Baggage Claim

Oliver Bareham’s personal blog.

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Dear Brother (Oniisama e…) LaserDisc scans and machine translations

These past few years I have fallen in love with the work of director Osamu Dezaki. Alongside Tomorrow’s Joe (Ashita no Joe), I hold Dear Brother in the highest regard.

It was a 1991 anime based on Riyoko Ikeda’s 1974 manga. You should watch the anime. It’s on Tubi for free. But really, just trust me. Buy the Blu-Ray from Discotek.

This anime came and went. There isn’t any merchandise besides some phone cards. Decaying fan sites and discourse is out there, but it’s a bit of a hunt.

Some time ago I saw a fan letter written by Hideaki Anno, apparently from the LaserDisc releases. From what I could tell, the LaserDisc packaging featured a treasure trove of notes from the staff that I just had to read. But I couldn’t find them!

If you’re not aware, LaserDiscs are one step above burnable trash in Japan — often on sale for 200 yen or less in heavy boxes shoved into the corner of second-hand anime stores. So I bought all five volumes of the 1993 Dear Brother LaserDisc release, was thrilled to notice unique letters from staff and industry luminaries in the interiors, and I scanned everything! And machine translated them.

I hope this (long, comprehensive) post brings fans of Dear Brother the same pleasure it brought me to compose it!

Note: I cannot read Japanese. I’ve used Google Lens for OCR, and GPT-4 for translation. My scans are good (and you can get them on Archive.org in high res) but these translations are not archive-quality and should not be depended on without verification. I’ve done my best to make corrections and have attempted to wrangle the correct tone and meaning out of the AI, but they’re essentially just for fun. Corrections of the most egregious stuff would be welcomed, email me: [email protected].

Volume One

Each disc is themed after a character and colour. The back is peppered with screencaps and notable quotes (“Anata wa dare?” says little Nanako) as well as series credits. The two notable parts to translate are the disc synopsis, and the subheading (seen here in pink on the far left.) Maybe it’s a pull quote? Not really. So I called it a subheading.

Volume One Subheading

A forbidden cult anime masterpiece born of satellite broadcasting is finally available on LD.

Volume One Synopsis

Private Seiran Academy. A story of beautiful love and deep hatred unfolds at this prestigious all-girls high school steeped in tradition. The protagonist, Nanako Misonoo, who is thrilled to enroll in the high school division of her dream academy, encounters three stunning individuals: Miya-sama, Sanjust-sama, and Sho no Kimi. She also gets introduced to the glamorous world of Seiran Sorority, a society that only the chosen few are allowed to join. As a freshman granted unexpected membership in the Sorority, Nanako begins to take a deep look at love, friendship, and the essence of being human, all while being surrounded by envy and jealousy. She confides her various experiences at the academy, along with unspeakable worries and hardships, in letters to her elder “brother” and a young man named Takehiko Henmi… A masterpiece anime born of satellite broadcasting. It is a work by Riyoko Ikeda that the Dezaki-Sugino duo took on for the first time in 11 years since “The Rose of Versailles.” It is considered a unique work that brings a fresh, unprecedented shock by transcending the framework of TV anime with its aesthetic world.

The disc looks like this:

An “obi” (sash that covers the spine) is included. Of course, it says “My tears won’t stop!” in huge text, sells it as the latest Dezaki/Sugino collaboration, and describes it as tanibi na sekai — a poetic concept of a romantic, sublime world of aesthetic beauty.

There are two paper inserts in each volume. The first one looks like this, and is an index of LaserDisc chapter markers based not on plot developments, but notable character quotes.

There’s also a form you can fill out to get a telephone card. Simply cut out a coupon from each volume to prove you bought the full set. Be quick, entries are due end of March 1994.

The interior is the best part. Here’s the spread for Volume One.

I haven’t translated episode synopses, but I’ve attempted to translate both the staff letter and the “letter to dear brother” from someone external to the production. There’s a bio for each author.

Volume One’s “From the staff to all the fans”

Bio:

Osamu Dezaki Joined Mushi Production in 1963. After directing series like “Astro Boy” and “Goku’s Great Adventure,” he was selected as the general director for “Tomorrow’s Joe” in 1970 at the young age of 26. Born on November 18, 1943, and hailing from Tokyo, he has received high praise as a director. Subsequently, he has brought numerous masterpieces into the world, including “Aim for the Ace!”, “The Adventures of Ganba,” “Nobody’s Boy,” “Treasure Island,” “The Rose of Versailles,” “Space Adventure Cobra,” “BB,” and more. He is also referred to as “Sakimakura” and “Mataba Sakimakura.”

The letter:

This is my second time working on Ikeda-san’s work since “The Rose of Versailles.” Her works have a unique aroma, whether you call it a theme or a world. They seem to pursue the literary aspect of the story. When I read the original work of “Dear Brother,” I was very drawn to these aspects, and at the same time, I felt a sense of anticipation that it would be difficult, but perhaps various images could be created. It’s not just about being cool or intense; it’s about creating images that resonate more and more with people’s hearts. Fundamentally, there is an original story, but when the characters start to move, and each begins to live, the story could go anywhere. I always had that sense of tension. So, rather than sticking to the original work, I placed more emphasis on the directorial focus of the reality of the characters who had started to move. As for the techniques, it was not something I was particularly conscious of, but I used a lot of completely black shots simply because I honestly felt they needed to be black. Whether or not it was successful, I wanted to effectively overlap the visuals with the characters’ psychology by delivering such physiological shocks. The psychological fluctuations of the people are indeed the overall aroma of this work. How the audience perceives that aroma is something I want to leave up to each individual’s free sensitivity. - July 8, 1993, at Tezuka Pro

Volume One’s “Letter to Dear Brother”

Bio:

Mutsumi Inomata Born on December 23 in Kanagawa Prefecture. After working with Ashi Production and Kaname Production, she is currently freelance. After going through Ashi Production and Kaname Production, she is now a freelance artist. Mutsumi Inomata is her real name. She was born on December 23 in Kanagawa Prefecture. She is active in both the fields of anime character design and illustration. In the realm of animation, she served as the character designer and chief animation director for works such as “Plawres Sanshiro” and “Genmu Senki Leda,” and as the character designer for “Future GPX Cyber Formula.” As an illustrator, she has also provided numerous illustrations for novels, including titles like “Prince of the Universe,” “Dragon Quest,” and “Continent of the Wind.”

The letter:

Comics are way hard to translate without actually knowing Japanese. Here’s my best effort to uncover some meaning.

For several years, I had stopped watching anime and stuff… Living a hectic life, it’s been like this for a while now. Having a set day and a set time to watch a specific program (not just limited to anime), had become impossible for me. Recording videos is also a hassle, and first and foremost, I just don’t feel that “I must watch the next episode!” kind of emotion anymore. Ah well, I was thinking maybe I’ve just become an adult. Heh heh heh. I’m such an idiot. No, that’s not it.

The blonde guy in the bottom-right is labeled as her friend, and she’s saying something about “Poupee-chan”. I think in the second panel he’s yelling saying “But that doll is supposed to be a girl!”

The final monologue starts with:

By the way, I have a container for “dangerous items” at the corner of my work desk. I keep things like cutter blades in it, so that I don’t accidentally drop them on the floor and cut myself or something. The “dangerous items” container I’m using now has a sticker with Saint-Just-sama’s “Nanako’s Eyes,” heh heh heh ♡

That’s about all there is to note about Volume One, besides the fact it comes with an enormous poster (it’s the same art used on the cover of the Discotek Blu-Ray.)

Volume Two

Volume Two Subheading

Those eyes of that person, mysteriously and beautifully shining. Why these feelings? Why...? The increasing heartbeat, the endless tears of adolescence. A masterpiece of forbidden cult anime born from satellite broadcasting! The second installment on LaserDisc!

Volume Two Synopsis

Nanako’s life at school, after being chosen as a sorority member, was not all glitz and glamour. There were misunderstandings with her best friend Tomiko, and jealousy and slander from other students, including Misaki Aya. And then there was the obsessive love from her fellow sorority member, Nobuo Mariko. “What is a sorority? Is it really that important?” Nanako began to question the very existence of sororities. Yet, she tries to look straight into herself, even while confused. Always before her were the mysteriously beautiful and shining eyes of Saint-Just. Drawn to those eyes that seemed to peer into a distant past, Nanako attempts to uncover their secret. Then, by chance, she finds out about the special relationship between Fukiko and Saint-Just. Could it be that Miya-sama and Saint-Just-sama are…? The complicated interplay of relationships and the previously enigmatic characters start to become a little clearer in “Volume 2: The Chapter of Freezing Rain.” The subtle breaths of the people surrounding Nanako can be heard.

Volume Two’s “From the staff, Dear Nanako”

Bio:

Hideo Takayashiki Born in 1947, native of Iwate Prefecture. After passing through Osamu Tezuka’s Mushi Production, became a scenario writer. Known for scripts of theatrical anime films such as “Hang in There, Tabuchi-kun!”, “Barefoot Gen”, and the “Phoenix” series. Also worked on numerous TV anime scripts like “Gutsy Frog”, “Gamba’s Adventure”, and “Tomorrow’s Joe”. Additionally, wrote scripts for original videos and TV dramas like “The Laughing Target”, “One-Pound Gospel”, and has written many novels, actively contributing as a versatile scriptwriter. Member of the Japan Broadcast Writers Association.

The letter:

Dear Nanako Misonoo, How are you? How is university life? It’s hard to believe that three years have passed since then. I was involved with you and those around you for just one year, but in retrospect, it was a very intense year. In any case, I did something terrible to you. It may have been the extreme form of “bullying” in some sense. My work as a scriptwriter involved probing and expanding the uncharted worlds between the frames of original works, constructing new narratives. In a sense, it was a painful job. And for you, it was excruciating. But now it’s a wonderful memory. I am filled with the feeling that I did some real work after a long time. How is your best friend, Tomoko? What about Mariko? I assume Fuki is becoming more and more beautiful? Do you occasionally receive letters from Kaoru? This summer marked the third anniversary of Saint-Just-sama’s passing. Thinking back, it was an unusually hot day. Your anguished form, waiting alone at the platform while listening to the chirping cicadas and the sound of the sea, is still etched in my memory. I hear that there has not been a single day without flowers at the electric pole where Saint-Just-sama fell. I am grateful for the chance to have met you and the people around you. Autumn, 1993

Volume Two’s “Letter to Dear Brother”

Bio:

Kazuhiko Shimamoto Born April 26, 1961 From the hinterland of Hokkaido After being selected as an honorable mention in the 9th Shogakukan Newcomer Comics Award Debuted with “Hissatsu no Transfer Student”. His masterpieces include Gyakkyo Nine’ and Moeyo Pen. Examples include Flame Transfer Student’ and Kamen Rider ZO.”

The letter:

Another piece directed by Osamu Dezaki and supervised by Akio Sugino has become a permanent edition (converted to LaserDisc)! (Hooray!) From the anime “Ashita no Joe” (1), the unique and beautiful way of life portrayed in anime is so intense that it has consistently given us dreams, hopes, despair, loneliness, friendship, love, perseverance, and revival! These works have even surpassed the original works in the emotional impact of their final episodes. I continue to be captivated by the atmosphere conveyed by these works. The reason I enjoy drawing the final episodes of my own works is entirely due to Director Dezaki’s influence! Currently, Osamu Tezuka and Ikki Kajiwara, the two individuals whom I revered as gods in the manga world, are no longer with us. Even now, these works, which possess added charm, continue to provide us (even those who have become professionals) with anticipation for the next episode, life lessons, and motivation for creating works. Seagulls, dance! Liquids, shine!! Wind, blow and then, “Why go to such lengths?” Charafo! Go as far as you can go! Mariko, somehow you’re really scary, Mariko.

Then the words scribbled next to the drawing of Mariko:

You are the protagonist of this work! I’m paying the most attention to you. You’re not alone! That’s right! Make me Mariko’s ‘older brother’… ‘older brother’…

Mariko is saying (OCR mangling here, sadly):

Thank you… I just feel… that’s special… Why not? If I had to say, maybe it’s a ‘woman’s world’…

(Clearly a reference to Rikiishi Toru of Dezaki’s earlier anime Ashita no Joe, who intensely speaks of a “man’s world”. He and Mariko love a good starvation diet!)

The little chibi version of Shimamoto(?) in the bottom left is saying:

But everyone, don’t easily become someone’s ‘older brother.’ It’ll be troublesome later!

GPT-4 noticed a cute reference it couldn’t include in its translation. Its note:

The text seems to be OCR scanned partially, and hence some meanings might be missing or distorted, such as “マンガ界のジョン・シルバーだ!!”, which appears to compare Dezaki and Sugino to a ‘John Silver’ of the manga world.

Volume Three

Volume Three Subheading

It’s not too late; our beautiful time can still be preserved, forever unspoiled, just like this white snow… A forbidden masterpiece of a cult anime born from satellite broadcasting! The fourth release on LD!

Volume Three Synopsis

Suddenly summoned to the sorority house, Nanako is pressured by Fukiko to end her relationship with Hemimi. Upon hearing this, Saint-Just confesses her complicated relationship with Fukiko. The shocking truth behind why “Miya-sama” wanted Nanako in the sorority unfolds, leaving her deeply shaken. Meanwhile, Saint-Just is tormented by the realization that the stronger her feelings for Fukiko, the more she ends up hurting her. The complex relationship between Saint-Just and Fukiko has a tragic past involving a near-suicidal event. On another front, Mariko causes an incident by attacking Misaki, motivated by slander about her parents’ divorce, which leads to a movement spearheaded by Kaoru to abolish the sorority. Amid the crumbling sorority, Fukiko remains composed. The fourth volume, “Chapter of Snow Dance,” captures her frightening yet noble confidence and deep sorrow. In the snow that never melts, remains the sad yet beautiful promise of Saint-Just.

Volume Three’s “From the staff to all the fans”

Bio:

Tomoko Konparu Born on March 13, 1956, in Nara Prefecture. Pisces. Blood type AB. A fan of both manga and anime, she became a screenplay writer and debuted during her university days with “Ikkyu-san.” Anime works include “Urusei Yatsura: Only You,” “Urusei Yatsura: Remember My Love,” “Touch 2: Farewell Gift,” “Phoenix,” “Cat’s Eye,” “Hime-chan’s Ribbon,” and more. Novel works include “Mystery at the Tower of London,” “Mystery at Nara’s Great Buddha” (published by Kobunsha Bunko), among others.

The letter:

When I heard that this work was going to be turned into an anime, I was shocked. I’d known about the series since its serialization, so my reaction was something like, “What!? Are they really going to do it!? And on NHK of all places!?” Expanding on the original work and filling in the parts that hadn’t been depicted was incredibly challenging, but also enjoyable. What surprised me was that, around the midpoint, the characters started to assert themselves, taking actions that were entirely different from what I had planned. The princess would say, “My pride isn’t so easily swayed,” San Just would insist, “I’m not going to commit suicide,” and even the older sisters of the sorority were like, “We can’t back down now.” Every time this happened, I had to rework the composition. This phenomenon of “characters moving on their own accord” was a first for me in an anime series, and it was an incredibly fresh and pleasant experience. That being said, it’s rare to be so emotionally invested in characters while working, to the point of even role-playing their lines. To be honest, this was a work that got my inner anime fan excited. Ah, I want to do work like this again!

Volume Three’s “Letter to Dear Brother”

Bio:

Keiko Fukuyama Born on September 7. From Tokyo. Currently, she is working as a manga artist, authoring works like “Ruru-chan of Star Island” and “The Tale of Appfelrant.” She also illustrates for children’s stories, including the “Mama Ghost Series.”

The letter:

It appears to be titled “To the Unforgettable Older Sister”. Much of it is too hard to OCR. It opens with this caption:

“To My Older Brother…” is so melancholic and sentimental that it instantly takes us back to our student days where we felt we were tossed around by fate for no fault of our own…

Here’s some of the text beside the character drawings:

Fukiko/Saint-Just: Reputed as the most beautiful sisters in school Mariko: The most popular Mariko-san who lured our tears. There’s a lot to think about! Tomoko: A straightforward, kind friend Nanako: So there I was, fully embracing my Nanako persona, reaping all the sorority perks you could imagine. (I mean, they even say they’ll hook me up with a dreamy guy!) 💧 And just when I’m soaking up that sorority vibe, guess who’s set to make a surprise appearance right after the teaser for the next issue!

Text coming out of the TV:

It was “Oniisama e”!!!! Poor Mariko-san, right~ Misaki-san also, there was no need to say that much, you know.

Volume Four

Volume Four Subheading

It’s not too late yet, our beautiful time can still last forever, unspoiled by anyone, just like this white snow… A forbidden cult anime masterpiece born from satellite broadcasting! The fourth installment on LD!

Volume Four Synopsis

Suddenly summoned to the sorority house, Nanako is pressured by Fukiko to end her relationship with Hemmi. Hearing this, Sanjust is compelled to confess his relationship with Fukiko. The shocking truth makes Nanako reel in disbelief. He deeply ponders that the stronger his feelings for Fukiko, the more he ends up hurting her. The unusual relationship between Sanjust and Fukiko reveals a tragic past of a failed double suicide. Meanwhile, in the school, an incident occurs where Mariko, slandered for her parents’ divorce, attacks Misaki, leading to an anti-sorority movement centered around Kaoru. Fukiko still acts nonchalantly in front of the crumbling sorority. The volume unfolds displaying Fukiko’s terrifying yet noble confidence and deep sorrow. A beautiful yet sad promise lingers in the snow that never melts.

Volume Four’s “From the staff to all the fans”

Bio:

Kenichiro Haneda Born on January 12, 1949. Graduated from Toho Gakuen College of Music in the Piano Department. An accomplished concert pianist, Kenichiro Haneda has a broad range of experience, including composing and performing music for movies and TV themes, as well as acting as a musical director for musicals and commercials. He has worked on numerous soundtracks such as NHK’s morning drama “Youth Family,” TBS’s “Women Work Hard” and “Life Is Full of Demons.” With his genre-defying approach to music and his bright, humorous personality, he is a sought-after multi-artist in various fields.

The letter:

I’ve worked quite a bit with Music Director Seiji Suzuki in the past. Suzuki gives me the music menu, and I’m the one who creates it. We’ve had some pretty detailed discussions about it. Of course, I’ve read the original work as well. When I read it at home, my daughter gives me a puzzled look, as if to say my interests have changed quite a bit (laughs). I think I wrote around 40 songs in total. The music is meant to have a Baroque sound while also feeling contemporary. The order was for something classical yet with a pop atmosphere. The image that immediately came to my mind was a rhythm section, with a harpsichord playing the melody. String instruments intricately marking the rhythm, much like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. And on top of that, a flugelhorn playing the melody… Regarding the scenes where the piano is played, I played all of it myself. I often compose and perform my own pieces. It’s less about talent and more like playing two roles; maybe I contribute quite a bit to cost-saving (laughs). In any case, this work has a unique atmosphere. If the music I created successfully captures that, then I must again express my gratitude to Suzuki for coordinating everything. October 28, 1993, aired on NHK

Volume Four’s “Letter to Dear Brother”

Bio:

Hideaki Anno Born on May 22, 1960. Originally from Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture. Height is 180 cm; weight is a secret. Debuted as an animator during his time at Osaka University of Arts, working on the TV version of “Macross.” Later worked on “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” the film version of “Macross,” “Royal Space Force,” and others, before directing “Gunbuster” and “Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.” Currently planning new projects.

