Greetings from Book Editing hell

Hi friends

Hope you are doing great, I am doing pretty okay right now. I apologize for my absence recently, but most of what I've been doing has been extremely boring and hard to share because it is so boring... example above. Literally going over pages many many times trying to improve it in tiny ways that almost nobody will notice (but that tends to be the difference between an ok product and a really nice product). 

I'll be updating a lot more from here on out though; I have a polished cover done, and a lot of process stuff to share! Editing a book that people have spend a frightening sum of money on is a lot of pressure, so I have been prioritizing that over everything else

Since I'm here, and for funzies, I'll just list what book editing means in general since maybe it's opaque to people who haven't done it by themselves before:

• color holds: The first 2.5 chapters had entirely black lines except in a few scenes. The latter chapters have holds applies, which means that the lines are filled in to increase the depth and atmosphere and to push dramatic lighting. If you don't do it, your art can look a bit blunt, and anyways I can't have half a book without holds so accounts for over a hundred pages of edits
• redraws: my older art is somewhat off model in places and I've been fixing that... and unfortunately I also have some pages that got saved over or corrupted so I've had to redraw those completely at the proper resolution based off the internet pages. Tedious!
• new pages: I knew I didn't do enough intro for Bex and so I'm adding in a few pages to round that out
• rewrites: lots of the story was written before I'd established some of the finer details. I can now go back and shove those in where it's possible, as well as tighten the dialogue and make each persons' voice a bit more memorable. This often requires balloon redraws.
• sfx fiddling: I just didn't like how sloppy some of the sfx were in the original, so I am going back and redrawing those. Since the sfx often include opacity issues or masking or texture, it can again take a lot of time and probably will go unnoticed (by everyone but me)

• text proof-reading: the easy part is running spell-check on every page. The hard part is capital spotting... the only place I use capital "I" is in the self-referential pronoun sense. Sometimes by accident I capitalize I's in the beginning of sentences or in formal nouns. Since spellcheck doesn't pick up capital letters in Photoshop, that means reading everything a billion times to make sure I'm not missing anything. Also, every instance of "LEVi" must be hand-tweaked since my font doesn't include lowercase i, and I have to use a separate image for that while retaining proper spacing between words. 
• See how boring this is? I'm so sorry
• Color corrections: the pages are SO DARK in so many places, yay for making this entire comic in a cave. Why did I do this. A lot of pages had to be edited to redistribute values so that the figures make more sense
• model-checking: I got off model in some places due to laziness, things like flags on the suits, logos and colors of the elbow pads, scuff and stains, holes, etc. That means going through every panel looking for missing details and putting them in. For example I got lazy and forgot every hole in Mike's shoulders from the stabby fish in Chapter 3 onwards, so I gotta put those in T__T
• textures: each page has a certain amount of grain either applied as a filter or manually added as an overlay, just for cohesiveness and style. So any edits I make must be run through those filters again for the final print file, adding another amazingly boring step 
• details: I'm being an asshole and going back to add in stray hairs and small textures cuz I think they look nice and break up the airbrushed look of some of the coloring. Is this a good use of time? probably not but~~

Anyways, that's what I've been doing for weeks! I'm sorry again for not posting as frequently but this sort of thing isn't very sexy/ requires a lot of concentration, so I didn't want to inflict it on you guys too much. I figure you only get one chance to make this book as good as you can, so it's probably best to focus while I have the opportunity. I also really REALLY appreciate everyone's support of the comic and want to make it as good as you all deserve. 

Going forward on ye olde Patreon, I'll be dropping some previews of the new pages, the cover(s), and whatever else. I'm bursting at the seams with content I want to get to but no time right now! But I got a lot of great suggestions for tutorials in the past few weeks and have a big Kickstarter tutorial planned as well, so I promise those things are on the horizon :]

(Oh, and I'll be making a post about the pin winner soon as well! Sorry for taking so long to get to that, I haven't forgotten and am excited to finally gift a winner)

Best,

Der