getting vern & lettuce ready for translation

Partly what I’ve been doing today is plain ol’ grunt work, prepping my Vern and Lettuce comics for publication in book form, as part of the DFC Library series. When I was first making the comics, my editor told me not to worry about foreign translations, just to make it a great comic, which, actually, was probably the best thing. (I had way too much else to think about!) But it does mean that there are a lot of things in my strips that can’t be used for foreign co-editions, namely coloured text.

The way it works is that Vern and Lettuce will be printed in English, but then if a foreign publisher wants to publish them in another language, it’s much cheaper for the printer (and therefore attractive to them) just to lift off a layer of black text instead of fiddling with layers of coloured text. So most of the time, I just need to lift the black lettering onto a separate layer in Photoshop. (Thankfully I’ve always kept the hand-inked black lines on its own layer.) But sometimes I need to rework a panel, like these ones.

I thought it might be a problem, but actually, I think these panels look a bit cleaner and classier with just the black text. Relief!

Hey, did you hear that the DFC’s Jamie Smart (foo5) has been contracted to make a children’s book? Here’s posted news about it here. Yay, Jamie! I loved his strip Fish-Head Steve and his DFC Olympics almost made me incontinent with laughter.

Another cool thing, Deadly Knitshade posted a link to this amazing rabbit graffiti in Shoreditch.

Hey, someone was asking in the comments in the last post if there is any way to subscribe to my blog. Does anyone know? I syndicate post onto my Facebook account automatically (but I like the way it looks better in LiveJournal and I’m more likely to answer comments here on LJ). Can people pick it up other ways? I’m a little clueless about this. (Answered, thanks!)