This has been a really fun project.
Way before we met, my darling spouse and I were both fans of the Rainbow Knight comics (which was the first original mahou shoujo story in our neck of the woods). It had been published in 2004-2009 in a magazine for girls — each issue had like 30-ish pages, and 10-12 of those were the actual comics. In 2009 the writer and the artists were abruptly fired, and the story was cut short a couple of issues before the end of Arc Two. But it had quite an ardent fanbase, and the writer was kind enough to share their vision for where the story was going, going so far as to post the script for the last issue of Arc Two and the third and final arc in its entirety.
And we happened to have 45 out of 50 issues in our collection. So, we cut out the pages with the comics, printed out the issues we didn’t have, typeset the scripts, and there you have it: two arcs of the Rainbow Knights comics collected in hardcover volumes.
Each arc is focused on a single knight out of the original three and deals with more or less a single Seal (there are seven of those, it’s a whole thing. What’s important is, each seal has a very clear symbol). So, first volume’s theme is the Knight of the Red Beam (her ability is fire-based), and irises. The second volume is the Knight of the Yellow Beam (her ability theme wind), and doves. Had the story ever been completed, the third volume would have been blue for the Knight of the Blue Beam with motifs of water and olive branches.
As is, we collected assorted bonus content (character files, short side comics about the knights, script for the third arc, covers of the issues we had) into a black volume with the series logo and rainbow endpapers.
My spouse carefully cut all the pages, marbled the endpapers, and assembled the cases. I typeset everything that we needed to print, designed the covers, and linoprinted the fabric. We made the textblocks together.
This was such a labor of love and I’m very happy with the way the books turned out. Can’t wait to revisit this story in its new form <3