The letter:

Way to go!! Oniisama e… Wow!! The long-awaited, tumultuous Volume 4!! This volume shows us the peak of the series, from Mariko-san’s stabbing incident to the dissolution of the sorority. Amazing, this is really amazing!! Yes. Especially the heartbreaking breakdown of Nobuo’s family, and the portrayal of the sorority’s downfall reminiscent of the French Revolution, are things that are indescribable with words. Yes. The highlights this time are– Brilliant! Highly sophisticated direction and high-quality animation in Episode 27! Tear-jerking! In Episode 28, Mr. Nobuo Hikawa’s soul-stirring outcry!! Upon hearing those lines, my tears really wouldn’t stop. Seriously. Amazing!! Oh, so moving! The heartfelt words of Miya-sama at the end of Episode 32. The sight of Miya-sama waiting alone in the Sorority House and those lines really hit me hard. Moreover, as always– Incredible!! The world that reminds me of ‘Aim for the Ace!’ and ‘The Rose of Versailles’!! Impressive!! The drama unfolds only in limited settings, like homes, trains, buses, crossings, schools, and other familiar places!! Very Sophisticated!! The direction, composed of stillness and motion, light and black, feels so mature. As expected, Dezaki-san! And, Powerful!! Nanako-san is turning into an adult right before our eyes. Moreover, the music is also great!! I wish the BGM CD would come out soon. The use of chimes and telephones remains clever as ever!! Ah, the only thing missing is a bit more on the background elements… by H. ANO ‘93 10/27

The tiger is saying “It’s awesome, isn’t it!”

Written above the drawings of Mariko and Saint-Just: “These two are definitely the ones. Yes.”

Volume Five

Volume Five Subheading

The summer full of light ends, the eventful summer ends… And then the cherry blossoms bloom again… Brother, I am now… A satellite broadcast-born forbidden cult anime masterpiece! The final chapter on LD!

Volume Five Synopsis

Finally, the petition to abolish the sorority has garnered signatures from over two-thirds of all students. As the campus is in a state of upheaval, Saint-Just is lost in thought alone. One day, he calls Nanako out and promises to take her to the beach where he used to go often with his mother when he was younger. However, on the promised day, Saint-Just never shows up. His sudden death plunges many people, including Nanako, into the depths of sorrow. Among them, Kaoru, who is battling cancer and fearful of its recurrence, takes the news of Saint-Just’s death most seriously. She finds comfort in the warmth of Takahiko Henmi, but continues to stubbornly refuse his love, thinking about his future. Love, friendship, bonds… The fifth volume, titled “Chapter of the Fireflies,” explores the dignity, beauty, and value of human life. Seasons turn, and the cherry blossoms bloom again, bringing back familiar scents to Nanako. All of this is accompanied by the most beautiful “love.”

Volume Five’s “From the staff to all the fans”

Bio:

Riyoko Ikeda Born December 18, Showa 22 (1947). Native of Osaka City. Blood type AB. Graduated from Tokyo Metropolitan Hakutsuru High School and went on to the Philosophy department at Tokyo University of Education (now Tsukuba University). Began drawing manga during her time in school and debuted with “The Girl in the Rose Mansion.” In 1972, she achieved great success with “The Rose of Versailles,” acquiring a broad fan base that transcended the realm of girls’ manga. Known for her keen historical perspective and deep insight into human nature. Active as a writer and essayist as well. Her hobbies include Nihon buyo (Japanese traditional dance), oil painting, movie appreciation, vocal music, piano, cooking, and knitting. Her work has been selected for the 76th Nika Exhibition. Major works: “The Rose of Versailles,” “Window of Orpheus,” “Empress Catherine,” “To My Brother,” “At the Ends of the Sky,” “The Blue Pomegranate,” “My Manga” Books: “If Only Life Could Be Lived Once,” “Women of the French Revolution,” “Women Who Wrote Masterpieces” Currently writing “Eroica” and “Prince Shotoku.”

The letter:

As one who has journeyed far from that radiant chapter called youth, a time that shone with an almost awkward brilliance, I find myself in a peculiar blend of bewilderment and nostalgia. Seeing my old ideas of high school life come to life as animation almost 20 years later is surreal, to say the least. Still, it’s exciting: hearing voices given to these characters, seeing them talk, laugh, and get angry. Watching them come alive is truly a thrilling and satisfying experience. Ah, adolescence — everyone’s inescapable stairway to adulthood. Some people take each step slowly and carefully, while others rush ahead, ending up out of breath or even lost. And then, there are those who may lose their direction, standing still, contemplating each step. Wrapped in the love of family, meeting various people, nurturing friendships, experiencing love, and going through the ups and downs of hurt and forgiveness — it would be wonderful to climb those steps in such a way.

Volume Five’s “Letter to Dear Brother”

Bio:

Rumiko Takahashi Born in Niigata Prefecture. Debuted in 1978 with “Katte na Yatsura,” submitted while still in college, in Shonen Sunday. Famous works include “Urusei Yatsura,” “Maison Ikkoku,” and others. Currently serializing “Ranma 1/2” in Shonen Sunday.

The letter:

A masterpiece infused with the creator’s soul. When I heard from the staff that “Oniisama e…” was getting the anime treatment on satellite TV, I was surprised. I’d delved into the original comic before and it’s quite an eccentric story. “How are they going to pull this off?” I thought. But learning that the script was in the capable hands of my acquaintance Tomoko Konparu, I was very excited. In fact, the anime that aired was genuinely captivating. The characters are so larger-than-life that they electrify the screen the moment they step into frame. It’s been a long time since an anime had that kind of presence. I believe the animation is done by the same people who worked on “Tomorrow’s Joe 2.” The scenes are so visceral that you can almost feel the punches land and see the fighters hit the mat. I kept asking myself, “Why isn”t a mouthpiece flying out?” (laughs) My favorite character in the work is Nobuo Mariko. The scenes where she bites her lip until it turns a flushed red, I find it really cute. But what blew me away was the show’s emotional intelligence. Just when the heroine seems on the brink of breaking, a lifeline is thrown her way. This nuanced touch prevents the darker, more harrowing elements from overwhelming the viewer. It’s as if you can feel the sincerity of the creator throughout the piece.

And that’s it. Again, check out the full scans on Archive.org, and remember to encourage all your friends to experience this beautiful anime!

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American Express charge cards aren’t as pretty as they used to be

I’ve long been fascinated by payment card designs. There’s a draft post I’ve had in mind for years about ones I love and hate. I may yet post it.

For now, I just want to express my regret and frustration with American Express’ treatment of what I think is the most visually appealing part of their brand.

The American Express Charge Card comes in many varieties worldwide, but the basics since the mid-80s are pretty well known: Green, Gold and Platinum.

American Express is proud of these cards, and rightfully so. Just look at the “Card Art” marketing push they did a while back, recall this Hercules joke, remember the dress, and note the prominence of these cards in any number of their famed television commercials. Seems like their marketing department is always fussing about them. I would too!

I have accumulated a number of charge cards issued in Australia and America, and I’m sad to report that they’ve gone off the rails a little in recent years. 

Here are a few of my Gold Cards:

Honestly, it’s the tipping that gets at me the most.

When you use an embossing machine to impress the numbers upon a PVC card, you generally want to “tip” them with a paint. Check your wallet — I would guess all of your payment cards will have some kind of tipping on the embossed numbers. The “default” is silver. The alternatives are, typically, black or gold.

Black and gold cost slightly more to produce. Especially black, which seems to be difficult to produce and source for some companies. I know this I’ve had to find alternative suppliers to get black tipping, and it has cost me extra!

I was disappointed but not surprised when the Australian gold card came with silver tipping — it’s lame, but maybe they just don’t press enough cards to deal with different tipping colours. But I think we can guess how American Express USA decided to cut some costs sometime between 2011 and 2015. And that blows!

The rest is just sloppiness. The drop shadow, why does it vary? It almost looks like they accidentally screened it multiple times on the bottom card in that image.

Finally, the “member since” number is a powerful piece of marketing that’s treated like an afterthought. You read FlyerTalk and see young people get hyped over member-since dates in the mid-70s all because their parent got them a supplemental card in their teenage years!

But what does my new card say? Since 2016? So much for my brand loyalty! I know I could call them and get it fixed, but why isn’t it there from the start? Maybe it costs too much to get the IT department to fix it. But how many annual fees are they missing out on?

Moving on, here are some Platinum Cards and a Green Card:

The same thing is happening! Gorgeous black tipping gave way to cheap silver sometime after 2012! I have no doubt that if I had an older Green Card, it’d be tipped in black, too. Like John Wayne’s.

These cards last had a significant design refresh around 2003, when they redesigned the centurion, replaced the background pattern and tightened up a lot of design elements in a pleasing way. It seems like this is the last time they really cared about the appearance of their charge cards. For a while they coasted on that work, but in recent years they’ve drifted. Errors and cost-cutting measures have chipped away at an near-ideal visual design. Nobody’s sweating the details.

It’s a real pity. Think of these complaints in the context of Disney World cast members dashing to pick up candy bar wrappers, or the perfect tilt of a MacBook in an Apple Store.

For American Express, the card is the brand and the marketing and the product all in one. It’s important to get it right. For a company with so much visual design work I admire, I’m sad to see it deteriorate.

Hopefully some hard-nosed perfectionist from their marketing department will soon notice the same problems I have, and the visual mistakes will be corrected. That, and the Plat’s 1x non-bonused earn rate.

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this is mine

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Where do Bittersweet Club International members live?

For the uninitiated: Bittersweet Club International is a program we run where we provide extra comics and little gifts to those willing to contribute $39 a year. The graphic above (click for a larger view) shows the geographic distribution of club members, and gives you an indication of where we get much of our financial support.

United States

A pretty unremarkable map, I think. It kinda looks like it just follows the population of the US, doesn’t it?

Europe

Much more interesting. Why so many Germans? What on earth is going on in Denmark over the rest of Scandinavia?

And where are all of our Asian friends? Gosh. You’d think they were too good for us baka gaijn.

Anyway. That’s it.

These maps show a subset of about half of all BCI members, so if you’re our lone Congolese reader (or whatever), don’t fret!

[su-itca-se]

Retina-Ready Webcomics

Remember the Retina display?

Apple, 2010:

The Retina display on iPhone 4 is the sharpest, most vibrant, highest-resolution phone screen ever, with four times the pixel count of previous iPhone models. In fact, the pixel density is so high that the human eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels. Which makes text amazingly crisp and images stunningly sharp.

It’s the new normal for smartphones and tablets. “Only iPhone has the Retina display”, Apple boast, but these days we must assume they are leaning on their strengths in colour accuracy, surface lamination techniques and wide viewing angles. The truth is, everyone makes Retina displays now, from Amazon to Samsung to BlackBerry. If you own a smartphone or tablet, chances are its display has a pixel density “so high that the human eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels”. Retina.

But there’s one exception. You’re probably looking at it right now. Even in 2013, your computer is almost certainly stuck in blocky non-Retina land. Apple wouldn’t gush about it. Even your cheap friend’s $179 Kindle Fire makes it look prehistoric.

But that’s all changing. Apple is making Retina personal computing happen while Google slavishly copy. (Just kidding, tacky Android friends.) Microsoft is kinda holding up the Retina train and won’t be ready until the next Windows, but we can be nearly certain that within a few years at least Macintosh users are going to be living in a fully Retina world.

No place to hide

The 90-130ppi desktop computing “standard” has been an invisible blessing for web designers since the web began. Make a graphic, 800px wide, good enough, pick the right compression, up it goes, done. People with ancient monitors see it big and scroll more, supernerds with 1080p ThinkPads push up their glasses and enjoy the extra space on their squinty spacious desktops. And all the people viewing on their Retina phones and tablets don’t care because everything on the web gets scaled down to fit on the small screens anyway. Sharp graphics for everyone.

But the party’s over. Just go to an Apple Store and look at their Retina MacBooks. (Or drag the loupe around on their website.) Look closely at those websites. All of a sudden we are facing a generation of computers that show all of the internet at a 200% zoom level just to fill those extra pixels, and our once-sharp photos, logos and graphic elements have turned into a terrible smudgy mess.

Yeah, and…?

It’s a new problem for everyone who publishes images online, and one that hits webcomics hard. We work in a visual medium consumed largely by technologically-savvy young people with great eyesight, and sooner or not they’re going to notice that your content looks distinctly old-fashioned compared to their 1080p YouTube videos, crisply-typeset weblogs and, well, their pixel-perfect back button.

You can ignore it. I suspect that the web will be uncomfortably smudgy and inconsistent for another decade. Expectations will remain low… for a little while. But if you’re the type to sweat the details, it’s not impossible to upgrade even the sprawling archive of a 7-year-old webcomic into something that looks great on these new ultra-sharp displays.

Because I did it! And I can show you how.

(If you have a lot of time. And care a lot about retina screens. OK, FORGET IT.)

Part One: Favicons

Let’s start with the easy stuff. We all use favicons, right?

I won’t walk you through all of that. I will mention that you SHOULD be using the true .ico format and not just lazily renaming a .png file to .ico. Many people do this, and it’s bad bad bad! Why? Well, despite being an anachronistic dinosaur, .ico allows you to make this:

Yes! That’s right. You can serve your NeXT, System 7 and Windows 3.1 customers with custom-tweaked low colour icons! And, um. Retina too. That’s the first one in the list. See how it’s double-sized?

This is possible in one file because .ico is a container of graphics, not a graphic itself. It can fit many different sizes and shapes of icon in its confines.

So while you could disregard what I’m saying and “go retina” by updating your “favicon.ico” PNG file to a 32 by 32 pixel size, the real way to get reinta-ready is to create a real .ico file with two sizes inside it. That way, retina browsers know to pick out the larger one, while non-retina browsers just take the same old 16 pixel one as always. Preferably, you’ll use the opportunity to pixel-fit your icon to each size.

There are various online services that can make .ico files for you. There’s a cheap Mac app called Icon Slate that does it too (as recommended by John Gruber, who has also explained how to use it for this exact purpose.) But my preference is Microangelo, a cheesy Windows app that lets you dig in and implement every different size of .ico.

It’s mostly self-explanatory. I recommend using the above size and colour combinations, just to be thorough. You might think it absurd to work on a 16-colour version of your icon to suit the zero people in the world browsing on a 16-colour display, but you’d be surprised when this stuff becomes relevant! Did you know some Android browsers use the black and white favicon? In 2013!

OK, done? Save and upload the .ico.

Tada! You are now making a great impression in the chrome of a retina browser. You’re already doing better than most of the websites on the internet, and all it took was one little file!

But there’s also the small matter of…

Your website

OK, OK. This part is a little more important than the favicon. But it’s also a completely different process.

There are two sets of graphics to update. The first set is the most fun to do. The second is a little painful, but I’ve figured out most of the hard technical stuff already, and I’ll tell you of the best methods I know.

Part Two: CSS

Hopefully we all know what CSS is about by now, and the general idea behind the separation of presentation from content. In a perfect world, your HTML is pure pure content and CSS is the interchangeable theme you apply to that content. Here.

Our first job is to “retinaise” these green bits. They’re the presentation, the design elements, all centrally located in the CSS. So it’s relatively easy to do this. We’ll leave the <img> (marked in orange) for later.

First of all, locate your CSS file (or files). Because I code my own sites from scratch, I know that everything is found in a single “global.css” file. Other people might have Wordpress or ComicCMS themes layered with a few different .css files for plugins and stuff. I dunno. Just find them.

Then search the .css file(s) for any line which includes this:

background-image: url(/directory/image.png);

or

background: […] url(/directory/image.png);

Those url() bits are image references. Icky icky old-fashioned non-retina-image references.

It’s those we’re gonna be changing.

OK. Got your CSS files ready? Know where all the background images lurk? Let’s begin!

The process

Open an empty text editor window. Now, read through your entire CSS file(s) and copy out EVERY DECLARATION BLOCK that includes a “background-image” or “background”. Paste them one by one into the text editor. Then, once you have your little “mess of declaration blocks with background image references in them”, strip them down to look like this:

See what I did there?

I chopped out everything unrelated to the line with the url() bit in it. Fonts, margins, whatever, I killed them all.

Then I changed anything that said “background:” to “background-image:”, and I made sure that anything about solid colours or repeating backgrounds or alignment or whatever was all stripped out, so all I was left with was the neat little “url(“image.png”)”. It’ll take a lot of text editing to compile this little chunk of CSS, but eventually you’ll get there.

And now we have a nice little list of the background-images your elements use. This is going to form the basis of an elegant little block of styles that you put at the end of your CSS to override the low-res versions for retina people.

But before we put it into the CSS and save it, we have a bit of work to do to this chunk of code. Let’s get to it:

Add a background-size value to each definition, and specify the width and height of your original, non-retina image size in pixels. (Yes, this means you have to check each and every goddamn image. It’s necessary so that retina browsers know the size of the original, non-retina image and can scale it accordingly. EXAMPLE: For h1, which has a background-image that is 630px wide and 278px high, it looks like this:

Put “@2x” in front of your images’ file extensions. So, navbar.png becomes [email protected], funnygraphic.jpg becomes [email protected]. These are references to the retina graphics you’re gonna make in a moment!

Wrap the whole set of declaration blocks in a big media query block. Media queries are a little hard to explain concisely, but you can simply think of this as the line that says “If you’re a retina browser, apply everything inside this block. If not, ignore me, move along.”

The media query line you see is this:

@media only screen and (min-device-width : 720px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2), only screen and (min-device-width : 720px) and (-o-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2/1), only screen and (min-device-width : 720px) and (min-resolution: 192dpi) {

Just remember to indent the enclosed styles (for readability!) and wrap your chunk ‘o styles at the end with a simple “}”.

For those who are wondering, this is a media query I tweaked myself after a bunch of testing. It captures every retina-capable browser, is future-proofed and won’t serve giant retina images to the mobile phones and tablets which don’t need them.

And with that.. we’re done writing CSS! You can jam your lovely new retina override code into the bottom of your CSS file. Or somewhere else. Just make sure that this section comes after you’ve already mentioned the existing images, because remember, we need them to come in and override the earlier definitions and never be overridden themselves.

Remember, if your site uses multiple CSS files that contain image references, you will have to redo this for every CSS file you have. Or you could do the right thing and consolidate them. Same goes for inline CSS if you’re unfortunate to have it. Fixing these issues is gonna be up to you and your level of expertise!

HOWEVER: when you’re done with your CSS hacking, don’t save the newly retina-ready CSS to the server just yet! The coding part is over, but all those references to files like “[email protected]” are going to result in “File Not Found” errors because the images don’t exist yet.

It’s time for you to make the graphics!

Making retina graphics

The best way to start on this is to gather every file the CSS refers to, put them all in a little folder on your desktop, and set up a batch process in a program like Fireworks or Photoshop that simply:

Scales the image to 200% of its original size

Compresses the file to the same format it was in (PNG, JPG, whatever)

Adds a “@2x” suffix to the filename

Puts it inside the directory on your desktop, alongside the original size.

I use Fireworks, myself. But nobody uses Fireworks. You should be able to figure this one out yourself, though. What you want is this:

At this point, you technically have retina-sized images that are ready to upload, but they’ve just been lazily upscaled. Despite how dumb this seems, it’s very useful to make your “dummy” image files before anything else because they can act as handy templates for you to reconstruct everything.

Of course, this is where you have to spend a whole heap of time working on your graphics again. There are no shortcuts here. It will help you a lot if the graphics on your site are easily reproduced or (even better) come from giant source images you drew ages ago and kept because you’re smart

Just open each image in your editor and replace their contents with higher-res versions, one by one.

I have a few notes on this process:

The “@2x” suffix is just Apple’s convention for double-size image filenames originally defined in iOS, and a lot of web developers use it too. If you dislike Apple enough to pick your own, go ahead, forge your own path — just remember that you need to change the “@2x”s in the CSS code too.

