The other day an advance copy of Scrambled Ink-the book that I and six of my friends had collaborated on-arrived in my mailbox. It's a weird feeling, to be able to finally hold an actual book. In hardcover, 180 pages and with a gracious foreword by Mike Richardson(owner/publisher of Dark Horse), it's slated to be on shelves in bookstores everywhere in July as well as, of course, online.
Dark Horse did a beautiful job-they're really a class outfit. Diana Schutz(our editor), Dave Marshall and Tina Alessi all went above and beyond with its production.
I'm very proud of my friends who managed to produce beautiful extracurricular work while busy variously animating, doing story and visdev. We're all very different from one another and our stories reflect it, but when I flip through the book I see the personalities of these guys I've come to know and love on the page, and the stories seem to me to go together in much the same congenial way we did sitting under the olive trees at work eating lunch, chatting cross-legged on the floor of one another's offices, crammed into an Amtrak booth bound for San Diego or leaning furiously over the foosball tables. Good times.
I hope it finds readers who enjoy reading it anywhere near as much as we did doing it.
There's plenty more where this came from, but here's a sampling of what's inside the covers:
a page from "Burger Run" by Dave Pimentel
Ken Morrissey's illustration from "Greedy Grizzly"; he wrote and illustrated it, with an assist on the prose from Keith Baxter
a glimpse of J.J. Villard's work
Dave Derrick's is a story set in Africa
Ennio Torresan's roman a clef, highly autobiographical
...and me(plus my inspiration on my mousepad there):
The table of contents; click to enlarge
When the book's more readily available we're probably going to do a couple of shindigs with it(the fun part of publishing!), which I'll post about here as they're scheduled.
Certainly most of us will be lurking in San Diego the week of the Con. Hope to see you there!