The ink is dry on the deal for the next translation of Longshot Comics. The Failed Promised of Bradley Gethers — book two of my dot-epic — will be published in Italian sometime next year by the same folks who did such a great job on The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers. Prospettiva Globale really pulled out all the stops to make their previous translation of my work as accurate and respectful of my text and art as possible, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what they come up for the next round of my dots-behaving-badly saga of family tragedy and (minimal) triumph.

Everyone’s inevitable questions remain: will there be a book three? Will there be reprints of the original editions? A tentative deal still stands, but it largely depends on my ability to sit down and get the job done. So blame me.

In more immediate publishing news, “Monster,” a script I wrote for a proposed Frankenstein anthology a full ten years ago, is finally seeing the light of day after much drama and a switch in publishers. Frankenstein réassemblé will be released next week by Les 400 coups, just in time for Halloween. Yes, it’s a French graphic novel/bande dessinée, so it’s another translation job. Between these two projects and the German edition of Longshot Comics, it’s been a long time since I’ve published in English. Which I suppose is pretty good for a dumb unilingual Anglophone, but I should really try to go native again at some point. Blogs don’t count.

Despite the lovely art by Gabriel Morrissette and pretty colouring job, “Un Monstre à Londres” as it’s been retitled for this edition, features a significant printing error. One of my pages is missing the text, meaning one sequence plays as silent, with none of the intended narration. Profuse apologies were offered by the editor, but considering no one seems to have noticed, I guess the story still reads fine as is. I was easy going with my response to this boo-boo. It’s not like it’s even the first time it’s happened to me. The second comic story I ever had published, back in the late ‘80s, had one of the pages printed out of order. And it still made sense. As these errors keep going unnoticed, I’m left with few possible conclusions. Either I’m such a brilliant writer my stories make structural sense any way you choose to print them, or I’m such a hack you could shuffle the material randomly, give it a read, and still experience the exact same sense of bored detachment.

Part of the deal I made for “Monster” is that web publishing rights revert to me after two years, which means I’ll be able to host the director’s cut of the story here, with all the words I wrote once upon a time in my own language. So watch this spot, Halloween two years hence, when you can read it just in time for the Mayans to destroy the world or whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing in December of 2012. Dicks.