Start of darkness in color ?

[renovator]

Hi,
With the success of Kickstarter could the black and white books be added as a pdf or printed at some stage in the future in ful color as there does seem to be a market ?

There are these quotes against
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144095

"Like On the Origin of PCs, this book is printed in greyscale, primarily to lower the cost both for me and for you. (As an aside, apparently some people thought I was serious in my intro to that book when I said I chose greyscale strictly for aesthetic reasons and even insisted on paying the full color price for black-and-white printing... the mind boggles.)"


http://www.giantitp.com/forums/archive/index.php?t-144095.html

I understand this sentiment, but the fact is that not everyone feels the same way.

And to a degree, you're looking at it backwards. We don't print in black-and-white to lower the cost for us, we do it to lower the cost for the reader. Printing the "original content" books in black and white allows us to have some products at a lower price point; not everyone can afford a $40 book. There are many fans (particularly high school and college students) who are low on funds but want to read the new stories that are released in print only. By keeping the cost of the "new" material lower, we can allow more people to experience the entire storyline.

The fact is that we sell two to three times as many copies of the black-and-white books as we do any given color book, and I think a lot of that has to do with the dramatically lower price. Many fans only buy the prequels, not the compilations, precisely because they are cheaper. I'm not going to sacrifice those sales (and leave cash-strapped fans out in the cold) just to cater to the small percentage of people willing to pay more.

Also, black-and-white is a little bit faster to produce than color strips, which helps when I'm trying to crank out 112 pages of content without anyone knowing that I'm doing it.

The books aren't in color?

Only On the Origin of PCs, Start of Darkness, and Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales are not in color (and the latter two have color inserts of 16 and 32 pages, respectively). All of the other books are full color throughout.


rgds renovator

[Kish]

Rich has said that he won't be doing PDF versions of any of his books barring a really unlikely shift in the comics market, and he won't be redrawing any of the black-and-white books as color as he would, in fact, need to redraw them from scratch (no color versions exist) and there are more productive uses of his drawing time.

[NerfTW]

I can barely understand your post. Where are the quotes and where are your thoughts? Because I can't see what your point is, since it's just jumbled in with the text from those other posts.

Anyways, making them in color would involve completely redoing them. They were done in greyscale, not color and then made black and white. (We'll ignore the issue of the one panel joke about the color, it can be removed with little issue.)

There's no point to it, honestly. And releasing them as a PDF causes the original problem of taking away from the book sales.

[renovator]

I can barely understand your post. Where are the quotes and where are your thoughts? Because I can't see what your point is, since it's just jumbled in with the text from those other posts.


Apologies I did not know how to quote from 2 old threads. I have now added the quote tags and I hope you are no longer offended by myself

[ThePhantasm]

I think you answered your own question with the quotes you provided.

[Porthos]

I believe, though I could be wrong, he has also said somewhere that another reason why he isn't planning on colorizing SoD is that in the time it would take him to color it, he could instead be spending his time making an all new book.

And, the success of the Kickstarter drive notwithstanding, he's probably going to see more sales on an all new book than a re-issue of a previous one. :smallwink:

[The Giant]

I believe, though I could be wrong, he has also said somewhere that another reason why he isn't planning on colorizing SoD is that in the time it would take him to color it, he could instead be spending his time making an all new book.

This, more than anything. If there's a lesson to be learned from the Kickstarter, it's that people will buy a PDF of a new story. Why would I spend an enormous amount of time coloring an existing black-and-white book when I could create an all-new story instead? There's just no point.

So no, this isn't going to happen at all. Sorry.

Question answered, thread locked.