It’s here!
The print edition of The Cosmic Survivor: The Hunt for Nebulon #1 is ready. It came out beautifully, much better than I though it would for print on demand. Though the printer still has to fix the white sliver on the bottom of the book (that wasn’t me, my bleed was correct) This was done by Print on Demand via ka-blam.com. I would love to see how it would look in offset printing but that has to be ordered in very large batches i.e. get published or have an amazing Kickstarter campaign.
I learned some hard lessons making this book every stage of the way. How exacting and unforgiving the standards of a print comic can be. But practice makes perfect. I think I know the deal now. It took me a long while to get to this point but it’s a solid lesson. And now, I have the most precise comic templates imaginable for my books so it never happens again.
I made so many dumb mistakes making this issue that could have been averted if I was more thorough in my research before I began.. I designed it to be an eBook pdf at first, a digital comic, thinking that’s as far as I would ever get – Comixology, Kindle, Amazon or Gumroad. My whole mindset was about digital. That was the backwards route,
Learn from me, do print first, digital later.
The proportions of my original art pages were so wrong. I thought it was 14 x 17 inches to be shrunk down to comic book size. I have to admit, it was really great to draw and ink at that size, like the way Jack Kirby used to do back in the day. It was cinematic and helped me get into the story. But it was also way off! Way off for iPads. Way off for Kindles. And even further off the cliff for Print. And I’ve been paying for that mistake ever since.
The correct size is 11 x 17 inches for original art with margins inside so it could be shrunk down to 6.75 x 10.25 inches at 300 dpi, being the trim size of a standard American comic. Since I was a designer, I thought I would just fix it in photoshop and make my ebook right there.
Well, not so fast.
Proportion issues either have to be cropped down in your art or you have to add art in order to make it right. And I had to make it right when I decided to go to print, no mistakes allowed.
When I decided to convert it from a digital to a print comic, it was weeks and weeks of laborious work and additional art to get it to the correct proportion, print resolution and professional standards. On top of that, fixing my writing, adjusting my word balloons, lettering, composing , design, all that stuff. I had no idea how sloppy the ebook version I made was. My only saving grace was that I did everything at high resolution for the ebook just in case and that helped me get back on track here.
I’ll do a blog post in the future to share my lessons on how to make a comic for print properly so all those hours I lost by being cavalier actually benefits someone else. But for now, I’m thrilled to have my first comic in print.
Time to enjoy that for a while!
;-) Michael