by Alex Baldwin
Jun 24, 2020 • 12:00PM
11 days ago
THIS IS NOT THE FINAL UPDATE, EITHER
Alright y'all, let's talk about things. Hatman here, by the way.
I'm in the middle of fulfilling orders for ENGLEWOOD. The first round of physical copies have gone out. If the tracking info is correct, some of you already have your books and stickers.
That said, we've run into more snags. In the interest of transparency, I'll detail everything for you.
If you want the tl;dr version: Shipping is slowed because stamps.com has been unreliable, Director's Cut should come in this week, shirts are being printed this weekend, don't have an ETA on posters yet because our printer needs repair.
DIGITAL COPIES
They're all sent out. The link I included was on a timer, to try and prevent piracy.
If you didn't get to the link in time, please email me (alex@hatman.net) with your name and backer number, and I'll send your copy.
SHIPPING
So, stamps.com is garbage.
I went to print your shipping labels the night of 6/17, but ran into an issue with my bank card being declined, so I had to get them printed the following morning, when I could call my bank (it's local, so they don't have 24-hour services) and get the card back up. Then I bought all the labels for the US-bound standard edition comics (around 152 packages). While processing all of those labels, stamps.com timed me out on the site. No big deal, right? Well, apparently they don't have a system that lets you reprint your labels except on the same screen where they were purchased. Since that screen had to be reloaded, being timed out and all, the labels couldn't be reprinted. A phone call later told me that the only option was to process a refund, and reorder the labels. Refunds process in about 2-3 weeks, according to them.
So I tried printing the labels again. And I made an effort to not get timed out on the site. But the site still hit some snag while processing, and couldn't make it past 151 labels, and got held up for about four hours. A few of the labels printed (about 15), but nothing else went out beyond those. Same deal as before—process refunds, try it again.
As of now, I'm waiting on about $1,000 in refunds to come in. There's no real ETA. USPS has to verify that the tracking numbers haven't been used and aren't about to be used, before they can send the money back. Some of you received emails with tracking numbers included, but those aren't legit.
The only real tracking number you'll get is the one sent through your backer info on Indiegogo. I'm not sure if the refund will go back into the stamps.com account (you have to fund the account on its own; you can't just buy postage directly) or my bank card, so until that processes, what I'm doing now is paying for the labels through my personal account, so there's (hopefully) no delay on shipping when the Director's Cut comics arrive. I'm buying these labels individually, as well, to avoid any issues with processing too much stuff at once. As a result, shipping is going to be a bit slower.
Needless to say, I am
very angry about this, and we won't be using stamps.com in the future.
THE DIRECTOR'S CUT
It was sent to production on 6/19, after a few days of back-and-forth trying to figure out how to get the wraparound cover correct. It should be in sometime this week, if estimates are correct. As of the time of writing, I don't have a shipped notification or a tracking number. We'll post about it on Twitter once the books arrive.
THE SHIRTS
They didn't get printed when I said they would because when COVID-19 hit, we were forced to shut down, and couldn't run any orders, or perform our regular maintenance on the printers. One started leaking ink during the shutdown, and will almost certainly be a total loss (right now, it's up to $8,000 in parts and labor to repair, for an $18,000 printer). But we have another printer, which we had shut down several months ago because it also had ink issues. However, it should be back up and running today, after our tech finishes fixing the print heads. The shirts will be finished over the weekend.
THE POSTERS
This one has been a headache all in itself.
We have two wide-format printers in our facility—a Mimaki JV150-130 and a Roland VersaCAMM SP-540V. The stickers were printed on the Roland, which has given us few issues in the years we've had it, and those came out great, as you've seen. We decided to use the Mimaki to print posters, since it's higher quality. And that's where our troubles began.
When we went to run test prints, the printheads on the Mimaki started having issues. Mostly dripping red ink, and I'm fairly certain you don't want a poster that looks like it came out of a crime scene. So we tinkered with it for a few days, but when we went to run test prints, the ink cartridges had expired (apparently, this is a thing). The Mimaki won't process ink from cartridges that are two months past expiration, so we figured we could just change the date on the printer and get around the problem. Turns out we'd have to disassemble the whole thing for that. So we got new ink. But because we didn't run our regular maintenance on it while COVID shut us down, there were deeper problems, which calls for professionals to come fix. They're
supposed to fix it either this week or next, but nothing's confirmed.
Because of this, we tried a test print on the Roland, but the quality wasn't nearly good enough. So we're waiting on the Mimaki to be fixed before we can run on posters. Since those were going to be shipped separately anyway,
anyone who backed a poster tier will receive another tracking number for those when they go out. Everything else will be shipped first.
