After the completion of each book, it has become tradition for me to sit down and carve a stamp for signing that book, based on the theme-symbol of that particular volume :)
(And every time I start a new volume I wonder what symbol I'm going to be able to come up with for it!)
By the way, I carved this in rubber I bought in Tokyo for this purpose and was stunned: it's invisible to the naked eye, but the surface of it has a microscopic texture clearly designed to retain ink evenly and deposit it with perfect coverage. I have never seen anything like it! Will these guys ever cease amazing me?
For days now I have been preparing all my pre-order packages, only a fraction of which you see below... It has included making a lot of companion sketchbooks and sketching a lot of original drawings. I believe everyone will be pleased with their goodie bag!
And finally, only this morning, the books themselves arrived! Ah the smell of a freshly printed comic! All 1000 copies of Malaak IV are right here and I have to find room for them in a house already packed with a few thousand of our books:
I'm very happy with the way colors turned out in this volume, more than I have been since vol. I. Also I am as usual amazed by how sharp printed comics look. For instance, on the screen, you can only make out a slight different in style between the present and past scenes, but in the book the difference is stark, as I intended it, with the pencil strokes of the line art clearly evident.
I have been busy all day contacting press and reviewers to get the word out; if you know a reviewer who'd be interested in hearing about this, please drop me a note!
