Duelling Books

Sean Michael Robinson:

Greetings all,

This will be very (very!) brief, as I'm saving my writing time this week for updates on the new edition of Church and State I, as it progresses from guts to book... 

As Dave has mentioned on his past two weekly updates, we're actually working simultaneously on two books now, Church & State II, as well as prepping a new printing of Cerebus Volume One, which those of you with long memories may remember, we came on to this project with more than a year ago, replacing a few signatures of an existing book printed by Lebonfon two years prior.

The two books couldn't be more different. Church & State II has the highest percentage of original art for any book we've worked on so far, and the goals are very different than Cerebus Volume One, which is represented almost entirely by newsprint scans. It's a bit disorienting, actually, to shift between the two volumes, though the new techniques I've developed for working with newsprint have brought the two books a bit closer together, enabling me to manipulate the exposure on the newsprint pages in a similar way to working with negatives. More on this in a future posting...

The progress so far-- For C + S II, we've completed the work on the negative scans, and are waiting for the original art scans to arrive, courtesy of Sandeep, who has been scanning them over the past two weeks. The negs are the best photographed pages so far in the series, and are in much better physical shape than any of the negatives we've seen so far. Seeing how fantastic the unbound C + S I already looks, this is very good news indeed, and gives me hope that, other than the shrunken tone, which still takes a punishing amount of work/time to correct, each volume is bringing us closer and closer to page-by-page printing perfection.

But don't take my word for it. Pick up the new C + S I when it comes out and compare it and an older edition side by side. See for yourself how far this project has come, and where it's going next.

Keep your eye on this space for updates on the new Church & State I, and if you haven't ordered your copy yet, now's the time!