairly normal things that usually happen to a script before it goes to the artist, but that’s exactly why this is backwards. All this text is edited in relation to existing art… mostly.

It’d be nice if this process were that simple, but in addition to the basic cleanup, there are some more editorial decisions being made at this juncture. One of these is that Poe wants a more focused approach to the story in the books than happened when the story grew as a webcomic, so I’m shuffling some of the scenes to keep the main storyline at the forefront throughout each volume. This means that page counts and chapter breaks are changed. In a normal process, these decisions should definitely be made before any art is created, because the artist will justifiably kill you and defile your body if you attempt it halfway through… but that isn’t the case for Errant Story, home of the runaway text. Many of the pages don’t actually have room for all the text Poe originally crammed onto them, so unless we want to start hacking away dialogue, they have to be split. That means finding a natural break in the dialogue, determining how the existing art should be repurposed on the new pages, and deciding what new art is needed and where it should go. Fortunately, I’ve had a lot of time to get a good feel for how Poe lays out a page, so I’m able to keep this fairly consistent with his style as I visualize the finished pages. I also try to keep in mind which side of the book each page will go on, so that scenes break in ways that make sense within a chapter. Combined, these changes amount to approximately thirty extra pages of art per volume (which is why attempting this with any artist who isn’t the original creator would result in that artist defecating into your open wounds after slicing you up with a rabid koala).

Having finally wrangled the wily scripts, though, I do yet another thing backwards. I reformat the original art for print, make whatever edits and page splits are called for, and letter the page despite the blank space where new art will go. After all this editing is done, I then I print the page on bristol paper so that Poe can work on it using the same tools he used for the original pages. How is that backwards? In a normal book, writing and editing goes first, art second, and lettering comes last, but Poe is very resistant to understanding that words take up space. Giving him pages where the lettering already exists helps him to account for it when he creates the new art, and puts the new art in context with the rest of the page it will appear on, which helps keep it somewhat more consistent. Remember, some of these pages are a decade old, and it’s really hard to go back in time as an artist, so the art guide helps reset his eyes for his old style.

Oh, and this is yet another thing that we’re ultimately doing wrong, because all of that editing happens in Photoshop despite there being a million better ways to do it. I would love to learn to use those tools and switch, but Photoshop is comfortable, the files are already formatted for it, and we’re short on time so don’t want to spend a lot of it needlessly converting the pages to a format for tools we’re less adept at using. For this project, we’re just going with what we know, and since we’re working in-house we can get away with that.

Ultimately, after all this backwards process, we end up with page after page of revised lettering and art, all divided into new chapters and new volumes. If we’ve done our job right, most of those pages won’t appear to be much different at all, and a new reader would never know we’d done anything. So why go through all this? Why spend all this time and energy doing absolutely everything backwards and wrong? Because when we do, Errant Story comes out right. This method would never work if we were creating new books from scratch, everyone involved would be going insane, but for Errant Story and the kind of evolution and growth we’re trying to bring out of it, this is the approach that takes what the comic was, and turns it into what it wants to be. To us, that’s worth it.

^-^’

After chattering about this subject a bit on Twitter, I thought I’d take a moment to discuss some of the things we’re doing differently in lettering Errant Story, and why we’re doing them that way. Before I get into this, I’d like to recommend reading Nate Piekos’s article about comic book lettering conventions, because it’s really important to know about the industry standards before you decide to go around subverting them.

First and foremost, here’s the important thing to know about Errant Story: this is a work that is entirely handled in-house. That means that we do everything up until the files go to the printer, all the writing, all the art, all the lettering, all the editing, everything. Because we do that, and we don’t have umpteen different people putting their hands on this project who need to all be communicating in the same standardized language, we have the freedom to do things our way, even when our way isn’t the industry standard (or even, necessarily, the best way of doing something).

When I came in as an editor and started looking into editing Errant Story for the collector’s edition, one of the first things I did was draw up a style guide. Basically, this is a document that lays out how to handle all the little lettering quirks that might come up in the course of lettering the pages. When I did this, I made a few decisions that ran counter to the way comic books are traditionally lettered, such as…

Breaking Bubbles

Because the pages of Errant Story are small and dense, there’s not a lot of negative space for large bubbles with a lot of text. Instead, text is routinely broken up into phrases so that the bubbles can be moved and distributed around the art in what little negative space there is.

