News

Here’s the press release for those three Manga sites that Paul and I built. Paul did all three designs, and I did the HTML coding and Movable Type wrangling. MT rules, by the way.
The folks at Random House were a complete treat to work with. We’re sure hoping that quote about what’ll happen if these previews do well will come true.
DEL REY LAUNCHES MANGA “PREVIEW” WEBSITES
(New York, NY; September 20, 2005)-Del Rey Manga, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, announced today the launch of new title-specific websites, each of which will allow manga readers to preview thirty pages from the first volume of a new manga title-before the official publication date-in an innovative page-a-day’ approach.
Cited as the fastest growing category in bookstores today, the graphic novel market has doubled each year for the past two years, leading to an estimated $100 million market today. The vast majority of the growth in the market has
been due to the increased popularity of Japanese comics, known as manga, a genre that Del Rey jumped on in the summer of 2003; Del Rey now has well over one million manga in print in the United States.
Although other large manga publishers have offered preview content on their websites, Del Rey’s approach is unique in that each day for thirty days, a new page of manga content will be added for each individual title. In this way, Del Rey hopes to encourage readers to come back every day, and to build buzz for their hottest new properties.
“Our page-a-day concept goes beyond what the other large manga publishers have offered on their sites,” said Betsy Mitchell, VP & Editor-in-Chief of Del Rey. “We wanted to give our fans an opportunity-absolutely free-to sample Del Rey’s new series before laying down hard cash. There’s a lot of manga on the shelves these days, and this is one way readers can decide whether our titles are the ones they want to spend money on. Obviously, we think we’ve got the right stuff.”
“If this promotion is as successful as we anticipate it to be, we hope to be able to provide preview websites-well in advance of publication-for as many forthcoming new series as possible,” added Del Rey’s Manga Director Dallas Middaugh.
The first three titles to be featured on the title-specific sites – all Kodansha properties – are GACHA GACHA by Hiroyuki Tamakoshi (on sale September 20, 2005; ages 16+), GHOST HUNT by Fuyumi Ono and Shiho Inada (on
sale September 27, 2005; ages 13+), and SUGAR SUGAR RUNE by Moyoco Anno (on sale September 27, 2005; ages 10+).
The URLs for the first three title-specific sites are http://www.delreymanga.com/gachagacha, http://www.delreymanga.com/ghosthunt and http://www.delreymanga.com/sugar.
About Del Rey:
Del Rey Books (http://www.delreybooks.com) was founded in 1977 as a division of Ballantine Books under the guidance of the renowned Judy-Lynn del Rey and her husband, Lester del Rey. Del Rey publishes the best of modern fantasy, science fiction, alternate history and manga. Ballantine Books is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, which is a publishing group of Random House, Inc, the U.S. publishing company of Random House, the trade book publishing division of Bertelsmann AG, one of the world’s leading international media companies. In the summer of 2003, Random House joined together with Kodansha in a creative partnership to bring some of Kodansha’s top properties to the United States, making Random House the first major trade book publisher in the United States to do so.
About Kodansha Ltd., Publishers :
Kodansha is the largest trade and magazine book publisher in Japan. Founded in 1909, the company by virtue of its long history, the quality of its publishing, and its established network of sales and marketing is regarded as the trade book market leader in the publishing business in Japan. Moreover, Kodansha has been recognized as the leading publisher with a mission to introduce Japan through its publishing business.

Thanks to the Best Husband Ever, we got all 100 minicomics folded last night. The minicomics were printed for me by the lovely and talented Wendi Strang-Frost of Strang-Frost Productions — thanks Wendi! You Rock! Tonight we staple, and I put in a hail-mary to try and get my Mucha drawing painted in time for SPX.
I had a minor catastrophy Sunday night. I went to paint the beautiful inks, which probably constitute the most beautiful drawing I’ve ever done — and the board completely flipped out on me. When I started the drawing on the Mucha piece, I picked that board because I thought it was some of the last of my dwindling reserve of Strathmore 500 cold-press 3-ply — you know, the really good stuff. It felt the same, was the correct weight, the tooth was how I remembered it, and it had initially been marked up with blue pencil for use as a page in the first series. However, the minute I set wet brush to paper, something went horribly awry. The board turned a mottled grey and instantly sucked up the water. It was like painting with a Q-tip on a piece of shirt cardboard. I tried to salvage it but no-go. It would take longer for me to thick-paint it on the questionable Mystery Board From Hell (which is probably not archival) than it would be for me to retrace it on to actual Strathmore 500 and have another go at it. So that’s what’s on the plate tonight. Wish me luck.
Either way, see you on Friday and Saturday at the Bethesda Holiday Inn!

