Everyone wants to know how to make comics. Okay, not everyone but a lot of people. Well, alright, some people want to know how to make comics. The good news is that, if we can make our own comics, anybody can.
During the ten years we've been making "Full Sanction", we've actually gone through two major processes in printing the books. One thing you'll see as we go forward is that the only certainty in making minicomics is photocopying. Your local copy shop will be your new best friend. Regardless of what your book is about or who your intended audience is, you will need to find a way to take you drawn and typed pages and make a book out of them. Before we going into detail about how we do it, let me show you some ways that others make their own minicomics.
First up, here's a .pdf that provides a good overview of many types of reproduction work, including minicomics. In this case, any art that's to be used in the minicomic is shrunk and then pasted in a proto-book format. This book is then taken apart and copies are made of each section. The resulting copies are then reassembled in the final published edition.
Next up, Jessica Abel provides a very thorough walkthrough of the creation process. Of particular note, she goes into detail about making an Imposition guide. This is basically a version of your comic without any actual content. What it does is help you understand how to lay out your pages so that they are displayed in the correct order. Take a look at the example I've made below:
As Ms. Abel suggests, you'll want to make a book including the number of pages you want. In this, our comic will be 12 pages long. Take three similar sized pieces of paper, lay them on top of each other and fold, similar to Fig. 1. Voila! You (not even) halfway there! Now, starting with the cover, number your pages. When done, you should have written 12 on the back cover.
Take the book apart and examine the page sets. You'll notice some weird combinations such as pages 2 and 11 being right next to each other. All in all, your pages will look something like Figs. 2 and 3. Now, as you lay out your pages with actual content, you'll have a better understanding of where everything goes.
When we started printing our comic, we had no idea how any of this was done. We actually figured out how to make it and then let that dictate the length and size of our comic.
We started with an 8x14 sheet of paper. This would then be segmented into eight small sections. We could glue our comic pages to their appropriate areas and would then do the same to a second 8x14 paper with their respective back sides. We'd photocopy the two separate sheets back to back and end up with something like this:
We manually cut it into the four page sets and staple them together. While it may seem like it worked well, it was very frustrating to deal with. Even the most careful cutting ends up imprecise so you'd always have some pages that were taller or wider than others in the same book. Other times, the page that's glued down may shift just a bit and the resulting difference means that the front side of a page doesn't line up with the back. There is nothing worse that having 100 copies of a book where the same word is cut off in every one of them.
A few years ago, we came up with another way to print our book. To start with, we changed the size of our page. This allowed us to drop the hard-to-find 8x14 sheets and use 8.5x11 paper. We now use a set-up similar to the figure below. Having the same set printed twice on each sheet of paper makes the collating later on that much easier.
The copying is done with the pages as shown above, stacked on top of each, already in the necessary order. This way, you can have them collated while copying. Simply have the clerk at your copy shop cut the paper horizontally and you end up with two copies of each book.
What's that? After everything you've just read, you still want to make your own comic? Instead, how about you make your own Full Sanction story. It's much easier and almost as fulfilling. Visit our Fun page to get in on the goodness.