Once a week, rain or shine, my brother and I responded to the hollow panic of 10 finished books by trudging to the library for 10 unread replacements.
He used tungsten wires with a diameter of five microns as the "springs" for the pages, placing the finished books into half a poppyseed, displayed on gold plates.
Clowes and Tomine have both recently finished books representing years' worth of work: Tomine's Killing and Dying was released in October.
On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores.
He began editing the poetry for DoubleTake magazine and writing a column on poetry, and before long he finished books like "How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry" (1999) and "The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration" (2002).
For the studios, big payouts for properties based on outlines and concepts rather than on finished books or fully formed screenplays is not uncommon; many of the superhero movies of late have been sold on little more than a few comic books and the broadest of plot ideas.