Don’t be afraid to compress your images a little harder than usual. Retina graphics bulk up your site a lot, but retina screens can mask image compression to compensate. Strike your own balance.

Sometimes you’ll remake images even better than the original. Don’t be afraid to scale your retina graphics down to 50% and save over the non-2x version so they match up! Just keep them sharp and good-looking. They may not be as cool as the retina ones, but for many more years they will be the only graphics seen by the majority of your audience.

Once you’re all done, upload your @2x files to sit alongside the old ones. Save your CSS to the server, and tada! Every CSS-styled part of your site will look super-sharp on retina screens.

This leaves only…

Part Three: Your <img> elements.

Not images, <img>s. Good old Web 1.0 image elements! If you’ve been a good little HTML author, you’ve ensured that all your <img> elements are CONTENT and never PRESENTATION. You’ve probably messed up a little, to be honest, but that’s OK.

This is gonna be more complex than the CSS part, and it’s harder to track down everything you need. You’ll need to do a survey of your site to figure out where <img> elements are used. Presumably, your comic pages are served as <img>s, but maybe you have emoticons in an image section, a header graphic..

A good way to test what’s what is to use special web developer extensions to temporarily disable your CSS. Or if you’re brave, blank your live CSS file for a moment, open up all the pages on your site and put the CSS back before anyone notices!! If you do this, you’ll quickly see your site “naked”, with all the <img>s revealed.

OK, so you’ve figured out what you need to change? A few scant header pics and oh ummm YOUR ENTIRE COMIC ARCHIVE? Well.

And now the real work begins

You should do the same thing you did when doubling your CSS images. Use automated tools to duplicate them, make them 200% size, add the @2x suffix. But unless your comic archive is extremely uniform (e.g. you simply take 600dpi print-quality PSDs which you resize for the web and that’s it) you will probably have to do a lot of specific work.

For me, Not Enough Rings was easy (it was a simple set of consistently-rendered scans that I just resize down for the web) but Bittersweet Candy Bowl was NUTS. In the Volume One chapters there were all sorts of fuzzy effects that masked the pencil shading and made it look nicer, which I elected not to include in the print version because I couldn’t figure out how to recreate them.

But GUESS WHAT? When you have to take those 600dpi edited scans and export 550 pages at twice the regular “web” size, you have to figure out all those effects again! And for Volume One I basically just gave up, because no matter what I did I couldn’t figure out how to fuzz up the pencil shading at the doubled resolution.

Not only that, I did all these tinting and halftone effects in Volume Two that I only rendered into web-resolution images back in the day. So I held back on attempting this retina upgrade until the publication of Volume 2 forced me to recreate those tints and halftone effects at a higher resolution.

Once I had the 600dpi images in hand, making retina-quality images was a cinch. But man, so much work went into getting those 600dpi images done! You can read Volume Two to see the amount of flourishes that had to be painstakingly imitated at a much higher resolution.

If you haven’t been disciplined enough to always work in high resolution, you will have to think about your comic archive very seriously. Some of you might not even have print-resolution scans of their older stuff!

For this article I will have to assume that you were forward-thinking enough to work at print resolutions, but if you were not: you will face the terrible choice of redrawing\reinking or recolouring your work. But this is the same choice you’ll consider when you go to print. Maybe it’s time to bite the bullet?

Putting your hard work to good use

So eventually you’ll end up with @2x versions of all your <img>-element images sitting alongside the old versions, dutifully waiting to be called upon. Site graphics (content I hope!) as well as your archive.

You can be missing a few, but hopefully you got most of them. With Not Enough Rings I got all of them. 8-)

Now, in an ideal world this would be the end of the article. But no, retina web browsers aren’t going to check if a @2x file exists if you don’t tell it where to find one.

Kinda dumb, right? But we work with what we have. We have to help the browser find the retina images.

Now, the problem. There’s just NO GOOD WAY TO DO THIS. There are many bad ways, and there are two slightly-icky ways (that I personally recommend.)

Let me walk through two terrible ways to do it, first.

Don’t do this!!

1. Forget the small images and just point everyone to the double-res stuff.

This… works. If all you did to create your non-@2x images was resize them down from @2x it might even feel logical! But, uh:

Sending oversized images to non-retina users is disrespectful of their time and resources

Your bandwidth use will immediately balloon, and your server will be working harder and longer for no good reason

Your images will look ugly on non-retina! (Browsers do smooth resizing of images these days, but a speed-optimised browser will never beat the quality-first algorithms that work inside an image editor.)

It’s just.. ugh. Do this if you care more about saving your time than doing anything correctly.

Although… if you’re not working to make the most beautiful and correct thing possible, why are you even bothering with this retina endeavour? Come on.

2. Serve the non-retina versions and include some javascript thing that tells retina browsers “Wait up! Replace them with the @2x ones!!”

This is what Apple does on their site, and fuck them! It’s kind of like doing the method above, but the other way around: it is a waste of time and resources for users with retina browsers. All of a sudden instead of a 200kb low-res image, I have to download a 200kb low-res image and THEN a 350kb hi-res image?

I guess it works. But gosh, it’s an ugly solution. (You get this weird “flash of non-retina image” effect while the page loads, too.)

The right way(s)

The right way to do it has “serve the right images to the right browser” as the core goal. That way nobody wastes any time or resources, everybody gets an image tailored to their screen and there’s no weirdness.

As far as I can tell, there are two things you can do. Both are a little ugly on the server side, but result in happy users.

Shaun Inman’s Automatic Conditional Retina Images

He wrote it up pretty well for a technical audience, so I won’t bother restating the details. But for the laypeople, let me break this method down:

First, you put a little snippet of Javascript code on every HTML page on your site. It’s short and sweet — all it does is set a cookie that says “I am a retina browser!” if it is run by a retina browser.

Then, to complete the process, you put a .htaccess file in the directory where your <img> element images live (or multiple directories.. e.g. /comics/, /theme/, whatever) that tells your web server to check for the “I am a retina browser!” cookie, and if it exists, serve the @2x version to the user.

And then you’re done. Non-retina browsers never get the cookie so they are sent the non-@2x file. And it will supply the non-retina graphics to retina browsers if it can’t see an @2x file uploaded beside it.

This is what I would like web browsers and servers to figure out on their own, really.

Some issues here

Inman notes that there are some situations where the browsers load images before the cookie is set, which really does happen a lot — the first page loaded by your retina user is often in low-res because the cookies weren’t set in time for the web server to see them.

I also noticed a few other things that felt yucky to me:

Using an nginx proxy to serve your static content? Guess what, this is Apache only! Time to make some exception rules…

CDNs won’t be able to run the .htaccess that checks on the cookie before serving files, so you gotta host your images locally again

Inman’s cookie doesn’t have a long expiry date attached, so that “first page load” experience happens more often than you’d expect.

I solved all of these problems, but it wasn’t pretty.

(Well, except for the cookie thing. Use this line instead of Inman’s. It sets the cookie for a longer time.)

<script type="text/javascript">if((window.devicePixelRatio===undefined?1:window.devicePixelRatio)>1)document.cookie='HTTP_IS_RETINA=1;expires=Wed, 1 Jan 2020 12:00:00 UTC;path=/';>/script>

An ugly improvement

I think you should write PHP that checks for the cookie and puts a @2x in the URL of every <img> on your page if the cookie is present.

Yep. PHP. Start your page with this:

And every single goddamn time you use an <img>, do this:

<img src="/img/introsamples/intro_sample1<?php print($retsuffix); ?>.png" width="950" height="696" alt="Augustus and Lucy chat about Daisy">

(I use PHP, but if you live in a nicer world than I then you can probably translate this code to your favoured language pretty easily.)

These PHP snippets are intended to do the front line work of sending those users who got the retina cookie (from Shaun Inman’s method) leaving the .htaccess as a weird little fallback for when you forget.

This is mainly useful for the purposes of ngnix proxies, CDNs and other “dumb” web servers that aren’t going to be able to do the .htaccess stuff for you. It also minimises behind-the-scenes Apache redirects which I find philosophically icky.

The worst form of retina <img> support, except for all the others.

Let’s not pretend this is a neat and tidy way to do things. The CSS and favicons were easy enough, but the state of the web right now is that serving <img>s in retina resolution is a difficult problem to crack.

Even with my multilayered solution, you are still going to have to deal with non-Javascript users never receiving your retina cookies and missing your retina images. You can’t fix the problem where the cookie gets set after the images start loading. And, worst of all, you’ll need to get PHP (or similar scripted languages) running on static pages where you might not want such stuff.

BUT! It works, well enough. Go look at the two sites I’ve been using as examples: Bittersweet Candy Bowl and Not Enough Rings. I think they work pretty well!

And look. If you’ve been good, you’ll find most of your pages only have one or two <img>s anyway. It’s not great, but it’s.. tolerable. (Tell me if you can figure out something better.)

So.

Favicons, CSS, <img>s. Are we done? Well, let’s not forget

External content

And this is where you give up.

Your users are going to upload non-retina images. Your social networks might provide you non-retina buttons. Your ad providers are going to serve non-retina ads. (Though, in a strange twist of fate, the Flash ads are going to have nicely upscaled text and vectors!)

And you have to live with it. You can’t control them. It’s a sad little thing to mar your beautiful webpage but I think in most cases it’s not gonna bother you too much. You can see above that a few of these external services are already on the retina train… it’ll just take time for everybody to catch up.

A few things I missed

There are certain issues I haven’t touched on here. Some have argued that it is effective to produce big but overcompressed images, others talk about SVG and web fonts. You can even just resort to CSS trickery and avoid image formats entirely.

But that’s not what I wanted to do. I had two webcomic sites already in existence with image-heavy designs and big archives. This was about the retina upgrade path, and I believe what I’ve laid out here is the best way for people who run existing webcomic sites to get up to speed.

In conclusion

I think all online comics will go retina. It’s just a matter of when.

I have hopped on a little early, mostly because of my personal interest in the technology. But if you make a website, you will be forced to join the party eventually!

And given that your archive is only going to grow with time and become harder to convert, it’s best you prepare for this high-resolution future ASAP. At the very least, ensure that your content is ready, and leave the rest to a site redesign.

Together we can all make the web a little sharper. I hope you are inspired by the idea that it’s possible to make a retina-ready webcomic website, even with the handicap of a huge comic archive and visually complicated site design.

Feels good man.

[su-itca-se]

Three-Quarter-Year In Review

I finished my degree last November. Then I got an email reminding me that I was 3 units short due to a planning mishap, so I finished my degree last December.

I’ve only worked at my casual job a few days this year. I have spent the rest of my time at home or in cafes, working on a to-do list for the BCB site. It has been a flexible list, held in various note-taking programs, with new lines added and subtracted all the time. If something came to my mind, I’d jot it down on the iPhone. If I sat down to plan something, it’d come out as a list of tasks within a larger project.

A lot of the things I accomplished are alarmingly trivial to the user experience, and I’ve felt throughout the process that there’s a real danger that I’m just chasing after an obsessive-compulsive desire to get this list down to zero.

Oh well. It’s October, now. And it’s basically done. So I wanted to review the list, to reflect, to recompose. Let’s go through some major features and sections in order. These notes won’t cover “neat things I’ve done to the BCB site and ‘business’” generally, only those I’ve implemented in this recent push.

Be warned, this post is over 10,000 words long and is likely the most uninteresting thing I’ll ever publish. But hey, that’s for you to decide.

A quick note

I spend a lot of time saying “I” did this or that in this post. In a lot of cases I called on the help of friends, asked people in IRC support channels, paid people I knew would do a good job or put up jobs on Freelancer.com to get the work done. As a control freak, I vetted and tweaked just about everything that was passed to me, but in many cases the substantial work — or the framework I built upon — was not my own.

So I give credit in advance to the following people: Popcorn, Sammybeany, Radial, Zoe, Segaholic, Tim, Graf and SpaceMouse. Without them, I’d be stuck puzzling things over a lot longer than I would have otherwise.

Page comments

The maintenance of our page comments has always been a huge drain on time and resources. More than ever, I respect the desire of some authors to leave comments off their sites. But since it seems very conventional for webcomics, and because I think it breeds loyalty among readers, we’ve built our system up and up.

Lockdown

A persistent problem with page comments is that the last 5 or so for every page were invariably off-topic “I can’t wait for the update!” exclamations, or, in the worst cases, “I’m staying up for the new page, anyone else?” conversations that lead to the comments section being used like an impromptu chatroom. And if the page update was in any way later than expected, it was flooded with comments where people would demand updates, other would get angry at the people demanding updates, and so on.

This all sucked. But there was an obvious solution.

I made the comments box for the most recent page go into “lockdown” an hour before the update was normally due, and I made it stay in lockdown if a page was ever later than that regular update time. It has worked perfectly.

Almost perfectly. One problem remains: “FIRST!” posts. I have not worked out an automated means of stopping lame, short comments that clutter up the first 10-20 slots on each page. I first came up with an unsatisfying solution:

Dumb comment warning

This just wasn’t the way to do it. (Perhaps I should have realised something when the Safari “Reader” button lit up.) After trying it for a while, I turned it off. It inconvenienced good posters, and the idiots just clicked through it.

For historical interest, the logic used to catch “possibly bad comments” was this:

$dumbthingstosay = array( # First "first", # Late naggers "you\'re late", "you’re late", "you’re late", "your late", "is late", "late page", "late update", # Censor complaints "block", "censor", "swear", "profan", "dumb comments", "filter", # Indications that someone is terrible "…", "...", "!!!", "???", "?!?", "!?!", "…", " im ", " thats ","grammer", "twokinds", "housepets", "epic", "ftw", "ban", " u ", "fursona", "lolz", "XD"

); if( # The post contained something dumb $dumbthingfound == "yes" # OR the post was in the first 20 minutes of the page being posted || $thedate < $twentyminsafterpagepubdate # OR the post was less than 12 words long || str_word_count($yourpost) < 12 ) { # Warn them. }

I do not recommend it.

Stars

The eventual solution I decided upon was a system where humans would sort the wheat from the chaff. Soon after a page update (and again, a few hours after that) comment janitors would select the top 3 comments. Those 3 top comments would be marked with a star and the site would be modified to only show those 3 on first load.

The philosophy behind this was that we’d be able to forget the “FIRST!” comments, that we could ignore the quality of the conversations going on and to basically let the commenting community develop at its own pace. It’d be a horrible mess of good and bad hidden behind a simple “show all” button. And since the main reason we care about moderating comments is so the majority of readers won’t be offended, having a “top 3” you can easily glance at seems like a great way to do things.

On the technical side, I was able to tie this into the new BCI authentication system (information forthcoming!) so that there was no easy way for anyone other than my chosen janitors to start marking comments. I encountered a few problems getting the system to work in our special mobile view. I also took the opportunity to figure out a new method of loading in the full set of comments only when the user clicked. (Essentially, using AJAXy Javascript stuff to pull in the comments on-demand instead of just hiding them with CSS.)

I’m not sure how to judge this system so far. I think it has worked adequately. I don’t regret the decision to nominate moderators instead of letting the community up and downvote comments, but I have been disheartened that the majority of the archive’s old comments need to be “starred”. And after supervising the moderation of the comic’s first 10 chapters, I’ve become increasingly empathetic with the janitors’ plight of selecting 3 good comments when there may not actually be 3 good comments.

Miscellaneous

It’s a little inelegant, but I was able to put together this little system where people who respond to other people get special green highlights. It has trouble when somebody writes “@Guy With Spaces In His Username”, because only @Guy is highlighted, but it does make it a little easier to track what’s going on.

I could have improved this by searching back through the comments for a page and trying to match full usernames, or better yet, linking back to their anchor on the page automatically, but I figured that’d be a big drain on the server and a lot of effort for something that will probably make mistakes anyway.

After encountering spacing problems in popular crappy browsers, I also abandoned my effort of doing cute censor bars with the unicode block character (blocks) and I reverted back to **. I did, however, adjust the line-height so the stars sit in the middle of the line.

(I wish we didn’t have to censor our comments.)

Archive reader

Now, this isn’t a specific page on the site, but the super important script that you view the archive with is the result of “viewer.php” — our “archive reader”. It’s the main driver of traffic on the site, giving us 60% of our pageviews.

I made a decent number of tweaks to it to improve the experience for new readers.

Navigation arrows

First, I replaced all the old page navigation stuff with those new, flat play\fast-forward\rewind arrows. This might be my old Operafaggery showing, but I think the metaphor still works. For a long time, we kept this little graphic Veronica did of the pets holding signs, but I don’t think either of us ever really loved it and it sure was showing its age.

I think the balance of the arrows is great, and there’s a kind of logical sense to the arrows below the comic being solely for chapter navigation. I’m also proud of my intelligent “chapter start” button, which switches to a “previous chapter” button only on the first page of a given chapter. (The idea being that if you’re stuck in the middle of a chapter, you’d be much more likely to want to start from the beginning of it than to jump way back to the first page of the previous chapter.)

I do regret the previous page arrow’s placement on the side of the comic. I think it’s unnatural for it to be there and I’ve noticed Veronica getting frustrated at its placement as she uses the site. However. I couldn’t work out a better spot for it, and it does work within that previously mentioned structure of “page navigation beside the page, chapter navigation beneath”.

I did implement this to counter some of the problems:

For new visitors, the first ten pages they view will have the next page arrow highlighted in red so they know where to go. (Red is now the unofficial “look here!” colour used on the BCB site.) Of course, the page graphic itself is always clickable to turn the page.

Yeah, I know, it’s a band-aid. But what would you do?

Bookmarks

No, not that kind of bookmark! The “We’ve kept your place” thing. Let me explain.

BCB is a long comic. It just flew past 1,000 pages. So I think it’s prudent to make the comic easy to catch up on. What I have tried to do here is build a feature that:

Figures out when you’re doing a big archive binge and keeps your place after you leave.

Presents a small, temporary nag link so you can easily return to where you left off.

It eliminates the “Hmm, I’ll go back and finish reading BCB.. how far through was I, again?” problem and hopefully endears readers to the comic.

It works with cookies in a complicated way that’s too mundane to explain here. It was also a pain to test. But here’s how it works for the user:

Read a few pages consecutively (about 10) and this appears:

Now the site remembers your place, and will continue as you keep reading. The bookmark will silently disappear if you read a few non-consecutive pages, but there’s a bit of tolerance inbuilt so that you won’t trash your bookmark simply because you wanted to jump back to page one of the chapter to remind yourself what X said to Y.

And so long as you have this bookmark, if you return to the site after a few hours but within 2 weeks, you’ll get Daisy greeting you on the homepage with this:

Or a similar reminder in the archive reader itself.

There is an additional reminder built in for people who are up to date on the comic, but don’t check the homepage for every update. So, for example, you read Monday’s page, but you forget about BCB for three weeks and return. It’ll know that the last page you viewed was 8 pages back, and will nag you to continue from there. Nice, right?

I’m a bit worried that the last reminder will be too aggressive and will annoy people who read on multiple platforms or computers. With four computing devices, I’m a good test case for that. We’ll see!

Overall I am quite satisfied with this feature. I hope people like it.

Cute sprite overlays on the archive viewer

This was another idea to make the archive binge experience more pleasant. We pop up cute little sprites when the reader meets certain requirements (they are reading a certain page, they have read X number of pages total, they have never posted a comment.)

Yes, I have just discovered cookies and want to do all I can with them. Tim made the sprites as part of a commission, and I decided on the old-school anti-aliased Chicago. Not as video gamey as I would like, but it’s actually really hard to find pixel fonts that aren’t only in multiples of 8pt.

