Strange Animals / 2022 / #4: The Comics Creator’s Technical Handbook (Part 2)
April last year, I posted the first part of The Comics Creator’s Technical Handbook, as I called it. Crowd goes wild! It was easily the most shared article I’ve written, at least recently, and it was something people found genuinely useful.
And then, nothing. No Part 2.
I had written around half of Part 2, in fact, but then, the second wave of CoVID-19 struck India, and if you remember, it was a pretty bleak time. The newsletter was the easiest thing to take off my plate with everything that was going on, and once I was able to be productive again, well, it was hard to look at that unfinished Part 2, let alone finish it.
So here I am, starting up again. Here’s Part 2. I’ve taken the outline of what I was going to write, and have written the thing from scratch, because it was, frankly, easier than finishing what I’d started.
Let’s get to it, once again.
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But first, let me reintroduce you to what The Comics Creator’s Technical Handbook actually is:
From Part 1:
What is the Comics Creator’s Technical Handbook?
It’s a reference document for people who want to make comics – specifically comics in the American style – and don’t know where to start with the technical aspects of things.
What this won’t be is a guide on how to write/draw/colour/letter/edit/produce comics. There are other, better books out there dealing with the creative aspects of making comics. Instead, this will help you keep your collaborators happy, and let you work with professional creators, publishers and printers with minimal fuss.
My goal is to help remove any technical impediments that stand between you and creating your best work.
For example, we’ll be tackling things ranging from simple to complex, like:
- What size is a comic book?
- How do I write a script that the people on my team will be able to read and use?
- How do I make things easier for my collaborators?
- How do I produce books that will print correctly?
Basically, things that will make sure your collaborators don’t hate you.
Part 1 goes on to explain the essential things to know about page sizes in American comics, including “trim size”, “bleed size” and “safe area”.
It also includes a link to the templates I send my artists when we’re working. This folder will contain all the ancillary material I will want to include with the Handbook.
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Why?
A few friends asked me why I was doing this in the first place, and I realised I hadn’t actually addressed that in Part 1, beyond its obvious use to creators.
See, when I started working in comics, I had to piece together all of this technical information by looking it up in different places, and make a lot of mistakes before I learnt the right way to do things. Even now, if you want to know everything you need to start making a comic, you have to google stuff and put it together. I was lucky enough that professionals helped me out, and pointed out my mistakes.
But there are certain mistakes that no one needs to make. You shouldn’t have to go the long way around for everything.
This is therefore meant to be a single place where you’ll get all this information. By “this”, of course, I mean the eventual book, which will be published as a PDF, along with all the templates you need. And, most importantly to me personally, it will be pay-what-you-want. I want this information to be available to anyone who needs it, and I don’t think a disposable income should be a barrier.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I think anyone should be able to get up one day and make a comic, and this is my attempt to make that easier.
It will also be a live document, and I hope to update it with any best practices that haven’t been included as time goes on.
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Follow-Ups from Part 1
Multiple artists reached out and asked me to add page sizes measured in metric units, so Part 1 has now been updated with measurements in centimetres. I’m going to desist from adding these to the actual art templates, because inches just makes more sense there, plus you don’t need to know any measurements to use the Photoshop guides in there.
Secondly, my friend and fellow letterer Hass pointed out that I should explain why artists should care about page sizes, since that’s apparently not a given.
Say you’re an artist. You’re drawing pages and working hard on them. If you send in pages at the wrong size, or at the wrong proportion, then someone else has to make decisions on how to make your art fit the right size. It might get cropped in a way you don’t like. Or, if you’ve sent it in the wrong colour mode or resolution (more on those in the future), someone else will change it to what is necessary, and it might not match your vision for the art.
So, for one thing, sending in pages at the right size gives you more control over how your art appears.
Also, further down the conveyor belt, the letterer and production artist will be working with your pages. If your letterer chooses one solution to fix the discrepancy, and the production artist chooses another, either the lettering will look wrong in the final book, or the production artist will have to make their best guess on how to fix things. (We’ve all seen the results of that, and they are not nice.)
All this can be avoided if you send in files at the right dimensions. You’re making life easier for yourself and for your collaborators.
With the outliers covered, let’s get to Part 2 …
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But first, updates!
