Comic Cuts - 2 November 2012

A somewhat chaotic week which started well (mostly dull, domestic successes like getting a new curtain rail up and working) then dipped downwards on Tuesday when my computer failed to save something because it had run out of free space. When you think that just over a year ago I upgraded from a 250gb to a 500gb hard drive and that I regularly clear space onto external hard drives... what the hell is clogging up all that space?

As it turns out, the four Sexton Blake Annuals were causing some of the problem. Four books with high quality (1,200dpi) scans of each page – all 640 of them – plus 600 dpi colour scans of the covers in various states from the original scan, via various stages of clean-up and re-lettering to the final published version. Shuffling them off to an external hard drive saved around 6gb (gigabytes). Juggling numerous other files saved a further 12gb and I currently have a work space of 15gb – which isn't as much as I would like as it was 18 on Tuesday, so I've filled 3gb already.

Space is always a concern while I'm working on a book that requires a lot of work, whether it is scans to send off to other people in the hope that we can identify an artist, or scans that I intend using in the book. As I said recently, I have four projects on the go at the moment and they're all picture heavy. The current leader and most likely to be first out of the gate is Lion: King of Picture Story Papers. I'm currently revising the introduction and filling in a few gaps in the index. This one will include all the annuals and maybe all the holiday specials – there may be a few too many gaps, so I may have to leave those and post them online at a later date as I did with the Hurricane Annual.

Penguin Books has merged with Bertelsmann's Random House to create the world's biggest book publisher. Pearson retain 47% to Random House's 53%. If you like percentages, the combined group will now publish 25% of all books sold globally and probably nearer 30% in the UK despite Penguin's sales falling 2% in the first nine months of 2012.

Surely it's not just me who thinks that Penguin Random House sounds like a law firm. Random Penguin is a much better name! And here are a few random Penguins... see what I did there?

 

 

Next week...  I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow, let alone three days hence. It might be a strip, as I want to concentrate on rewriting the introduction to the index. We shall see.