Of course, I suspect that most people reading this are already, at the very least, somewhat tuned into The Way Things Really Are. T&K readers, I have found, tend to be both intelligent and inquisitive sorts, and there's magic and the most startling activities afoot, both good and evil, to be found in them thar hills yonder! --And with the Good Guys out-numbered and out-gunned by many orders of magnitude these days, it makes me strain and want to leap into the fray to the assistance of the underdog. However, after much, (much) contemplation, I have come to the conclusion that this simply isn't the forum. After all, I have for years been publishing under more than one name, in ways and places where such things are far more appropriate. So until things change and the time comes for speaking directly, (perhaps in a few years when FEMA opens its barbed wire gates for business), I'll continue in those efforts while carrying on here as normal.

Cuz, I suspect that, 'Normal', is going to become a highly valued commodity over the next few years. And I'm in the entertainment biz, after all. --An effort to provide a brief respite from the insanity of the world; where one may visit with Rubel and Heath and their friends before heading back into the wilds of these strange times. And with my publishing soon to become much more frequent, I'll be aiming to make T&K something which will be reliable over the coming months and years. . . I've done a lot of growing up since the late nineties. It's time to start paying back my debts to the world. And that means drawing a lot more comics!

So onward then. . !

So a day ago, I received my advance copies of the latest issue, (#41) via courier.

Doesn't look bad. . . They got that recurring graphics error fixed. . .

Flip, flip, flip. . .

Pause.

Heart begins to race and I sit forward in my chair, re-scanning the page to make sure. . .

No, they didn't!  No!

The text corrections I sent were not used.  Aw, man. I hate it when that happens!

I've used four different printing agencies now, and explored several others over the years. None of them really cut it. The only one which actually printed perfect books for the whole time I was with them was also the very first printing company I found. I worked with them only for the first two issues, but wow. Their work was exquisite! Color cover was perfect. Interiors, perfect. But they also charged triple what the competition was asking, and with my circulation, I simply couldn't afford to keep using them. --And that was with a circulation of 5000! At the time, I remember being quite worried by this. I thought that this was it; my fledgling company was going to die before ever getting rolling. Based on what I believed was the normal cost of printing, I'd been hoping for a circulation of perhaps 8000 or more in order to function.

So there I was. . , I'd done a pile of research, had gotten quotes from a dozen or more different printing companies, and the company I ended up going with seemed to be the best deal for the highest quality. Of course, at the time, I'd not thought to inquire about printing companies which worked outside the city where I lived. Goodness. What a difference. Toronto is an expensive town in all respects! --It was a good day when I met a bunch of other kids who were also self-publishing, and who directed me to the companies which regularly printed comics and charged the industry standard prices which, as it were, much more affordable.

And so, like many other other cartoonists before me, I began sending my work to a small town in southern Ontario. It was a lousy half year during which I realized just how shoddy a printing company could be! Now, while they did do reproduce wonderful color covers, their black & white interior work was another story entirely. Unbelievably awful. And their attitude. . ! You know you have a problem when your printing company somehow manages to turn perfectly clean, black & white line-art into mud, and then blames the artist for the problem, claiming stubbornly that, "Comics are supposed to print dark. Dot tone greys just naturally turn all black if the dots are too small. That's just the way it is. It's not our fault."

What? Yes it is!

But I was new to the world of comics, and these guys were famous for printing several well known black & white titles. So perhaps it really was me doing something wrong. So rather than storm around, I instead tried to figure out what was going wrong. What I discovered was, while annoying, still pretty interesting.

--Check this out. . . The company was, Prenny Print and Litho, and their premier client was none other than Dave Sim of Cerebus fame. Now, Dave was printing at the time upwards of 20,000 copies of Cerebus every month, plus untold thousands of collected volumes. A huge and important client for a small printing company. Cerebus was probably paying off somebody's mortgage and possibly a million dollar business loan or some such. The problem, however, was that Dave is the king of hair-thin line-work. He's an artist who has at times gone through as many as six ink nibs per page as each, new and atomically sharp stainless steel quill nib wore down to merely, 'sharp'. Dave likes to be able to make his ink lines *thin*. --Line work which the conventional printing press can easily fail to reproduce. And so Dave ached and hurt inside as every artist of any worth will do when his or her work is reduced as such. And knowing Dave, I expect that he complained. I certainly did.

