Before we begin I would like to thank Gianluca Glazer from Radical Publishing for helping me out with some of the fine details. I aslo would like to thank Dave Arhar from Penny Dreadful Press who also offered up some first hand experiences. At the end of this article I will be posting links to a number of sites I visited while researching this post.
What I’m hoping is that with this information you will be armed with enough knowledge to safely find a publishing company that will actually print your comic the way you want it to be printed. A little knowledge goes a long way.
Comic books to some extent are steeped in tradition. The way a comic feels in your hands, the colors, even the type of paper used on a traditional comic book is important. If you want to create a comic but decide to use paper that is heavy and thick, it’s not going to feel like a comic. Lets be honest, your book may be beautiful, it may feel expensive, it may be a much higher quality book then you personally have ever seen, but if it doesn’t feel like a comic book then it’s not a comic book. They say that if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck. If you want to publish a traditional comic, first you must understand what makes a comic book…a comic book.
Components of a Standard Comic Book.
A traditional, or standard comic book is comprised of three simple parts: Size, binding and paper stock.
Size/Page Count
6.625″x10.25″ 32 to 52 pages. 32 is the norm.
Adam Swan explains the size of a comic book like this: “Comics are printed in ‘signatures’ of 16 pages. This means that a comic, for economy should be either 16 pages long, or 32. This is because a standard printing plate is 2 comic pages tall, by 4 across (2×4=8 known as a ‘flat’) and comic pages are printed on both sides (8×2=16, 16 pages in the signature.) Most comics are 32 pages long with 4 covers.”
Binding
Saddle-stitch bound, which means stuck together with staples.
Paper Stock
40lb to 50lb paper for the interior pages
40lb to 80lb glossy paper for the covers.
Shopping around for a printer takes a lot of effort and it certainly helps if you understand what the printing company is talking about. I have tried to work in as much information on this subject as possible from those who have experienced self publishing and printing comics first hand. This next bit came from a conversation I had with Gianluca Glazer who is the Director of Marketing at Radical Publishing. Gianluca has quite a bit of publishing experience under his belt. Here is what he had to say:
“Regarding paperstock, the weight is actually determined by the what kind of paper the printer actually uses. For example, 50 pound stock of paper for one printer may be different from 50 pound stock from another printer because they use different qualities of paper. Most, if not all printers, will send you a sample of the books they have printed and you can determine what you want. The key is to make sure the paper is thick enough to avoid any watermark like ripples in the paper caused by the ink. All paper should have a gloss to it and you can either do a self cover or plus cover for the book. A self cover uses the same stock as the interior page and a 32 page book would have 28 pages of interior and 4 pages that comprise the cover, inside front cover, inside back cover and back cover. A 32 page plus cover is 32 interior pages plus a cover page (usually a thicker almost card stock stock weight) used to comprise the cover, inside front cover, inside back cover and back cover.
Also, a serious publisher should get a Diamond account since they are the major means of getting into a comic book store. The direct deals and the smaller distributors are usually only interested if you are already out there and they can see your product. As part of Diamond, you get at the most 40% of the cover price of your comic. That is a whole other long discussion on soliciting your comic for the world to see.
A number of comics use plus cover though not as many as self. It doesn’t have be card stock and could be the same stock as the interior but most would use something slightly thicker. A 48 page prestige bound (prestige is a squarebound book without staples) book is a plus cover and if you look at the cover and the interior, you’ll notice a difference. The easiest way to tell is count the interior pages. If there are 32 pages (not counting the inside front and back covers) then it’s a plus cover. If it’s 28 pages, it’s a self cover.”
Finding a printer
This advice was written by Dave Sims who self published 300 issues of Cerebus. I couldn’t explain it any better then he does here.
“To find a printer for your self-published comic book, you can refer to the yellow pages of your phone directory. Provide them with a copy of a black-and-white comic with colour covers and ask how much they would charge to print 2,000, 2,500, 3,000, etc. This is the way that printers work: if you just ask how much they charge, they’re going to ask how many you want to print. Expect the quotes to vary from around 40 cents to 2 dollars a copy. Let them know that the cover stock and interior paper do not have to be exactly the same and that you are concerned about keeping the cost per unit down. Sometimes they will have a supply of paper from another job or remainders lying around that they can give you a ‘deal’ on.
The difference in price will depend on what the printer specializes in. If they do mostly wedding invitations and fliers, a comic book is going to be a very big job and it’s going to cost you. If they do mostly newspapers and advertising supplements, it will be just another job. It they do mostly coffee-table-style art books and labels and promotions for Coca Cola, Exxon or other multinational corporations, your job is going to be too small and it will cost you.”
Offset Printers
Offset is the traditional process for printing comics. Earlier in this article Mr. Swan did a great job of describing offset printing in the “Components of a Standard Comic Book” section. Offset printing uses giant professional printing presses. This type of printing is great when it comes to the price you pay per book. If you are going to have thousands of books printed, then offset printing is the way to go. The problem that you will run into with offset printing is that if you don’t have a lot of books to print, then your tiny run probably isn’t worth a printing companies time. If you are looking to print 200 books, traditional offset printing is probably not for you. Think of it this way, in order to print off 200 books the printing company will basically turn the press on and turn it off 3 seconds later. Those presses are big boys and the effort to prepare your measly 200 wouldn’t be worth any ones time. Most of these printers wont even talk to you unless you have 2000 or more in mind. That is not to say that you can’t find someone to do it, it just wont be easy and may be cost prohibitive. Dave Arhar at Penny Dreadful Comics is a good example of this.
I spoke with Dave Arhar regarding printing runs and he had this to say:
“Because our funds were limited, and so much was invested into the quality of the product, we elected to print only around 225 copies each of both Gothic Romance #1, and The Faustians #1. I’m extremely proud of the value the books offer, but ultimately this has had very little effect on interest or sales. I’m not promoting that first time publishers should sell their work on newspaper print, but as for my investment, I wish I would have focused less on presentation, and more on promotion.”
Toner Printing (think laser printer)
On Demand Printing
Full color print on demand can’t begin to compete with offset on price. On demand printing uses, for all intents and purposes, what you would have to call industrial laser color copy machines. These machines do pretty much what you would expect them to do, in the way you would expect them to do it, if that makes any sense. The beauty of printing this way is that they can get very crisp colors and they are willing to print small runs since there is very little set up. on the other side of the coin, your cost per book can be quite high at easily $1 to $3 a book depending on the company. The fantastic feature of print on demand is that you can purchase as few as a single copy. Companies like lulu.com specialize in “on demand” printing and others can be found easily with a simple Google search. I get the feeling that the independent comic world will gravitate towards “on demand” over the next couple of years. As the cost comes down and the quality improves I have no doubt that “on demand” will someday receive a lions share of the self publishing business.
In Conclusion
Hopefully this article points you in the right direction. It certainly doesn’t answer every question but then again it is impossible to answer every question. If you have anything that you would like to add to this article, or some experience that is relevant please leave a comment. I would especially like to hear about your experiences with self publishing.
This particular post is only one of many to come. You can read others like it in my “Comic Biz” category.
Webography
http://www.answers.com/topic/comic-book
http://www.fonerbooks.com/2005/08/graphic-novels-and-self-publishing.html
http://lawrenceyong.wordpress.com/2008/01/11/dave-sims-advice-on-self-publish-comics/
