Advance Copies Arrived!
about 3 years ago – Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 08:01:40 AM

Greetings Backers!

This is just a quick update to show you pictures of the advance copies which arrived to us. 

We are thrilled with how glossy and pretty they look. Howard even managed to find the typo, so now we can relax because we've discovered where it is. (Every book has at least one typo which we invariably discover after it is too late to correct it for this printing. We'll correct it for a second print run if this book happens to get one.)

I am informed that 17 pallets of books and slipcases have been loaded onto a container ship and are enroute to us. It always amuses me when the person from the shipping company very politely tries to make sure that I understand exactly how much space 17 pallets will take up when it arrives. I definitely need to clear some floor for it, but it'll all fit.

Fortunately the ship with our books does not have to transit the Suez Canal and so won't be caught in the traffic jam over there, but the whole shipping freight system is affected and slowed slightly, so delivery will likely be early May instead of the last week of April. 

Your next full update is scheduled for the week of April 26-30.

Thank you for supporting Schlock!

Howard and Sandra 

Progress Update #18
about 3 years ago – Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 03:25:56 PM

Greetings Backers,

TL;DR: Just waiting for bulk shipments to arrive so we can ship to you. Current expected ETA to our warehouse is the week of April 26, but there might be a one week delay. Details below.

It has been almost two months since you last heard from us, during that time we've gone a couple of extra rounds with the printer to identify errors and make corrections. Including the mini-saga of the lost Schlock Mercenary strip, which I tell in detail below. (short version: we didn't find it, but we fixed the problem by different means.) I was hoping to have photographs of our advance copies for this update, unfortunately they're in some sort of shipping limbo where I've had a tracking number since Tuesday, but the online tracker says it has no data other than that the label was printed. This is actually fairly normal for an international package. Frequently the package arrives before the tracking information ever updates. Sometime in the next couple of days we'll have those advance copies and approve the bulk shipment to be sent out to us.  The listed schedule for delivery from the printer shows us ahead of schedule until 1/19, but then the printer needed an image correction and had questions about the slipcase which ate up some days to solve. Right now it looks like the bulk shipment will be about a week behind the original estimate.

Estimated Schedule for delivery from the printer:

• Files in: 2021-01-01 (actually uploaded 12/31/2020)
• Plotters & proofs ex China: 2021-01-13 (They arrived to us on 1/13)
• Corrections in: 2021-01-20 (I submitted corrections on 1/15)
• Updated low-res PDFs out: 2021-01-22 (Received 1/19)
• Ok to print:2021-01-25 (Approved 1/19)
• (Factory is closed from Feb 06-21 due to CNY holiday)
• RTS date: 2021-03-16 (I should have gotten advance copies by this date. Still waiting for them to arrive.)
• ETD HK: 2021-03-22 (Delayed pending approval of the advance copies.)
• ETA at Taylercorp: 2021-04-26 (probably going to be delayed by a week.

Once the books arrive at our warehouse, Howard will sign all the  covers and Sandra will immediately ship out the unsketched orders. We'll  have a more specific schedule on sketching once we reach that point.

We're also waiting on the bulk shipment of Tiny Planet Mercenary books. The good folks at Gallant Knight Games are chasing down the causes for delay there, we suspect pandemic supply chain issues.

Progress Updates

Big Dumb Objects book: Done! Waiting on advance copies and bulk shipment

Confelicity/Schadenfreude Coin: Done! 

Tiny Planet Mercenary: Done! Just waiting on the bulk shipment to arrive.

Slipcase: Done! Waiting for bulk shipment to arrive.

Warning Sign Stickers: Done! If you missed picking up stickers as part of your Kickstarter, you can get them in our store.

Enamel Pins: Done! We've put some of the spare Landon pins in our store, so if you missed   adding them to your order, you can get one now.

Escape From the Friggen Jungle PDF:   Done!  

Kitesfear model: Done! They're safely stowed waiting for shipping day.

It feels really good to have everything in production or ready to go.

The Mini-Saga of the Missing Strip

The first step to making a Schlock Mercenary book out of a pile of strip images is a rough layout. Sandra plunks all the strips into place and then goes page by page through the resulting book comparing it to the online archive to make sure that all the strips are in the correct order and all footnotes are in place. This step is critical because "plunk all the strips into place" is a very repetitive process and errors creep in. In the case of Big Dumb Objects, I discovered that a strip was missing. I rearranged the other strips to make space for it on the page, and then went back to my folder of all the strips to grab it. The strip was not there. I grabbed a low resolution image from the website to hold the place and wrote myself a big note to ask Howard to go find the missing strip for me. I may have even sent an email requesting Howard go find me a better copy of that strip. At the time Howard was stressed and our entire house was being turned upside down with repairs from a sewer problem, so I didn't pursue it. But I still had the note. To remind me. 

