Archive for ‘writing’
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Here’s some fun bonus materials for the making of junkyard chase: the designing of the logo.
I knew I wanted to use two different fonts: one for each word in the title. The word “Junkyard” I wanted to be textured, rusty, or something that kind of visually suggested the location. The word “Chase” I wanted to be kind of fast looking or cybernetic, to imply the action and the fact that it’s a sci-fi story (one of the main characters is a robot, after all).
So I came up with a concept page, like below.
I submitted these to my group of friends to see their thoughts. Ultimately there were a few combinations I hadn’t thought of before, and I made adjustments accordingly.
The collaborative process of comics doesn’t have to be limited to the writer / artist relationship. There are several blogs of professionals out there where you can bounce designs off and receive some constructive feedback. However, you always need to be careful when putting your work out there to make sure no one steals it.
While your fellow writing buddies may be your good friends and best critics, they’re also the competition. It’s a tricky balance to know what to let them know and what to get their feedback on, and what to keep from them entirely.
I won’t begin to say what you should and should not give away to them, but use your best judgment.
Anyway, this finishes up the blog series for this particular story. Should be updating web comics again now, so be on the lookout for those.
Later!
”Comment
After submitting the files to the printer you wait to receive the box. That glorious box filled with your sweat and hard work. And when it arrives you take it upstairs and it’s like your birthday. A big smile falls over your face. And you open the thing like a kid in a candy store and hold aloft over your head in triumph.
I’ve talked to many of my other professional writers friends and asked, “Is there a more satisfying feeling than holding your own work in your hand?” My buddy Russell Lissau had a great response to this:
“Yes. Going into a comic store and seeing your book in someone else’s hands.”
So the book is finished and available at local Chicago comic stores and conventions I’m attending (see the convention and signing schedule in the upper right corner of this website). I’m working on getting a store up on this site so it can be purchased over the internet as well.
Be sure to tell your friends to check out this awesome book. It’s a fun short story with a full copy of the script and Jeong’s original pencils in the back, so creators can see how the comic was made and use it as a template for their own comic-making.
There are a few things I neglected to talk about in this blog series that I may go into in the next few posts, such as designing the logo and creating the cover.
I hope you’ve all enjoyed the making of junkyard chase blog series so far, and if there’s enough of a response I may do another one for the next book I do. Thanks for all of your continued support, and I look forward to making many more comics in the years to come.
-T
So now that we’ve selected a printer, we sometimes find that each of them have some different requirements. In Minute Man’s case, they requested that I pre-press my .pdf documents (the final file I send to them for printing) to account for the fact that the book will be saddle stitch and not perfect bound.
“Wait a second, bald man…you lost me.”
If some of you are saying this while scratching your heads right now, let me back up a second.
There are several kinds of binding for your print books, and I’ll talk about the two most common to the comics industry below:
1) Saddle Stitch: This is the staple format you see with your monthly comic floppies. No doubt many of you have recreated this binding at home with homemade comics back when you were little (or are still doing it today – some people I know do this with their convention sketch books to save money).
The trick with Saddle Stitch binding is that you’re not printing on a single page (front and back), but you’re actually printing on 4 pages at once. So you have the following pages all in one:
Front:
First page, last page
Back:
Second page, second to last page
The trick here is to make sure the odd numbered pages are always on the right when submitting your final document to the printer. Numbering your pages may help with keeping them in order (which, for this project, I didn’t do).
2) Perfect Bound: This is the format of graphic novels, which have pages that are two sided glued into a center binding. This format I find to be a little easier to pre-press because you just have to account for the front and back of a page. However, trying to do something fancy like spreads can get tricky, especially since sometimes your artwork can get buried in the gutter of the binding.
There are a ton of resources on the internet on binding and pre-pressing your materials if you want more detail, or feel free to ask a question in the comments below.
Suffice it to say, since Junkyard Chase is such a short story, doing the saddle stitch pre-press work didn’t take very long. Since Jeong had already sized the pages to meet the print specs (remember, we looked these up a few posts back), all I had to do was make sure they were to spec, then align them so they would print correctly.
First and last page on the front, second and second to last page on the back, etc….
