Zampano

Yesterday was a great day! At least for me and all the German readers of Endless Sky. After three years of work and countless prepublished episodes on Zampano and in the German magazine COMIX, the book is finally finished and was sent to the printer this week. The book will hit the bookstores in the week of May 22-29 and you will be able to get your copy at the comic book conventions in Zürich and Munich at the end of the month.

Here’s a first look at the last pages of chapter 8:

So, how does the dead tree version vary from the online version?
All in all the book will have 280 pages and 8 chapters as well as an epilog. The foreword was kindly written by Cuno Affolter, renowned Swiss journalist and curator of the comics library in Lausanne. I wrote an afterword that sums up my feelings about the whole story.
All copy has been revised and all grammar mistakes have been eradicated. There will also be two versions, a regular version with perfect binding and a limited edition hardcover version with a signed print..

Here are the bad news for online readers: We will only serialize Endless Sky up to chapter 8 on Zampano. If you want to read the entire book you need ot purchase a copy of the book.

Now, this concerns mainly the German edition. but what about an English edition? We’re talking to potential publishers in the USA but we can say that we will make an ebook version available through the Virtual Graphics Shop and starting in two weeks you can purchase Endless Sky apps from Comixology. You heard it here first, all of our books will be available from Comixology shortly. An official announcement is coming soon. We’ll keep you posted on the print edition…

And another comic festival in Angoulême reached its end. This was the festival’s 40th birthday and the scandal that erupted after the announcement of the winner(s) will guarantee that this edition will stay in people’s memories for quite a while (you can find info about this across the net). We don’t really care since none of our creators were nominated (…surprise, surprise!). The festival was interesting for us in a lot of different ways. After a difficult and formative 2012 and the resulting delays of some of the releases, a lot of fans that asked for specific books had to go home empty handed. Also, the financial crisis seems to have taken hold of the French and parting with their hard earned money has become quite a difficult decision for many of the visitors (Paris has now it’s own “financial crisis store” that sells things below 50 Cents). The Manga- and Comic tent was pretty much empty on Sunday and at least one exhibitor, Pulp’s Art (a retailer from Paris) seemed pretty unhappy about the organizers decision to take Soleil out of their tent and to move them in place of the missing Dupuis into the large tent. Saturday and Sunday were however tremendeous for us and made more then up for the lackluster first two days. This will also be the last time that we’ll be attending with a 6m booth at the ParaBD and we had a talk with the organizers to move us with a bigger booth into the Nouveau Monde tent. Let’s hope this will work out.

Other than that lot’s of meetings were held and new contacts made. Expect an announcement about a new distributor for our apps in English/French and German in the next week or so.

Exterior view of the ParaBD tent on Saturday morning after the big rain storm!

Virtual Graphics booth. A WIP shot!

The finished booth on Thursday morning shortly before the opening.

On the afternoon the tent was filled to capacity with fans. This is what it looked like pretty much every day.

A nice pub by the large tent where a lot of creators and publishers could be found drinking and dining.

Street view of the city on Sunday afternoon. The whole town gets into the comic fever.

Casterman has traditionally the first big booth in the large tent.

German artist Andreas got a nice display at Lombard as well as a great exhibit.

Panini is also a publishing giant in France with the largest display of the festival.