Then we moved from house reconstruction, to daughter's wedding, to Howard is sick, to pandemic shut downs, to the comic has ended. All without breaks. By the time I was doing final passes on the book, I saw the note and was absolutely certain that I'd already fixed it. I remembered seeing the note multiple times and doing ...something. Reader, the "something" I did, on multiple occasions, was to look at the note  and think "Yes I need to fix that." Yet somehow that got transformed into "I fixed that already, didn't I?" Which then led to me removing the note because I'd fixed the problem. (I hadn't.)

So the book went off to print with a thousand high-resolution strips and one low resolution one. 

One of the first checks the printer runs is to look for images where the resolution is below 300dpi. The printer ran the regular check and I had to make image corrections for a couple of pieces of margin art. This is normal. I have no idea why this routine check failed to notice the one low resolution strip at the usual time. But it was only when they were getting ready to bind the book that they noticed one of the strips was too blurry, then they contacted me. And I realized I had not in fact replaced the low resolution place-holder with a print resolution strip. 

This is where our lives are quite different than they were before. Instead of carefully waiting for Howard to have a work pause and then sending the rest of his day sideways in a panicked search for the lost strip, I was able to walk into his office and tell him about the problem, and he calmly went on a quest to find it. He delved through his regular archive, his back up of his archive, then into the old back ups he made before he switched machines. We were able to find the high resolution black and white scan, but somehow the full color, high resolution, version was completely missing in the archives even while the web-resolution strip was sitting in plain view on the website. Near as we can tell it went missing right when it was uploaded. 

Our best guess is that there was a naming error. All the strips are named by date and punchline like this: 20210319-Too-Many-Monkeys. If there is a typo in the date, the auto filer on the computer will stick the strip in a very different location than we expect. In order for the strip to air correctly on the website, the date has to be perfectly correct. So in the summer of 2015 we probably had a day where the strip mysteriously didn't update. Then we frantically found the strip by going to the (since deleted) transfer folder and fixed the date for the online strip, but we never went and found or fixed the print resolution version. 

In the end, Howard took the high-resolution black and white scan, combined it with the low resolution color image so that the lines were sharp even though the colors were a touch pixelated. Voila! It took Howard about fifteen minutes once he stopped the futile searching for the file that exists somewhere we-know-not-where. 

I uploaded the correct strip to the printer and they re-printed the signature of pages where the strip appeared. Fortunately there was no extra cost to us since they hadn't caught the problem when they were supposed to. The signature of pages with the correct strip was then combined with all the other signatures for binding.

Thus ends the mini-saga of the missing Schlock strip. If you want to go Easter egg hunting, you can try to figure out which strip we had to perform surgery on to bring it up to print resolution. 

Thank you again to everyone who supported this project and who  continued to be kind while we figured out how to get it done despite a  series of life-disrupting events. Your next update will be the week of April 26-30, which might be delivery week for the bulk shipment.

Thank you so much for backing our project,

Howard and Sandra

Progress Update #17
over 3 years ago – Tue, Jan 19, 2021 at 12:06:20 AM

Greetings Backers,

TL;DR: Everything is either off to print or already arrived. Sketching and shipping will begin in April. Details below.

We've entered a new phase with this Kickstarter. Everything is in the hands of the printers and manufacturers so we just have to wait. Howard and Sandra will spend this wait time preparing for our next projects. We'll talk about those down below, but first the updates for this project. 

Estimated Schedule for delivery from the printer 

Files in: 2021-01-01 (actually uploaded 12/31/2020)

Plotters & proofs ex China: 2021-01-13 (They arrived to us on 1/13)

Corrections in: 2021-01-20 (I submitted corrections on 1/15)

Updated low-res PDFs out: 2021-01-22

Ok to print:2021-01-25

(Factory is closed from Feb 06-21 due to CNY holiday)

RTS date: 2021-03-16

ETD HK: 2021-03-22

ETA at Taylercorp: 2021-04-26

So you can see that we're currently running about five days ahead of schedule. After books arrive at our warehouse, Howard will sign all the covers and Sandra will immediately ship out the unsketched orders. We'll have a more specific schedule on sketching once we reach that point.

