About: The Physical Books

You can order yourself copies from Lulu.com. Specifically:

• Chapter Two, paperback ($17 USD)
• Chapter Two, hardcover ($55 USD)
• Chapter Three, paperback ($17 USD)
• Chapter Three, hardcover ($60 USD)

(but, see later in this page for details on international pricing)

The PDF versions are free, of course, and available from right here on this site.

So, remember how the original books were 8"x10½"? And how I mentioned that was apparently a non-standard "custom" size, and that it was that way to begin with for historical reasons and was stuck there because I felt I didn't have the time to reformat it into something more standard like 8½"x11"?

Turns out that, in the grips of a global pandemic and slowly losing my mind to cabin fever, I found the time. And, in the midst of reformatting everything, I took a second look at all of the commentary and tweaked some of it. And hey presto, now there's second editions!

In reality, if you have the first edition, the second edition might not have that much new for you. Everything's been reformatted into 8½"x11", as mentioned, some commentaries have been updated a bit, the text intro to Chapter Two has had a section added for 2021, that sort. Though, most importantly, some of the comics and other art have been color-corrected to be slightly less dark, print-wise, than before.

Then there's the hardcover version, which I discuss a bit further down the page.

The problem with Chapter One at this point is that the comics you see on the web are the ONLY versions of them I have. Anything Chapter Two onward has 300dpi originals, suitable for printing, but Chapter One is stored entirely at roguhly 90dpi or so. That's... considerably less suitable for printing. Putting those up would require me rescanning and re-editing all of them, and unfortunately, many of those were only done in pencil, and pencil has this tendency to fade over time, especially cheap pencils on cheap printer paper...

This isn't to say I won't ever make a Chapter One book. It would, however, involve me redrawing the entire chapter from scratch. That might be an interesting project, but it's not something I'm going to try just yet. You know how slow I am with this.

Each book is 8½"x11" and kinda-sorta around a half-inch thick (slightly bigger and thicker for the hardcover versions). Chapter Three is a little bit thicker than Chapter Two. These are a bit bigger than the first edition of the books, which were 8"x10½". In the event this isn't helpful enough, the following pictures should clear things up:

• Figure 1
• Figure 2
• Figure 3
• Figure 4
• Figure 5
• Figure 6
• Figure 7
• Figure 8
• Figure 9

New to the second edition, there's indeed a hardcover version! And it's more expensive than the paperback version, as you may have noticed. Let's discuss:

• The paperback versions are similar to the first edition books; that is, perfect-bound and kinda the same print quality, using Lulu.com's "standard" color finishing. This is far more economical, but there's some parts where the lower quality might show, especially on pages with a lot of ink and mostly dark colors. Overall, though, still good.
• The hardcover versions are, obviously, hardcover, for a start. But more importantly, they use Lulu.com's "premium" color finishing, which is significantly better. It's also significantly more expensive. It's not cheap, printing 200+ page full-color books on-demand. This version's just there if you wanted to lay down the cash for something snazzier. And incidentally, the hardcover option itself isn't what increases the price that much, it's the premium color finishing. I just added the hardcover option as a small bonus.
• The PDF versions are, of course, PDFs. Those don't go through Lulu.com at all; you're directly downloading them from this very site. The content's more or less the same as the physical versions, with minor changes so the text isn't referencing the physical pages and some of the more awkwardly-sized or double-page art is rearranged due to not being constrained by physical dimensions. You'll get the idea. The images have also been mashed down a bit so the PDFs remain in the 100MB range for storage convenience, and the fact that some cloud-based PDF hosting services take exception to gigantic, image-heavy PDFs being dumped on them.

That's not likely. eBook formats tend to be closer to HTML than hard book layouts, and that would require me to redo the entire thing from the PDF-centric format I've got now. Sorry about that. PDF will be the closest I'll have.