However, this runs into a lettering issue. Traditionally, dialogue which trails off and begins in another bubble ends in ellipses in the first bubble, and starts with ellipses in the next. I scrapped this, because the result was a whole lot of ellipses needlessly taking up precious page space and introducing unnecessary visual pauses into the dialogue. Instead, dialogue which trails into the next bubble ends with ellipses, but the subsequent bubble begins without them. I figure our readers are smart enough to follow that, especially since it’s pretty close to literary grammar.

Double Dashes

I eliminated the double dashes in Errant Story for the same reason I eliminated the secondary ellipses: to save room, and bring the lettering back towards a literary standard of grammar. I’m sure the original reason for the double dash had to do with the difficulties inherent in hand lettering, and I’ve done enough of that to sympathize, but Errant Story is not hand lettered. The ideal in moving to digital lettering is to mimic the feel of hand lettering, but without slavish devotion to the restrictions it created. Errant Story doesn’t have a seventy year history of lettering style to match, so I feel no remorse whatsoever about bidding the double dash adieu.

Captions

In Errant Story, we only ever see one type of caption, for locations or times. These always appear in a shadowbox, in a specific font, in mixed caps.

At one point in the story, Sarine is going to spend a ridiculous amount of time talking about the past. These are not, strictly, narrative captions, so they’ll appear in their own unique format to indicate that they are voiced over the art.

Crossbar I

Traditionally, the letter I only appears with crossbars when it is a personal pronoun or part of an acronym. This is one of those comic book lettering conventions that I understand from a lettering perspective but loathe from an editing perspective. In this case the editor in me teamed up with my lazy side and won, and consequently anytime an I is capitalized in Errant Story it appears with the crossbars. To do otherwise would require either manually dropping the letter into lowercase anytime it would be required, or routinely typing it in lowercase within the script. Neither is something I feel to be an acceptable use of my time.

Emanating Dialogue / Off-Panel Dialogue

Traditionally, dialogue that isn’t coming from a character on screen (as it were), ends in a tail to direct the reader’s attention off panel or to the point from which the dialogue is originating. Again, Errant Story has small, dense pages (because in Poe’s head letters don’t take up any space, much to my continued annoyance), so there’s usually no room to do this. Instead, any dialogue bubble that can’t be directed to the character doesn’t have a tail at all. There are a couple exceptions, but generally we assume the readers are smart enough to figure out who’s speaking and follow the dialogue without that little cue.

Overlapping Bubbles

Errant Story has small, dense pages, and all the art is against a black page background. Butting bubbles up against borders (which is preferred for most books) makes no sense in that context, so all bubbles in Errant Story break the borders of the panels. I feel that keeps the eye moving across the page better, as well, though I might feel differently if the pages were on a white page background and had a lot of negative space to play with.

Quotation Marks

There are all kinds of rules about how and when to use quotation marks in a comic book, and they’re good rules… but rather than pay them any attention, I have done my level best to eliminate quotation marks from Errant Story dialogue altogether. I personally think they’re ugly and there’s no very good reason to include them in dialogue lettering, as we rarely speak with them in life. The exception is when a character is speaking in a way that clearly calls for air quotes. Everything else, I’ve found a way to work around that I think is just as clear.

Talking Foreign

The traditional approach to indicating dialogue in another language is to enclose it in chevron brackets. I kept that, but also decided that in Errant Story, the elves are hoity-toity enough to demand their own special font, which is something that is not always done. I then spent hours swearing and trying to find a font that was both arrogantly old fashioned and still legible as a dialogue font.

In Errant Story there is also a special font dedicated to reading or rote recitation. This appears without brackets, because it’s meant to only indicate a change in the character’s tone.