Progress Updates

Big Dumb Objects book: Done! We've submitted approvals and corrections to the printer, now we're waiting on corrected proofs before the official Okay to Print. (Details and photos below.)

Confelicity/Schadenfreude Coin: Done! When Howard finally had brain space to look at the design, he approved it as is. This preserved creative brain for other tasks.

Tiny Planet Mercenary: Done! If a PDF copy was part of your order, you should have it in your hands now. The Mayhem cards have been approved and are in production. The book proofs still haven't arrived, so Alan is poking the system to see where they got lost during the holiday season. Once the book proof is approved, the production order will be placed. 

Slipcase: Done! Being printed as you read this.

Warning Sign Stickers: Done! If you missed picking up stickers as part of your Kickstarter, you can get them in our store.

Enamel Pins: Done! We've put some of the spare Landon pins in our store, so if you missed   adding them to your order, you can get one now.

Escape From the Friggen Jungle PDF:   Done!  and delivered.

Kitesfear model: Done! They're safely stowed waiting for shipping day.

It feels really good to have everything in production or ready to go.

The Proof Copies

The day we get our proof copies from the printer is always exciting. It is our first chance to see exactly what the printed pages will look like.

We were particularly interested to double check the slipcase to make sure that it looked good and that all the books fit correctly. 

They do!

The resolution on the test box is low, so they also sent us a high resolution image of the slipcase for us to inspect.

We also get a set of Plotter Proofs, which are low-resolution pages that are bound into signatures in exactly the order that they'll be in the final book. One of Sandra's jobs is to go through the plotter proofs page by page to make sure that everything is in the correct order.

In this case the everything was in order except for one spot on the back cover. Sandra made a graphic for the printer to demonstrate the problem.

Since the person we communicate with via email is not the same person who receives the returned proofs in China, we also circled the error and made a note for the factory so they would know to fix the problem before printing.

At the moment we're waiting for the physical proofs to transit back to China. Then the people on their end will output a corrected PDF. At which point Sandra will okay things to go to print. We've loved our partnership with this company. They catch errors we missed and have saved us from mistakes more than once. 

What is next for Howard and Sandra?

We're already hard at work creating books 17 & 18. The current plan is to try to get them ready to run a Kickstarter in April when this Kickstarter is shipping out. This time we want the covers, bonus stories, coin designs, margin art, and everything completely ready to go to print as soon as the Kickstarter funding closes. We'd like our next project to have a faster turn around and to deliver on schedule. 

To that end, Howard has been designing all four remaining Schlock Mercenary book covers as a group. For this image he's dropped in placeholder art.

Howard is now focused on learning digital painting tools so that he can create final art for the cover of A Little Immortality. Once he's learned the tools, we expect the other three cover images will go fairly quickly. Howard already has an outline for the bonus story for A Little Immortality. He'll also be working on that in parallel with the cover since writing and arting take up different portions of brain.

Sandra is working with her in-house assistants to set up the warehouse so that it is ready to receive pallets of books and slipcases. She's also going to focus on putting some new merchandise into the store to help keep the business solvent until we're ready to launch the next Kickstarter. When not working directly on Schlock Mercenary things, Sandra has started teaching online classes and has been working on writing fiction. 

If you want more details on what we're up to, you can sign up for our newsletter. For more day-to-day updates follow Howard on twitter, or Sandra on Twitter. (Note, twitter feeds include political opinions.) Sandra has her own newsletter as well. We have lots of projects in various stages and we enjoy talking about them.

Thank you again to everyone who supported this project and who continued to be kind while we figured out how to get it done despite a series of life-disrupting events. Since the project is mostly in a waiting-on-manufacturing stage, the next update will be a little further out. You can expect to hear from us the week of March 15-19. 

Thank you so much for backing our project,

Howard and Sandra

Most of you have filled out your surveys, Thank You! If for any  reason you did not receive your survey, or if you need to update your  address, you can go to https://big-dumb-objects-schlock-mercenary-book-16.backerkit.com/ and login to fill out your survey. If you've tried that and are still  having trouble, email [email protected] and we'll help.

Progress Updated #16
over 3 years ago – Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 10:00:48 PM

Greetings Backers,

TL;DR: The book should be off to print before the end of the year.  Check the Tiny PM update below for info about what to expect for PDF delivery within the week. Read all the way through to see some process images for the BDO bonus story.

