Comments on: BAST by Nick Cardy

By: Colleen Doran

Colleen Doran — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 13:57:53 +0000

In reply to Carol. :) Maybe someday, but it would definitely take a lot of money!

By: Carol

Carol — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 17:57:00 +0000

Would it take a lottery for a colour edition? Could we kickstart a colour edition? 😎

By: Stewart Vernon

Stewart Vernon — Sun, 24 Jul 2016 05:08:22 +0000

Thanks for all of that detail! I really appreciate it. I remember you previously posting about your personal lettering font before. I’m not doing that, but I do have a better font now than I originally did, so that really jumps out at me when I look back at early stuff I’ve done. That’s probably the most glaring difference I feel like I ought to fix… along with a few unintentional typos and a handful of crossbar “I” characters that slipped through where they shouldn’t. I also have a few panels where I forgot to carry over a background thing that should still have been visible.

I think maybe you’ve helped me decide, though, that I really should fix the lettering for the best and most consistent presentation… and fix the unintended gaffes… but leave the character designs as-is and people can see how I evolved over the course of time.

I’m pretty much doing everything in Adobe Illustrator, and the plan is to make backup copies and update those while keeping the originals… so if I am ever famous 🙂 I’ll be able to go back and talk about the originals versus the changes I made later.

Thanks for all the insight you gave me here, it was very helpful.

By: Colleen Doran

Colleen Doran — Sat, 23 Jul 2016 00:14:04 +0000

We’ve made very few changes in the art. I can think of, maybe, five panels where we swapped tone sheets for something better. Otherwise, the art is left exactly as is. I did not redraw anything unless I found a genuine continuity mistake. And I didn’t find many.

In a few cases I added pages I could not add before. For example, there is now a major double page spread in Volume I that wasn’t there before, for the simple reason that I had no idea how to add a double page spread to a book without screwing it up when I was self publishing, as embarrassing as that is to admit all these years later!

Lettering on Volume I and part of Volume II was redone. There was a different letterer doing the work on the original series. But like many letterers he wanted royalties and a raise, and I can’t blame him. But we really couldn’t afford it. So I decided to do the lettering myself.

My early lettering was just terrible. So, when restoring the project, we decided to replace all work by the original letterer as well as to replace all my early lettering with a font based on my hand drawn lettering created by Comicraft just for this project. Allan Harvey did all the restored lettering.

It makes a huge difference in the readability and continuity of the work.

I know several people who have made big changes in their early work, and I gotta tell ya, it was tempting. I have always regretted the inking style I used on pages 60-180 of A DISTANT SOIL, as I succumbed to pressure to harden up the look of my art since I kept getting ribbed for being too “feminine”. Big mistake. Those pages are the only page from the entire series that really bother me. But I’m stuck with them.

If I won the lottery, I might redo them, but I doubt that will happen! And if so, we’d be getting a color edition!

By: Stewart Vernon

Stewart Vernon — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 22:43:23 +0000

On the subject of restorations… How do you decide what to fix and what to keep for nostalgia? I’m not accusing you of George-Lucasing your work! 🙂 I ask for myself for legitimate reasons. I’ve been doing a Web comic for a while, and it was rough in the beginning. I changed lettering fonts after a few months, and tweaked some of the character designs too. I’ve been running for nearly 2 years now, and am considering collecting some of them into comics or a TPB… but every time I look at them, I wonder if I should collect them “as is” only fixing unintentional glitches like a stray line, missing line, or typo in the text… OR if I should update the earliest ones to match more the way I’m doing it now. It’s a hard decision, and my stuff is not nearly as complicated or detailed as your work.

By: Colleen Doran

Colleen Doran — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 16:56:35 +0000

It really is, never expected it.

By: Stewart Vernon

Stewart Vernon — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 07:18:48 +0000

This is pretty awesome. Also cool when someone you admire does a thing based on something of yours!

By: Colleen Doran

Colleen Doran — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 01:05:36 +0000

I love this piece!

By: Stampers Saverem

Stampers Saverem — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 21:32:20 +0000

*Yowsa!*

Don’ mess with this Kitty!