While I have been able to scan most of the art for this webcomic directly from the originals, about 100 pages of original art sold early on. Back in the Dark Ages we shot art directly from photo negatives, so most of the early pages on A Distant Soil were not digitized before sale.

About a dozen pages from issue #4 and every page from issue #5 (but one) had to be scanned from the book. I am not sure if you can tell, since we are using very high res scans (1200 dpi). However, if you have any of this art, please contact me.

For those of you who know what happens in issue 4 and 5, you know why the art sold so quickly. I’m anxious to see how it will look online.

Whew, can you believe we are at the end of issue #3 already? So much time to draw it, so little time to pop it all on a blog. I am going to switch to posting pages five days a week starting this week. Our traffic drops considerably on weekends. I guess people are reading the blog at work! Hah!

I’ve taken all the A Distant Soil original art off the market so it could be scanned and properly archived. Once a page goes up on the webcomic blog, it is available for sale. Please inquire.

Technical note; I got a letter from someone about a week ago asking me why A Distant Soil wasn’t being shot digitally while Image was routinely shooting art digitally for the last ten years.

1) Image didn’t switch to digital for the majority of their books until after the year 2000. I got that directly from Jim Valentino, and he ought to know.

2) The art from A Distant Soil predates my going to Image in 1996. I self published the book in 1991. All my art was shot from original pages, and back then, everyone was using negatives.

3) The first 180 pages of A Distant Soil originals were drawn to magazine proportions. This dates back to a publishing stint with a company called Starblaze, and they did large scale books. The original art is much larger than standard comic art, which makes it difficult to scan on computer (much more difficult ten years ago than now.)

At the time I did the art, there was no way to add tones to original art by computer. All of my tones are directly applied by hand. Because the original art is larger than normal, the tones reproduce smaller than normal and without precise control, they look muddy when printed.

The early computer scans were dreadful. Our printer attempted to scan the pages at 300 dots per inch. Because of the size of the art and the tone sheets we used, the art cannot be scanned at 300 dpi. It requires a minimum of 600 dpi, and 1200 is better. But at the time, the printer could not do it. Few printers had scanners that could go to 1200 dpi, and fewer had large platen scanners.

So, all of the early editions of the graphic novels had to be shot directly from negatives. In fact, with original line art like this, it is actually better to shoot negatives than to scan because the scanner will pick up dust and minor flaws the camera will not. The camera will see clean black lines only, while the scanner will translate grey pencil lines and dust into black showing flaws the eye won’t catch.

Now that I have a scanner that can shoot 1200 dpi, and also has a very large platen, I can get excellent quality scans and no stitching the pics together! I actually have a better system than our printers had ten years ago (thanks, J!).

4) Because hand applied tones and digital tones do not look the same when printed, I will continue to do all of my art by hand to retain the look of the book until the series is finished. And then I am going to chuck these tone sheets forever.

5) I will probably be saying goodbye to hand lettering then, too. I am going to continue to hand letter the rest of the series, but will be redoing the lettering of part of the series when we finally get around to a final edition of these books. You’ll know it when you see it, but when I started lettering the book myself, the results were sad to see.