Crack open the comic in your hands to somewhere deep into the newsprint and bring it right up to your face so that your nose kind of fits. --Don't touch it. The ink will come off on your skin. Anyway, do that and inhale. Through your nose. 

(Just do it. Otherwise the rest of this column is meaningless.) 

Okay? Smell that? 

That's the smell of Preney Print & Litho and their big Heidleburg press, and that's a pretty uncommon smell. Most places as I was informed by Preney's sales staff don't use big German presses. They use presses which aren't quite as good.  (Oh them Germans and their fast cars and high-end printing presses. Top of the line doncha know!) 

There are several other smells books can have, but there are two main ones. --Or two that I notice moist often anyway. First, you have the smell of the average North American paperback novel, and second, the smell of books with really really well produced color pictures. 

You can check out to see what I mean about the paperback smell by smelling either of the first two issues of T&K.  The printer I was using for those issues didn't use a big German press.  The first two issues smell like regular paperbacks.  I really like that smell. I associate it with some of my favorite stories.  In fact I'd likely have stayed with my old printer just for the smell, except that my new printer is saving me about a thousand dollars a job.  (I make it policy not to pay for air quality unless I'm getting head aches and nose bleeds.) 

Then there's the other smell, the one given off by the average coffee table book with really really well reproduced colors. It comes only from books printed in the Orient.  A good way to smell this one is to pick up either, like I said, a book with really really nice looking color pictures, (like the cars from the eighties, Japanese presses are second only to German presses for precision, but are significantly less expensive), or if you know what Manga is, pick some up, either color or black & white, and take a whiff.  That's the smell I'm talking about.  I like that one a lot too. 

Often, I am told, smells and memories are tightly linked, so I suppose the ones I recognize most easily might well be different from the ones you do.  (There are several different brook odors out there.)  But mine smell either like good ol' sci-fi paperbacks, or like the exotic dusty treasures I used to find fifteen years ago sitting on the bottom racks of comic shops. --Books with Kanji characters and pictures of animated heroes and heroines from places very far away. 

Anyway, after taking a whiff of Thieves & Kings issue #3 and after the guys at Preney told me what sort of press they ran, it struck me all at once that Thieves & Kings was being printed on the typographic equivalent of. ., (wait for it) a Porsche. 

So my new slogan, I decided, should go something like this: 

Thieves & Kings; 100 issues long but WAY STINKING FAST WITH LOTS OF TORQUE AND STUPID BACK SEATS WITH NO LEG-ROOM! 

Issue 5 hits the stands in May. I just finished its cover painting.  Lots of blue.