Ads

I moved the leaderboard ad below the comic. This might actually increase its value to advertisers, but it also achieves the whole point of the alternate design I made for the comic viewer (something I planned from the start.) Absolutely minimal header, comic as high up on the page as possible, everything perfectly arranged for an archive binge with minimal fuss.

This page is actually a ridiculous mess as far as ads go: there are so many! But I feel like it’s remarkably balanced, now. Ads are a horrible pain to shoehorn into a design, but they don’t bug me in this design. I’m pretty pleased with it.

The ideas I threw out

I wrote this down in my todo but never acted on it: “Change site colours for moody chapters?” It seems like a nice idea, but it’s really hard to implement. There are a lot of graphics to change and I don’t know where I’d want to use it. I feel that I should pull this one out when the comic nears its end and we need to go all super dramatic.

I also had the thought that I should make Safari’s “Reader” functionality work with the site for iOS users. You could hit “Reader” and it’d load full-size pages with the auto-pagination functionality taking you further and further in the comic without having to actually load new pages. I did some Googling and gave up. It’s not very simple to work with Readability’s code, and I found few resources about coding graphic-based pages to work nicely in it.

For some reason at one point I had “Develop a new comic reader based around AJAX, which also keeps in mind the new curated comments and the new intro chapter\old archive division” on the list. I don’t really understand what I was going for. I think AJAX is an interesting thing to consider and when it comes to Vero’s next project I want the website to be far more inventive and involving and conducive to long-form storytelling, but at this stage I think the way it’s set up is mostly okay.

And so that does it for the archive reader. Now:

Bittersweet Club International

I decided to revamp the whole program. For the unfamiliar, BCI is a paid membership program for readers of the comic. You pay $39 a year for a few site features (a little emblem next to your name, access to a bunch of exclusive comics), three deliveries of small gifts (charms, lapel pins, etc) and that’s mostly it.

Taking stuff away and putting stuff in

We initially promised sneak peeks at the comic, but unfortunately BCB has never had a consistently big buffer and so this became a huge pain to maintain. This benefit was phased out.

We also promised free shipping for store orders at the time of a gift delivery, but this was a nightmare to organise and not a single person asked for it. This was also phased out.

The one thing that was “phased in”, sort of unwillingly, was the expectation that Veronica would put out special “BCI comics”. I was very resistant to this idea, insisting that it made BCI a much bigger burden on her than it was supposed to be—that BCI should really only have scraps that we don’t want to put out publicly for whatever reason. But Veronica’s low self-esteem and member misconception (“When’s the next BCI comic coming out?”) has resulted in her creating all these side stories for the BCI members to read. I’m not totally sure if it’s worth it, but she recently cranked out two of these comics in two days, and so I’ve adopted the concept that this is one of the main benefits of membership into the marketing.

These changes were announced in an email newsletter and in a redesign of the BCI subscription page. There wasn’t really any reaction to it.

The login system

This function is so boring and technical, but it had to be done. It was actually one of the first things I wanted to change with BCI.

Because I was going for a serious, financial institution aesthetic, BCI members were originally issued randomly generated PINs with their welcome letters. The old way people posted with their username was by typing something like “Fred!1325”. Their username, a ! and their PIN. But there were problems with this. People always forgot their PINs, and the PINs were publicised in the auto-remembering name box, and it was just weird and insecure and a hack on top of the comments system. So I decided to figure out how to do proper encrypted passwords with hashes and salts and all this horrible stuff that took about a month of boring coding to implement and test.

The effective difference can be seen in the new Sign In link, pictured here:

Where once you typed ! and your PIN, now you have to sign in and it changes to this:

A hardcoded username and a log out link. Just like a real website!

The other nice thing about Sign In is that it reminds everybody that BCI exists. I made sure to add a new blurb to the BCI Sign In page that explains how to get a BCI account.

I regret that this system only lets you log in on one browser at any given time. It sucks for the mobile BCI users, but I don’t see an easy way to resolve it and it’s kind of a low priority.

Expiry problems

When I first coded up the system to create and manage BCI members, I left in fields for expiry date but never actually coded in an expiry mechanism. While I let the lapsed monthly users go for a very long time, the anniversary of the program forced me to implement a few checks.

This all took months longer than I’d have liked, but BCI now locks you out of the Members section and stops marking your name in gold on the site if your membership expires.

I had to manually go through the monthly members and cull the ones who stopped paying. I had plans for an automatic script that would interface with PayPal to do this work automatically, but I think the way forward now is to stop selling monthly memberships (they’re a pain!) and just expire everyone manually every few months. Eventually we might have so few monthly members I could just ask them to all transition to the annual program. We’ll see.

Another awful problem was the forum account — I used to manually set every member as part of the “BCI” user group, which meant that expired members would retain their status long after the other BCI facilities knew enough to lock them out. Now I have a script that runs on the first of the month that locks out those that have expired. As a bonus, I was able to nearly-completely automate the BCI promotion feature for forum accounts in the member centre! It’ll save me hundreds of tedious setup tasks.

Expiry opportunities

I put together a naggy email that goes out to all annual subscribers two weeks before their membership expires, encouraging them to renew. It’s a cron job that runs once a month and hopefully it’ll generate a few dollars at some point.

Abandoned plans for a free membership

My todo list at various points had these ideas noted down in it:

Have some globally visible line at the top or something that says “logged in: gold \ normal account”

Maybe create a basic membership to protect your name and view some introductory incentive comic.

Create a basic membership to protect name, view comic (prereq. will be letting us email you). Line at the top or something that says Logged in as a Gold member, here’s the new content as of a few days ago, grey out stuff they can’t access? Maybe a good way to drive BCI memberships?

I don’t mind this idea, but right now the system is much more conventional. No free memberships, but samplers of the private comics on the store.

I should probably come up with more ways to advertise BCI around the site, even if it’s not through an omnipresent bar at the top of the screen. I put a little note in our Graveyard section, for instance. Not sure of tasteful ways to do more.

Forum

Ha. The forum. I still have a lot listed for this one:

But I did get a few things done. The issue with the forum is that it’s used by a small segment of the readership and that it’s already pretty good. Most of these todos are feature tweaks that fight the software itself, and might not bother people as much as they bother me.

Here’s what I did get sorted:

The Javascript thing that resizes oversized images was improved to run before the pages finish loading. It improves the experience of reading a page with a lot of images in it a whole lot!

The mobile version, which runs on a custom template I had to pay for (the inbuilt one is super Javascripty awful shit that feels like it’s someone’s first attempt to make a webpage for the iPhone) was hacked further into looking nice. There’s now a heading, I fixed the New Posts button to look consistent and pretty, and I did some work to the navigation bar to stay in keeping with the rest of the site.

.. and that’s about it!

The forum issues are really something I need to hand off to somebody else on Freelancer.com or something. I don’t have the time or inclination to work on it when I have other things to worry about, but it surely matters to the forum’s heaviest users. I dunno. If it was just a matter of money, I’d consider asking for a donation pool, but it really is more to do with me setting aside time to orchestrate a change.

Candybooru

Candybooru is based on Shimmie. I didn’t design it from the ground up, and so it suffers from the same problems as the forum. I heap patches onto it until it looks nice, but I can’t vouch for the underlying code it’s generating.

But! Candybooru gets more traffic than the forum, and I think it’s more fun for casual users to browse. And I’ve always been able to message Shish (its author) on IRC and get useful answers. So I’ve tried to hammer down every last change I’ve wanted to make.

Excellent images

Remember how we needed these for our wonderful global footer’s thumbnail bar? The excellent tag needed to be populated, first, so I got a few people to trawl Candybooru and pick out favourites. Once that was done, I made it so that only admins could add or remove excellent tags (not a native Shimmie function!)

Finally, I added some visual elements:

Plus a little “Top Picks” button that allows you to view only the excellent images:

This doesn’t really solve the problem of crappy art flooding the front page and making Candybooru look bad, but it does provide a redeeming link to the sceptical. (I think about this stuff, you know! I’m constantly second guessing how people will react to BCB just by clicking around the website.)

Artist comments

For a long time we’ve been marking admin comments in green, but it was suggested to me that another great feature would be to highlight the artist comment in some way or another. So I was able to take the code that parses the tag list for whoever has _(Artist) appended to their name and use it to set a special CSS class for every “author comment”:

As you can see, it overrides the admin colour. I hope this is useful to people.

Small things

I did a LOT of boring things that aren’t worth talking about in detail.

“_(Artist)” automatically gets capitalised, so no more work correcting ugly tags.

I spent a lot of time making sure the search input box was properly placed in dozens of browsers.

I added a next image thumbnail. Kind of silly, but it works, right?

I enabled the tag history plugin to protect against vandalism. It seems to work well enough, but other admins like Radial do most of this policework, it seems.

I added a “forgot your password?” function because so many people did exactly that.

I disabled anonymous comments to avoid spam. And I added a cute “No comments” image because it looked so bare when the post comment box was missing and nobody made comments.

I added the emoticon popup from the page comments.

I added special admin-only functions: “Replace Image” and “Resize Image”. These are tremendously useful, because so often people upload something that needs to be cropped or resized down. I originally thought of implementing some Javascript graphics editor, but it was too much work. I can just edit images locally and use “Replace Image” if someone uploads something that needs levels tweaking or cropping or whatever.

I tweaked the auto-resize Javascript to work more effectively than the one that comes with Shimmie. It properly handles resized windows, toggling in strange use cases and doesn’t jump around as it loads.

I asked Shish for some help fixing some leftover PDO bugs that caused fatal errors when doing stuff like adding new aliases. (Our copy of Shimmie is a non-release version from the tail end of the MySQL -> PDO transition, and a lot of database-modifying code fails to make use of the newer stuff.)

I disabled an annoying feature that logs you out if you use multiple IPs.

These things, and I went through the old archive imported from the original fanart gallery and made sure it was all tagged properly.

A lot of work. Ugh. But Candybooru is pretty great now!

The rainbow

Now some designy stuff. For a long time we had this:

And I was upset by it. It was so simple and wonky and clearly handmade by somebody who didn’t really know how to use the pen tool in Fireworks.

And it didn’t even match up to the concept from the first mockup of the 2009 BCB “relaunch” design:

There were supposed to be little particles of candy. A candy rainbow. Like an ad for Skittles, but more pastel. You know?

I knew that I didn’t have the skill to make this kind of graphic, so I looked for people with Photoshop experience. And I didn’t find all that much success doing so.

First, I tried a thread in the Something Awful forums. They’re always doing Photoshoppy logos for small companies, so I thought why not offer $50? Nobody replied. So then I tried Freelancer.com, and I got a zillion enquiries all from absolutely terrible candidates who basically all just wanted to just do a Web 2.0 reflection on a stock photo and call it a day.

Finally, I tried deviantART, where I found a girl who specialised in cutesy artwork. I paid her to work on a bunch of different designs but never really understood what I wanted and didn’t have much web design sense. (She kept doing insane things with the links and logo and header size and so on.) And then I found out she didn’t even make it in a vector format, she was shaping the rainbow by smudging it in Photoshop.

So in the end, all I got from her work was inspiration for the colours—a nice soft gradient look. But I had to make the rainbow myself.

I think it came out pretty nicely!

I had to learn how to use meshes in Illustrator. I was able to change the font to Freight Sans Pro, the “official” BCB web font. And I totally abandoned the candy idea.

But it looks alright to me. Compared to the old one, it’s lightyears ahead. One of those things you don’t realise is so much better until you actually compare the two.

Characters section

It’s not quite as visually exciting, but I did update the ageing characters section.

Veronica painted four portraits for the Kickstarter project (another massive design and copywriting and video-editing endeavour I haven’t really mentioned!) so I had to make room for them. I figured I could also change up the secondary characters to use newer, watercolour paintings.

It was very difficult, seeing as there have only been two proper chapters in that style, but I was able to extract a lot of faces out of Ask Roseville High answers with the help of content-aware fill and artful cropping. There are a decent amount of images that still look pretty bad, though (Blur! Tess!), and so next time Veronica does a batch of new answers she’s going to carefully pick questions that will allow for paintings that will do double-duty in this section.

Store

Another big one.

The BCB Store has been redesigned at least three different times in two years. It has been my first experience making a web store, and somewhere I’ve been able to try out all sorts of ideas about how I think a web store should work.

I first drafted up the design while on jury duty. (Awful, right? It was a sexual assault trial, too.) It remains somewhat similar today, following a simple design where every item is on one big page. No categories, no jumble of “item pages” auto-generated by some clunky ecommerce script, nothing like that.

This simple, graspable “here it is, just scroll down and that’s all of it” design appeals to me, but now I keep wondering if it’s alienating to potential customers who are used to more complicated store systems. I took solace in the fact XKCD does the same thing, but I dunno. If I could go back in time, I’d just use Shopify.

But hey. Like a lot of things on the BCB site, I get so close to my ideal that I just keep hammering on things until they’re perfect. No point in resigning to someone else’s script now!

So we started with a store design that just used the basic PayPal buttons for “add to cart”, where adding an item would be this clunky back-and-forth affair where you had to keep viewing a PayPal checkout page and clicking “keep shopping” to add your next thing. Around October last year I was able to migrate to a more fluid experience using Jcart, a floating, dynamically-updating table-based system which I ambitiously styled after Daisy holding a stack of boxes. It worked! And I was mostly okay with it, except for a ballooning number of unfinished pieces I tackled this year:

Text and cleanup

The old store had no real intro text and no FAQ. But I found (through survey responses) that a lot of people had terrible misconceptions! Some people thought shipping would be expensive out of Australia, some thought that we only accepted PayPal, some thought that we only took credit cards, all sorts of stuff. So I tried to make it super clear with three points:

And we follow up in a new bottom-of-the-page FAQ to drive the point home.

I can’t easily tell if this has cleared things up for people, but I sure hope it does!

I also ditched a few things from before. No more shipping estimates on the main page, no more shirts (they were more visual clutter than serious source of revenue!)

Daisy cart

I fixed up the “Daisy cart” in a few neat ways. First of all, I implemented an animation where adding an item to cart would trigger an item box to appear to arc up and land onto the stack, a cute little effect that hopefully draws attention to the right part of the page. (Yeah, look! I’m just like OS X 12 years ago!) This required me to figure out how to use jquery and jquery’s animation features, especially in getting the little things right—timing, an apparent “gravity” to the box, etc.

After that, I added a box which previewed your shipping and subtotal, which I figured would be a useful thing to show people just how little adding more items would be in terms of extra shipping cost. I also modified Daisy to show sweatdrops when carrying more than two items, basically just for the hell of it.

Item updates

I took new photos. For pretty much everything. I took a photo of the poster to replace the cold-looking digital version that preceded it. I took photos of new items.

I also added a bunch of new items which required redesigns and tweaks: BCI, the Lucy figurine, the Sue necklace, the new charms. These are mostly unremarkable things that just took up time, but you can see the most interesting thing I did in the Lucy figurine:

I highlighted some of the videos I took for her special item page and put them in animated GIFs. I first tried borrowing the code from the figurine mini-site for Projekktor (a fancy thing that allows you to use proper HTML5 video while also serving Flash to old browsers), but found it impossible to get it working right. I settled on this remarkable little Mac App Store app called GifBrewery, and it did a nice job converting the movies I wanted.

Oh! And I made all sorts of sample comics and interesting things to add excitement to the BCI item box. So far, it seems to be encouraging more signups than the old, bland one.

Figurine mini-site

Oh, I mentioned the figurine mini-site, right? I remade it.

I think it’s pretty, don’t you? It’s more or less like the old one but more visual (so as to show off the packaging I worked so hard on!) and with functional purchase buttons at the bottom of the page.

I also spent half a day making a special easter egg you get if you refresh it a lot. CREEPY!

Checkout page

This was the most unfinished thing about the store when I updated it. I didn’t end up changing too much, but I think I got the wording right. I also implemented something I’ve always wanted to do:

A brillant application of print CSS, right? You get to click “print order form” or “checkout with PayPal”, and if you do the former you get this reformatted version of the cart already on your screen, with item names, quantities and prices all ready to go. I was pretty proud of this one, and it was easy to implement!

I also came up with the idea of a tipping feature, after having seen (and used!) one on Angela Melick’s shop. It has only just gone into effect, so I don’t know if it’ll generate anything meaningful for us. But it has, effectively, replaced donations:

IPN

Oh god. This has been a long time coming.

I bought a label printer:

And then I paid a guy $300 to work on this IPN (Instant Payment Notification) system that would automate the store.

In March.

8 months later and we’re in the final bugtesting phase. AUTOMATING THE STORE IS A BIG DEAL.

What am I talking about, you might ask? Well, let me quote from the Freelancer job I put up:

We have a store at http://www.bittersweetcandybowl.com/store/ using the software “jcart”. Essentially it allows a user to create a PayPal shopping cart and pay for their items. Right now, I just receive “payment received” emails of these orders and deal with them manually.

This IPN script is supposed to automate an increasingly complex task — processing the orders we receive in our web store. I want the script to create new rows in a table for each new paid membership, I want the script to generate labels for merchandise orders, I want the script to email digital items like ebooks. In other words, this script would have to, upon being notified of an new purchase, figure out which item types have just been bought, and deal with them all in the prescribed ways.

“Increasingly complex task” was a euphemistic phrase for 4-8 hour sessions of editing databases, sending out emails and amateurishly writing labels by hand. And since this is my domain (Veronica has never done orders) I was very interested in making it a more efficient process.

I was lucky to find a guy that was extremely helpful and patient as we tested and tested this thing. Here are some of the services it (“The IPN Script”) offers:

Emails users “thanks for your order!” with a customised set of messages depending on whether their item is shipping within Australia, includes an Amazon-supplied item or is a mixed order

Prints labels on the label printer with icons to represent what was ordered

Generates tab-separated data files for submission to Amazon’s Seller Central portal (for order fulfilment)

Matches existing BCI members to the database for renewals

Creates new members in that database and emails login details (including a randomly generated password) while printing a welcome letter with address label

Delivers eBooks via email (where necessary)

There are dozens of test cases and so many things that went wrong. Think: dealing with linebreaks in delivery addresses when forming the tab-separated Amazon file, writing server-generated PostScript which can be converted to PDF, merged with a membership letter and automatically printed in duplex mode with CUPS, implementing plaintext alternatives with correct MIME types so auto-generated messages aren’t filtered out as spam, dealing with eCheque payments and temporary holds placed by PayPal, compiling libps for Solaris…

LOADS OF BORING STUFF.

It’s weird how I don’t really want to go into it beyond spitting out a few issues at you, but just imagine this long process of testing, breaking, reporting, waiting, implementing fixes etc going on for 8 months and then you have an idea of the work that went into the IPN script. And I didn’t even really do the “work” work! (Well. I did some of it — the printing stuff is mostly OS X Automator and shell scripting.)

But don’t worry. I have pretty pictures to show you.

First, consider the amount of icons that have to go onto our labels! They have to be monochrome, memorable (for me), inscrutable (to the customer) but also interesting and pretty enough to go with our custom packaging.

Once again I asked Tim to make them up for me and he did a terrific job:

Which is which? An exercise for the bored.

The labels come out like this.

I made one just for you! Just to be clear, this is what happens when you order two buttons and a Sue necklace from our store:

Once checked out of PayPal, you get a thank you email with a shipping estimate.

The script generates a 90x29mm PDF with the address and item icons on it.

This PDF is transferred to my home computer over to a folder which triggers an Automator workflow that passes it to the label printer.

The printer prints it.

When I’m ready, I pick up the pool of labels, some pre-stamped padded mailers and I fill them with whatever is shown on the labels.

Then I dump them in a mailbox.