Telepathy

Telepathy in Errant Story is kindof a nightmare from a lettering perspective, but mercifully one that doesn’t come up a lot. I eventually settled on an italicized dialogue font inside a bubble with a drop shadow and a bracket of smaller (also drop shadowed) bubbles. The drop shadow is color coded to the “speaker.” This is nothing like the usual telepathy bubbles you might see, but I think it manages to be clear.

The above list is the only set of lettering changes you’re likely to see on the page, but we’ve also made a lot of non-conformist decisions about our editing and lettering process. For now, though, all this rebellion has about worn me out, so I’ll have to talk about those process decisions in another post.

^-^’

Sorry, but today’s page is a bit delayed.  A mouse somehow kicked all our asses today.

Okay, I’ve rested up, and now I’m ready to talk about some of the other weird things we’re doing when it comes to editing and lettering Errant Story. Remember before, when I said the thing you needed to know is that Errant Story is all in-house? Well, that goes double for this part, because we’re definitely not doing this stuff “right.”

And here’s why: Errant Story is put together backwards. Also, it’s alive.

See, Errant Story is a finished webcomic, and on the web, it’s even already been published. But that didn’t happen in a clean step by step process the way it does for print comics, it happened one page at a time over a period of ten years. Poe took shortcuts, learned things on the fly, and made things up as he went along. In effect, Errant Story wasn’t made, it was grown.

Now, however, we’re trying to take this organic, pulsing thing, and put it into books. And it didn’t grow for books, though it’s obvious that’s where it should be. It grew on the web, for the web, and some of the things Poe did way back when… they don’t work anymore. So in editing Errant Story for print, we’re not starting from scratch and building forward the way regular comic books do, we’re starting with a giant, fully-grown tree and trying to prune and replant it so that it comes out still looking like the same tree. Just better, and in a different spot.

What, specifically, are we doing differently?

Well, Step One of any comic should theoretically be a script, but Poe never wrote one. Instead he thumbnailed panels and jotted dialogue down in a sketchbook one page at a time, drew the pages, and then typed up the dialogue and lettered the comic roughly an hour before posting a page. Worse, he overwrote the dialogue in the same file every single time he lettered a new page, and for many years rasterized the text into pixel data in the art files, making it impossible to simply edit. This created a problem, namely that printing Errant Story would require relettering every page, and that leads to the first backwards step in our convoluted process. We had to start by creating a brand new script from the existing pages. We have a few amazing transcribers who painstakingly copy down the text from each original page into the script (did you know that there’s about 17,500 words per volume of Errant Story?), and the result is the base script that gets chopped up for all the editing.

In a way, this is also the first thing we’re doing wrong (aside from kindof the entirety of Poe’s initial approach to lettering). The industry standards for formatting a script vary between the major houses, but they consistently want you to output a script in Word. Guess what we did not do? Instead, I found an amazing program, called CeltX. I love this program, it has features that as an editor I simply could not function without. Formatting is done automatically with key commands, it recognizes pages of the comic as units and has a view where pages act like index cards that you can actually shuffle and rearrange, it offers color coding by plot arc (or in my case, by chapter, since that’s how I prefer to use it), it handles multi-script projects, and has built-in management for script elements like characters or settings. It can export as text, and can automatically reformat the script (which looks more like a movie script when you’re in editing mode, which is good for me because that’s what I’m most familiar with) into a PDF chart that breaks down each page by panels. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to script in Word when they could be using CeltX instead. It is now the only thing we use in-house, but, if we ever wanted to work with anyone else in the industry, we’d have to take all that lovely functionality and toss it in favor of a script formatted by hand in Word. That’s the price you pay when you need to be able to standardize across an entire industry… it’s very slow to adapt.

We, on the other hand, are small and flexible. So, once the script has been created in CeltX, it’s time for the next backwards thing. I go through the script and make corrections to the text, note formatting issues, and basically make the text letterer-friendly. On the face of it, these are fairly normal things that usually happen to a script before it goes to the artist, but that’s exactly why this is backwards. All this text is edited in relation to existing art… mostly.

