Way back in 2001, I had what we like to call in the business “a massive hard drive failure.” Among the various things that were lost were the high-res color versions of several Suburban Jungle strips (more or less the entire “Goody Awards” story arc). Fortunately, I’d sent high-res grayscale versions to Plan 9 Publishing for the release of Love Bites, and of course there were low-res color versions up on the website, so it’s not like the strips are erased from history. But this does leave me with a dilemma … for No Predation Allowed, which is intended to be full color, do I run the high-res grayscale, or the low-res (and thus super-fuzzy) color?
My preferred answer is to “re-colorize” the high-res copies, and if time allows that is in fact what I’ll do — but I’m rapidly running out of time if I want to get these things done by AnthroCon. Given how much of the first volume is already in black and white (since the first year or so of strips were mostly in black and white), using the high-res grayscale strips will work if I have to punt … but it’ll be one of those things that just gets under my nails and bothers me forever. So we’ll see how it goes. I may end up burning some midnight oil on this. The 10-year collection is going to be pretty much the capstone on a major endeavor of my life’s work, and I really want to get it right.
-The Gneech