Tada! Nice system, right? And now, before sealing each one up, I throw in one of these:

It’s a real letterpress thing, made in America!

But that’s not even the biggest time-saver. It’s the BCI stuff. Member signups used to be a nightmarish mess of manually searching to see if they had an account already, typing up SQL commands and faking “random” passwords, manually curating 5 stacked “Your member details” emails, doing a mail merge on a temporary spreadsheet and all this crap. Now I get this wonderful welcome letter already printed out for me, and all I have to do is glue the right card to it, seal it up with a Jasmine keychain charm and put a stamp on it.

Phew.

Our amazing new global footer

For a long time, I wrestled with information like Twitter links, ads pointing people to the IRC channel and other stuff that seemed important but was impossible to place properly on the site. Should it just be on the homepage? Should I jam it next to a news post? What if people start recognising such a sidebar as “that noisy thing they have to scroll past to get to the comments”?

I must have tried 3 different ways of doing this. It started out with three character pictures beneath the page navigation linking to Veronica’s deviantART page, the mobile site and the RSS feeds. Of course, back in those days, deviantART was the main source of links to the site! I don’t have the next few iterations, but I can assure you they were only ever “okay”. Nothing was beautiful or looked right.

But one day I was looking at a blog, and I remembered that in like 2006 or something it was a web design trend to put a big mass of information at the bottom of the page. Was it the Wordpress theme “Hemingway” that kicked it off? Who knows.

It became the big project for March.

But I struggled. I tried idea after idea and it all felt so cramped.

Planning

I started to figure out what I needed. Twitter accounts, right? Tumblr accounts too. Convention notifications! A link to Not Enough Rings. RSS links! (Two of them.) Privacy policy! Author credits and email links. Copyright. Formspring? Store ads. A link to the forum? Popular forum topics. Links back to interesting pages in the archive. The IRC!

That’s a lot. I was kind of overwhelmed. I did have one idea, though. There would be a main area with persistent information—the critical author details, Twitter links, copyright—but the “hopefully you’ll read this” stuff could be folded into a little thumbnail bar. You know, like Cracked! Or Scribol! And… the one I once made fun of The Oatmeal for. :(

But it was an effective idea. I’d put together little 120×120 images and pair them with short text that would catch a reader’s eye after they scrolled to the bottom of a page. I could build a giant database of crap and just pull a few random results for thumbs.

But I still needed to design it. I came up with a number of mockups. This initial mess, followed by a vertical design until I finally got to something workable.

And this is how it looks in real code:

It took a lot to get to that point. Like with the rainbow,I decided to see if anyone in SA-Mart had the kind of information design skills to manage something as complicated as this. I got a few awful mockups and one reasonable one (that was pretty close to what I was already doing) and I ended up shelling out $50 for basically nothing. I had to figure out how to implement the new Twitter follow buttons (easy) and a means of pooling together all the information for the thumbs (not easy).

The thumbnails

Here’s some of the work that thumbnail bar required:

Figuring out a list of special links to store items and stuff that should be included in the jumble

A nightly Tumblr-scraping script that checks for new posts with the Tumblr API as well as the images associated with each post

Surprisingly dramatic revision of the Not Enough Rings code to support pulling random published comics from the archive

Several modifications to Shimmie (the script underlying Candybooru) that allow admins to set “excellent” tags (we only want to show wonderful art, after all!)

Relatively sophisticated thumbnail generation code which tries to crop out the top of Ask Roseville High answers (the questions)

Hours of work writing click-friendly headlines (i.e. “Watch where you’re going!” instead of “Not Enough Rings Zone 1 Act 3”)

Hours of work checking all the machine-generated thumbs and improving the bad ones

It was immense! I got a lot of help, though, and commissioned Tim to do a lot of the creative writing stuff. He’s great with silly taglines.

Otherwise it was just methodical, working to get each category of information operational before moving onto the next.

And then it was done

There were a few other things I had to change to support it. I’d long wanted a better privacy policy page, and now it looks reasonably presentable. I also had to figure out a new way to present the news on the front page. I eventually came up with the mathematically-proportioned boxes you see here:

Which is sort of okay. I don’t think I was that satisfied with it and it might change, but for now it stays. (The main issue was the ad, for what it’s worth. For a largely symmetrical page, it’s fucking hard to shoehorn in a lopsided ad.)

The footer itself remains pretty good! I have received some compliments, which is nice. I haven’t tracked how well the thumbnail works to keep people on the site, but I’ve heard some good anecdotal feedback. In terms of the design… well, it looks balanced, right? I was always a bit bothered by the fact the middle column is huge and empty (even when there’re a few entries in it!) but it does give the necessary white space to offset the clutter on either side and above. While it’s semantically weird, RSS in the footer is a web standard and looks pretty enough.

The main oversight I think I made relates to the placement of the thumbnail bar. Most sites like Cracked put it right under the main page content, yet mine’s all at the bottom of the page. In the end, I don’t think the links in my thumbnail bar are relevant enough to put under a comic, especially as they compete with Veronica’s page comments.

WHATEVER! It’s much nicer than it was, and I can certainly tweak it as time goes on. But I regard this as a pretty big success.

Writing help

I leaned on my friend Popcorn to read through and revise just about every bit of text on the site. The combination of his suggestions and my pre-emptive fear of his reaction to my work has lead to some dramatically shorter, simpler and more readable text all over the site. (The strength of his BCB work was, in fact, the primary reason he got a job offer from a prestigious software firm. I think it worked out wonderfully for everyone involved.)

A few things we ditched:

Intro paragraphs explaining the purpose of each page

The old “essay” Veronica wrote about BCB’s history

Overlong, over-descriptive meta descriptions (so now we look pretty on Google!)

The redundant “story summary” that dated from when the About page was named Story & Characters

And all sorts of blurbs and blocks of text were reduced to their essential components. Great!

While we got all the important bits done, he got busy in the end and so I’ve been working with Segaholic to finish the job. It is nearly as good as done.

Website bugs

Oh god. These are boring. I’ll just list them (out of order) to show you the kind of stuff I resolved:

Strange font size differences across browsers

PHP recording notices in logs, filling them up quick

CSS bugs in Android, Android Chrome, Windows Phone 7, webOS

Broken links (I ran a spider on the site and read my logs to find these and I think I nailed them all)

Typekit-inspired slow loading in Firefox, sometimes

Various bad IE7 CSS bugs

Speech bubble tail on “Post A Comment!” was terribly positioned in certain cases

Even pages showing up in the mobile viewer by mistake for mobile users who opted out of the mobile view

Ugly whitespace on the side of certain pages because of one of our headings having a weird size

/lol.html/ and /lol/ load a pages where they shouldn’t

This isn’t everything, believe me. But these are just a few miscellaneous bugs I retrieved from my old todos. I deal with these almost every day as I stumbled onto new things.

Backend server stuff

The code underlying the BCB site is held together with glue and sticky tape. I’m a really bad coder and have terrible habits and I’ve kind of resigned myself to the idea that the BCB site will forever reflect my inability. I think I’m quite good at markup and have strong opinions about CSS, but when it comes to the PHP and MySQL groundwork that generates my lovely HTML, I’m a complete amateur.

But I was able to do a few things to improve the experience on the site. Some hacky, some not. A few highlights:

I installed Crashplan on the server, which automatically backs up every file to the “cloud”. (This has saved my ass a few times as I’m now able to pull historical versions of files from the backup, as well as basic “undelete” stuff.)

I set up daily MySQL database backups.

I installed nginx and set it up to serve most of our static files. (This is a fast little HTTP server that basically intercepts every user request to big slow Apache. If the file the user wants is in /img/, nginx hands it off super quick. If not, it passes the request to Apache, which does the complicated work.)

I fixed a zillion problems that cropped up because of nginx (IP address pass through, Apache performance settings, UGH WHATEVER INCREDIBLY BORING STUFF)

I revised the log rotation and deletion policies (The disk used to fill up with these!)

Chapter autoupdate (we already had an automatic facility for updating the comic three times a week, but if it was rolling over to a new chapter it used to be manual. NO LONGER.)

A special mention for a special bug

The one thing that deserves special mention here is the horrible segfault bug that was NEVER RESOLVED.

I don’t have all the details here, except to say that Apache used to occasionally stutter and die, logging something about a “segfault” over and over again with every request until you manually restarted it. This lead to some really stupid downtime, especially when it happened right after I fell asleep for 8 hours (this happened quite a few times.)

I asked our host about it and did some Googling and it turned out to be some kind of Apache bug on Solaris. I tried to learn how to use Sun’s Dtrace (a kernel debugger thing that later made it into OS X!) to figure out what was breaking and why, and I tried to time it to see how long we went between failures, but honestly it was anything from 2 minutes to 7 days and it just became too much.

I developed a shitty interim solution, which was to code this crappy shell script that checks if the log has “segfault” in its last few lines. If it does, it restarts Apache, and if it doesn’t, it just moves on. I set this up to run every 5 minutes and it kept the server going for a long time.

Our host said that it was a problem that was fixed with the newer version of their software, and that I’d have to migrate to a new VPS to get the benefit of that. I put this off for months, as I had final exams going on, but eventually I set aside the two or three days required to move all the crap across to the new server.

And then the problem came back! And then I put my script back into action. And.. that’s the current state of affairs.

Hardly a satisfying story, just a jumble of annoying boring nerd crap. But that’s what this bug has been. Stupid and pointless and seemingly unavoidable. I think I’ll leave the hacky little reboot script running forevermore.

New reader

This was a project where an existing feature was completely remade. For a long time we had this, a kind of dopey little intro page that was first drafted up on paper by Veronica.

The copy was always kind of nerdy and unappealing to me, so I set out to fix it. Popcorn’s influence resulted in something that was extremely short on text, and my affection for NPC’s About page lead me to do the SHOW DON’T TELL thing and introduce the comic through snippets from the comic itself.

I’m sure it doesn’t seem like much, but the process of writing this page took something like a full month. I did a few neat things that required a bit of time—I used some of the typographic stylings I had developed for the figurine packaging, I recomposed the comics from their original scans, I even reorganised the panels of this page—but mostly it was a process of cutting everything down to the bare minimum so it could appeal to those coming in from banner ads.

Has it worked? I dunno. I haven’t done enough testing! But I sure was happy with how it came out. I think it’s very readable and does a good job of getting you interested in BCB—that is, if you’re the type of person who would get interested in BCB.

The cutting room floor

The reason the new reader page took a month had a lot to do with the time I spent on work that never made the page.

There were lots of extra words, of course, which I mentioned were cut out. But the biggest thing that caused me consternation was my desire to include something shooting down the idea that BCB was a furry comic. You see, as I anticipated this page to be the first stop of a sceptical ad clicker, I thought it necessary to say “but don’t worry, this isn’t a weird fetishy comic for furries” in some less confronting way.

I had the idea of doing it iconographically, with two lines:

[Mike and Lucy] = [Bugs Bunny, Mickey] [Daisy] ≠ [the “Bawwwww” furry]

Which I think is a good use of pop-and-internet culture but ultimately I gave up on it or anything like it. Same as my stillborn idea of getting Veronica to draw a BCB character in the Robin Hood “yiff in hell furfags” pose for use on the homepage.

I think it’s just too hard to deny being something without being offensive and coming off as looking super defensive. In retrospect, it totally would have been embarrassing.

So there’s nothing about furries anymore. Except for this, largely a Popcorn invention:

I think that’s the best way to put it. And even this answer might be toned down in a year or two.

Promotional stuff

At this point we’re getting out of the technobabble woods. This section is for the grab bag of things I did to make the site generally appealing to new readers.

bcb.cat

For a long time we used the short URL bcb.im, but I was always desperate for bcb.cat (for obvious reasons.) After reading and reading and deciding that we really aren’t supposed to use bcb.cat for a non-Catalan site, I went ahead and bought it anyway.

It’s.. still working! But I suppose it might stop working one day. For now it’s very cute.

Newsletters

With the help of Sammybeany I now have custom Apple Mail stationery and Mailchimp templates for both Bittersweet Club International and site mail generally. The automated systems of the site use these as well.

These designs have hopefully projected a more professional image to our customers!

Amazon page

I did some work sprucing up our Amazon page and learning how to do the special things. I uploaded images of the book (which, sadly, show as “customer images” with my name attached… kinda weird, but oh well!) and wrestled for a long time with the “Search Inside The Book” program.

Now it’s all working, and combined with some lovely reader reviews I think the page looks great.

BY THE WAY: One frustration with being a Fulfilment by Amazon seller is the way they automatically send out a “review this seller” form. A lot of customers see that they bought the book from Bittersweet Candy Bowl and write a lovely review… but hte review only goes to our Amazon seller account and not the product itself! I wish some of the 40 or 50 reviews we’ve got as a seller could go to the book, but hey. We’re not doing too bad.

Shameless advertising

Since leaderboards pay badly, I figured after the first 50 pages a reader looks at, I’d serve them this static “ad” instead of it:

An ad which will eventually change to this after 100 pages:

I dunno if it works, but hey. If you’re loving the comic at that point, maybe you’d spend money. Or maybe it plants a seed in your mind that you’ll go to the store afterwards… I dunno.

I hope it’s not too annoying.

Facebook quiz

We had this ancient Quizilla quiz that Veronica made back when she had time to do such things. But Quizilla is kinda old (and Teen Nick bought it? Wow) and quizzes are for Facebook now so I made this forum thread asking for a Facebook-enabled fanmade update and a whole bunch of people made quizzes, some good and some bad…

What I wanted was something that would slowly spread around newsfeeds for years in that kind of insidious way things spread on Facebook. But after the quizzes I saw in the thread, I don’t think a quiz will achieve that. Maybe if I was a Facebook fan page maven who was constantly feeding stuff to a huge group that constantly feeds me likes, but eh. That’s not me.

Miscellaneous

Buying fonts

I stopped being an ass and purchased the fonts we use on the site. Among others, VAG Rounded and Freight Sans Pro Semibold (for headings and the rainbow navbar). I’m now in the habit of paying foundries for their hard work and am building a lovely little collection on MyFonts. I think what I lack in visual design ability is offset by my passion (and good eye?) for pretty typefaces.

Abandoned ideas

I would like to have unified the login systems behind BCI, Candybooru and the forum but it’s an INSANE amount of work. I feel bad for it, but this is just not going to happen. Ever.

I considered a home-made auction script for the site as a means of selling off collectible, one-off stuff, but it seems like a lot of work. Besides, we can just do future Kickstarters or something to get rid of our prototypes and other crap!

I thought about using Amazon affiliate links after reading about how a lot of people—even webcomic artists—make money using them, but I eventually gave up on the idea. Veronica doesn’t write blog posts recommending coffee machines and DVDs and neither do I!

And that’s it.

I think I’ll draw the line here. There’s more to do but it's all relatively mundane — retina display support, a place for a newsletter signup form, some tweaks to our new “CAPTCHA” mechanism. I feel secure… at least until I start work on Not Enough Rings again.

P.S. For those interested, this post was created after I spent some time combing through archives of my todo lists, turning it into plaintext and using unix tools to combine files and erase duplicates. The full list is here for your perusal, but it’s more interesting for its length than its content.

[su-itca-se]

Follow-Up

For such a lightly-trafficked rarely-reblogged Tumblog, my posts seem to inspire a disproportionate amount of private feedback and occasional drama. Before I figure out what next to write about, I have some updates on previous posts about bookselling, our burglary and DailyComix.

Books

We have sold 266 copies of Volume One since I finished posting my bookselling experience. That makes for a total of 716, nearing half our print run. My sales predictions were generally accurate, though demand has been very soft post-Christmas. At this stage, the idea of selling hundreds of books in 2012 is unthinkable. But bundles with Volume Two are a very appealing idea!

I am very proud that we have been able to sell so many books at such a premium price. There are a lot of kind, supportive Bittersweet Candy Bowl readers out there.

Insurance

We wuz robbed, but insurance came through in the end. A few people have asked how it panned out, so I’ll show you here:

The iMac took a month to replace, but I got it replaced with a new top-of-the-line one! Basically, Apple’s current low-end model is the same as what my stolen high-end model (of years past) was, so that was what they offered. But I noted that they’d have to spend like $600 extra, since I had 16gb of memory in mine and I assume they’d order (overpriced) memory from Apple for the new one. So I made the offer: I’ll buy my own replacement memory ($110 on eBay) and you buy me the high-end iMac. It worked!

The Playstation (a 20gb launch model) was replaced with whatever the newest Playstation is - a slim 160gb model. I sold the replacement on eBay for $250, and bought a first generation American fat Playstation 3 for the same. So while we lost a ton of saved games and a beloved personal artefact, the new (old) one is an improvement. (It has a chrome face and Wi-Fi.)

The foreign currency - which I (very honestly!) guessed at $150 USD and €60 - was replaced in AUD at current rates.

The carry-on bag was not available in Australia, so I decided to be picky and found it online, in the US. They paid the quoted amount of $160, I ordered it and now it is here.

The Palm Pre 3 phone was the only trouble. I bought it for $220 (a good price that required a fair bit of eBay monitoring) and they offered $205. However, at the time it was stolen, the market price had increased to $350+. So while I was planning to eBay it, I got none of the expected profit. I complained, and after a month of thinking about it, they offered $600. Done!

In all, the pecuniary cost of the burglary was negligible. But I got a better computer, Playstation 3 and new carry-on bag out of it. The real price was the stress and wasted time.

The iMac is now tied to furniture with one of those Kensington laptop locks, by the way. Thieves beware. (Unless you brought a saw. Good thinking!)

DailyComix

I posted in the midst of this latest comic reader drama, and got a few surprising reactions.

Brad Guigar, who operates Webcomics.com, objected at my screenshot of a comment on the news post about DailyComix. He later clarified this expectation in a news post. While I don’t agree with the idea that a paywall implies privacy, he kindly allowed for the screenshot to remain as it is. I will be more cautious about sharing comments from sites like Webcomics.com in the future.

Chris Hanel, who wrote the catalytic Tumblr post that drove much of the anti-DailyComix movement, sought me out over IM. We talked for about an hour. I concluded that he was an unconvincing spokesperson. I’d post the log so you could judge for yourself, but I haven’t got permission. Either way, I think he stated his position much more effectively in the aforementioned post than in our chat.

After this point, there were a few more angry comments about DailyComix on Reddit. I received a few incoherent emails and tweets criticising me for supporting content thieves. But the drama had mostly subsided until Jeph Jacques spoke out about the DailyComix app, with another outburst that echoes the general sentiment of my previous post's screencaps.

Soon after, Google delisted the app, and its developer, “Klaymore”, conceded the fight: (emphasis my own)

In the last few days, I have received hundreds of emails - most from comic publishers - asking for their comics to be removed from DailyComix. While I am happy to remove them on request, it seems that none of the supported publishers would remain once all comics were removed. Therefore, there is no point to continue maintaining DailyComix. There is also something I should clarify regarding our app - we did not steal from the artists, writers, or publishers of webcomics. Our app linked users to comics that were hosted (freely available) on the Internet. We never claimed that any copyrighted work was ours, and we did not host any copyrighted information on our app or servers. We are not in violation of copyright. We also did not make any significant money from publishing our app on the Android Market. To be honest, the income from this app was less than it cost us to run the webservices on which the app depends. I seriously doubt that our app has had any significant impact on publishers’ income - and I am confident that this can be verified with the statistics that both myself and publishers collect.

The developer emailed his appreciation of what I wrote, told me of “the overwhelming flood of angry letters and threats (both physical and lawsuit)” and confirmed a couple of my assumptions:

You are absolutely correct about several things:

I have received over a dozen sad emails from users, pointing out that they only learned about their favorite webcomics on DailyComix.

