2021/03/19
I love comics! And I love web comics. One of my favorite is the Pepper & Carrot series from the french author David Revoy.
Pepper & Carrot is about the witch "Pepper" and her cat "Carrot" telling small and beautiful stories that always bring a smile on your face.
David Revoy is creating those stories since 2014 and continues so until today with the help of his numerous patreons.
But what is so special about this comic? First of all it is suitable for all ages, without violence, discrimination, sexism or anything related, yet with stories and visuals appealing to toddlers, children and adults. This combination is already hard to find in the comic world. Next it is free and by free I mean with no strings attached, under a permissive Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Every line, every brush stroke, every word of this comic is open source and can be modified, remixed or even used commercially as long as you attribute the author and collaborators. This already created some interesting sidekick projects, like an animated version of one episode, a board game, multiple PC games (#1, #2) and also the book I've published two days ago.
David Revoy published the english comic episodes 1 to 29 within 3 books on October 2020 as printed hard and softcover at DriveThruComics. After years of experiments and research he was able to create a publishing workflow that fully relies on free(libre) open source software.
This was a rocky road and he hit the walls multiple times as open source publication software is still not 100% suitable for a CMYK publishing workflow. He was able to hunt down and help fixing bugs in the open source software packages he used, mostly regarding to color management and color profiles and also PDF compatibility.
He kept the process completely open and created a partly automated toolchain to gather the comic pages for the books and prepare them for publishing in any language the comics are translated to. And with the help of the awesome community these are around 50 languages!
As soon as he published the books, I immediately ordered the first one with episodes 1 to 11. After reading them to my children and thus translating them to german on-the-fly I though: "Why shouldn't I create a german version, so my kids can read them by there own?"
Beeing a programmer, I started digging into the source code thinking:
"This can't be to hard, as it's already almost automated, right?"
Well, "only" 4 months, a lot of very nice and helpfull conversations with David Revoy and some commits to the publishing toolchain's source code later I'm holding the second and final proof print of the german hardcover in my hands. (See image above)
Achievement unlocked!
Now it's on you to get the book and read it for yourself, get it as a gift, read it to others or to your kids.
You can order the book at DriveThruComics. Part of the revenue will directly go to the author David Revoy, so he can continue creating this great comic series and another part will be used to publish the other books in german.
If you are from Leipzig Germany and want to save some cash on the shipping and also reduce resources and CO² used and produced by shipping each book individually, please drop me a line at info [at] anzui [dot] dev and I will send you the payment details. I will collect orders for Leipzig Germany, order them in a bulk and then deliver them in person using my eco-friendly and sturdy cargo bike directly to your doorstep.
The price for the hardcover including shipping to my place is 16.00€. Any amount on top will be donated directly to David Revoy.
Thank you and happy reading!