This week saw the release of Arkham City: The Order of the World #6, which ends the series. I am so proud of this book, and the things we got to pull off in a mainstream title (I swear I didn’t know we were canon till like 3 issues in). I also got to do a little tribute act to the great Gaspar’s work in Arkham Asylum. Plus getting to work with my Coffin Bound cohorts is always a thrill! Special thanks to editor A. Tuturro for having me along, and for her editorial sensibility, which clearly comes from the same comics that made me fall in love with the medium.
Since we last spoke, The Department of Truth #16 was also released, the Alison Sampson/Jordie Bellaire issue set in Haight-Ashbury. Radio Apocalypse #2 also came out last week. I think that’s it, though I might be forgetting something.
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Physical Art
So now, you know what the art dimensions should be if you’re drawing and delivering digitally. But what if you’re a traditional artist, who prefers to draw on paper? What size should you be working at?
The answer’s a bit complicated than you might think. I’m laying out the “standard” art dimensions below, but we need a preliminary note.
Artists who work “traditionally”, i.e. on paper, usually use Bristol board sized 11 x 17 inches. This is, however, not directly formatted for print, because it’s a slightly different proportion to the standard comics page.
These days, most artists would scan their own artwork, and then send the art files to publisher digitally. If you’re one of these, you could just as easily work at 11 x 16.7 inches, leaving .15 inches top-and-bottom empty. This scales down exactly to the bleed size specified for print (it’s 160% of the standard comics size). You have to scan it at the correct resolution (more on this next time), and then chop off the empty top and bottom, and voila. In fact, this is what I recommend to my artist friends.
If this works for you, you can simply stop reading and wait for the next part.
On the other hand, veteran artists who started out working traditionally would actually send in the physical artwork to the publisher, and there, the publisher’s production department would scan (or more accurately, photograph) the artwork, and then align it to the page by eye. For this, it was more convenient for the artists to mark out bleed, trim and safe areas, so the production department knew how the artist intended to present the page. Additionally, some space would be needed for the artist to actually write down the title of the comic, the issue number, and the page number, so the book could be compiled correctly. In fact, several publishers used to (and some still do) send artists their own boards with all of these things already marked and ready to be filled in.
Many artists prefer to work like this because it’s the convention, or because they’re used to this side, or because they’d prefer to have the details of every page visible for when they sell their art (although, of course, you can always write those on the back, like many people). Anyway, this is not necessarily how I’d recommend you do things, but it’s a valid method.
Here’s how you do it yourself:
Take an 11 x 17 inch board. Mark out .5 (1/2) inches from the left and right edges, and .8125 (13/16) inches from the top and bottom edges. (You can either draw lines here, or draw crop marks.) This is your bleed size, which is 10 x 15.375 inches (i.e. 10 x 5 3/8 inches).
Next, you mark .625 (5/8) inches from the side edges and 1 inch from the vertical edges. This is your trim size, 9.75 x 15 inches (i.e. 9 3/4 x 15 inches).
Finally, you mark 1 inch from the side edges, and 1.375 (1 3/8) inches from the top and bottom edges. This is your safe area, 9 x 14.25 inches (i.e. 9 x 14 1/4 inches).
Proportionately, these exactly match the dimensions of the digital pages in Part 1.
For double pages, we go old-school. You do exactly the same thing as above. And then you take a nice sharp paper cutter, and you slice all down the left trim line of the right-side page, and the right trim line of the left side page, so you’ve physically gotten rid of the central bleed area of both pages. Then you turn the pages over, line the trim lines up against each other and stick them together with tape. That’s your double spread!
For formality’s sake, here’s our measurements:
Single Pages
Trim Size: 9.75 x 15 inches
Bleed Size: 10 x 15.375 inches
Safe Area: 9 x 14.25 inches
Double Pages
Trim Size: 19.5 x 15 inches
Bleed Size: 19.75 x 15.375 inches
Safe Area: 9 x 14.25 inches (x2)
(Note: My source for this portion of the guide is this excellent article by Blambot’s Nate Piekos.)
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I intended to cover scanning and cleaning up scanned art in this one, as well as resolutions and colour modes, but I think that might be better left for next time, both so that this Part 2 might be posted earlier, and because we’ve filled up enough space here, and there’s no point fatiguing readers with this stuff. Let’s pace ourselves
I also intend to do a series of process posts for The Department of Truth, because I’ve lettered 17 issues so far, which I think covers four volumes, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff to talk about both in how Martin and I evolved our process, where we ended up creating collaborative lettering, and how I approached lettering each guest artist.
So, fingers crossed, this newsletter might actually come out regularly for a little while.
Hope springs eternal.