Chapter Two had a different problem than Chapter One. Thanks to a poor choice of file format, I couldn't reopen the art files that contain the actual text. However, unlike Chapter One, I COULD get to the artwork itself. So with that in hand, I re-texted every single comic. It cleaned stuff up a lot, but there's a few changes compared to what was on the web before:

• I use Blambot Casual (the current speech bubble font) from the get-go, rather than start with Chiller and change after the demon chicken part.
• All of the text/thought bubbles are cleaner and look more like how I do them nowadays, rather than how they were done back then. This one's more minor, but you might notice it.
• Some parts of the comic have been rewritten slightly. Most of this was just to reword awkward sentences or fix some typos or whatnot, some of it was to fit text better with the switch to Blambot Casual, but there are a couple spots where major inconsistencies or plot holes got patched up. Most notably, Salthalus talking about Marzos has been fixed to match up better with Chapter Three.

Chapter Three had some minor fixes, but I retexted all of it for consistency's sake regardless. That didn't change much, though: The font was already Blambot Casual, the bubbles were already somewhat standard once I switched to Inkscape, and the comic didn't need much rewriting.

They are! Chapter Two and Chapter Three on the web are now up-to-date with the retextings in the first edition books. The color corrected versions from the second edition books, though, are just for print purposes, so those won't come back to the web.

Please be quiet.

Lots of stuff. Thought processes, silly trivia, sensible trivia, art notes, history, details, whatever comes to mind, the origin of Bean Man, that sort. You know, commentaryish stuff.

There's also a ton of extra doodles and such in both books. Chapter Two's bonus doodles are all scanned in from my sketchbooks and made just for the book, plus one or two full-page, full-color drawings. Chapter Three's doodles are all tablet-drawn from the ground up, so they're all much cleaner and crisper, plus there's more full-color stuff in there. Unfortunately, none of them are scans from my sketchbooks at the time I originally drew the comics, as I couldn't find them.

Do note that the commentary and sketches are written for people familiar with the comic up to the point of publication. This means that the discussions WILL involve spoilers. Chapter Two's commentary was written around the start of Chapter Six and Chapter Three's was written around the end of Chapter Seven, so plan accordingly.

The printing and sales are both handled by Lulu.com. I dunno, they seem to do a decent job of things.

That's all Lulu.com's territory. You'll have to ask them.

Looking over my distribution options, I think that's presently limited to North America, Europe, the UK, and Australia. It's basically anything Lulu.com covers without going to their global distribution option, which makes things really super expensive. Trust me, you don't want to see what the cost was for the globally-distributed hardcover premium color option.

This one's tricky. Lulu.com requires me to specify pricing individually for each currency they use (USD, CAD, EUR, GBP, AUD). These prices have to be at least a set minimum, which is effectively their printing costs. That part's obvious and to be expected.

However, that minimum price is different between each currency, and those prices don't map out to USD prices equivalently. For instance, $55/$60 USD for the hardcover versions is NOT the same as $80 CAD (at time of writing). Far from it, in fact. Unfortunately, the minimum that Lulu.com allows me to set for CAD/EUR/GBP/AUD is quite a bit higher than that of USD, and I have to adjust the price accordingly. I can only guess that they're a smaller operation than the giganto printing/publishing places and need to charge more to deal with international printing or legal stuff or whatnot.

But, more confusingly, although I was required to specify those individual prices, I've been told by some of my Canadian friends that they still see the plain USD prices anyway. So maybe it all works out okay and you really are just paying the USD price converted into your currency (plus what I would assume to be somewhat hefty international shipping charges)? Man, I don't know what's going on.

The short version is: If you're seeing higher (converted) prices for international currencies, that's beyond my control. Sorry about that.

I'm afraid not. If I could, I would, but Lulu.com doesn't let me tie books together in a bundle like that.

Oh, come on.

...seriously?

Well, like I said, Lulu.com does all the printing and shipping. So, the books never come through me, thus I never have a chance to sign them or anything like that. Such are the foibles of print-on-demand stuff.

However, I'm considering the logistics of just ordering a few copies, signing them as need be, and shipping them out myself. It might drive the price up a bit, but that'd be the only way to do it, short of asking me to sign a copy in person or whatnot. More on that once I've decided how it'll all work.

Of course, if you DO find me in person and ask me to sign a copy you brought with you, I'll probably do so.