Tänään tuli postia Janolta:
Dear all,
Here's another one in the series of embarrassing "almost there, but
not quite there yet" messages about that darn Don Rosa Early Art
project. There's not really much new to say, but I just wanted to send
a quick update anyway to show you that I'm still alive and that this
(for everyone involved, including Don, me and -- most of all -- YOU
guys) very frustrating thing is actually still happening.
So, what's going on? Life does not only always find a way, but also
often finds a way to get in *your* way. For me, this has been in the
form of more work than usual with my usual day job of working on Duck
comics for Egmont, my studies for my second degree in book sciences
and my dad falling very sick very fast recently and now needing
permanent care, which is extremely exhausting and stressful, both to
the mind and body.
As mentioned in the last message, the scanning and remastering of the
materials is pretty much done and I really do hope that I finally get
around to finalizing the inside book layout in the near future.
I know that the most burning question probably is: "How can this
f*$/§@g thing take so long?" I might have addressed this in the past,
but if not, here goes: After the very smooth work on Pertwillaby and
Captain Kentucky (which I finished within just a couple weeks back in
the Summer of 2012), I was very certain that another project like this
would easily be manageable to do in a few months. However, that was a
very naive beginner's mistake as I hadn't really considered that most
of the work on PP/CK had already been done before as all of the strips
were already available to me in hi-res scans that I just needed to
place into the book layout. The only new scanning and remastering in
these books was the bonus materials that had never been reprinted
before, but those were only a few pages.
Now, the absolutely time-consuming problem with this "art book" that I
didn't take into consideration when I announced it was that it ONLY
contains of such bonus art stuff... which had never been reprinted
before and which I received from Don in literally more than a thousand
single sheets of xerox copies (most of them even in individually cut
paper formats so that they couldn't even be scanned via the scanner's
automatic doc feeder and had to be placed individually on the scanner
glass). And after those hundreds of hours of scanning, there were the
next hundreds of hours of getting all these scans into good shape for
being printed in high quality. Even as a main job, this would have
been a project for a couple of months... let alone doing this as a
side "fun" project in my spare time. So yeah, that's why this is the
most embarrassingly endless book production ever (though I really hope
it will have been worth the wait in the end).
If I had realized this when I first considered the project, I would
have never started that darn campain but would have rather have worked
on the book for a couple of years and then only announced it once the
work had already been finished. But again, I was too naive due to the
success of the very easy (in comparison) PP and CK books. It
definitely wasn't my plan to grab people's money and sit on it for
hundreds of years.
Anyway, where does that leave us? The book IS still happening and
every once in a while, Don even stumbles over new stuff that he had
forgotten about before (like recently some illustrations for a
convention program), which will now obviously end up in the book, too.
So the only advantage of the hundred year waiting time is that the
book will be even more complete than it would have been if it had come
out earlier. And obviously, everyone who paid for it WILL get their
book when it's finally printed.
Still, I totally understand people possibly being upset or tired of
waiting (I would be, too!), so as usual, I'm offering to fully refund
any still unfulfilled pledges to anyone who doesn't like to wait
anymore. If you'd like to request a refund, please DON'T do this by
replying to this message, but send me a separate mail with the subject
line "Don Rosa Refund" and your PayPal mail address or your IBAN and
BIC if you're from within Europe. Any refunds will be processed within
a few days. (So far, only for or five people out of more than 200 have
done so, so it seems that most of you guys are still eager to get this
thing despite the ridiculous waiting time.
)
Please note, though, that a refund means you'll be completely removed
from the order list and won't be eligible anymore to get the book for
the original 55 EUR price. (I'm only printing a very limited amount of
99 copies besides the copies that have been preordered and those
non-preordered copies will sell at 99 EUR.)
As a reminder, ALL copies will be signed by Don (the signed endpapers
that are going to be bound into the books have been lying around here
for quite some time...) and will most likely come with an additional
signed print that wasn't part of the original perk so that you'll at
least have an additional little goodie. I'll also check if it's
possible to maybe upgrade the binding to half-cloth or something for
an even more exclusive look, but that depends on how expensive that
would be. I'll keep you posted on those details.
Again, thank you very much for your support, everyone, and I hope to
be back with some finally positive news before too long!
All best,
Jano