Paul Sizer’s new book, Moped Army is here at last! You can read Paul’s press release, buy it from your local comic stores this Wednesday, or meet Paul in the flesh at one of his many signings over the next month! Yay!

Since Paul Sizer has posted about it on his blog, I guess it’s safe for me to do the same. We didn’t want to jinx it by telling the news too soon, but we both got a gig to design some new Manga websites for Del Rey Manga!
It seems that Del Rey is buying manga properties and wants to create one-chapter previews for each new book, kind of like what you see over at Tokyopop. The new books getting previews are for Gacha Gacha, book 1, Sugar Sugar Rune, book 1, and Ghost Hunt, book 1.
Paul’s doing the design, and I’m code-wrangling. Links to follow — very soon! — as soon as they’re public. Yay Team Clockwerk Haus!

Rollande declares this key prototype to be “three-quarters-done.” It looks a lot closer than that, at least to me.

At the moment, it’s about 50% larger than the key in the comics, but clever, crafty, cunning Rollande has further tricks up her sleeves:

“The key measures about 2.25” from the bottom of the “button” to the top of the key. The widest point is 1″. It is a 10th of an inch thick, or about three mm. at the head. ”
…
“Anyhow, I was looking the the Rio catalog, and they have this stuff I think you can take molds with and it shrinks so you can make matching, proportional earrings. THAT might answer our problems. I’ll have to look into it. ”
…
“I looked at RTV mold making stuff. (Room Temperature Vulcanization) … There is also stuff that you can put into your finished mold that will magically shrink 50%… But if I got something I would be happy putting IN the mold and then filled the mold with shrink-y stuff it, I could then make ANOTHER mold of the now tiny finished item. We could get tiny. I also could do this with a wax original as the stuff is room temperature. It raises some interesting possibilities.”

More soon as work progresses — I’m REALLY getting excited! It’s been about five years that I’ve waited to see this… six separate silversmiths (say that five times fast!) have told me that they could make me a prototype, and only Rollande has carried through this far! Hooray for Rollande!

My buddy Rollande has shown me the long-awaited prototype for the new Vögelein key necklace.
It’s GORGEOUS.
The shots I have are of the rough key, fresh out of the investment and with the sprues still attached. When Rollande finishes cleaning it up, I’ll post pictures.
She’s planning on doing one other prototype now that she’s got the system down. She’ll perfect the design and then make a mold, from which she’ll start making them in quantity. As we get closer to that stage, I’ll let people know a ballpark figure for costs… I figure they’ll be a little on the pricey side because each one is individually handcrafted. You’d be getting a work of art that took three solid years to perfect, and in my world, handicrafts like that don’t come cheap; we pay people properly for their love and talent.
Yay! Keys! Yay!
These are gonna be SO PRIDDY.

After about a week of brainstorming, hairpulling, researching, and avoiding, I finally have an image for the cover of Vögelein: Old Ghosts.
Now I just have to do a couple color and shadow studies in Photoshop before I go ahead with the painting. Once I have a rough colored image, I’ll post it on the front page for everyone to see.
Yay!
(just please ignore the two dozen angrily crumpled balls of paper on my studio floor.)

Hey, glad to see you again. Sorry for the long break between updates. Yes, I know it was nearly a year. I was spending my time getting married and doing work on the new house, and after that I pretty much just dove into the work for the next book. I hope you’ll all forgive me the delay when you have the new graphic novel in your hot little hands.
I’m just naturally the kind of person who likes to do things all at once instead of dribs and drabs — and this website was beyond easy repair. It needed to be gutted and rewritten from the top down, reorganized and recoded, all by hand. No easy task. A few weeks ago I finally had a large enough block of time to sit down and start coding… and it was a good thing too, because 1998 called and wanted their website back.
After a lot of heavy lifting, redrafting and hitting Movable Type with a hammer until it realized it really did know how to deliver webcomics, it’s finally done. Enjoy, and be sure to check out the newly-revamped Self Publishers section — there’s a lot of good new links and articles in there.