I was on the fence as to whether I should do a Doris Danger trade or a trade of the Lump first. The Lump is kind of my most precious story. It was the first, serious, large, real project I’d conceived and finished, and I am quite proud of the story.
I had always intended to follow my Tabloia comics with a trade paperback of “The Lump,” if for no other reason, because it was the only major “story” in the Tabloia comics. Way back on February 9th, 2005, following the cancellation of Tabloia, I had emailed my Diamond representative (my distributor) about the future of Tabloia. I told him I intended to do a color trade paperback of the Lump, and then possibly following it up with a one-issue adventure of either Doris Danger or Dick Hammer.
He wrote back that any new project must be submitted for review, but that given my track history, they wouldn’t need to see full copies of the next issues in the series. He said he’d be hesitant to do stories of the characters in Tabloia, given my sales numbers. (Ouch…) He said I should lean toward one-shots, if I take characters from Tabloia, and promote it without referring to Tabloia, to make it fresh. (Double ouch…)
So this advice was in my head, as I finished Tabloia and prepared for the next project, the Lump Trade. I thought I could whip out a reprint book like this relatively quickly and with a minimum of work. It would also buy me some time while I continued pumping out pages for whatever the next project might be.
But then, down at San Diego that year I heard about Marvel doing a Halloween-release of Kirby’s monsters, and decided I should instead quickly put a package together with what little I had to collect of my Kirby-style Doris Danger stories. That set the Lump trade back a few months. While I was making the deadlines to get the Doris Danger humongous treasury to the printer, I was also submitting “The Lump TP” cover images and descriptions for inclusion in Diamond’s catalog, to be published in a few months.
I don’t even remember considering doing the Lump trade in color, so I must have scrapped the idea pretty quickly. First of all, the time it would take me to color a comic would set it back a year. Second of all, at that time, I didn’t have the computer knowledge of how to color it, so I would have had to have hired someone, or tried to get a friend or desperate aspiring comics guy to do it. If I relied on someone else, who knows how reliable they would be, or what kind of timeline they would be on. Not to mention the immense additional cost it would be to have it printed. Would that cost generate the additional sales? Just maybe. Especially since so many publishers have popped up overseas who have begun charging the same for printing a color comic as it costs to do black-and-white books here in America or Canada. But at any rate, it was something I lost interest in trying very early on.
I contacted my friend Damon Thompson, who had done all the great covers for all the Tabloia comics. I told him, I had originally planned for there to be six issues of Tabloia, and since there were only five, might he consider doing a new cover for the Lump trade? I told him I wanted a lot of dismembered hands. Maybe like a stack or row of them or something. He said he actually thought it would be fun. That made me relieved that he would do another cover. When he sent it to me, I thought it was his best one yet!
March 30, 2005, I again wrote to my Diamond representative. I asked for permission to post “The Lump” trade paperback in July’s Previews catalogue, which would ship in September. I billed the book as black-and-white, 104 pages, for $12.95. He said for that high a cover price, I should consider throwing in some additional pages, to give my (few) fans a reason to order the trade. And so I started re-thinking, or alter-thinking, about this “additional pages” business. I had time to think about it, because I was throwing together the Doris Danger trade, and that bought me a few months.
The original “Lump” story was scripted to run 72 pages, and once I began drawing it, I stretched it out to about 90. I remember I had estimated the 104 page business, because I figured that would give me a dozen pages for whatever else I felt like adding.
I knew I wanted to add the original covers and back covers of the Tabloia comics, because they all portrayed the Lump storyline. But just like that, ten more pages were accounted for. So then I began visualizing other things that might be fun to include as well.
In every issue of Tabloia, I had a title page with a silly small print warning, and three little text features: 1. a letter of introduction from my imaginary editor, Rob Oder, 2. “Fun Sanitation Tips from the Sultan of Sanitation, Dr. “Cleanie” Santini, and 3. “Surprising Sex Science Facts from Professor Pardi!” I enjoyed all these enough that I thought, why don’t I throw those into the trade as well. So that was another five pages added, and I had written text pieces for the sixth-and-never-published-issue, so I thought I would throw that in too.
I thought it would be fun to include some of my “secret texts” from the website. Every issue, we would post a “secret text” for that issue, black text on a black background. If you knew where it was and highlighted it with your mouse, the text would “magically appear, for extra-special, super-dedicated fans!” I thought some of these texts were really funny, and they deserved to be read by people, so I decided some of those would go in too.
And then I decided to include a bunch of my old layout and character sketches.
And then I was asked by Smallzone Distributors in the UK to write a four-page horror story, and I had an idea in my head that I thought would work nicely.
It was a dream I’d had, that really freaked me out, about being able to see a glimpse of something in the mirror, but not be able to tell what it was. And then, I finally saw it, and it made me desolate with foreordained fate. The mirror was showing me glimpses of my own life in the future. The mirror had fragmented its reflection in time. I was catching glimpses of how I was going to die. I woke up gushing tears. I thought it would make a good story now, with characters from the Lump, and sent it off to the UK for publication. Naturally, that had to be included in the Lump trade.
So I just about had my package together, and now it was bulked up to an idiotic 160. This was in part, because you should do your comics in multiples of 16 pages – or at least eight. So I would say, okay, 104 isn’t enough. Next step is 120. And then I’d find I had 121 pages I wanted to include. So I’d try and come up with 136. And while brainstorming to get 136 pages, I’d come up with 137, and so on, until I was up to that idiotic 160. And so, at the last minute, again to bulk up the pages, I decided I wanted to write an epilogue to the Lump. It would be three pages, plus a title page.
Pretty quickly, I’d come up with an idea for a sequel to “The Lump,” but now it was looking like it might never see print. So I decided, well screw that, I’m going to presage the sequel by hyping it in an epilogue. Because you never know if something is going to sell, right? I could be hopeful that even though Tabloia wasn’t successful, maybe people would enjoy the Lump trade. And if they enjoyed it enough, I wanted to hype that I was more than happy to do a sequel to it. Not to mention, I think the epilogue tied everything together interestingly. It was in character with the rest of the story.
So with all these additional features (seventy idiotic pages worth!) I ended up having a lot of prep-work and editing to do, to make all this printable and neat and orderly for the trade. It involved cropping, spacing, playing with layouts and sizes, and A LOT of text. Not to mention I’d have to draw a brand new four pages!