Jaka's Story Restoration Begins...

Greetings friends and Cerebus Restoration patrons,

I've been quiet on the blog front because of amount of things I'm currently trying to juggle, namely, getting the last pieces of Reads in place so we can move forward printing it with Marquis, and using all other spare time to try to finish Cerebus Volume One, while planning the next step forward.

The next step forward? It just so happens that the next book chronologically also happens to be the book with the lowest inventory—Jaka's Story. (It also happens to be one of my three favorite individual Cerebus volumes, along with Church & State II and Going Home.)

For those reasons and a few others, it's the perfect subject for the series I discussed in the last restoration update—a series of how-to articles that detail the step-by-step process I use to put together one of these books, from selecting a scanner to working with a printer. It'll include evaluations of a bunch of the most commonly available scanners, sample Photoshop scripts for different tasks, possibly even some video and sample files to work with. Although Jaka's Story will not be anywhere near as work-intensive for me given the condition of the materials, it should provide a good overview for people who have to do this kind of production work themselves, and a good repository for the information I've picked up over the past two years.

But hey, it's all promises until the first installment arrives, right? So I'll be on my way now and get on that!

Restoration Update:

Reads: The corrections for the edited text have arrived from Dave, and the completed text will be dropped into the template this morning/today, pending approval of the revisions I've made to the layout of the text pages. Other missing elements—my essay (half complete, accompanied by the before and after images for the back, which are all done), the thank-yous (waiting on JF to supply them).

Church & State II: All now complete save essay and back matter/thank-you's

Cerebus Volume One: Approximately 60 pages left, and then any revisions that will need to be made once I've made 11 x 17 "soft proofs" of the whole shebang.

Jaka's Story: A few hundred pages of scanning already completed. Once all of the original art has arrived, I'll figure out what we're missing and we'll make a list for what negatives we'll need to fill in the gaps, if there are any!

In the meanwhile...