Printing Comics

By John Fortman of Fallen Angels Used Books.

Contents:
Comic Book Sizes
Preparing the Paper
Tools: From Scanner to Print Format
Creating the Image
Preparation for Printing
Creating the PDF
Printing
Getting the Word Out
Making it with Print Comics

Creating a print quality comic is easy. Getting the final product printed and sold is a bit more difficult. That's something this document will attempt to describe.

Comic Book Sizes

When creating a comic, you need to know what the final product will be before you climb into the trenches and start drawing.

The standard size allows for bleeds because so much is trimmed off in the printing process. This means the drawings can go all the way to the edge of the paper. Minicomics must allow for, and trim off, an unprintable area around each printed page. Bleeds are not possible because of the way offset printing works at this size. Ashcans are simply a way to get ink on paper. They aren't intended to be fancy so it's not worth it to try the fancy stuff.

Unprintable Area:
Laser printers have a fairly uniform unprintable area. If you print on both sides of a page, the front and back sides will match up pretty well. Offset printing, however, has an uneven unprintable area. When the paper is turned over to be printed on the back, usually inside the printer, the print is offset from the previous one. This is the reason for having a live area. Otherwise, text and graphics would get chopped off arbitrarily.

The unprintable area for an HL-5140 laser printer in portrait mode is 0.17" on top and bottom and 0.24" on the left and right. In landscape mode, it's 0.17" on the top and bottom and 0.19" on the left and right.

The unprintable area for an offset printer is more like 0.24" on the left and right, 0.17" on the top and 0.34" on the bottom. (These aren't real values, though.)

Offset Printing

Notice in the image above that the light gray areas denote the parts of the back-to-back live areas that do not overlap each other. Also, the back-to-back comic pages can be shifted left to right as well making it even more difficult to know how the page will look when finally printed. This is where the concepts of live areas and bleeds comes from.

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Preparing the Paper

First, always draw considerably larger than you expect the final product to be. For the methods professional artists use, check out Blambot's Rule Your Own Comic Pages Tutorial. Amateur artists take what they can get, though. Most amateur comics are drawn on printer paper, hardly larger than the printed version. The print quality suffers for this but for beginners, getting ink on paper is an important step.

Next, choose the size you want to work from. If you intend to produce each image separately then arrange them on the computer, work at any size you like. If you intend to draw the page layout by hand, be sure to draw it at the same aspect ratio as the finished product, preferrably with bleeds:

11x14 with bleeds

Bleeds: Any artwork outside this area will most certainly be trimmed.

Panel Border: Due to the way offset printing works, this area may or may not be printed. Do not put anything important in this area. Some comics leave it blank.

Live Area: This is where the important artwork and text goes.

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Tools: From Scanner to Print Format

Don't have money? Don't pirate software. There are many freeware programs out there that will get the job done as well as the expensive professional ones. Of course, many of these only work under Linux but beggers can't be choosers.

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Creating the Image

The idea is to produce a print quality image in a form that can be used by the printer to print the paper version of your comic.

Dots Per Inch (DPI):
Simply the number of pixels per inch on paper. (To convert centimeters to inches, multiply by 0.39.) Usually, 300 dpi is a good quality for color images. 600 dpi is a good quality for black and white or grayscale images. Some printers require as high as 1200 dpi for line art and/or text.

What does this mean to you the artist? Your originals must be at least as large, preferrably larger, than the final version.

How did I get these sizes? Multiple the size in inches by the required DPI. Round up to the nearest pixel.

The file sizes aren't always as scary as they might seem. Vector graphics (.EPS, .PDF and others) can make very high quality images for very small file/memory sizes. For example, Adobe Illustrator can combine 300 dpi color graphics with 1200 dpi B&W fonts, panel borders and word balloons.

Basically, know what you're trying to produce. That will determine the image size you need to work with.

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Preparation for Printing

(From the Keenspace Forums)

For photocopiers you need a good (near perfect) original. You probably don't want to use your original artwork because it's not sized properly for the page and I assume you letter with the computer like the rest of us. Basically, you need to get your originals into a form that will look good on paper.

Printing companies all have their own requirements for this. Comixpress for example wants a PDF file with each individual page on a separate page of the pdf. If you want to go to the copy shop and make copies, you want the pdf file to have 2 page spreads as you see below.

Letter sized layout

Notice the top spread is for the inside pages and the bottom spread is for the cover. I leave a white border around each page because that's the way I formatted my comic. If you intend to use the bleeds and trim off bits of image then you want the image to go all the way to the edge of the paper.

A letter-sized page is 8.5x11" and you want to fold it in half. So, each page of your comic will be 5.5x8.5". HOWEVER, most printers and copiers can't print to the very edge of the paper (except War's color printer). That's why there's a usually a border. The blue lines above represent the printable area of the page. You will want to keep anything important inside that. AND you should leave about a half-inch border in case the paper gets skewed in the copier. Graphics can go there but nothing importand (like a person's face) and text should never go there. In fact, text should stay within the dotted outline shown above.

You should always start with a LARGER image and reduce it down. NEVER save your large images as jpeg. Save as GIF, TIFF or PNG. None of these formats have the compression artifacts that jpeg has. The size on disk doesn't matter much either as long as you have enough.

You can include the text in the image or not. If you don't use a desktop publishing system like Quark Express or Adobe Illustrator then it's easier just to include the text in the comic image. It really depends on how you want to handle it. A professional printer might ask for 1200 dpi fonts and line art but 300 dpi color for example. For purposes of your first print, just go with what you have.