Sign up for our Newsletter! If you want to  continue to be apprised   of all Howard and Sandra Tayler projects and not  just the ones related   to this Kickstarter, we recommend you sign up for our newsletter.

Most of you have filled out your surveys, Thank You! If for any reason you did not receive your survey, or if you need to update your address, you can go to https://big-dumb-objects-schlock-mercenary-book-16.backerkit.com/ and login to fill out your survey. If you've tried that and are still having trouble, email [email protected] and we'll help.

Progress Updates

Here is the current status of deliverables in this project.

Big Dumb Objects book: Bonus story will be complete by the end of this week.  Cover finalization should follow. We really want this into the  hands of the printer before Christmas. But it might be the week between Christmas and New Year. Either way, so close! We'll finally be moving onward to production and fulfillment instead of creation. Some fun details about Howard's art process with the bonus story are below. 

Confelicity/Schadenfreude Coin: We still hope to get this into manufacturing prior to Christmas, but the design still needs Howard's art eye, and Sandra is keeping his art eye focused on finishing the book first.

Tiny Planet Mercenary: I have word from Alan that print proofs are on the way to me. This means that the PDF version should release to backers within the next week.  If you ordered Tiny Planet Mercenary, be on the lookout for an email from DriveThruRPG.com. It will have a link for you to login (or create an account) and claim your PDF. You'll get two separate emails, one for the book PDF and the other for the Mayhem card PDF.  We expect print copies to be at the Hypernode Media warehouse in early January. We'll ship out all the orders which don't also contain print copies of Big Dumb Objects as soon as the books are in hand. 

Slipcase: The design is done and ready to  send to print. The book and slipcase have to be sent to print at the same time, so this is waiting for the book to be done.

Warning Sign Stickers: Complete! Orders  which only contained stickers have been sent out. If you missed picking  up stickers as part of your Kickstarter, you can get them in our store. 

Enamel Pins: Complete! They look amazing.   We've put some of the spare Landon pins in our store, so if you missed  adding them to your order, you can get one now. 

Escape From the Friggen Jungle PDF:    Complete!  If this is a part of your order, you should have received  an email with  download information. If you did not get an email, you  can use the link at the top of this update to login and download your  copy.

Kitesfear model: Complete! They're safely stowed waiting for shipping day.

Howard's process for creating this bonus story has been quite different from prior efforts. Some of this process may be adapted to future comic stories, others will remain unique to this bonus story. Howard has been creating art digitally, printing it, coloring with marker, then using digital art for finalizing detail. Howard's commentary grabbed from a Twitter thread he posted on 12/6.

Howard: One of the joys of marker colors is the randomization of texture you get. The black lines are laser-printed at 600dpi from vector art, so if you zoom in and see pixelation in the black, there's your scale.

Howard: Same panel, scanned at 600dpi, laid into place in the page, and more black linework added digitally (using Clip Studio Paint.) This was last night's work.

Howard: A couple of things you might notice in the final:  1) The right-most character's right eye has moved 2) The pink wings have black outlines they lacked in the original marker art.   Funny story there...

Howard: 1) I had already started coloring when I realized her eyes were too close together. I decided to fix it digitally by copying and pasting marker textures from her forehead to fill the gap left when I moved her right eye to the right. 2) At about the same time I realized that a hadn't even DRAWN her wings.  I knew I'd be adding linework digitally anyway, so I eyeballed it, no construction lines, and just went straight in with the pink marker (Copic Violet 06), and *whew* got the shapes right.  

Howard: The last spread will be like the others, with an all-digital two-page spread of big SF stuff behind inset panels of story.  In a meta-moment, I realized that it could look amazing if some of the big page spread elements were done with markers.   Which is to say, the spread will NOT be like the others, because I'm an idiot who has decided to try being artsy.  The meta? The first page of the story is entirely digital. Marker art appears with the first page turn. With the final page turn we change locations, and only the starfield is digital. Everything else (including a planet, oh-no-what-have-I-done) will be rendered with markers.

Howard: Not being a COMPLETE idiot, I've thumbnailed a bunch of this stuff digitally so I can lock in the compositional bits and know that the page spread works *before* I start committing markers to paper.  (Still very WIP. "Get ref!" means "GET REFERENCE FOR SPACE STATION, SILLY MAN.")  And the starfield itself is a work-in-progress, too. All the foreground-ish bits (nebula, star-eating-star, etc) are in their own layers and can be scooched around.

In the ten days since that thread, Howard has nearly finalized that last two-page spread. He needs to do a final effects pass on all the pages, then we'll print the pages for an on-paper color check. 

