The ZGXP (Part 5 - Knee Deep in Comics)

I got off track somewhere along the line in my blog. I had begun writing the blog with a recap of what I'd done the previous week, but last week I regaled you with tales of what I'd be doing this week. Now I don't have anything to talk about.

Well, okay, that's not entirely true. I should fill in the intervening time. It's been almost a week since I made the estimate that I'd have 540 pages of comics paneled by this Wednesday. It was an audacious claim and one that I made hastily, but I'm still confident it's doable. Fortunately, I realized it would be more work than I was counting on and requested some test pages from the client. The new comic would be black and white, as opposed to the color pages for our previous comic with this client. This posed some interesting technical problems. When the image was scaled down in size and quality, we were noticing some weird checkerboard patterns in the stippled backgrounds. It took our artist and me a while to find the right combination of quality and size that reduced this pattern but also left the text legible. Once we had that figured out, I relayed that information to the client so they could scale the pages accordingly for us.

Today the 500+ pages were waiting for me. It's a manga series broken up into 14 issues of 30 – 50 pages apiece. Luckily, our artist (she has a name, and it is "Sara") was pretty much done with her other project, so I managed to snag her for paneling the comics all day. Just today I got through five issues. I had Sara redoing the panels on another comic we needed for the Reader. She got those two books done (about 180 pages) and an issue of our new manga done as well.

So, in one day, even with Sara working on another project for part of it, we got 6 of the 14 issues paneled and tested in the Reader. The paneling being done by Wednesday seems like it will be the easy part. Paneling the comics is only half the battle. The second part of my estimate (it's turned into more of a wager) had been that we'd be able to ship the new comics to Apple by Friday. This takes a bit more effort. We'll need to incorporate some new art assets for the front end of the Reader. We'll need copy from the client. Perhaps trickiest of all, I'll need to snag an engineer to actually tinker with the code to get these assets implemented. Again, there will be some unexpected delays, but it's my job as a producer to expect and avoid them. Tune in next week to see how it goes.