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Creating the PDF

PDF is NOT a proprietary format as you might believe if you live in the windows world. http://www.scribus.org.uk/ is an open source desktop publisher that will export to pdf. It's what I'll be using to create my comic spreads. It's meant for linux, though.

Smart Draw was suggested in IRC and Open Office.org will export to pdf. These may or may not be as exacting as you need. You'll have to try them.

Adobe Acrobat is THE PDF program for Windows, though (not the reader, the program).

Out of the bunch, Open Office will cost you nothing.

Remember, you want to make spreads so if you have 28 pages of comic to print the spreads will be 28-1, 2-27, 26-3, 4-25, etc. Also note that the pages need to be in increments of 4 because you will have 2 comics pages per size of the paper (for a total of 4). So, 16, 20, 24 or 28. 32 or more is pushing it because you need to include the cover and the poor paper trimmer can only do so much. More on that later.

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Printing

There are a lot of methods to use to get your comic printed.

The basic idea is to find the least cost per copy when you print your comic. I see $0.03 as reasonable and $0.05 as getting expensive. You can get around $0.015 per copy with offset printing, though. Keep that in mind.

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Getting the Word Out

This is the part I haven't done myself. I do have a bit of research done as far as getting links and some basic information like that. So here you go:

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Making it with Print Comics

(From the Keenspace Forums)

Today I did a little breakdown of the costs involved with making money from a print comic by going through a distributor like Diamond.

Typical cover price for today's comics is around $3.00. Diamond will buy comics from you for a 75% discount on the cover price which means you still have to do the printing yourself. A good business model for making money from your endevors is to multiply the cost of producing the work by some value. In this case, I used 2 times markup so you're making double what it cost you to print your comic.

The comic dealer makes about 25% of the cover price for each comic sold.

I'm generalizing shipping into bundles of 10 and further generalizing that each comic weighs about 3 ounces or about 2 pounds for shipping calculations and qualifies as "bound printed material" for the USPS. (I know a minicomic weighs about 2 ounces so a full sized comic must weigh more.) So, shipping is roughly $2 for the package of 10 or $0.20 per book.

Sales Tax FAQ for Missouri. Notice that shipping is not taxable so the only part of the book that gets taxed is the cover price.

With this in mind, here's a quick breakdown of what everyone in the business is making. (Please note that I'm generalizing a bit and I may be leaving someone out.)

Now, split up the remaining $0.38 between: Colorist, Letterer, Inker, Penciler, Writer, and Editor, then throw in some profit for the company (ie, divide by 7) and each person on the staff makes around $0.05 per book sold in the US. A nickle!

As fun as that sounds, take a look at the printing cost per book.

Kinkos (the last place you would ever go to get a large body of comics printed) will charge you something on the order of $4.50 to print a full sized comic.

Comixpress.com, a reasonably good digital print service, will charge you $1.20 per book to print 30000 (or to print 10 books. Digital prices are the same no matter how many books you print) 24-page comics with color covers, B&W insides with a comixpress ad thrown in.

In another thread, I believe I had discovered a place where you could get your comics offset print for around $0.50 per book, but that was stretching.

Notice that all these prices are for printing B&W pages too. Color pages are ridiculously expensive, more than tripling the cost of the comic. In some cases, the cost to print color is more than 10 times the cost to print B&W.

This mythical $0.38 per book seems unattainable, especially or a solo artist. However, increasing the cover price to $4.00 gives you $0.50 to print the comic, which is more realistic. Seriously, though, $4 for a comic is expensive.

Even if the artist is able to write, draw, ink, and whatever else the comic himself/herself, the best deal you can get through Diamond is less than 13 cents on the dollar or 12%.

The only way to make up for this is volume.

In 1965, Spiderman had a distribution of 600,000 comics but the comic was sold at $0.12. If you use the percentages paid for shipping, distribution and so on above, the artist could expect to make about $15.4K a year. In 1965, that was probably pretty good.

In 1975, Marvel had a distribution of 300,000 comics and the comics were sold at $0.35. The artist could expect $22.5k per year. A good salary in 1975.

In 2000, distribution of comics has fallen to around 30,000 comic and the comics are sold at $3 each. The artist can expect less than $20k a year. That's next to impossible to live on without a good budget and planning.

So how can an independant artist make money?

Cut costs for one. Wide distribution is still key to making any money but the biggest cost when distributing the comic is the distributor. There are lower cost distributors out there. Diamond isn't the only option. You could do it yourself, but there are comic dealers who will not buy comics if they aren't listed in Preview (Diamond's catalogue).

Doing the warehousing and distributing yourself has its own costs but it would allow the artist/company to basically make back what it paid to the distributor (or roughly $1.68 per comic, part of which goes to warehousing and shipping). Let's say the final profit on the comic is $1.25 if you do your own everything. That still requires 1333 issues to be sold for a $20k a year salary or a distribution network of at least 133 comic stores willing to buy 10 comics each (and have them all sell!) Probably double that would be a better bet.

How many comic stories do you know of? Personally, I know of 3 but 1 has 5 locations in Saint Louis, so 8. That's a far cry from the estimated 250 needed to make a good yearly salary.

Not only that, but you have to produce a 24-page book every month of every year for the rest of your working life.

Artists typically make up the disparity by selling merchandise, doing artwork for shirts and commissions. At a convention, a well known artist can charge quite a bit for commissions.

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