It’d be nice if this process were that simple, but in addition to the basic cleanup, there are some more editorial decisions being made at this juncture. One of these is that Poe wants a more focused approach to the story in the books than happened when the story grew as a webcomic, so I’m shuffling some of the scenes to keep the main storyline at the forefront throughout each volume. This means that page counts and chapter breaks are changed. In a normal process, these decisions should definitely be made before any art is created, because the artist will justifiably kill you and defile your body if you attempt it halfway through… but that isn’t the case for Errant Story, home of the runaway text. Many of the pages don’t actually have room for all the text Poe originally crammed onto them, so unless we want to start hacking away dialogue, they have to be split. That means finding a natural break in the dialogue, determining how the existing art should be repurposed on the new pages, and deciding what new art is needed and where it should go. Fortunately, I’ve had a lot of time to get a good feel for how Poe lays out a page, so I’m able to keep this fairly consistent with his style as I visualize the finished pages. I also try to keep in mind which side of the book each page will go on, so that scenes break in ways that make sense within a chapter. Combined, these changes amount to approximately thirty extra pages of art per volume (which is why attempting this with any artist who isn’t the original creator would result in that artist defecating into your open wounds after slicing you up with a rabid koala).

Having finally wrangled the wily scripts, though, I do yet another thing backwards. I reformat the original art for print, make whatever edits and page splits are called for, and letter the page despite the blank space where new art will go. After all this editing is done, I then I print the page on bristol paper so that Poe can work on it using the same tools he used for the original pages. How is that backwards? In a normal book, writing and editing goes first, art second, and lettering comes last, but Poe is very resistant to understanding that words take up space. Giving him pages where the lettering already exists helps him to account for it when he creates the new art, and puts the new art in context with the rest of the page it will appear on, which helps keep it somewhat more consistent. Remember, some of these pages are a decade old, and it’s really hard to go back in time as an artist, so the art guide helps reset his eyes for his old style.

Oh, and this is yet another thing that we’re ultimately doing wrong, because all of that editing happens in Photoshop despite there being a million better ways to do it. I would love to learn to use those tools and switch, but Photoshop is comfortable, the files are already formatted for it, and we’re short on time so don’t want to spend a lot of it needlessly converting the pages to a format for tools we’re less adept at using. For this project, we’re just going with what we know, and since we’re working in-house we can get away with that.

Ultimately, after all this backwards process, we end up with page after page of revised lettering and art, all divided into new chapters and new volumes. If we’ve done our job right, most of those pages won’t appear to be much different at all, and a new reader would never know we’d done anything. So why go through all this? Why spend all this time and energy doing absolutely everything backwards and wrong? Because when we do, Errant Story comes out right. This method would never work if we were creating new books from scratch, everyone involved would be going insane, but for Errant Story and the kind of evolution and growth we’re trying to bring out of it, this is the approach that takes what the comic was, and turns it into what it wants to be. To us, that’s worth it.

^-^’

After chattering about this subject a bit on Twitter, I thought I’d take a moment to discuss some of the things we’re doing differently in lettering Errant Story, and why we’re doing them that way. Before I get into this, I’d like to recommend reading Nate Piekos’s article about comic book lettering conventions, because it’s really important to know about the industry standards before you decide to go around subverting them.

First and foremost, here’s the important thing to know about Errant Story: this is a work that is entirely handled in-house. That means that we do everything up until the files go to the printer, all the writing, all the art, all the lettering, all the editing, everything. Because we do that, and we don’t have umpteen different people putting their hands on this project who need to all be communicating in the same standardized language, we have the freedom to do things our way, even when our way isn’t the industry standard (or even, necessarily, the best way of doing something).

When I came in as an editor and started looking into editing Errant Story for the collector’s edition, one of the first things I did was draw up a style guide. Basically, this is a document that lays out how to handle all the little lettering quirks that might come up in the course of lettering the pages. When I did this, I made a few decisions that ran counter to the way comic books are traditionally lettered, such as…

Breaking Bubbles

Because the pages of Errant Story are small and dense, there’s not a lot of negative space for large bubbles with a lot of text. Instead, text is routinely broken up into phrases so that the bubbles can be moved and distributed around the art in what little negative space there is.