This bonus story is so close to being done!

Many thanks to all of you backers who have been so patient with us  this past year while the project kept getting more and more overdue.  Yes there was a pandemic and Howard's health issues, but we still feel like we could have been more prompt with delivery. Thank you for sticking with us and extending your trust. We're excited  to be getting to the point where we're finalizing the last few things  and sending off to manufacture.

The next progress update will be the week of January 18-22.

Thank you so much for backing our project,

Howard and Sandra

PS: You may see us on other platforms pushing products, announcing  sales, or being stressed about money in these uncertain times. This is  because we have sequestered the funds to pay for printing and shipping  your books and other items. We are not allowed to touch those funds for   day-to-day living, they're reserved to fulfill our  promises to you. Day-to-day living money is a separate fund and  we'll likely need to  hustle to keep that fund healthy through the economic shifts that are already beginning and are likely to continue  through the next months. In particular we've been increasing our  offerings over on the   Schlock Patreon site and Sandra's Patreon,  because having a steady source of income seems like a very good thing for creatives like us.

Progress Update #15
over 3 years ago – Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 11:25:22 PM

Greetings Backers,

TL;DR: Howard is finalizing the bonus story pages.  We have a draft of the Confelicity/Schadenfreude coin. Tiny PM is headed for print.  We have some giftable items available in our online store. Details below.

Sign up for our Newsletter! If you want to  continue to be apprised  of all Howard and Sandra Tayler projects and not  just the ones related  to this Kickstarter, we recommend you sign up for our newsletter.

Most of you have filled out your surveys, Thank You! If for any   reason you did not receive your survey, or if you need to update your   address, you can go to https://big-dumb-objects-schlock-mercenary-book-16.backerkit.com/ and login to fill out your survey. If you've tried that and are still    having trouble, email [email protected] and we'll help.

Progress Updates

Here is the current status of deliverables in this project.

Big Dumb Objects book: Howard has been working on bonus story pages at a pace of about one page per day. He plans to finish the 12-13 spread today. That only leaves pages 14-17. Then he has to do a final effects pass on all the pages, so we're optimistic that the bonus story will be complete the first week of December. Cover finalization should follow. We really want this into the hands of the printer before Christmas.

Confelicity/Schadenfreude Coin: This one stalled in the past month because Sandra had too many irons in the fire. However we hope to get this sent to manufacturing before Christmas as well. 

Tiny Planet Mercenary: The book is in the very last tweaking stages. We should have the PDF version sent to backers the first week of December. Hopefully we'll have the print version ready to deliver to backers before the end of December, but much depends on the schedule of our Print on Demand printer. We don't know how the holiday season rush will slow down production or delivery, except that turn around is likely to be slower than if we'd gone to print during a different month. 

Slipcase: The design is done and ready to send to print. The book and slipcase have to be sent to print at the  same time, so this is waiting for the book to be done.

Warning Sign Stickers: Complete! Orders which only contained stickers have been sent out. If you missed picking up stickers as part of your Kickstarter, you can get them in our store. They make great holiday gifts.

Enamel Pins: Complete! They look amazing.  We've put some of the spare Landon pins in our store, so if you missed adding them to your order, you can get one now. We're also running a sale, buy four pins get the 5th one free. Pins make great small gifts.

Escape From the Friggen Jungle PDF:   Complete!  If this is a part of your order, you should have received an email with  download information. If you did not get an email, you can use the link at the top of this update to login and download your copy.

Kitesfear model: Complete! They're safely stowed waiting for shipping day.

Many thanks to all of you backers who have been so patient with us this past year while the project kept getting more and more overdue. Thank you for sticking with us and extending your trust. We're excited to be getting to the point where we're finalizing the last few things and sending off to manufacture.

The next progress update will be the week of December 14-19.

Thank you so much for backing our project,

Howard and Sandra

PS: You may see us on other platforms pushing products, announcing sales, or being stressed about money in these uncertain times. This is because we have sequestered the funds to pay for printing and shipping your books and other items. We are not allowed to touch those funds for  day-to-day living, they're reserved to fulfill our  promises  to   you.   Day-to-day living money is a separate fund and  we'll likely need   to  hustle to keep that fund healthy through the  economic shifts that   are already beginning and are likely to continue  through the next   months. In particular we've been increasing our  offerings over on the  Schlock Patreon site and Sandra's Patreon,  because having a steady source of income seems like a very good thing for creatives like us.