Hey gang, how's it going? Been a while, hasn't it?

It is with genuine relief that I announce my return to active duty at JonLock.com. The past month has been devoted solely to the production of the Dying to Tell paperback - my first venture into print. As such, my brain has been overflowing with all the technical wizardry I normally go out of my way to avoid. Microsoft Word is my bread and butter. Ask for a spreadsheet, and I'll whip up a masterpiece on Excel. The things I can do on Paint would challenge your belief system... Photoshop and InDesign? Good grief. A stranger in a strange, strange land.

Stumbling and starting through guidelines, page bleeds and borders, I have systematically resized and reformatted each of the 91 pages of sequential artwork that comprise Dying to Tell. TIFFs have been converted to PDFs. Artwork has been scrutinized at the microscopic (pixular?) level: erasing pencil marks, correcting punctuation... cutting and pasting panels, redrawing borders... the list goes on. The end result? Some gorgeous artwork I couldn't be happier to send to print - all thanks, of course, to the many talented artists and designers responsible for bringing Afterlife Inc. to life. The downside? If I have to rescale another page, I may just scream.

Still, this is all a necessary evil in return for the honour of seeing Afterlife Inc. finally make the leap from screen to the page. Once those final pages are ready, it's a case of combining my PDFs into a single, whopping file and sending them on their merry way to Stuart Gould of UK Comics for printing. That then leaves us with most of February to iron out any last minute issues before debuting the book at the London Super Comic Convention - my first show on the other side of the exhibitor table.

Frankly, I can't even get my head around this at present. Four weeks until the big weekend might as well be a lifetime. For now, I can't see past the end of January, and that fateful moment when the book is finally sent off. And yet this is only really the beginning. After which, there's the digital version for the download market, ISBNs, some potential shelf space in a couple of stores... All very exciting - and all the harder to believe we've finally reached this point, nearly a year and half since I first decided to put the series together.

So yeah, thanks again, gang, for all the support so far. It means the absolute world. My brain is fried. I'm print-obsessed. Give me a week or two, and I should be back to something resembling my normal self.

On the website front, do stay tuned for some gripping new developments in the coming week. Our Dying to Tell adventure may have reached it's conclusion, but our next Afterlife Inc. series, Near Life, is about to start! Until then, check out this preview, with art by Afterlife Inc. regular Ask Jackson.

Anyhow, that's quite enough for one day. Excuse me while I go make a sandwich and slip blissfully into a cheese-and-pickle-fuelled oblivion.

See you next week, folks. It's an exciting time for Afterlife Inc. I hope you'll stick around to see where it takes us.

Love and mutual respect.

Jon