However, this runs into a lettering issue. Traditionally, dialogue which trails off and begins in another bubble ends in ellipses in the first bubble, and starts with ellipses in the next. I scrapped this, because the result was a whole lot of ellipses needlessly taking up precious page space and introducing unnecessary visual pauses into the dialogue. Instead, dialogue which trails into the next bubble ends with ellipses, but the subsequent bubble begins without them. I figure our readers are smart enough to follow that, especially since it’s pretty close to literary grammar.

Double Dashes

I eliminated the double dashes in Errant Story for the same reason I eliminated the secondary ellipses: to save room, and bring the lettering back towards a literary standard of grammar. I’m sure the original reason for the double dash had to do with the difficulties inherent in hand lettering, and I’ve done enough of that to sympathize, but Errant Story is not hand lettered. The ideal in moving to digital lettering is to mimic the feel of hand lettering, but without slavish devotion to the restrictions it created. Errant Story doesn’t have a seventy year history of lettering style to match, so I feel no remorse whatsoever about bidding the double dash adieu.

Captions

In Errant Story, we only ever see one type of caption, for locations or times. These always appear in a shadowbox, in a specific font, in mixed caps.

At one point in the story, Sarine is going to spend a ridiculous amount of time talking about the past. These are not, strictly, narrative captions, so they’ll appear in their own unique format to indicate that they are voiced over the art.

Crossbar I

Traditionally, the letter I only appears with crossbars when it is a personal pronoun or part of an acronym. This is one of those comic book lettering conventions that I understand from a lettering perspective but loathe from an editing perspective. In this case the editor in me teamed up with my lazy side and won, and consequently anytime an I is capitalized in Errant Story it appears with the crossbars. To do otherwise would require either manually dropping the letter into lowercase anytime it would be required, or routinely typing it in lowercase within the script. Neither is something I feel to be an acceptable use of my time.

Emanating Dialogue / Off-Panel Dialogue

Traditionally, dialogue that isn’t coming from a character on screen (as it were), ends in a tail to direct the reader’s attention off panel or to the point from which the dialogue is originating. Again, Errant Story has small, dense pages (because in Poe’s head letters don’t take up any space, much to my continued annoyance), so there’s usually no room to do this. Instead, any dialogue bubble that can’t be directed to the character doesn’t have a tail at all. There are a couple exceptions, but generally we assume the readers are smart enough to figure out who’s speaking and follow the dialogue without that little cue.

Overlapping Bubbles

Errant Story has small, dense pages, and all the art is against a black page background. Butting bubbles up against borders (which is preferred for most books) makes no sense in that context, so all bubbles in Errant Story break the borders of the panels. I feel that keeps the eye moving across the page better, as well, though I might feel differently if the pages were on a white page background and had a lot of negative space to play with.

Quotation Marks

There are all kinds of rules about how and when to use quotation marks in a comic book, and they’re good rules… but rather than pay them any attention, I have done my level best to eliminate quotation marks from Errant Story dialogue altogether. I personally think they’re ugly and there’s no very good reason to include them in dialogue lettering, as we rarely speak with them in life. The exception is when a character is speaking in a way that clearly calls for air quotes. Everything else, I’ve found a way to work around that I think is just as clear.

Talking Foreign

The traditional approach to indicating dialogue in another language is to enclose it in chevron brackets. I kept that, but also decided that in Errant Story, the elves are hoity-toity enough to demand their own special font, which is something that is not always done. I then spent hours swearing and trying to find a font that was both arrogantly old fashioned and still legible as a dialogue font.

In Errant Story there is also a special font dedicated to reading or rote recitation. This appears without brackets, because it’s meant to only indicate a change in the character’s tone.

Telepathy

Telepathy in Errant Story is kindof a nightmare from a lettering perspective, but mercifully one that doesn’t come up a lot. I eventually settled on an italicized dialogue font inside a bubble with a drop shadow and a bracket of smaller (also drop shadowed) bubbles. The drop shadow is color coded to the “speaker.” This is nothing like the usual telepathy bubbles you might see, but I think it manages to be clear.