Now back in the 70's, the guys at Prenny, being a small company wanting to keep their client happy, thought and worried about the problem. And in the end they came up with a solution.

First of all, they turned the contrast knob on their press right up to the highest setting they could get away with without turning pages entirely black. I expect that this was the first thing they tried. It wasn't, however, enough. All of Dave's teeny, thin line work was still going missing in the final product. So next, the guys as Prenny did something daring. In total disregard for the instruction manual which came with their big printing press, they began to use a non-standard ink. --An ink which was much more thick and 'hearty' than the stuff normally designed to go through the machine. And voila! The resulting pages displayed every hair thin line Dave drew with great accuracy, and Cerebus readers everywhere had filthy hands from all the excess ink which rubbed off as though from sheets of carbon paper. And all was good.

The only problem was that twenty years later, when I presented Prenny with the fine-tuned grey tone work used in Thieves & Kings, their ink-choked printing machines, permanently shuddering on the very edges of a contrast nightmare, coughed and spat out pages where much of my careful work had been reduced to pools of solid black. And yours truly ached and hurt and complained.

Unfortunately, because I was also so small a client unlikely to be paying off anybody's mortgage or million dollar bank loan any time soon, and because there was such an abundance of small-press guys like me who had money to spend but who didn't seem to care about the problem, (that is, who didn't use grey tones in their work,) the folks at Prenny didn't feel the need to change their process on my account. Annoying, but fair enough, I suppose. I guess I was just twenty years too late. So, once again, I hit the road in search of another printing company.

Well, I ended up finding one which seemed to work somewhere between the two extremes. They charged a bit more than Prenny, but a great deal less than my first printer. --And they also knew how to make a nice looking comic book where the pictures turn out looking exactly as intended. Finally! And all was good.

But then, along came computers and digital pre-press. Scanners and Photoshop and layout software and that whole universe of complications, and the printing industry has never been the same. Old print engineers experienced in the craft of photographic plate making made way to young and inexperienced workers. The painful result was that all the rules changed and a thousand and one brand new things were able to go wrong with a print job. And they did. And they do. To this day, they do.

Sigh.

In the past, if I felt the urge to make a last minute change to a page, I would courier a physical sheet of paper with the actual replacement image and detailed instructions for where to paste it down upon the original page.

These days, I can simply email a new graphics file.

The problem is that where it is very hard to ignore an envelope with the words, "THIEVES & KINGS CORRECTIONS," written upon it in big black marker, it is by contrast very easy for an emailed graphics file to go missing on somebody's hard drive. Even after phoning to make sure everything was a-okay.

Of course, if for this issue, I'd sent along the correct text to begin with, (the version without spelling errors and passages which I felt sounded awkward), then there would be no problem. Issue #41 would be happily added to the pile of completed projects. Unfortunately, this isn't how it went this time around.

See, it works like this. . .

There is a region of the mind from which all story writing emerges from, and it is a raw, wild and private place where emotions and logic all make perfect sense. However, once you bring that stuff out into the light of the regular world, once you put it on paper, most of it ends up seeming over-dramatic, childish, or just plain silly. One of the most important and least understood jobs of the writer lies in making sure that ideas survive the transition from the realm of dream, (where all stories are born), into the hard reality of the printed word.

Now, on some occasions, I can write a scene, and I can re-write that scene, and re-write it again until I'm quite blue in the face, but still find myself simply unable to pull it into shape before press time. The piece for this issue is an excellent example; an important idea which I really didn't want to come out sounding half-assed. When I'm working to perfect a piece of story like that, often only when I stop writing and step back for a few weeks am I able to really see things clearly.