Several of these people pointed out that they have purchased merchandise from those publishers (but wouldn’t again).

Talk is cheap, of course, but let’s take Klaymore and his users at their word.

We are left with the following consequences:

Webcomic authors, successful in removing the app from the store, can now feel secure that their work is no longer being “stolen” by Klaymore.

DailyComix users feel sad and angry at their favourite authors. “Dozens” or more will no longer support them.

The developer of the app, who could not even break even on server costs while the app was available, has an unsellable project that took hundreds of hours to write and test.

Authors, 1. Readers, 0.

Developer, who cares.

Justice!

[su-itca-se]

How Dare You

Brad Guigar, on Webcomics.com last year:

Comic scraper sites (and apps) pop up at the rate of every other month or so. Typically, they use a webcomic’s RSS feed to “scrape” the comic and use it for their own purposes — whether it’s a collection of their favorite comics in one site or an app that allows a reader to easily surf all of their favorite comics in one, easy place. In general, comic scrapers take only the comic, leaving behind the other elements of the webcomic site — like the blog …and the site’s advertising.

The latest offender: DailyComix, an comic reader app for Android. Load it onto your phone, wait for it to download a comic index, pick a bunch to follow, and read them strip-by-strip in a clunky interface. There’s a free, ad-supported version and a $2 paid version.

The reactions:

This is all a bunch of crap.

DailyComix isn’t hurting anybody. It’s a tiny app that will never have a large, serious audience. The user experience isn’t great, it’s missing crucial information that readers care about (page commentary, site news, comments sections) and even if it was great and useful, most people would forget they ever downloaded it after a month anyway. It has less than 500 paid users. It was last updated in September. The ratings are pretty ordinary. It’s unlikely anybody uses it for anything other than reading XKCD.

It’s hardly the next Flipboard. Neither was Web Comic du Jour, LinkPedia, ComicRack’s Scraper extensions.. or the inevitable next thing you’ll see a dozen webcomic artists get flustered about in a couple months.

So move on. Stop spending time fretting about nothing important, and develop your artwork or business. That would be the efficient thing to do. We could stop right here.

But some like to fight for the principle of the matter, even if it’s intellectual masturbation. That’s fine. We’re on Tumblr after all.

Here’s the thing, webcomic creators: even if these scrapers were widely used, they wouldn’t hurt you. They would, in fact, empower your best readers, drive new readers, and help you make more money.

Let us imagine a world where readers stop visiting their dozens of bookmarks to their favourite websites, and instead use a third party aggregator to plough through content, mostly skimming, never seeing ads, never viewing the work in the creator’s intended context. The consequences are clear: the reader will use up server resources, the creator won’t receive ad revenue, the reader won’t see promotions for new merchandise.

Disaster! Stolen content! End of a well-worn business model!

Except.. well, we had this discussion. Readers expect this much of you.

I just think it’s piss-poor judgment to pull your content out of a thriving and highly brand-aware channel that’s frequented by a lot of very influential folks…for what? So, you can hold up all that inconvenience you’ve created to demonstrate to your bean counters that no one’s getting your “content” without being programmatically annoyed?

This was about an Old Media publication pulling full content from their RSS feeds. But the sentiment rings true for those New Media creators who recoil at the thought of Web 2.0.

You see, people who use tools like RSS Readers, social networks and aggregator sites are seriously into their comics. They’ve thought about how they consume this content and they’ve made it fit into their lives better.

Most won’t give you money. That’s just how it works here.

But those tool-assisted readers that will?

It’s in this pool of people that you’ll find the guys that gift you $50 worth of advertising by posting your every second strip around Facebook. The people who monitor a list of 50 webcomics and inevitably link your strips on the front page of a major comics and forums they follow across the web. They’re the ones that are following your Twitter feed and seeing your every message about new stuff in the store. And, more likely than not, they’re going to make up a large proportion of your 1,000 True Fans. After all, they spent time (and possibly money) figuring out how to better fit your work into their life.

Sure, this is all gut feeling and supposition. You’ve got to believe. But a quick check of my own survey data for BCB indicates that those who read via RSS are more interested in merchandise and donations, and an Adobe study says those dastardly app-driven iPad people tend to spend 50% more on internet retail than desktop users. It’s almost the common wisdom now that the technologically inclined are more likely to spend on frivolous things.

Why don’t you want these people to love you? Why aren’t you clamouring for better apps to be made for these people to read your comic through? (You do have a full-text RSS feed, right?)

And!

Let us not lose sight of the other consequence of this brave new hypothetical world of popular aggregator apps - the new readers you’ll gather. That DailyComix home screen is a daily visit for hundreds of thousands of Android users, right? Wouldn’t you kill to get your comic in front of that many comic-hungry eyes, right in the content window? By golly, you are! And because of your appealing name and favicon, you’re going to find new readers at no cost at all!

New readers that will, at first, drain bandwidth, view your pages out of context, and certainly without seeing a single one of your ads.

But new readers that are going to wonder if you have a characters page. New readers that will hunt for the author’s Twitter. New readers that will passively read until that one time your character does something they just HAVE to find the damn site so they can post a comment on it. New readers that will mostly buy nothing, but will sometimes buy something. They’ll find you.

And they cost you nothing.

Still, the whine and wail about content aggregators is ever-predictable and will seemingly go on forever in every field:

“Flipboard has attracted a valuable and high-growth audience of social influencers and enthusiastic readers with one of the most popular apps on the iPad. We believe this more beautiful, more readable layout will increase your viewership and cause more people to retweet, share and like your content.”

You get paid in Tweets, baby.

Cute.

As Merlin Mann put it, cutting out the aggregators “usually reflects the values of a company who think so little of both their audience and their staff that they’d burn cycles on deliberately making their material harder to get.”

Yes, you get paid in Tweets now. And by accepting Mere Tweets, you show your best readers how much you love them. You affirm the philosophy behind your choice not to erect a paywall. You show the world that you’re eager to give your readers every possible means of reading your comic and getting involved in your story. You’ve lent readers your trust. In my experience, they will pay you back.

And some clever developer gets some money for making a tool that people want to use. Win-win-win.

DailyComix caved, of course:

As some users may have noticed, a number of comics have been removed in the last few days, at the request of the publisher. Our policy is to always honor these requests, since these publishers often make a living from these works - and we believe in supporting publishers for their efforts.

Meaningless. Spineless. The cycle will continue.

But I can see why they’re scared of all the tin-pot dictators. Those pretend lawyers have bite!

Update: I describe the reaction to this post at the end of this entry.

[su-itca-se]

We Were Burgled

Stupid word, burgle.

On Wednesday, we went to my mother’s place to take care of the dog for the day. She has been barking since the move, and so we were supposed to be there to walk her and stop her from being a nuisance. Which we did! We brought our phones and laptops along (thank God.) And then we went home around 9pm, stopping for groceries on the way.

At 10:50pm, we opened the front gate of our apartment (we have a strange internal courtyard thing, as we live within a secure hotel complex.) This made a noise, and I heard some scuffling inside the unit as I approached the front door. After unlocking the door, I quickly walked down the hallway, first noticing that all the lights were on, then that my iMac was gone, then that the back window was wide open with the flyscreen pushed out.

After dropping our grocery bags, I rushed to unlock the back door (which exits onto a private service lane adjacent to a car park), and yelled at Veronica to run to the right while I ran left, in the hope that we could identify who was fleeing. They must have bolted out very quickly, because I did not see or hear anything from the point I walked through the hallway all the way up until I walked to a major intersection, seeing nothing of interest. Veronica didn’t see anything either.

While I was running up to the intersection to look for any strange figure carrying a giant 27” computer, I dialled 000 on my phone and, huffing and puffing, called for the police to come and reported the burglary detail-by-detail. While I was on the phone to police, I searched for other things stolen — our Playstation 3, and some carry-on luggage — while Veronica got the building security involved and started to get some of the neighbours together.

We found out that while most people were unaware of anything happening, our next-door-neighbour heard something loud “like moving furniture” around 10:15, and that the security patrol had last walked past our back door at about the same time, and didn’t see the unattached flyscreen. We also discovered that they left a sweaty old shirt on the desk where the iMac was.

My mother came over, and after we spoke to the police and security and sorted it all out, we carefully locked the window and stayed at my mother’s for the night, returning the next morning for forensics to check for fingerprints and other evidence. They didn’t get much, but they found that the shirt was a good candidate for DNA evidence, and that if the thief had DNA on file it’d likely match them. We also discovered that they stole our foreign money hidden in a box (kept from BCB Store orders: about $180 USD and €60) and my HP Pre 3 phone I had sitting loose.

So it has been a day. My guess as to what happened is this: they noticed our lights were off, and investigated the window. They realised the fly screen could be removed easily, and used some sort of technique to push the window open (it was ajar, but jammed to be only open an inch or so with a wooden stick). They entered the place after 10:20, making a fair bit of noise in doing so. Then they had a look around and disconnected the computer and Playstation, and when we entered at 10:50, they bolted, maybe into a car, so that we did not see them. It was obvious that we startled them — they surely did not mean to leave the shirt, as well as my digital SLR camera which was sitting right beside it. I also found that the iMac was turned off about two minutes before we opened the gate, so they might not have been in for very long.

It’s basically out of our hands now, and even though there are security cameras to look at and the DNA matching to do, I believe that we will only be contacted if somehow the computer or other items are located.

We didn’t lose any data except the save games on the PS3. The iMac was fully backed up to a Time Capsule, which, miraculously, was left on the desk. We have contacted our insurance company, and are awaiting a decision. Having read our policy, I believe we will be fully covered for all items, but I am not sure how they plan to replace an original American PS3 or a never-sold-at-retail Pre 3 phone.

Some interesting notes: we had some kind of sword in the house, and it looks like they took it. The sword was something rescued out of a bin that I was seeking to throw away when nobody was looking — I’d rather not talk about it — and it was lying under the couch. I suppose it’s a good thing I didn’t get a chance to confront the thieves, given this.

I also have tried to track the iMac. It has “Find my Mac” installed on it, so I was able to instruct Apple to Remote Wipe the hard drive it the next time it comes online. This would be very nice as it contains sensitive information, providing it falls into the hands of a person who will dig hard enough to find that information. However: I think have a login password set on it, so unless they plug it into a network (or use the Wi-Fi icon in the top right) while it is at that login screen, it won’t be able to contact Apple and won’t be able to wipe itself. There is a chance that the “Find my Mac” thing will stay resident in the hidden recovery partition and activate even if they clear out my installation, but there’s no good information about this on the internet, and calling AppleCare to find out how it worked was a big waste of time.

One big mystery remains, however. Take a look at these IRC logs of a chatroom my iMac was connected to:

[10:49] * SuitCase ([email protected]) Quit (Ping timeout) [11:06] * SuitCase ([email protected]) has joined #lemonade [11:12] * SuitCase ([email protected]) Quit (Quit: SuitCase) [11:13] * SuitCase ([email protected]) has joined #lemonade [11:18] * SuitCase ([email protected]) Quit (Quit: SuitCase)

The first line is a ping timeout: the computer’s power cord was yanked out of the wall a few minutes before 10:49, so it stopped communicating with IRC.

The next four lines are far more mysterious. An IRC client using my same WiFi network logged on at 11:06, then at 11:13, finally quitting (not timing out) at 11:18. For this whole period, I was on the phone to police, pacing around the back of our unit. It does not make sense that it was the iMac, because of the login password and the fact it wasn’t configured to use Wi-Fi. Also, how the hell would the thieves have been close enough to pick up our WiFi and have the inclination plug in a giant desktop computer 15 minutes after stealing it?

I’m assuming it was some kind of IRC server glitch, but that is such a lame explanation. I have no idea how this happened. Either way, it’s academic at this point. I’m no crack detective.

Edit: I realise now that it was my MacBook Air - when I opened it to initiate a Remote Wipe on the iMac, the Colloquy client in the background logged on and cleanly disconnected each time I opened and shut the lid. Whoops!

That’s about all I can say about the big event. It was a bit of excitement, I suppose, and a big annoyance — I was planning to unpack our groceries, brew some tea and implement all these bug fixes to the BCB site that I had prepared. Instead it was a mess of a night that fucked my sleeping schedule to the point that it’s right now 4:27 AM on Friday and I’m still not tired.

Veronica was strong and helpful throughout, and we were both so intent on sorting things out that I don’t think we got a lot of time to despair. I think we have the universal experience here: a lot of stress at first, then a bit of a cleaning job, but when it comes down to it we’re only going to be upset if insurance weasels out of covering us. At least we interrupted them before they took everything.

We were lucky, and unlucky. Don’t get burgled.

P.S. Transitioning from a 27” iMac to an 11” MacBook Air is rather shit.

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BCB Page Comments, November 2009 – August 2011

Bittersweet Candy Bowl gets a lot of comments. So a while ago I put together this image graphing them all.

(Click this one. It's wide.)

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BCBCon

This July, we arranged a four-day Bittersweet Candy Bowl reader meetup in Boston.

22 people attended.

I thought it was a pretty great success, all things considered. Fun, strange, memorable and mostly problem-free. In the end, it was the kind of gathering I had hoped for.

The idea came of “LemoCon”, the meetup my friend Sammybeany organised for many years. I went to one of those meetups, Veronica three. Ostensibly it was derived from the membership of an IRC channel called #lemonade, but we were really just expatriates of a Sonic-the-Hedgehog-based message board called The Moogle Cavern. Typically, 7–15 people would meet up somewhere in the United States, share a few hotel rooms for 2–4 nights, do some vacation-ey things together and head back home. If it sounds weird, it kinda was — internet people are always a bit weird. But for pretty much everyone who went, it was a lot of fun. Seeing the other side of someone you only knew through text often had surprising results. Intolerable people revealed their awesome side, and others were a little disappointing. But either way, you found your friends, you had some good conversations, you created some stories and you promised to yourself to meet up again afterwards.

This is not exactly why I pushed to do a “BCBCon”. In a way, it came of me asking Veronica which convention hall she wanted to lease for the upcoming BCBCon, the international fan gathering where thousands of MikexLucy shippers would swarm towards a towering podium where Veronica would raise her arm and rally the troops, a giant Lucy face behind her, the Charles Foster Kane of high school drama webcomics, dominating a world that had forgotten PAX and San Diego, for only BCBCon was worthy of the webcomic world’s great annual pilgrimage. Or bi-annual. Or no, monthly. We'd have to be fair to those who couldn't fit in to the stadium we'd hire.

I said all this stuff to get a rise out of her and to have her be all cute and embarrassed. It’s the sort of stupid rambling joke I often make to her when we walk home. But with LemoCon’s success in mind, I thought “hey, we have way more people than #lemonade ever did. What would become of a reader meetup that I arranged the exact same way Sammy did LemoCon?”

Well, you’d get another LemoCon, it seems. I didn’t know how many people would come, and in the end, I’m pretty amazed we got 22. My first guess was 7–15. It turned out most of the attendees were people we knew intimately from the #bcb IRC channel, or the forums. Only a small handful of attendees could be described more readers than community participants. And that was okay.

It took a bit of investment, of course. In the end, each attendee paid us $120 for their share of three nights at the Holiday Inn at Beacon Hill (a reasonable, though unremarkable choice of mine) as well as committing various amounts of money to get there. We had people fly up from Texas and Mexico, drive down from Toronto, train in from Chicago.. Plus of course, Veronica and I live in Sydney, and took the trip up from New Jersey. It was certainly a big showing, but it’s not all that surprising that we didn’t have random passive readers of the comic putting down $500+ to come hang with some strangers. And not one was a deadbeat, I got every dollar necessary to foot the hotel bill! Very surprising to me, given how young many of the attendees were.

Now, the story and photos:

We had met up with Zhan and Lily at the bus station, old friends who we’d met a bunch of times before. We weren’t too disoriented from the trip, but as we dragged our luggage through the city to the designated meeting area, we eventually stumbled onto about 15 young people standing around with suitcases and both had a minor freakout. Veronica turned her face and hid for a bit, and I just cringed internally and said “Oh, this is weird.” a lot until we got close enough to say hello and identify ourselves.

A very strange experience. Probably the worst one of the weekend. You think “oh, shit, these people really came” and “oh shit, I’m kind of in charge of them!” Well, maybe not. I didn’t think those things, but it was the same kind of anxiety that might accompany such worries. I’m not an anxious person at all, but it’s hard not to feel a wave of it when you see this:

You will have to mentally fill in that stock photo with a big group of people with huge suitcases wearing Bittersweet Candy Bowl clothing.

Anyway. We went to the hotel, and settled in, and got to know everyone. Throughout the weekend SpaceMouse, Lily and Zhan provided us with the most useful local guidance around Boston. SpaceMouse had booked a bunch of things and prepared us all for the train system, for instance.

And then we went to the Museum of Fine Arts!

I enjoyed this. It was my first taste of what Boston’s culture was like. I shouldn’t pretend to think I learned a lot about the city while I was there, there was too much else going on, but I did get something out of this visit.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that our group was quite open to wandering around the galleries for a few hours without getting antsy. I got a lot out of the early American stuff on display. It’s a great gallery.

The Chihuly exhibit they had going on downstairs was tremendous. Made for good photos, too.

As we searched for a place to eat dinner, the restauraunt Zhan worked at came up in conversation, and Veronica and I asked if we could bring our party of 20+ to eat there. Turned out we could, and we had a great dinner. Possibly the best food I had during the whole overseas trip!

When we got back home to the hotel, Toasty logged onto his Netflix account and we watched half of Bebe’s Kids on Veronica’s laptop.

The next morning we went to the Museum of Science. Saw a planetarium show, saw the butterfly garden, played on a see-saw.

After that, we looked at Harvard and bought some books, which was fun. We went to some nerdy shops around the area, and I found some amazing old Sega magazines from the early nineties. The ads were as good as I hoped:

Above photo stolen from “Level 50 Fighter”.

That evening, we went to Sacco’s Bowl Haven, a name that I found childishly amusing. It was a bowling alley for “candlepin bowling”, which is an interesting local variation of the regular ten-pin. 

We had a lot of fun! It got a bit competitive, which is always great. They had some nice food, too. The only downer was when I couldn’t order a drink because the server (the first and only to ask my age on the whole US trip) didn’t like the fact my ID had expired. Oh well.

We went back to the hotel, and prepared for a night out drinking. SpaceMouse had asked about a certain bar, and hey why not. The kids could stay at home.

The place was really nice, once we got a seat. Things went about as well as expected. Only about five of us went. One didn’t drink. Veronica drank too much and got super depressed. And peed in a drain.

:|

The next morning, she spent a lot of time drawing requests and working on a business card that I decided simply had to be prepared that day. It kept us back, but what can you expect? We didn’t have terrible hangovers, but we were entitled to a lazy morning.

The stop after that was Faneuil Hall, which is like this giant food market alongside a shopping centre. But it was all situated in big historical buildings, and because of the July 4 weekend, lots of interesting stuff was going on. Very busy.

Lunch was pretty good.

Vero’s wasn’t, apparently. But what do you expect, fresh fish in Boston?

Armed with Kaxbe’s employee discount, we went to Abercrombie & Fitch to prepare for a night in the swimming pool, which basically didn’t work out because it closed early. We ended up going to SpaceMouse’s place out in suburbia to see his cat, who was very cute.

Dinner that night was a little dramatic, because they didn’t have enough room for us all. Half the group split off and had 7-11 hotdogs or something.

When we got back to the hotel, I did a big giveaway of slightly flawed BCB merch. Free posters, free stickers, lots of things. It was nice to be able to give most people what they wanted.