The above list is the only set of lettering changes you’re likely to see on the page, but we’ve also made a lot of non-conformist decisions about our editing and lettering process. For now, though, all this rebellion has about worn me out, so I’ll have to talk about those process decisions in another post.

^-^’

Sorry, but today’s page is a bit delayed.  A mouse somehow kicked all our asses today.

Okay, I’ve rested up, and now I’m ready to talk about some of the other weird things we’re doing when it comes to editing and lettering Errant Story. Remember before, when I said the thing you needed to know is that Errant Story is all in-house? Well, that goes double for this part, because we’re definitely not doing this stuff “right.”

And here’s why: Errant Story is put together backwards. Also, it’s alive.

See, Errant Story is a finished webcomic, and on the web, it’s even already been published. But that didn’t happen in a clean step by step process the way it does for print comics, it happened one page at a time over a period of ten years. Poe took shortcuts, learned things on the fly, and made things up as he went along. In effect, Errant Story wasn’t made, it was grown.

Now, however, we’re trying to take this organic, pulsing thing, and put it into books. And it didn’t grow for books, though it’s obvious that’s where it should be. It grew on the web, for the web, and some of the things Poe did way back when… they don’t work anymore. So in editing Errant Story for print, we’re not starting from scratch and building forward the way regular comic books do, we’re starting with a giant, fully-grown tree and trying to prune and replant it so that it comes out still looking like the same tree. Just better, and in a different spot.

What, specifically, are we doing differently?

Well, Step One of any comic should theoretically be a script, but Poe never wrote one. Instead he thumbnailed panels and jotted dialogue down in a sketchbook one page at a time, drew the pages, and then typed up the dialogue and lettered the comic roughly an hour before posting a page. Worse, he overwrote the dialogue in the same file every single time he lettered a new page, and for many years rasterized the text into pixel data in the art files, making it impossible to simply edit. This created a problem, namely that printing Errant Story would require relettering every page, and that leads to the first backwards step in our convoluted process. We had to start by creating a brand new script from the existing pages. We have a few amazing transcribers who painstakingly copy down the text from each original page into the script (did you know that there’s about 17,500 words per volume of Errant Story?), and the result is the base script that gets chopped up for all the editing.

In a way, this is also the first thing we’re doing wrong (aside from kindof the entirety of Poe’s initial approach to lettering). The industry standards for formatting a script vary between the major houses, but they consistently want you to output a script in Word. Guess what we did not do? Instead, I found an amazing program, called CeltX. I love this program, it has features that as an editor I simply could not function without. Formatting is done automatically with key commands, it recognizes pages of the comic as units and has a view where pages act like index cards that you can actually shuffle and rearrange, it offers color coding by plot arc (or in my case, by chapter, since that’s how I prefer to use it), it handles multi-script projects, and has built-in management for script elements like characters or settings. It can export as text, and can automatically reformat the script (which looks more like a movie script when you’re in editing mode, which is good for me because that’s what I’m most familiar with) into a PDF chart that breaks down each page by panels. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to script in Word when they could be using CeltX instead. It is now the only thing we use in-house, but, if we ever wanted to work with anyone else in the industry, we’d have to take all that lovely functionality and toss it in favor of a script formatted by hand in Word. That’s the price you pay when you need to be able to standardize across an entire industry… it’s very slow to adapt.

We, on the other hand, are small and flexible. So, once the script has been created in CeltX, it’s time for the next backwards thing. I go through the script and make corrections to the text, note formatting issues, and basically make the text letterer-friendly. On the face of it, these are fairly normal things that usually happen to a script before it goes to the artist, but that’s exactly why this is backwards. All this text is edited in relation to existing art… mostly.

