While it’s no particular secret if you follow the newsposts or my Twitter feed, I am officially working on a Ctrl+Alt+Del 1.0 Complete Book Set.

I define Ctrl+Alt+Del 1.0 as everything from the very first comic up to the end of the original Ethan and Lucas storyline in Novemver 2012. In other words, the first ten years of Ctrl+Alt+Del.

While I had been (slowly) releasing smaller collections, at this point it would take at least another eight of those books to reach the end of CAD 1.0. Even if I could put out one a year, that’s eight years before all of those strips are available in print. And I’m constantly producing new content here (Analog and D-Pad, Starcaster Chronicles, Console Wars) which will eventually need their own print collections.

So with that in mind, I’ve decided to try and offer the first decade as one complete product.

This massive collection will be a three volume set. Each volume will be 8″x12″, and clock in at roughly 350 pages each. The collection will house over 2,200 comic strips, everything found here on the website for that ten year period, as well as a bunch of exclusive comics that were found elsewhere. It will also include the first 460 Sillies (the ones that feature Ethan and co. as the primary cast), and a collection of various Ctrl+Alt+Del artwork from across that ten year period.

Volumes One and Two will be all of the Ethan and Lucas stuff in the order it was published. Volume Three will be everything else (the gaming one-shots, Chef Brian, the Players, the Space Archaeologist books, the sillies, etc) This means that if you just want to sit down and read through Ethan’s adventures, you can do that, without regularly being interrupted by one-shots about random games. Likewise, if you feel like just sitting down and reminiscing about games gone by, you can do that as well.

Now, as I’m still laying out the books, everything is in flux and nothing is set yet. I have some preliminary quotes from the printer, but until I have exact page counts etc, I can’t get final quotes. What I do know is that this will be the largest project I have ever tackled. Printing three books this size is really expensive, and I’m going to have to use Kickstarter to try and make it happen. It’s unfortunate, because they take a cut, but I’d rather not have to refund tens of thousands of dollars worth of orders because we couldn’t raise enough money. With Kickstarter, if the demand isn’t there, no harm no foul and everyone can simply walk away.

So when everything is ready and I launch the Kickstarter, we’ll find out. But in the meantime, it would be helpful for me to at least be able to guage general interest in this project. My target number for this collection is in the $75 area. That seems to be in line with similarly-sized collections of other comic strips, and still quite a bit better than the $200ish it would cost to buy the same ten years of strips in the smaller books.

While I realize that clicking a button on a poll does not necessarily translate to pledging the cash when the time comes, having a rough idea of the sort of interest that exists may help me work out some numbers and structure the Kickstarter for the best chance of success!

Target date for the Kickstarter would be sometime this Spring/Summer, with the books shipping (hopefully well) before Christmas. We would ship internationally, and there would of course be some sort of option for the set to be signed by me.

With that, I’d love to ask you to help me out by answering this quick poll honestly.