About 12 minutes past surprising news that well, yeah. “That, well, yeah,” pretty much sums up what’s going on.
As (hopefully), most of you have seen, I’ve started putting new issues of the comic up to end what were the zero issues and what are now issues in sequence. You can go back through my old blogs here to see my decision making (flawed as it was), and why things are going this way. I’m not getting into that. I know I’ve made mistakes and I’m trying to get things going again to finally put up all the issues that are here on my hard drive in the newest of my styles and in PDF form so you can all read it where ever you like.
With Amazing Incredible Issue 06 out last week and 07 ready for this week, I was about to get to redoing what had been the “series 06” issues (again, too confusing to explain), that had been taken down as I established the new continuity. The process pretty much had started for the first one (all that’s left is to do the word balloons), and I ended rewriting the entire issue to reflect the new continuity. The plan was to go down the line and re-release the new versions of those old issues and update them continuity wise (and probably rewrite them all, honestly), one a week for the next few weeks until they were all done. That was the plan.
I knew I had problems with this process already. A couple of months ago, I moved hard drives around and somewhere the inDesign files for the later issues vanished. Essentially, inDesign is a desktop publishing program that I use to make comics. Not having the files was harder but since I had previously exported them as JPGs or PNGs and had them up on the site, I didn’t think twice about it. I could just use those files when updating those 3 or 4 issues. No mess, a little fuss, but not something I couldn’t overcome and keep on the weekly schedule.
This morning, out of sheer curiosity, I went looking for those files and… well, the 2:30AM meltdown.
I have the captures for the files. I do not have the inDesign files (we knew that), but now the actual page exports have gone missing. This means I don’t have the layouts of those issues, I don’t have the text, I don’t have anything but the raw captures I produced two years ago when I wrote those issues. They’re not in the website cache, they’re not in the old galleries, they’re not on my hard drive and if the internet Wayback machine site doesn’t have them… that, well, yeah.
Not the greatest way to start a Saturday.
Back to work.
Jim