It’d be nice if this process were that simple, but in addition to the basic cleanup, there are some more editorial decisions being made at this juncture. One of these is that Poe wants a more focused approach to the story in the books than happened when the story grew as a webcomic, so I’m shuffling some of the scenes to keep the main storyline at the forefront throughout each volume. This means that page counts and chapter breaks are changed. In a normal process, these decisions should definitely be made before any art is created, because the artist will justifiably kill you and defile your body if you attempt it halfway through… but that isn’t the case for Errant Story, home of the runaway text. Many of the pages don’t actually have room for all the text Poe originally crammed onto them, so unless we want to start hacking away dialogue, they have to be split. That means finding a natural break in the dialogue, determining how the existing art should be repurposed on the new pages, and deciding what new art is needed and where it should go. Fortunately, I’ve had a lot of time to get a good feel for how Poe lays out a page, so I’m able to keep this fairly consistent with his style as I visualize the finished pages. I also try to keep in mind which side of the book each page will go on, so that scenes break in ways that make sense within a chapter. Combined, these changes amount to approximately thirty extra pages of art per volume (which is why attempting this with any artist who isn’t the original creator would result in that artist defecating into your open wounds after slicing you up with a rabid koala).

Having finally wrangled the wily scripts, though, I do yet another thing backwards. I reformat the original art for print, make whatever edits and page splits are called for, and letter the page despite the blank space where new art will go. After all this editing is done, I then I print the page on bristol paper so that Poe can work on it using the same tools he used for the original pages. How is that backwards? In a normal book, writing and editing goes first, art second, and lettering comes last, but Poe is very resistant to understanding that words take up space. Giving him pages where the lettering already exists helps him to account for it when he creates the new art, and puts the new art in context with the rest of the page it will appear on, which helps keep it somewhat more consistent. Remember, some of these pages are a decade old, and it’s really hard to go back in time as an artist, so the art guide helps reset his eyes for his old style.

Oh, and this is yet another thing that we’re ultimately doing wrong, because all of that editing happens in Photoshop despite there being a million better ways to do it. I would love to learn to use those tools and switch, but Photoshop is comfortable, the files are already formatted for it, and we’re short on time so don’t want to spend a lot of it needlessly converting the pages to a format for tools we’re less adept at using. For this project, we’re just going with what we know, and since we’re working in-house we can get away with that.

Ultimately, after all this backwards process, we end up with page after page of revised lettering and art, all divided into new chapters and new volumes. If we’ve done our job right, most of those pages won’t appear to be much different at all, and a new reader would never know we’d done anything. So why go through all this? Why spend all this time and energy doing absolutely everything backwards and wrong? Because when we do, Errant Story comes out right. This method would never work if we were creating new books from scratch, everyone involved would be going insane, but for Errant Story and the kind of evolution and growth we’re trying to bring out of it, this is the approach that takes what the comic was, and turns it into what it wants to be. To us, that’s worth it.

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After chattering about this subject a bit on Twitter, I thought I’d take a moment to discuss some of the things we’re doing differently in lettering Errant Story, and why we’re doing them that way. Before I get into this, I’d like to recommend reading Nate Piekos’s article about comic book lettering conventions, because it’s really important to know about the industry standards before you decide to go around subverting them.

First and foremost, here’s the important thing to know about Errant Story: this is a work that is entirely handled in-house. That means that we do everything up until the files go to the printer, all the writing, all the art, all the lettering, all the editing, everything. Because we do that, and we don’t have umpteen different people putting their hands on this project who need to all be communicating in the same standardized language, we have the freedom to do things our way, even when our way isn’t the industry standard (or even, necessarily, the best way of doing something).

When I came in as an editor and started looking into editing Errant Story for the collector’s edition, one of the first things I did was draw up a style guide. Basically, this is a document that lays out how to handle all the little lettering quirks that might come up in the course of lettering the pages. When I did this, I made a few decisions that ran counter to the way comic books are traditionally lettered, such as…

Breaking Bubbles

Because the pages of Errant Story are small and dense, there’s not a lot of negative space for large bubbles with a lot of text. Instead, text is routinely broken up into phrases so that the bubbles can be moved and distributed around the art in what little negative space there is.

However, this runs into a lettering issue. Traditionally, dialogue which trails off and begins in another bubble ends in ellipses in the first bubble, and starts with ellipses in the next. I scrapped this, because the result was a whole lot of ellipses needlessly taking up precious page space and introducing unnecessary visual pauses into the dialogue. Instead, dialogue which trails into the next bubble ends with ellipses, but the subsequent bubble begins without them. I figure our readers are smart enough to follow that, especially since it’s pretty close to literary grammar.

