Sonichu [9/23/15] Printed "Number Zero" Book Now Available Through Lulu

Let alone recording that DVD in SLP/EP mode to start with.

Let alone thinking it was drawn with a mouse when it was a tablet. He'd certainly wouldn't waste his talent on that than he does with tangible products, though seeing him hold a Wacom pen in an odd manner might bug me.

To him, those are just meaningless numbers. Chris reminds me of my mom in some way, she understood how to wire up a whole house illegally to cable TV, but could never figure out what hooking up a stereo meant. Some people are just like that, being practical than technical. I hate trying to knock sense into these people, I simply give up.

If only Chris had the foresight to make a hi-res master of these pages with the Comic Sans font and simply shrunk those done for the web, it would've paid off well for him years down the road when this Lulu thing came up.

 

Because I am an autistic piece of shit, I also bought one of them. I figured it was cheap enough that I didn't mind, just to see how it came out.

As you expected, it came out like shit.



The cover is pixelated and shitty, Chris really obviously just stretched out whatever resized image he happened to have on his PC at the time, rather than rescan the original or do anything that required any effort.

The spine is completely fucked up, and spills over onto the back of the book, making it totally useless -- the bottom half of text can't be viewed from the side. If by some shitty reason you ever wanted to buy multiple future issues to put on your shelf, you'd never be able to tell which one is which. I don't know if this is because he just copied/pasted a book spine he assumed would work, or if he really underestimated how big the book would be. Probably both. The result is that the cover is one of the worst things in comic history. It honestly is so poorly done and so low quality that if Chris wasn't saying it was his I would assume this was a troll attempt to make him look bad.

The back cover is significantly less pixelated, but still looks like garbage because it is, of course, drawn all in markers and pen by Chris.

The paper used is matte and looks like the lowest quality/cheapest option he could get it printed on. Someone else mentioned it looks like "draft" quality and that pictures make it better -- it seriously is so ugly and the resolution so low, it looks like a test page, and I can't even capture how shitty it is on camera. I've purchased comics from Lulu before, and they weren't nearly this bad, so there must be varying levels of publishing quality (or Lulu themselves has dropped in quality significantly -- it's been years) and Chris picked the worst.

So, it's exactly what you expect. Low quality and no effort by Chris other than uploading it. He didn't even check to see if things fit on the cover.

 

It's almost better that it's a steaming pile of hedgehog dung.

 

Chris's Lulu account is down.

 

The most ironic part us, Chris isn't cutting corners on these productions deliberately. He just doesn't know anything about the technology or the artistic process. But if you tried to educate him, he'd get pissed at the suggestion that he should do more than he's doing.

 

Yeah, may have gotten pulled. The product page is also gone. Not surprising, honestly. The real question is if it was pulled for copyright/content issues or because it's simply so poorly done.

 

I want to think both!

 

My guess is copyright issues rather than quality issues, considering what Lulu allows onto their site (NSFW)

Spoiler

I wonder what he's gonna do about the Etsy pre-orders?

 

Now I wonder who ratted Chris out to Lulu to get those books off their 'shelves'? It wasn't that hard to point out the IP swipes to them I'm sure.

 

How is this the fault of haters? From what I can tell the only hate comes from the fact that he paid for the cheapest production package.

 

If I had to guess, I'd say it was a pretty cool guy.

 

Cool guys snitching or not, lulu took it down because it's a copyright violation.

Chris is like those fat trashy guests on ricki lake who respond to legitimate criticism with "y'all don't know me" and "I do what I want".

 

I'm probably overestimating Chris, but this seems like a good way for him to harvest addresses. If you buy from Lulu, you got it shipped straight to you -- he'd never know who bought it. This way, he knows every single person who buys it and where they live.

 

I call 'em party poopers!

Knew there was a catch.

 

Chris added a paragraph to his listing on Etsy:

**Please note: This is the ONLY way to order the book; I have the books printed through Lulu.com. And each copy sent from me will be shipped in a plastic Comic Book Sleeve with cardboard lining, inside a large envelope. My price here covers shipping from there to me, and then to you. Thank you.

Chris said he changed the access for the listing to private.

 

So wait, does this mean Chris is sitting on a pile of comics he had printed before the listing was taken down? Good luck selling those after people found out about the print quality.

 

Let alone piggy-backing on the entire thing.

 

Wow, Chris is being really shady about this. There is zero reason for him to do this, other than trying to skim some extra money off the top on each one he sells, or to track who is buying them.

 

Certainly is (he is his own middleman). I don't suppose he'll get into deep s--t for this one.