Narrow Window

Sean Michael Robinson:

Hey everyone! This will be another brief one, as Mara and I are both powering through the cleanup on High Society now, looking to hit the narrow delivery window between "Diamond sales report" and "in time for Christmas."

Meanwhile, this week I received a jump drive in the mail from Walking Man comics maker Matt Levin, which contained not one, but two High Society original art scans!

First, here's a page of one of Matt's Walking Man comics, usually made (as far as I can tell) with some kind of stamps or hand-applied printing.I love the scale of the last two panels.

Matt's High Society pages were especially interesting as I got the rare chance to compare scans of actual original art to negative scans that I had adjusted and completed weeks earlier. The verdict? Very favorable. More on this as we get closer to the book release.

Meanwhile, it's not too late to contribute to the book! Please send your High Society original art scans to cerebusarthunt at gmail dot com.

Yesterday, finishing up the major work on the pre-cleanup portion of the book, I got my first real sense of how the next book of this project can go, if things are planned well. The last twenty pages of the work I had to do were all sourced from original art, all scanned on the same scanner, with the same settings. The uniformity meant that I only had to get the settings once, and then run the script on each page, giving it a once-over afterwards and saving. Those last twenty pages averaged about 5 minutes of time per page, as compared to the twenty minutes per page I've been working on High Society. No manipulation, no backflips, just dealing with the information that's been captured in the most efficient way possible.

I have high hopes it'll happen next time.