Double Dashes

I eliminated the double dashes in Errant Story for the same reason I eliminated the secondary ellipses: to save room, and bring the lettering back towards a literary standard of grammar. I’m sure the original reason for the double dash had to do with the difficulties inherent in hand lettering, and I’ve done enough of that to sympathize, but Errant Story is not hand lettered. The ideal in moving to digital lettering is to mimic the feel of hand lettering, but without slavish devotion to the restrictions it created. Errant Story doesn’t have a seventy year history of lettering style to match, so I feel no remorse whatsoever about bidding the double dash adieu.

Captions

In Errant Story, we only ever see one type of caption, for locations or times. These always appear in a shadowbox, in a specific font, in mixed caps.

At one point in the story, Sarine is going to spend a ridiculous amount of time talking about the past. These are not, strictly, narrative captions, so they’ll appear in their own unique format to indicate that they are voiced over the art.

Crossbar I

Traditionally, the letter I only appears with crossbars when it is a personal pronoun or part of an acronym. This is one of those comic book lettering conventions that I understand from a lettering perspective but loathe from an editing perspective. In this case the editor in me teamed up with my lazy side and won, and consequently anytime an I is capitalized in Errant Story it appears with the crossbars. To do otherwise would require either manually dropping the letter into lowercase anytime it would be required, or routinely typing it in lowercase within the script. Neither is something I feel to be an acceptable use of my time.

Emanating Dialogue / Off-Panel Dialogue

Traditionally, dialogue that isn’t coming from a character on screen (as it were), ends in a tail to direct the reader’s attention off panel or to the point from which the dialogue is originating. Again, Errant Story has small, dense pages (because in Poe’s head letters don’t take up any space, much to my continued annoyance), so there’s usually no room to do this. Instead, any dialogue bubble that can’t be directed to the character doesn’t have a tail at all. There are a couple exceptions, but generally we assume the readers are smart enough to figure out who’s speaking and follow the dialogue without that little cue.

Overlapping Bubbles

Errant Story has small, dense pages, and all the art is against a black page background. Butting bubbles up against borders (which is preferred for most books) makes no sense in that context, so all bubbles in Errant Story break the borders of the panels. I feel that keeps the eye moving across the page better, as well, though I might feel differently if the pages were on a white page background and had a lot of negative space to play with.

Quotation Marks

There are all kinds of rules about how and when to use quotation marks in a comic book, and they’re good rules… but rather than pay them any attention, I have done my level best to eliminate quotation marks from Errant Story dialogue altogether. I personally think they’re ugly and there’s no very good reason to include them in dialogue lettering, as we rarely speak with them in life. The exception is when a character is speaking in a way that clearly calls for air quotes. Everything else, I’ve found a way to work around that I think is just as clear.

Talking Foreign

The traditional approach to indicating dialogue in another language is to enclose it in chevron brackets. I kept that, but also decided that in Errant Story, the elves are hoity-toity enough to demand their own special font, which is something that is not always done. I then spent hours swearing and trying to find a font that was both arrogantly old fashioned and still legible as a dialogue font.

In Errant Story there is also a special font dedicated to reading or rote recitation. This appears without brackets, because it’s meant to only indicate a change in the character’s tone.

Telepathy

Telepathy in Errant Story is kindof a nightmare from a lettering perspective, but mercifully one that doesn’t come up a lot. I eventually settled on an italicized dialogue font inside a bubble with a drop shadow and a bracket of smaller (also drop shadowed) bubbles. The drop shadow is color coded to the “speaker.” This is nothing like the usual telepathy bubbles you might see, but I think it manages to be clear.

The above list is the only set of lettering changes you’re likely to see on the page, but we’ve also made a lot of non-conformist decisions about our editing and lettering process. For now, though, all this rebellion has about worn me out, so I’ll have to talk about those process decisions in another post.

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Sorry, but today’s page is a bit delayed.  A mouse somehow kicked all our asses today.