New Comic book: La BD de l'Avent, Le Lombard publishing.

A very original book

A few months ago I wrote a short comic, a four-page one-shot, not about Pepper&Carrot, but about Christmas for Le Lombard publishing.

It was a great opportunity for me to work with a new team and set new standards. It was also a privilege to work for this publisher, famous in the Franco-Belgian comics world for such iconic titles as the Smurfs, Tintin, Blake and Mortimer, BlueBerry, Léonard and many others. I was also honoured to contribute to this collection of 25 short stories by many special guests, famous authors in the French and Belgian comic industry

The principle of this book is original: each story comes with bound pages that are impossible to read before cutting the edge. The idea is like an "Advent calendar", but this time without little windows to reveal a present or a chocolate: you have to cut out the pages and discover a new story every day in December before Christmas.

All the stories in this book are in French, for the French-speaking market and sold in bookshops. The book is already published and available. You can find it in your bookshop or read more about it on the product page on Le Lombard's website.

CC-By and made with FLOSS

As you can imagine, I've negotiated with the publisher to release my story under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-By), so that I can share it with you, make it part of free culture, and open it up to translation. However, we did agree on one exception to my release: it must be after the book has been released in stores, and I think it's very fair to give this first publication exclusivity to the company that fully financed the making of this story.

On a technical level, I unfortunately had to do a lot of Bash scripting with CLI tools to be able to deliver a correct CMYK PDF and TIFF in their specifications (mostly based on Adobe Photoshop and Indesign), and I kept all the specifications to report to the Krita developers when the text tool refactor is ready. As it stands, the software can't deliver the format this publisher requires from the save or export menu. Still, I was happy to be able to tweak something and still be using only FLOSS (Free(libre) and Open Source) even though it might have taken me twice or more as long to make my comic as it did for other authors. A big thank you also goes to my publisher for their patience with my testing of the file formats.

Online Soon?

But where to host this comic online?

That's why I'm currently refactoring the Pepper&Carrot site in a git branch called 'When-Worlds-Collide', a very complex refactor, especially on a site that has had more than 10 years of incremental changes. It's more like untying spaghetti knots to make a change at such a fundamental low level. But once done, this new structure will also be used to publish other stories on the Pepper&Carrot site, such as my MiniFantasyTheatre episodes or small one-shots like this one. And with a translation system, of course. Thanks to this improvement, I should be able to publish it on the redesigned site before the end of December.

Video trailer (in French):