On the final morning, Veronica and I went to see Zhan and Lily on our own. Some of the people had already said their goodbyes at this stage, and things were winding down.

Half of the group: one's behind the camera (Zhan) and the other ten had to leave early.

After we all settled down in the burning hot sun to talk about our plans, we all went home. And that was that. (Well, kinda. We went on to exhibit at a convention and pack and send 200 books.)

BCBCon was a learning experience for me, certainly. If I were to do it again, I’d aim for 12 people. 22 was too much, people retreat into smaller groups and are too hard to manage. (For example, when half of us split to go see Harvard while the other half went back to the Museum of Science.) I’d plan to leave time for indoors activities — my fear that everyone would stay in the hotel and be boring was unfounded, and I think that if you keep it in moderation you can have some fun with video and board games and stuff in these big group environments. I’d make allowances for a night where everyone can get super drunk (but I’d also be mindful that 75% of Internet People don’t drink at all.)

Oh, and I suppose I’d never trust a Chinese lapel pin company to deliver their product on time.

But beyond this? There’s really not too much to complain about. It was cool to meet a bunch of people we only knew through the internet. It was fun to talk about the webcomic, and for Veronica to see first hand how dedicated some of her fans really could be.

It worked well. I think we’d do it again.

P.S. This post is well augmented by the long, semi-stream-of-consciousness retellings fromTD, Kaxbe and Veronica, who posted all on that forum topic page. 

P.P.S. You can see the rest of my photos here. I only picked the best ones for this blog post.

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Making Money with a Book is Not a Bad Idea

This is the final part of a series of posts about making Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume One. Please read: the introduction, part one and part two.

Let’s bring this long, arduous journey to its conclusion.

Money. How much did we make? Was it worth it?

I’ll be super open here. I’m not quite as skilled at this as Dorothy Gambrell, nor am I as organised, but I do have numbers for the book.

But first, vague guesses.

This was my original back-of-a-napkin (well, back-of-a-contracts-problem-question-sheet) conception of where we’d make our money this year. At the time I was figuring out what the membership idea was going to be (turned out to be a wonderfully successful little paid-fan-club thing, Bittersweet Club International) and I only had this vague idea of how we’d sell the book, perhaps Lulu, perhaps Createspace, but probably not anything where we’d have to stock hundreds. Each quadrant was supposed to represent about $7,000.

But the pie chart is all wrong, now. Here’s my projection for 2011’s actual sources of revenue:

The book has blown up and made everything else smaller (non-book merch is only about 5% of the big khaki slice). We grew the pie!

It took time and money, though. We didn’t expect to have to spend $13,000 to make a book to sell. Here’s that table again, of how much it cost to get it together.

We had to spend all that before we officially put the book on sale. We managed it pretty easily, though, with no Kickstarter or anything. Our printer took credit cards just fine, so most of the run was funded by Chase and Citibank's largesse, with bills to be paid well after the books were delivered. More importantly, we gathered about 280 preorders, which amounted to $14,000 due to the big sketch & limited edition ideas.

Now, there are some added per-unit costs not accounted for in this chart. You know, the money that comes out of the $39 (our store) or $49 (Amazon) we charge for a copy.

First of all, you can round down the net revenue to about $37 per copy sold on either site. Amazon’s commission is about $12, but they do pay your credit card fees and ship it for you. Paypal merely take $2 for items sold direct through our store, and we charge the customer $4 for our actual shipping cost. So effectively, even though Amazon’s copy is priced $10 higher, every copy we sell makes us $37 once it’s on the way to the customer and the money’s in the bank account.

The major ongoing cost comes in the Fulfilment by Amazon program. It’s really not too bad, but there are a few different fees beyond their eminently reasonable shipping costs. (On par with media mail.)

To summarise:

They force you to sign up for the $39/mo professional plan to add new products

They charge a monthly fee for the space your items are taking up

They charge a big annual fee when your items have sat in the warehouse for over a year.

The initial monthly fee I just folded into the book production costs. A few months, then back to a standard account. Easy.

Now, the ongoing fee for space is pretty reasonable. Of the 1400 books Amazon received, we’ve got rid of about 400 of them through customer orders or the shipment to our relay to Canada. (See the previous post for details on that.) And a book of ours takes up 0.08 cubic feet.

So how does that work out for our 1000 books sitting in the warehouse? Well: in the holiday months, $48 a month. Non-holiday, $36. A little more than negligible, but pretty reasonable — for the book that sits in the facility for a year, it costs you 50 cents. That’s fair.

The real kick in the guts comes when the books have sat there for over a year and you get the new “Long-Term Storage Fee”. This would be $3,600 for a thousand books. (Eek!) I’m hoping by then, we’ll be down to only a few hundred in stock. At $3.60 a book, it’s ugly but manageable. But we’ve got a lot of time before we have to deal with it.

But that’s really it! Apart from Amazon’s selling fees, the PayPal fees, and the FBA fees above, everything is pure profit. And so it should be, for all the effort involved!

And here’s the reward. The revenue.

At the time of this post, we’ve sold right on about 450 books. Included in this 450:

192 × standard books sold directly to US readers ($39 RRP, $37 net)

125 × sketch books ($59 RRP, $56 net)

75 × limited edition books ($59 RRP, $52 net)

25 × discounted Amazon copies for preorderers ($42 RRP, $32 net)

25 × full-priced Amazon copies ($49 RRP, $37 net)

8 × copies sold at ConnectiCon ($39 RRP, $36 net)

Right about $20,000 in revenue. If we work things out by just paying off the $13,000 outlay and then counting every dollar afterwards as our profit, we’re about $7,000 in the green.

That should get to $13,000 after our pixellated sales drive gets us to 600 copies. (600 copies and we’ve doubled our investment, that’s the idea.) Maybe we’ll get to $18,000 if we get a Christmas rush of 100+ extra sales beyond that.

Assuming my estimates are on track and we make that money, by the end of 2011 we’ll still have about 800 books left to sell. That’s $30,000 worth of stock left to sell in 2012, at full price, or perhaps $20,000 if we assume we’ll do bundle deals when Volume Two is out and sell the leftover copies cheaper.

To recap: we risked $13,000 and spent a lot of time making and selling the book, and:

As of today, we’ve made $7,000.

As of the end of 2011, we’ll have likely made $18,000.

As of the end of 2012, we’ll have possibly made $38,000.

This is starting to feel like real money, huh! And if we build the reader base even further, and get a smaller Volume Two out the door for a lower price, who knows what is possible for us next year!

That brings this little series to an end. It's most of what I learned, and all I can think of posting for the world to learn from. I hope the posts have been of some interest to those who wanted to know about our struggle to self-publish a big, heavy webcomic book. You can read more from an artist-enterpreneur's perspective (a rare breed!) in the wonderfully interesting reMIND blog. Otherwise, I'm not sure what I can point you to — I wrote this knowing that there's not a lot out there that really covers the stuff here in a human way, so with some luck I've made a little contribution here.

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Distributing a Book is Interesting

This is the second part of a series of posts about making Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume One. Please read: the introduction and part one.

I’m breaking with (blog title) convention here, because for all the pain I thought we might run into when figuring out how to send hundreds of hardcover books, I ended up with an overwhelming feeling of.. enlightenment. I learned that things could be a lot easier, at least once you set them up. I would recommend the lessons in this post this to people who need to ship books en masse.

I understand not everyone cares about our idiosyncratic situation, especially if they’re reading this to learn about distributing their own book, but I have to set up the scene:

We live in Sydney, Australia.

The books were to be printed in a factory in Quebec, Canada.

Three-quarters of our paying customers are in the USA.

Also to complicate matters (or, more likely, make them harder for you in following our example) we have bank accounts, residential addresses and tax IDs in both Australia and the USA. Enabling us to set up accounts for stuff in both countries, which you may not be able to do.

So, given this situation, what did we do? The “straightforward” thing would be to have our printer send all our books to Sydney, then mail them out at the local Australia Post to customers all around the world. This is how we’ve dealt with our other merchandise, so far. Buy 400 buttons in a big box from the USA, have them shipped to Sydney, mail them out across the world as we need to.

But two things made that option not very straightforward. First, it’d cost a thousand to ship the (factory-fresh) books to the US, but likely thousands to ship them to Australia. Second, it’d cost about $20 to mail a book at our post office, and $30 if it was to the USA. (They have a security surcharge on packages heavier than 500 grams, now.) As a comparison rate, USPS have media mail for merely $3 a book.

Now, the thousands extra in freight we might be able to stomach, but your average American buyer eyeing a $49 comic compilation is probably gonna vomit if they see that it costs $30 in postage to get it. And I didn’t really like the idea of having to repeatedly lug boxes of books to the post office every week for the next year, either way. This would be far more annoying than your average small merchandise order.

So, what to do? Well, a member of our IRC channel, Starwatcher, overheard me discussing these problems, and let me know about a service called “Fulfilment by Amazon” (FBA) that he used at his work. It’s not unique, there are other companies like Shipwire that do the same thing. Generally they call themselves fulfilment services. And they work like this:

You ship your boxes of stuff to their big warehouse.

You log into a website, and tell them who to send things to, and in what quantities.

They ship it to your customer.

They charge you for the shipping, and some kind of ongoing fee for the space your stuff is taking up.

I won’t go into price comparisons with competing services. Overall, I found FBA was simply the easiest, cheapest, best-documented solution to this problem.

So, we sent Amazon the majority of our books. 1400.

I wish I had a photo of 1400 books to insert here. It’d be impressive. But I don’t, because we never saw them. Direct from the printer to Amazon. But I do have this:

Wow! And it only cost $400 to get them all there, because the warehouse Amazon puts FBA books into is in Pennsylvania, not far from the printer.

We did run into a bunch of problems, of course. Things are never that easy. First, let’s go through the issues we had in getting the books to Amazon.

See this thing? It’s an ISBN barcode. And next to it, an Amazon SKU barcode. The ISBN barcode is just one of those things a “real” book has. You need it to get into book databases and libraries and stores and stuff. Now, the SKU barcode? Remember, what seems like a database entry on a website to us is actually a physical book in a warehouse somewhere. So the people picking and packing this stuff need to know what each item is, simply by scanning it. So Amazon supplies you with this barcode and says you have to put it on all your items.

My perception was that since we had an ISBN (we had to pay $250 for the privilege, remember!) Amazon could just use it as the identifying barcode for each of our books. They do have something called “stickerless commingled inventory”, where you can get them to rely on the barcode printed on your product’s packaging for their inventory management.

But.. not for books! Apparently. You have to print out the stickers.

This was a real problem for us, because we knew we weren’t going to have access to the books before Amazon received them. There was the option of getting them shipped to Veronica’s mother’s house, stickering them ourselves and then re-shipping them, but that would take a long time (1400 copies, unpacked and repacked!) and would cost twice as much in shipping.

So I begged our printer to do it, and they were surprisingly quite cool with the proposal. I paid them a total of $200 to print out a bunch of adhesive labels and sticker over the ISBN (an Amazon requirement) with the SKU barcode needed. It added about 15 cents to every book we had them print.

So, kinda stupid, but that was done. (They had to label every shrinkwrapped pallet of books with a special label, too. But this wasn’t so annoying, as there were “only” about 15 pallets.)

Once stickered, another point of confusion came in arranging the delivery. Amazon seem to prefer having UPS come to pick up your stuff (from a US address, of course), and make things a little harder if you want to send them stuff on your own. Essentially, if you’re sending more than a few things for them to store, your shipment is classified as a “LTL” (less than truck-load) delivery. That’s some kind of shipping jargon I still don’t fully understand, but what it meant was that the company delivering the books had to make an appointment with the Amazon warehouse to deliver the books. In the end, I didn’t have to deal with that, I just sent the printer the instructions and I guess their shipping company worked it out. But it was a little stressful, and added much to the literally 100+ emails I sent back and forth to our sales rep during the production of the book.

Eventually the books arrived. A short notification came in an email. And the numbers in that screenshot above appeared. Kinda weird to think about all the people packing and moving and taking inventory of these many hundreds of books, because I never saw them. Just numbers on a screen going up and down. But they exist! I’ll show you.

I discovered a few of the problems involved in delivering the books.

First of all, remember where I said “You log into a website, and tell them who to send things to, and in what quantities”? Well, I can confirm that it all works, but with one caveat. You can’t change the country to anything other than “US”. Why not? Apparently, it’s because Amazon refuse to fill out customs forms (as are required for international shipments) unless they sell the book themselves.

So while I have the (kind of amazing) power to click “Submit” on a web form, and have a book immediately sent out to anyone in the US with a street address, this power is useless for anyone outside of America. It’s neat, and it means we can take book orders through our PayPal web store (which I later “process” by feeding into the Amazon web interface), none of this applies to our international orders. We can do nothing for them.

EXCEPT! We can sell on Amazon. That fixes it.

Unfortunately, this is where things get complicated right where I don’t want them to be. I’m not a retail guru by any means, but I know that putting confusing obstacles in the way of potential customers is a terrible thing to do. But now, we had to account for all sorts of junk, and get the customer involved in deciding things they shouldn’t have to think about.

Realising this was the only way, we set up a listing for the book on Amazon, linked it to our book inventory, and directed international customers to use it. The downsides are numerous:

Amazon takes about $11 of the $49 list price as commission.

Amazon doesn’t allow you to issue promotional codes on books, so we had to do this stupid “It’s $7 off for three days only!” promo for all our people on the mailing list.

Amazon doesn’t take PayPal. (A lot of people around the world rely on PayPal’s local bank transfer integration, not having a credit card.)

Because we are merely “Selling on Amazon”, users have to go through the following stupid mess to buy the book:

Why isn’t there a big “Buy item” button like any other Amazon listing? Because you only get that if it’s a book “sold by Amazon”. Even though Amazon stores the book, takes your payment, and ships the book, officially speaking, we’re selling the book, not them, and so it doesn’t work the same way. Very stupid. There’s a way to get around this called “Amazon Advantage”, but our $11 selling fee would become $27. Goodbye, profits!

There are some advantages. We get random people finding us on Amazon.com (maybe), and Amazon.com plus FBA basically runs itself (we get an email saying a book was sold and shipped, and never have to think about the order beyond that. It’s a bit like Spreadshirt.)

Anyway, I’d say this part of the FBA equation turned out worse than I expected. A lot of people have had trouble paying on Amazon, and I never liked the idea of having to pay $11 commission when I’m not actually getting any exposure or benefit from the page for 90% of the sales (which I’m sure are coming from our Store page’s link to the Amazon site, and not random Amazon customers who stumble across the book.)

So, having already confused our customers by saying “buy here if you’re in the US (using PayPal)”, and “buy here if you’re not in the US (using Amazon.com, here are the convoluted instructions)”, we had to come up with a third option for buyers.

It came in a US-based reader and FRIEND OF THE COMIC, ToastyJester. I figured he’d have the spare time to receive and store a bunch of books, and mail the books out to people that need to use PayPal. I’m gonna put a new “Buy here if you’re in Canada, or if you’re not in the US and cannot buy on Amazon.com” option on the site, charge $49 + shipping, and give him $10 on each sale.

Oh, did I forget to mention Amazon refuse to send the books to Canada, even if you buy through the Amazon.com website? Yeah. Some tax reason. So Toasty is gonna fulfil all those orders. It’s the only way to ship books to the second-most important country.

ANYWAY. I’d say besides the whole Canada thing, we could probably just tell those overseas people to get a credit card and deal with Amazon. But I worry it’d lose us sales, so we’re gonna try this experiment. I was able to send out 80 books to Toasty for something like $100, and I set him up with packing materials and an email-based order system. We’ll see how that goes.

The observant among you may have noticed I went from talking about 1600 books to 1400. This is because we chose to receive 200 ourselves. 30 in Hartford, CT, 170 in North Brunswick, NJ.

Let’s talk about the 30 copies, first.

We came to America this June, and left in July. We booked the flight earlier in the year after Qantas sent me an email telling me about a crazy cheap flight they were offering, and after a trip to the travel agent we were left $2,800 poorer but with new big plans for the four-week uni holidays.

For part of our trip, we arranged a table at ConnectiCon, an anime\comic convention in Hartford, Connecticut. We planned to sell the books there, and hopefully make a decent amount on them all.

There’s a lot to say about ConnectiCon, but I can write a blog post about conventions later. To boil it down:

The printer said the book would be ready weeks after ConnectiCon

We urged the printer to expedite the printing so that it wouldn’t be that late

We determined that it’d arrive at New Jersey on the week we left for ConnectiCon, even if they printed them quick

So we had them rush 30 copies to our hotel room in Hartford, for delivery on Saturday (just in the nick of time!)

This cost us some extra in shipping that we only barely made back on our meagre 8 book sales that weekend. (Conventions are kind of a shit way to make money! Uh, I mean, wait until the convention post later.) But it was the first time we got the book, and it was pretty exciting to be there with BCB fans approaching us and talking to us about the book right after we saw the finished product for the first time.

After that, we packed our bags (with 20 extra books inside!) and went back to New Jersey, and spent a hectic week shipping off the other 190 books manually.

What for? Sketch editions!

You see, we initially offered a run of 75 “Limited Edition” books that would come with a poster and a sketch inside for an extra $20 over the preorder price. As always, we’re overrun and surprised by the interest our fans have in anything “limited”, so those 75 sold out quickly, and were followed up by 130 more “sketch edition” orders (with sketch but sans poster).

Now, while it’d be nice to just get those sketch editions sent out by Amazon, it’s impossible to write in the back of a book you don’t have access to. So it was necessary for Veronica to spend three days cooped up in front of a TV watching Cold Case Files and Unsolved Mysteries marathons on A&E, drawing sketch request after sketch request.

This wasn’t all that simple. So many people either forgot to use the Paypal “instructions to seller” field to tell us their request, or they changed their mind, or they had questions, that it took me about 8 hours in front of my MacBook Air tabbing between Numbers and Mail to compile a huge spreadsheet of definitive sketch requests, along with numbers (the Limited Edition was numbered in order of order time) and accurate mailing addresses. I had to send out 4 or 5 different bulk emails to all the people who forgot to request anything, and AGH.

There’s a snippet of that huge spreadsheet. Crude, but it worked.

For the start of it, I had to stay with Vero while I corrected the spreadsheet. After it was done, we all went out to a few office supply stores and bought the material we’d need for all our packing and shipping work. Turns out it’s a pain in the ass to send all this stuff! We needed packing tape, adhesive labels, even a laser printer (I didn’t trust the inkjet they had already) and, of course, a couple of big boxes of padded mailers. (I bought the mailers from Uline, a good company!)

It all coalesced into this chaotic garage scene:

In this room, we spent a day and a half packing, labelling and sealing packages for:

75 limited edition book customers

120 sketch book customers

10 new Bittersweet Club International (BCI) members

170 existing BCI members (who we needed to supply with their second gift, a small lapel pin)

15 customers who ordered various othermerchandise

20 BCBCon attendees, who we had prepared a special lapel pin for, but which arrived late so we could not hand out in person.

It wasn’t a disaster in itself, but it took a long god damn time when it was basically me, Veronica’s mother, and nobody else. We got about an hour of help from Veronica’s easily-distracted cousin, and Michael, Veronica’s 8 year old half-brother, did an admirable job separating envelopes into different boxes.

That was it, though. Veronica was upstairs on her laptop, colouring comic pages, because the site had ran out of page buffer and her fans were angrily demanding content. Her friend (who I had hoped would come over to help us pack) was unavailable.

We were still packing on Friday, with our plane leaving for Chicago on Saturday morning. We tried to get it all done before the post office closed at 6pm that day. We failed.

