GHOST OF THE BADLANDS Retail Monochrome Edition Status
An update on the status of the retail editions of Razorfist's Western
On April 15th, Arkhaven and Razorfist announced the publication of two monochrome editions of his GHOST OF THE BADLANDS comic, one in hardcover, the other in paperback. Unlike the editions custom-printed for the backers of his crowdfund, these are printed through a distribution system that allows for delivery through bookstores all over the world, including Amazon.
One difference between the backer edition and the retail edition is the size. While the backer edition is 12” x 9”, the maximum size available through the distribution system is 10.88” x 8” for the hardcover and 11” x 8.25” for the paperback, with a maximum Dots Per Inch of 599 DPI per page.
(Technical Note: That’s correct, 599 DPI. We’re working with the printer to fix a system software bug we discovered in the process of trying to resolve this issue. Whereas printers understand “600 DPI” to mean “less than 601 DPI”, the programmers who wrote the software system for the printer decided that it meant “less than 600 DPI”, thereby creating a problem for everyone who works at 600 DPI, since Adobe systematically provides images in the 600.00 to 600.99 range and considers all of them to be 600 DPI.)
The need to resize a comic from its source are for a print edition is entirely normal, given the wide range of personal preferences of the various artists we utilize, and there are seldom any issues beyond the occasional need to move a few dialogue balloons so they’re not cut off or lost deep in the interior margins. However, in this particular case, the combination of a few factors led to an unexpected complication.
As it happens, the excellent illustrator of GHOST OF THE BADLANDS, George Alexopolous, happens to utilize an illustration style that, for lack of a better word, can be described as being essentially pointilist in nature. This particular style, combined with the need to modestly reduce the size of the illustrated pages while keeping the DPI at 599, unexpectedly resulted in an unwanted moire effect when the books were printed.
The books were prepared by the editors and made ready for ordering on the day we made the announcement, but fortunately, we have learned to make a habit of sending out proofs to the authors before shipping anything in quantity, particularly when it’s our first time working with a new artist and a new process. Razorfist, of course, immediately informed us that the results of the printing were less than entirely satisfactory.
Here are two examples of the problem. Both photos are of the hardcover, which, being smaller and more compressed, was a worse case than the paperback.
Obviously, this print quality is totally unacceptable to us, so we looked into our various options for addressing the problem, and after considerable discussion between the editors and the authors, landed on cropping the pages being the optimal solution due to the small amount of reduction needed and the amount of white space available to be cropped. The editors went through and modified the book as required, and as you can see on the page from which the most material needed to be cropped; nothing vital was lost.
After the modifications were made and approved, we printed both a paperback and a hardcover edition and sent them out to the author. He should receive both of them today, and assuming that he’s able to approve them for shipment, we will order them for delivery to the warehouse, which should permit us to get them out to everyone toward the end of next week.
While we set up our new warehouse system to provide more efficient and timely delivery, our primary concern is always with the quality of the products we publish. So, we hope our new buyers will remain patient, with the confidence that what they will be receiving will be well worth the additional wait.
We’ve received a few email inquiries from customers who have bought GHOST OF THE BADLANDS, and since those inquiries served the inspiration for the creation of this substack, we’ll also answer them here.
If you ordered an edition of GHOST OF THE BADLANDS from the Arkhaven store, you will be receiving a physical copy of the book as soon as we can sort out this printing issue. You will receive it at your billing address if that was the only address provided, and your shipping address if you provided one that is different than your billing address.
The shipping costs are included in the price. Even if you live in Japan, you were not billed separately for shipping because the cost was included in the retail price.
We do not have any way for you to track your order until it is shipped from our warehouse to you. We will provide you with a tracking number once it ships from the warehouse. Normally, this is sufficient, since we store the books in our warehouse, but in the case of a new release like this, there can be a lag in between when the book is made available and when the first copies are printed and shipped to the warehouse.
Needless to say, we apologize for the delay. You can rest assured that we have learned our lesson from this experience, and we will not make the color editions of GHOST OF THE BADLANDS available for purchase on the Arkhaven store until we have confirmed the successful printing of the color interiors.
UPDATE: The Monochrome editions have been fixed. Click here for the update, complete with pictures of the revised editions.