Comic Book Production
Here at the studio we assembled each issue of Ernor in the computer using QuarkXpress, copy the files to CD-ROM and ship that off to the printer for output. The company, Brenner Printing, specializes in comic book production and have very specific guidelines available for the file types they handle. There are other companies that provide the same services however and you will want to check with any service provider well in advance of your project to make sure there are no hidden surprises.
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The Script: The following is a step by step guideline of how the last stages of production are completed. As with any production it all begins with the story. In the case of Ernor #4, Vicky and I worked out all the storyline and plotting in advance and wrote a simple script to indicate dialogue and descriptions as a guideline. As you can see, this provides a framework of the story on how each issue will flow. Typically we've been working from an outline that was laid out for the whole story. This was broken up intochunks that would provide the material for each "chapter" or issue. Once a little synopsis of the issue is worked out, we then alternate on creating scene descriptions and dialogue until we are both satisfied with the result.
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| The Layout Book:
In the book biz, my Journalism instructor had told us that they would make up a "dummy book" to show the printer what the actual book should look like, the order of pages and so on. It's been many years since either of us were in school but the idea of that remains the same. Once the script was completed we usually worked out a "thumbnail" of each page as it will appear. Basically I just folded about eight sheets of printer paper at the middle and stapled them like a comic book. This formed a "mini-comic" and we then sketched directly on those pages following the script. This allowed us to see how the story progressed from one page to the next and also showed the pace of the action over the course of the issue. The example on the right is the first page of the Layout I did for issue #4. Usually Vicky and I alternated on the Layout book as well, each contributing their own efforts to the look and design of the pages. This process took up to two weeks or longer. |
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| The Pencils and Inks:
When the layout book was done (or sometimes before it was done) Vicky started penciling the pages. We used a standard 11" x 17" Bristol board that was already pre-printed with panel borders. We now use standard 11"x14" Bristol board and draw our own panel lines on it. Vicky drew all of the characters in pencil first and then turned the pages over to me to pencil in the backgrounds. Once those were completed I handed the pages back to her for inking. She then inked all the characters using an assortment of technical pens and brushes depending on the scene. Once the characters were completed, she passesd the boards to me once again and I inked all the backgrounds. This rotation worked the best to prevent as many unwanted overlaps of the background or foreground elements as possible during the inking process. After the pages were finished I scanned each one into Photoshop. Since our current scanner is only 8.5" x 11" I had to scan the top half and bottom half of each page separately and then piece them together. The pages were then reduced to their final size of 6.75" x 10.5" at 600 dpi and were saved as a bitmap TIFF files since they are black and white. This saves on file size as each page tops around 2.5 megs or so. You may notice that real comic books are a little bit smaller than this, the extra image area allows for the final comic to be trimmed to their current standard size. It took 3-4 weeks to pencil and completely finish inking the pagesso they could be ready for scanning. It then took about six to eight hours to scan the pages and assemble them digitally.
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| Lettering:
Each issue of Ernor was then lettered using Adobe Illustrator with ComiCraft's Wild and Crazy font. This allowed me to create custom balloons for dialogue and special text boxes for descriptions that are a separate element from the actual artwork. If I need to go back and move a dialogue balloon it is much easier to do it this way. Each TIFF page was opened in Illustrator as a template. The balloons were then positioned on the page and the text added using the Text Tool. Once everything was placed on the page I selected it all and used the Create Paths options that turns the text into actual Illustrator objects that the printer can read. This was then reduced about 50% so that when the objects were imported into Xpress, it wouldn't have to work so hard. The Illustrator file was then saved as an EPS file. I lettered the entire issue #4 in around 10 hours taking a break or two. Actually I cheated a bit because I imported all the text from the script file and only had to do some minor editing. Saved a lot of re-typing that way.
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| Assembly:
Okay, so at that point I had 22 pages of art and 22 pages of EPS images that were eating up a LOT of memory on my G3. Since the document from the previous issue was already created in QuarkXpress I opened that and used it as a template for the new issue. On each page there was a picture box that the inked art goes into and on top of that is another picture box that contains the EPS file of the text balloons with transparency enabled. It took a bit of fiddling with the size of the text overlay but once I worked out the first page, the others were the same so I copied those through the rest of the document. Each page that had text went through this same procedure. Then the letters page "Yip-Yaps" was laid out in two columns and typeset by hand. Some of the e-mail letters I pasted in there directly from the file, the rest had to be typed. Lastly I would write the "Patterings" editorial and usually do that the night before the disk is shipped out. This way all the stuff I'd been saving up was fresh. To assemble the entire issue after all the files had been approved took the better part of a day. I usually did it all in one go and had it finished around ten to fourteen hours later. Then we printed out a hard copy to see how it looked.
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| The Cover and the Disk:
The printer wants the cover sent as a separate document since it's on different paper stock and is in color so they can make separations. This is usually the first thing I finish since the cover art has to be ready for the distributor months ahead. The Mprints logo is another TIFF file along with the Ernor title that I created with Bryce 3D. Those are overlaid on the front cover the same way the text is done for the interior pages. All of the files including the fonts and everything else are then burnt onto two CD-Rs. One copy of the disk goes to the printer and the other is kept as the source copy, so I can delete it from the hard drive and make space for the next issue. Each issue of Ernor is around 135 megs. We then sit around on pins and needles until the proofs come back. So far, all our hard work has paid off and each issue only has a couple of glitches that we didn't catch. Still it's one slick way to make a comic book. |
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The Opinions:
This is probably nothing new to veterans of QuarkXpress who use it on a daily basis for Newsweek or Time, but it gives the small publisher the power to create publications on their desktops that has never been there before. Programs like PageMaker and In-Design are also just as useful and widely accepted in the printing industry. The interfaces are very similar and the effects are identical.
Also, if you are considering self-publishing I really can't recommend Macintosh enough. Get one even if you're not going to self-publish. I was a Mac user before and found out that a majority of the printing industry is Mac based. I do own a Wintel PC that a friend gave me for gaming. I have both on my network now and they happily live together and share files just as if they were meant to. All of the software that I need as a publisher is available to me on Mac and if you haven't seen a catalog of what's out there now, you're missing out. A lot of the basic stuff is now available for both platforms.
Hopefully this has provided some insight on how a comic book can be made in your "garage" and have it come out looking like it was published by the "top four".
--- Pat