I am by no means the only writer to experience this. Indeed, it was precisely because of this problem that the job of 'Editor' was created. Editors are fresh and smart and they wear crisp shirts, and when the exhausted writer they are working with turns in his or her draft copy, the editor with clear eyes can recognize in an instant all the flaws which the writer is simply too burned out to be able to see. Editors, properly matched to a job, can dramatically cut down the length of time it takes to produce a decent bit of prose. And of course, I don't use an editor.

Now, normally this isn't a problem for me. I have this system, you see. It works like this. . .

I type furiously without eating or sleeping, deep into the night. Then upon the last hit of the enter key, I roll back in my rolling chair, and declare, "Ah! A fine job! You really captured that idea nicely! Good work, Mark!"

Then I put the piece away and feel good about myself until a week later when I re-read it and blink in horror, "Holy smokes! This is the worst dreck I've ever read! This completely stinks! What the heck was wrong with me?! Was it the coffee? Quick! I must re-write this immediately!"

Anyway, when press time rolls around, I've usually repeated this process a dozen times or more, and usually, I've gotten the piece to work, only changing small things in the final draft, turning "which" into "that", and similar micro-alterations.

But sometimes. . .

Sometimes I'll find myself on the umpteenth re-write and things still won't jive properly. And then I really begin to sweat! To be honest, this happens more often than I'd like to admit. Sometimes, I find myself doing re-writes right up until the last possible moment, even going so far, as I described above, to send fevered changes to the printing plant on the very eve of press time. I really don't like doing that, and I'm sure the people at the printing plant groan at me when I do it, probably complaining about temperamental artists and their crazy whims, or some such. They certainly bill me for the trouble.

Anyway, the printing agency sends me something called a blue-line. It's a one-off approval copy of a comic book which both the printer and the publisher can go over to look for things which need fixing before press time. Luckily, this time around, every single one of the pages had developed a strange graphics problem which was entirely the fault of the printing plant. Every page needed to be re-done, and so this was a perfectly convenient opportunity for me to make all my last second changes to the text without feeling like I was gumming up the tightly scheduled process, and so I sent along the changes with much relief! Unfortunately though, wires got crossed, somebody somewhere made a mistake, and the corrections I sent ended up lost and ignored on somebody's hard drive. Damned irritating. The changes were not implemented, and the final product isn't what it should have been.

Now, I am making a somewhat larger deal out of all this than is really warranted. The version which made it to press was only a few shades away from what it was meant to be. I was very near the end of the writing process on it, and the idea comes across reasonably well; just with a little too much drama and a scattering of dumb typos, plus a spot or two where the grammar was awkward and could have been more clear. (And was. In the final corrected version which didn't get used. Bah.)

Anyway, if you are is interested in reading the corrected text, I've included it here. It's just a few small things actually; corrected spellings and a few re-worked passages. A smoother, slightly more mature ride through the story. I only changed about a hundred words in total.

Nonetheless, I called up the people at my printing company, and told the production coordinator what had happened. She was extremely dismayed and apologetic. I have, of course, the right to demand a pulping of the print run and and a complete re-do of the job. I've done this once before with a trade paperback where I simply couldn't let the problem go, (and where it certainly wasn't my fault). This time, however, I decided to not make a big stink, and so I let it go after extracting a promise that the corrections would be free of charge when it came time to reprint. --Normally I wouldn't put up with this sort of thing at all, but there have been a couple of times in the past when the company went to the wall for me in cases where they certainly didn't have to. I am extremely grateful for those efforts, and so I don't mind allowing things to remain smooth if I can afford to. Everybody makes mistakes, and this wasn't the sort which, while it was somewhat embarrassing, (poor grammar being what it is), wasn't going to kill me. The production coordinator sounded quite relieved. I think heads really roll around there when the presses have to be stopped and backed up due to worker error.

Anyway, that's how things looked yesterday afternoon. . .

Take care!

-Mark

Toronto,
Mar 27, 2003