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countdown to NYCC, D-28
I have pushed off sending card artwork to the printer until Sunday night. I have some late entries for cards, and better to resolve them before sending.
Above is a map of the 110 cards for the print run. On the right side is a “gutter” between the last two vertical rows. This allows us to have different background colors that “bleed”. Cutting is imprecise, so for cards that are all the same edge color, they can be “butt” cut, since both sides of the cut will have the same color. But to have black bleed cards, there is a gap from nearby Magenta bleed cards, so that there will be two different cuts, separated by 0.25″. If the cut is slight off, you will not get a sliver of black or magenta on the wrong card.
For this run, we will have 99 Magenta bleed slots, 5 black bleed, 5 white bleed, and one peculiar one which will have a black border on one side, and white on the opposite. I could just leave that spot blank, but I have an idea for a NYCC promo card that could use an odd border.
At this moment, I have 3 open slots.
Ideas for cards to go in them:
– Tractor cards (from my vintage farm tractor series) I have 5 from the set, which I have printed as ride-alongs on the Suckpax 2 sheet.
– My Dad’s Record Collection info card. I could print a card to include in each pack, which explains what the series is about.
– SideKick internal series. I have 4 of this series printed already, could add another one or two.
Suckpax 3, wrapper artwork to printer
Got one item off of the To-Do list, the artwork for the wrappers is now dispatched to our printer. Should come back to us in two weeks, and then we apply the wax layer.
We are going to print enough for 300 boxes of Suckpax. Series 1 and 2 each had 200 boxes in their build, but now the wind is at our backs, and there will be higher interest due to The Sucklord appearing on Bravo TV’s “Work of Art”, which will air the first episode the night before the New York Comic Con.
Countdown to NYCC, D-29 ramping up
This week is going to be a lot of late hours, a lot of time devoted to getting stuff ready to send out for fabrication.
Biggest things (highest priority):
Artwork for Cards. Deadline to get final artwork to printer is Friday (Monday if I have to). I have 83 in hand (out of 110). The Sucklord is working on about 12 more. Simeon has asked for 6 slots, but not sent art yet. Datadub is sending in art for one card. This leaves about 9 open slots for cards.
Ride-alongs! I have a bunch of SideKick related cards I can add in, if the slots stay open. I have sent out an appeal to my cronies to see if anyone has cards they want to include.
Die-cutting fixtures. I have to send out to have special fixtures created for Die-cutting stickers.
This is an example for a small box. I do the design in Illustrator, send to fab company, and it takes about a week to have it made.
Letter to Artists: Any artist who has worked with any project associated with SideKick is invited to make a guest appearance at our NYCC booth. I need to write this up as an email to send out.
R&D: Still working out some technical aspects of special cards to go into Suckpax 3. Got some cool new things to slip into packs.
Suckpax 3, Sticker cards, test layup
The Sucklord designed a kick-ass set of stickers for the set. 9 different, and we are going to kiss-cut them like vintage sticker cards (Garbage Pail Kids, Star Wars, etc). I had a company make up a custom batch of sticker material, which matches the composition and thicknesses of the old style stickers.
Just printed a test layup of the 9, and some of the cards may need some size adjustment.
Once the artwork is locked down, I can design the steel rule die that will do the kiss-cut.
Digression: Kiss-cut is not what tough girls do, but when a pattern is sliced into the top layer of a multi-layer material. A die is carefully shimmed so that it only cuts through one layer and not all the way through the stack of material. This yields a sticker where you can peel away just part of the front, shaped in some way.
I am excited thinking about some of these stickers showing up on lunch boxes.
Suckpax 3, Boxes printed and cut out already
We already have the printed and die cut boxes for Suckpax 3. They were done in tandem with Suckpax 2 boxes, to reduce cost. All we need to do now is number and glue them up. Scheduled for later this week.
This is the only component (other than sketch card blanks) already done.
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