Feeling like the worst end-of-day customers ever, we rolled into a small local USPS store with a giant SUV full of packages, and asked if there was any chance we’d get them out before the close of business. Turns out the answer was no, and as nice as the guys were to us, we got barely any sent out.

We also found out you need to fill out a customs form, by hand, for everything going overseas. (There were a lot of things going overseas, including 80 of those pins for BCI members.) Eek.

So what ended up happening is we gave the books going to the US to Veronica’s dad, who mailed them out that Saturday (after we’d left), and left Veronica’s mother to fill out about 200 customs forms and stand in line for several hours at the USPS while they weighed and printed labels for everything. (We owe her so much, it’s ridiculous.)

And that was that. Kind of. Have you been keeping track of numbers? We had 200 books on hand, and sold 8 at ConnectiCon, and had to send 75 limited editions, as well as 130 normal ones. That’s right, we were short about 15 books! I noticed that the amount of books we were short matched up precisely with the amount of people who forgot to specify a sketch. So, despite Veronica’s wailing, I decided to screw ‘em, leave their order unaddressed, and send off an email about it, essentially saying “because you forgot to provide a sketch request, we’ll send you a standard book from Amazon, and mail out a sketch on a piece of paper from Australia in a couple weeks.” Those who responded with a request got their request. Those who responded with nothing got one of these:

So far we’ve had no complaints. (We offered refunds to those who’d be upset by the fact it wasn’t sketched in the actually book, of course. No takers.)

A few final notes: I made the stupid decision to fill one of our checked bags with books, so that we could benefit from local shipping rates for the 20 or so Australian book orders. Damn stupid idea, because guess what? What’s $3 as a local media mail package at USPS is as much as $16 in Australia. We lost about $150 on undercharged postage there, and should have just bit the bullet and left them with Veronica’s mother to mail out at the (eerily similar) international rate. Oh, and we had a dreadful time getting past the scales at the airports on the way home. What a mess.

Also, a few of those leftover people who forgot to ask for a sketch lived outside of the US, so I couldn’t just tell Amazon to dispatch them! Instead, I had to add all their addresses to my personal Amazon account, briefly lower the book’s price to 99 cents, and order 8 books, each to a different address, and pay for it all as some kind of strange jet set book customer with home addresses spanning Europe, South America and South Africa. Wherever I lay my hat, etc.

I forgot to talk about mailing lists here, by the way. I don’t know what to add about them. I gathered a list of 1450 email addresses “interested in the announcement of Volume One”, I used MailChimp to send them notifications of pre-orders, paid them a monthly fee for a few months, and then reverted to a free account once the second “Hey! You can buy the book now!” email went out. I found that about a third of the people who got the email never read it, about a third checked out the special preorder site, and about a sixth acted on the emails and bought a book in response.

There’s this whole art to writing newsletters that catch attention and sell books. I did my best, but I have to say my only philosophy was to keep it clean and simple, and I have nothing more interesting on it than that.

Next time, we’ll round up where the money went (including for FBA!) and whether it was worth doing all this crap to begin with.

[su-itca-se]

Preparing a Book is Hard

This is the first part of a series of posts about making Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume One. You may also wish to read the introduction to this series.

Preparing this book was a terrible ordeal.

We were faced with a number of problems in getting this book ready for print. If you’re not familiar with the offset printing process, essentially all you have to do is send three PDF files to your printing company: the cover, the endleaves and the interior. Specify how to build the book, pay them, have them delivered, and you’re done.

Three PDF files. But a lot of work goes into making them. Some of the problems I had were ordinary for people in the position of making their first book: having to learn Adobe InDesign (a print layout program, basically the only game in town these days), learning how to adapt to the printer’s templates and margin guidelines, and knowing which materials to specify you wanted the book made with.

Other problems I ran into, however, were more unique:

You see, the majority of this book’s comic pages were written on blue lined paper, in pencil. (It was a tradition Veronica kept for a while because BCB was basically just something for a handful of deviantART people to read, and the exercise paper was readily available.) I had to make each page look fine in print, a considerable task given that unfiltered pencil looks horrible in print and lined paper looks horrible anywhere.

The process began something like 3 years ago, when I got Veronica an Epson Perfection 4870, a giant high-quality scanner, and on one long night we put it to great use. I set it to automatically scan the glass every 20 seconds while Veronica sat beside it, feeding the machine page after page from her notebooks, until it was all done. We had uniform, high quality scans of all her work.

These were the updated scans that soon went into her new site. But they weren’t just used as-is, oh no. I spent a very long time working on the exact right Photoshop action to make the pencil look more inky, and the blue and red lines go away as much as possible. The result?

Not bad, right? The second picture is after processing in Photoshop, and the last picture is from the physical book. Turns out those faded grey lines are a little better defined in print than I would have liked, and this is one of the more obvious examples where they remained even after filtering. I still feel like I did the best job I could, though, having tested dozens of files with a strange set of actions that adjusted levels, replaced colours, selected and separated layers of grey from black, all the while trying to fade the lines without messing with the shading. That was hours of work, but so long ago I barely remember.

If you have a copy of the book (and have read it), you might notice the first 15 chapters or so don’t have the lines. The first image in this blog post is free of line residue, for instance. This is because Veronica manually erased them. The process took forever, so I told her to give up on it pretty early on, especially because I was pretty certain the printing process would make them invisible anyway. (Whoops!)

She did a lot of other time-intensive work, even once she gave up on cleaning the lines. We’ve been promoting the fact that there have been a lot of dialogue changes in Volume One, and that’s something you might notice throughout the book if you pay close attention. We came up with a Photoshop brush that mimicked the darkened pencil from the original scans, and Veronica erased and tweaked and removed various bits of dialogue across hundreds of pages. She also changed the art in certain places (just look above at Augustus’ smile, as an example.) This work alone took about a month, in-between her other projects.

So, after a lot of automatic and manual work, the revision of the old pages was complete. Next came file management. (How exciting.)

We had to run the filters on hundreds of pages across many ordered subdirectories. Then Veronica had to move them on and off her laptop, so she could do the editing away from home (our gigantic comic archive directory usually resides on my iMac.) You can get a feel for the organisation I adopted from this screenshot:

Needless to say, when I realised that the only efficient way to get the 500ish comic pages into InDesign was by pointing it to a folder full of files like 001.psd, 002.psd, etc and running the Image Catalog script (thanks Webcomics.com!), I was kind of upset at the idea of having to pull each folder out of this structure, rename each page, and so on. I wanted the computer to do that.

So I had to go to IRC, pretend I was earnestly learning how to shell script, and beg for the help that resulted in this little thing:

#! /bin/sh n=1; for dir in */600dpi-Photoshopped/; do cp -- separator.psd /Volumes/My\ Book/Book\ Design/targetdir/"$((n++)).psd"; for file in "$dir"/*; do cp -- "$file" /Volumes/My\ Book/Book\ Design/targetdir/"$((n++)).psd"; done done

I ran the above 10+ times when making the book, as I needed all the page files uniform for InDesign even though we both kept tweaking the original files and making the old consolidated folder obsolete. I include this dull sidenote because I found that managing files, even after enlisting the help of a magical shell script, took hours and hours of my time. It’s just one of the things you don’t necessarily expect, but was critical to the whole process.

Finally, I had an InDesign document to build.

You can click that one to see the full screenshot.

InDesign is complicated at first, but I guess it’s approachable if you understand traditional Adobe apps. I’m not going to go into the specifics of how to employ this complicated program to make a interior PDF file, but in the course of using it I learned how to set up page templates, manage and reconcile file links in the Links panel, and I even tried to use text styles effectively!

Either way, it’s an important program to learn how to use. I already benefitted from my newfound familiarity with it when I was preparing minicomics, and will certainly use it for all future books we make.

Of course, when you build a complicated InDesign document, you start to get antsy about how it’s gonna feel in the hand. This is where I found the suggested margins and gutter sizes really came into play. I used Lulu, a cheap print-on-demand service for quasi-proof copies.

(Thank Veronica for the above photo.) Each of these books cost like $25 to make. POD makes for a great deal and while the quality isn’t there, it helps you get a feel for how the real book will work.

That’s another thing I had to learn. The offset printer can’t actually supply anything like this, because their process is basically like turning on a machine that makes a thousand books in one run — you can’t just churn out one copy as practice. Lulu, on the other hand, are using a laser printer and automatic binding machines that can print just one copy for you to look at.

This is where you learn that for a thick book, you need at least a half inch gutter (I’d suggest more!) and that inconsistent page sizes are a pain in the ass to manage.

I guess before I thought about it, I had the idea that you could basically just hit “scale to page size” and print out your whole archive in varying proportions. Then I thought that with some minimal tweaking, Veronica could add extend the edges of each of her pages, and I could have what’s called “full bleed”, where your content extends right to the edge of the page. NO GO.

See, the way it works is like this:

You’ve got this safe zone, where you put everything that MUST be printed, and then you have a margin around that which will probably be printed (though the printer might shift around, and cut off one edge), and then you have an area that you must fill but isn’t really printed.

So you have to assume your final trimmed pages could be printed like any of these:

Any of those are possible if the printer is jiggling the pages around and getting them all wonky. And you are supposed to expect that.

This presents a problem if you want to take pages that weren’t designed for print (those with dialogue and important content going right up to the edge of the image) and extend the edges to fill the (rather large) margin space, because theoretically you could have pages that look like:

Eek! You can see how it’d go very wrong, especially for grid comics. Plus that extension technique starts to look really weird when you’re doing it an inch or so out on each side, “just in case”.

So we settled on just doing black borders around everything but the safe zone, which I thought was a cop-out solution until I realised basically every webcomic book in existence does it. (Go check, if you have other webcomic books. Nobody thinks about print until they’re 3 years in.)

On a few pages (eg. 410 and 549) I had Veronica fully extend the drawing to the edge for dramatic effect. Anything that felt illustration-ey got that treatment, but for the bulk of pages we just kept the pages contained in a black border. This minimised printing risk and reduced the effort required. I think for the grid comics this also made for a more aesthetically pleasing style.

But this section has a sad footnote: my experience with all the books we received was that despite all the warnings, the printer doesn’t actually jiggle around like they say it does, and you can basically trust the safe zone to actually go right up to the edges of the “probably printed” area on every page. I figure the printers are covering their asses and only guarantee a small safety zone when selling their product, but I would be more adventurous with the next volume. I’m not sure if I want to saddle Veronica (or someone else!) with the effort of extending the edges of all 200-some of her pages to cover the bleed area, though. Perhaps we will outsource.

I kind of glossed over paper size, by the way. Paper size is just as painful to work out.

You have to consider margins, safe zones and gutters when determining the paper size (or “trim size”, so say the professionals). With offset printers, you can actually pick any trim size you want, so I spent a few hours with a piece of paper and spent a few hours making this paper size table, linked to in the previous post.

From that, I was able to determine that we were lucky enough to be able to design the book around an A-series ratio of 1.42:1, which would be very helpful if we wanted our next volumes to be consistent (for New Beginnings and afterwards, all the pages are drawn on A4 paper.) It was quite important that the paper ratio of the majority of the comic pages put in the book be wider than the one I chose for the paper they were going on, because added space on the sides of a page are far less obvious than added space on the top of a page. (You can hide it in the gutter.) My only regret here was for a bunch of pages in Return, where Veronica used these dreadful wide pages that have plagued me ever since she made the chapter.

And yes, I’m aware that the book’s trim size of 9.25 x 6.75 is a 1.48:1 ratio, not a 1.42:1 one like A4. But you forget! Add a gutter on the inside edge. Add your margins. Add a half inch for the page number. Tada! Your safe zone minus page number in a 9.25 x 6.75 book is 1.42:1.

(Do you see how this could take an arts/law student more than a few hours to figure out.)

At some point I returned to automation, when it came to the task of aligning each comic in the centre of each page’s safe zone. InDesign’s inbuilt align tools are pretty miserable. So, I took to Freelancer.com, put up a request for someone who knew how to script the program, and a wonderful person wrote an AppleScript program for me that allowed me to align each image on each page to the top centre of each page’s safe zone. Cost me $100. Run the script, apply a black background, and done!

Of course, there was a lot more tweaking after that. It was a pain converting colour images (some of the incentive comics were colour) to black and white without wrecking them, but I was pretty pleased how the conversion did turn out. But at a certain point, the interior was done. I used my printer’s suggested PDF settings, and hit export. (I did this three times, actually.. I had some yellow (Y ink, as in CMYK) in my grey colours that took me a while to identify and replace with a K-only shade. Whoops!)

Oh, and remember how I mentioned “the endleaves”? There’s this whole process where there are four pages of endleaves on either side of a hardcover book, where page one is glued face down to the hardcover, page two is typically a pattern (I told the printer to print the cat faces pattern in blue, for a 20c-per-book charge!) and pages 3 and 4 are kind of like the first page of the book. So I had to shift some of the interior onto those pages.

Finally, we had the cover, which is the most simple thing to work out. Sure, you have margins and bleeds, but it’s just one wrap-around thing. The printer tells you how thick it’ll be, so I designed this:

The illustration on the cover came about after a lot of deliberation. In the end, I think it’s pretty attractive, though perhaps not as marketable as it could be. But this book is largely for fans, so I don’t feel too bad about it. The barcode is a real ISBN with price information, and it took me some time to confirm that the blue on yellow combination doesn’t confuse barcode scanners. The rest of it was just cribbed from other comic books.. the genre and pricing format adapted from Scott Pilgrim, the synopsis loosely based on a number of comics and novels on our shelves.

And, like that, we were done! The content was produced, arranged, and sent off to the printer. (I skipped the part where Veronica had to draw 25 pages of new comics and 80 chapter title illustrations, by the way. That was a whole lot of work which added a lot to the book and took weeks.)

There were a few other considerations before printing, of course. Specifically, the configuration of the book. From the start, we wanted to make sure the paper we used looked professional. I asked for paper like the type you see in manga books, yellowed and rough, and we ended up with “Abibow #80”, which fit the bill perfectly. Our printer fedexed us a copy of another comic that had the same type of paper, which helped in our decision.

You can get a feel for the final paper we used in the photo above, if you don’t have a copy of the book.

Picking between hardcover and paperback was a bit more of a last-minute thing. I assumed that the pricing would be like it is on Lulu: if your paperback is $5, it’s $15 with a hardcover. But nope! We were looking at a $2 premium. So we went with it. It made the book more durable, increased its perceived value, and generally allowed it to stand out a bit. It’s not just a thick book, it’s a solidly built one.

In the end, I was quite satisfied with how the book ended up. I do have some regrets, but they’re few. If you truly must know, the flaws I identified in the final work were:

David appears way too dark in “Tread Carefully”. What looked good on the screen didn’t look good on paper.

The lined paper was a bit more visible than I wanted. I should have had Veronica erase it all.

There are two unnecessary black pages at the end, left over because the printer messed up. Remember how I had to move some of the interior to the endleaves? They forgot to reduce the interior page count once those pages were moved, so I ended up with two black pages.

The bundles of pages were bound in a way that left the last two pages of the book loosely bound to the spine, and liable to fall out if put under stress.

That’s about it, though, and it’s not too bad! I was really nervous about making a spelling error, or totally misaligning something, or (heaven forbid!) duplicating or moving a page by accident. Yet after double and triple and quadruple checking, all of the errors in the final product were the kind that are almost impossible to predict.

Once it was done, we ended up paying for 1600 copies of the book. It worked out that the quotes were along the lines of $7,000 for 500, $8,000 for 1000, and $8,500 for 1500 books. (And they had 100 overrun, which they make you pay for.) So we have an absurd amount of books in stock, but for not much more than it would have cost for 500 copies. 

So that’s what I have to say about the technical work behind preparing the BCB book for print. In the next post I will discuss what I learnt about distributing hundreds of books around the world. It can get kinda complicated when the books are printed in Canada, your main customer base is the US, and you personally live in Australia.

[su-itca-se]

Printing a Book is Hard

This is the introduction to a series of posts about making Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume One. Please read: part one, part two and part three.

The more I try my hand at making BCB a serious media venture, the more I have realised how naïve it is to assume the internet is a world-flattening, democratising force of the universe. Maybe it’s simple to tweet or tumbl your ideas, and to that point, it’s true.

But publishing a webcomic on the web requires all sorts of technical, marketing and business expertise. Producing and selling merchandise based on what you publish is a busier endeavour, where creativity gives way to the consideration of minimum orders and materials science and the whims of the marketplace. Going alone may cut out the publisher, distributor, or middleman, but you end up spending so much time trying to learn about the process of doing things, you may as well be filtering your work through somebody who knows.

Self-publishing a book is the best example of this phenomenon so far. Once again, Veronica and I were forced to become jacks-of-all-trades, learning about and working within the constraints of printed books. Here is an unordered list of things that I, personally, now understand that I did not understand before:

Adobe InDesign

Bowker and the ISBN system

Appropriate margins and gutters

Customer order fulfilment services

Selling on Amazon.com

Barcode legibility

Paypal CSV transaction export

Basic file operations through shell scripting

International freight

Endleaves

The black-and-white end of working with a CMYK colour process

Paper weight

Mail Merge in Microsoft Word

Sending bulk email and managing a mailing list.

These were all critical skills used in the process of producing this:

A book remarkable in that it is 600 pages long, contains comics drawn on pages with 8 different paper aspect ratios, required hundreds of hours of Veronica’s time to both completely replace chapters and read and edit every single damn line of dialogue, took three (or more?) proofreaders to find any remaining errors, and was mostly originally drawn on a medium that doesn’t even look good on the web, let alone print (lead pencil on lined paper).

It could have been a 100 page thing on Lulu. But we kind of went all out. I know certain webcomic artists have the same struggles in coming to terms with InDesign’s interface quirks and mulling over print-on-demand and offset printing and so on. But I feel like we tackled just about every problem we could with this project, and even if we didn’t it sure felt like it.

And guess what — after spending countless hours preparing it, it was the most expensive thing we’ve ever had to pour money into!

Almost $13,000! You can buy three Volkswagen Beetles for that. And these are mostly sunk costs. I mean, we did get 9 extra ISBNs, and a neat image alignment script, and some leftover Sharpies. And 18,943 airline miles.

Still, not a whole lot left over, besides 1600 books to sell. (How we got to that quantity is another story.) And while $8 per book against a list price of $49 isn’t a bad tradeoff, let’s not get too hasty and assume we’ll sell every book we made!

I think in the old days, once you had a publisher, they would give you a template to draw on and you would use that template and they would do everything else. And if not for the vague feeling that some day this is all going to be useful, I can see many hundreds of hours worth of value in a company that deals with this technical crap for you.

But that's not how it went. We did it alone. And I want to try and expand on some of what I learnt at least for our curious readers, if not fellow artists and writers and people-who-help-artists-and-writers.

...

And.. uh.. I still haven't started on the details and already this is a long post. For structure's sake, I will do a few separate posts on how the book came together, because otherwise I’m going to lose you in dense walls of text.

Next time, we’ll talk about how Veronica and I prepared the content for print. (Then we’ll get to distribution. Then we’ll do money.)

[su-itca-se]

Introduction

Here I am. Another medium (Tumblr!), another time.

Baggage Claim is gonna be where I post small articles I’ve always wanted to write but never had the space for.

Just so you know — I’m “SuitCase”, a person who is now largely defined by my involvement in Bittersweet Candy Bowl, a webcomic made by the love of my life, “Taeshi”. I know people, I do and make things, and I study (previously, a BA in history and English, currently, a law degree.) But in online terms, BCB is where my head has been for the last 18 months, and it’s something I want to talk about.

I strive to be honest, so you should get a better idea of me by the time I've written a few entries. 

I hope my writing amuses and interests, regardless.