How to Badly Produce a Physical Collection of Your Digital Comic in 10 Steps
Hello. If you are unaware, I am one of the organizers working on the 2025 St. Louis Independent Comics Expo, colloquially known as SLICE.
This has up taken up a nontrivial portion of my life this year, and will probably continue to do so every year for the foreseeable future. Last year, I worked with Alain to develop a SLICE TTRPG, which was fun and we definitely pondered doing a follow up or second edition, but then life lifed real hard, and my energies and efforts went else where. Specifically, they went into paraluman. Well, kind of.
I wanted to make a thing. Very crucially, I wanted to make a thing for the sake of making a thing, not for making profit. I had this collection of 52 photo comic in anthology form that existed digitally, and if nothing else, it’d be fun to make a physical thing.
So, here is the very process in which I made printed versions of this thing that very much will only lose me money.
1) You make the thing. This costs you nothing but time and effort.
2) You format the thing. This costs a lot of time and a lot of effort depending on how you engineer things. Using MS Publisher, a software constantly on the verge of getting stricken from the digital world, probably doesn’t help with the process.
3) You get the idea to annotate the thing, so you print things in full color thinking that surely there won’t problems with that. This costs about $30, which you’ll pay for.
4) You annotate the thing. This is fun.
5) You realize you need to scan the thing. This is less fun. This costs nearly $40, which you’ll pay for, and then begin to question at what point do you need to actually get a printer/scanner, or why you didn’t check with the local library first (although, that was because the last three times you tried to do a thing at a library, the scanner/printer was out of commission).
6) You then finagle with PDFs for far too long.
7) You then try to recreate a process you used to do effortlessly in undergrad. You eventually find out Staples does the closest approximation.
8) You realize that color printing 56 pages is actually a terrible idea and not tenable, so you switch to black and white so that it can exist, and will debate making a color edition later.
9) You realize you’re out about $200 with little hopes of making it back, let alone making a profit, but as it were, the point was not the profit. The point was making a thing.
10) You decided next year to do something simpler. Like prints. Maybe riso prints. Riso prints sounds simpler.