Ctrl+Alt+Del Comic Collections

Pledge Manager Inbound
about 3 years ago – Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 05:42:37 PM

I'm going to be sending out pledge manager surveys shortly, and I wanted to go over a couple of things again.

• The surveys will come from Backerkit, so if you don't get one, check your spam filters, etc.
• Please fill out your surveys soon; the more information I have, the easier it is for me to tackle the next stage of this project.
• Right now you are just entering your information/picking add-ons. Nothing will be charged until later this summer. I'll post with advance warning when I'm planning to lock down and charge orders.
• Until I lock down orders, you can edit your address, so don't worry if you're moving soon.
• The shipping prices for customers in CA, AU, UK, and EU includes customs/VAT as well as delivery; you should not be hit with any additional fees by your postal service.

Finally, if you missed the Kickstarter campaign but still want to grab some books and take advantage of the lower international shipping, or you only wanted the digital versions of the books, you can head over to the pre-order store here.

Hah, did I say March 22nd?!
about 3 years ago – Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 03:37:20 AM

What I meant to say was "I'll open the pledge manager as soon as Backerkit is finished reviewing my setup, which apparently takes a couple days."

It will be this week, though.

Stickers! Also, Pledge Manager
about 3 years ago – Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 12:58:27 AM

So cute!

Right now, my plan is to launch our pledge manager on Monday, March 22nd.  I've been crunching numbers for about a week straight now, and I feel pretty confident that I've gotten the shipping estimates as close to accurate as possible without doing a disservice to you or me.

And for backers in Canada, UK, EU and AU/NZ, the shipping prices you see include not only shipping, but import charges as well. You should not find any additional expenses owed when receiving your books. In every case, the shipping price for 3 books fell at or below my campaign estimates, so I promise you I worked very hard to get the best possible shipping arrangement possible for overseas backers.

Technically, the pledge manager will have you inputting your information (address, payment info) as well as adding anything extra to your order that you'd like, but you won't be charged right away. Payment for shipping and any add-ons won't be charged until later this year when I lock down the orders, right before we start shipping. Don't worry, I will give you plenty of advanced notice when that is going to happen.

What this means is that, in the unlikely event that I've calculated something catastrophically wrong, I'll have the opportunity to communicate that and fix it before locking in/charging any orders.

In the meantime, when the pledge manager survey goes out next week, you can help me the most by getting all of the information filled in as soon as possible. Especially if you're looking to add items to your order, I need to know that early so that I can go about making sure we're making enough of what we need. It also helps me to see where orders are going to, so I can start planning to send stuff to where it needs to be.

If you think you might be moving in the near future, don't stress about it.  Just fill out your information now, you can always edit your information at any time up until the point I lock orders later this summer. I will be sending out a number of updates leading up to that point, reminding people to double check/verify their order information.

Just Touching Base
about 3 years ago – Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 05:43:36 AM

So I wanted to give you a little update on where we are with things... not much of anywhere, really.

Kickstarter hasn't transferred the campaign funds yet, so I can't engage the printer beyond virtual high-fives and patting each other on the back about what awesome books we're about to make.

I have been spending a lot of this downtime reading and re-reading through the books, scouring to catch mistakes or typos before they get to print, and I can report the following two things: the books read great on a tablet, and I can probably recite the first five issues of Starcaster from memory at this point.

The other thing I'm working on is our Pledge Manager. So my idea had been to open up a pledge manager,  let people grab their add-ons and extra books and whatever and then, armed with that knowledge, get the right amount of stuff printed. Later down the line once I had all the accurate numbers, I would calculate and charge for shipping.

It seems I may not be able to do that. Most of the pledge managers I'm talking with seem set up to do it all at once: pay for addons and shipping costs in one go. It sort of puts me in a chicken/egg situation. In order to give the most accurate shipping prices, I need an idea of how many books are orderered and from where, but in order to find out how many books get ordered, I need to also be ready to charge shipping.

It's not the end of the world, I can definitely set up to just do it all in one go, it just means there's a bit more work and planning that needs to take place beforehand. Rather than just opening up the pledge manager to accept additional orders, I need to spend the time sorting out shipping arrangements for various combinations of products that aren't even made yet. I don't want to overcharge (bad for you) or  undercharge (bad for me) anyone for shipping costs, so I need to crunch all of the numbers and make sure I get this right.

So all of this is to say, the pledge manager is coming, it's just going to take a bit longer than I'd initially thought! I'll keep you posted as we near a launch for that.

Analog and D-Pad Volume One
about 3 years ago – Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 11:02:04 AM

Only Twenty-Four hours left!

The last of the three books that I haven't talked about yet, was actually one of the most straightforward to put together. Analog and D-Pad didn't require a big additional section detailing alternate outcomes, nor did it need its content categorized and annotated. For the most part, it was just a matter of putting the comics in order.

I say for the most part because there was an aspect of that that ended up being a little tricky. When I started the Ethan and Lucas reboot focusing on the Analog and D-Pad version of these characters, I had envisioned releasing their stories only in full, complete comic book issues. And I did that for a while, but it didn't take long for me to realize approach wasn't giving me enough of an outlet to do everything I wanted to do with these characters. I had stories and vignettes I wanted to tell that didn't require a full 24 page issue to address. While the comic issues were great for showcasing the super hero story side of things,  one-shots and smaller stories were better suited to exploring who these guys were out of the spandex.

Initially I began exploring this via one-shots for my Patreon subscribers. And it worked really well, getting to visit these characters outside the framework of a big narrative/big bad to fight. However for a time, this meant I was doing comic issues and one-shots concurrently. This wasn't a big deal since, while the one-shots were canon, they weren't effecting of the big stories in the comic books. However when it came time to arrange them all into a book, it became clear that I had a puzzle to solve; where exactly did these one-shots fit amongst the timeline? 

So for the first time, all of these comics are in chronological order to when they happened for the characters, not necessarily to when I drew them. And these one-shots, previously only available on Patreon, take their permanent place in the overall story of Ethan and Lucas.

Of course, the issues of Analog and D-Pad got a healthy dose of the remaster treatment for the book as well, especially issue #1. (I was in a big chin phase, apparently. As an artist, sometimes you spend so much time and you're so close to the work, that you can't see stuff like this until you've stepped away from it for a while. But at least I can address it before these pages are immortalized on paper forever.)

And finally, Analog and D-Pad Volume One features the three original issues of Analog and D-Pad, from back in 2006! I put just about every scrap of content from 2002-2012 into the CAD 1.0 Omnibus, but I held these three issues back specifically for this book.

Not a lot of people realize this, but the concept for Analog and D-Pad actually dates back to 2003. This book includes some initial pages I started back then, as well as a wallpaper of the duo in costume from 2004. Analog and D-Pad have been around almost as long as Ctrl+Alt+Del has!

And so while those original three issues of Analog and D-Pad are no longer "canon", they're still fun stories and an important part of the history and evolution of these characters, so I'm excited to finally be able to include them in this collection book.