After you get the files in the format the printer wants, send them off via whatever method they prefer to receive them (Minute Man has an FTP site for larger files like this), and they send a confirmation e-mail with approximately how long the job should take.
And then four weeks later, we have…well, we’ll talk about that next time. 
So we have our final pages (and boy do they look spiffy). Now it’s time to find someplace to print them. Being new to the production side of things, this was kind of a new process for me…but thankfully one that was easy enough to pick up on.
Knowing that I wanted to print this piece from the start, I went and got a standard comic size dimensions and sent those to Jeong early on while he was building the pages. An easy access (and free) template for various standard page sizes can be found here.
I knew I wanted to make a standard comic size book (as opposed to a manga book), so I put those dimensions into my favorite program and made sure the pages Jeong sent to me fit. Then I got to lettering.
I won’t bore you with the details of lettering, as this is a very important process and one that you would typically use a professional letterer for your books. For this project, I took on the task myself. If you’re interested in some lettering tips, let me know and I can make another series of blogs about that later.
So for self publishers there are a few default places to go for printing. I like to get quotes from several printers, figure out who can give me the most competitive pricing, and go with them. Some places will give you discounts the larger quantity you order. More copies of the book mean bigger discounts, but you don’t want to sit on inventory for a long time, so it doesn’t make sense to order thousands of copies just so you make more money per copy of the book.
I knew I wanted the book to be around $3 per copy – cheap, so kids could buy it with their own money if they wanted to. So I had a cost per book in mind while reaching out to these sources. Below is a list of the printers, and some of my experiences with them.
Ka-Blam: Typical first place print on demand people go. They’re helpful and make a quality product. Their pricing is pretty flat, however, so your cost per unit is going to be the same if you order 1 or 100 copies of your book. My first @$$hole! book had a small print run from Ka-Blam.
Minute Man Press: A chain of stores that have some pretty good turn arounds and negotiable pricing options. They’ll work with you to get the quality you need at the price you want – although sometimes it means doing some more pre-production work yourself. My second run of @$$hole! was printed through them, and they were the printer I finally selected for this project due to bulk order discounts and quality printing.
Lulu: Lulu’s really used more for books, but can be used for comics. Back when I lived in Ann Arbor I knew several people who used lulu for their own POD projects, and the quality was very high.
Cafe Press: Lots of people use cafe press, perhaps a little less now than they used to. Not because there’s anything wrong with them, but because there are so many other options out there. I encourage you to include them in your bidding process, though, since they do make good stuff.
Lightning Source: A buddy of mine uses Lightning Source for all of his printing. What’s nice about them is they 1) include a UPC (bar code) in the purchase order, 2) put your books on amazon.com for you, and 3) offer discounts for repeat business. I found their specs to be a little confusing, so I haven’t used them yet, but I do agree the quality of their product is high and you get some great benefits if you print with them.
So how do you select a printer? I look for a few qualities:
1) Competitive pricing. If a printer is less expensive (or is offering bulk discounts), chances are they’re at the top of my consideration set.
2) Turn-around times: How fast can they print and deliver this project to me? This is important, especially if you’re trying to restock between shows or signings. If a printer takes 18 days to turn something around, and another only takes 14, then I don’t have to do the math for you to say who’s better in my mind. (Hint: it’s the 14 days…less is more).
3) Flexibility: What kind of additional offers or benefits does the printer allow, such as discounts for reprint printing jobs? Chances are my initial print run isn’t going to last me until the end of time and I’m going to need to print again, but some printers charge a “set up fee” for repeat business. This has never made sense to me, and printers who do this are almost instantly off my consideration list.
Once you’ve selected a printer, you then have to prep your files a bit to send. Each printer has a different set of requirements for their files, so we’ll go over some pre-press information next time.
Making of Junkyard Chase 9 – The Collaborative Process (final pages)
March 21st, 2011 |Posted In: writing
So Jeong and I agreed on the layout pages, and now was the time for him to move onto the pencils (and eventually, the finished pages).
So Jeong went to work, and this is where the role of writer changes slightly to the role of “project manager.” You check in with Jeong, see if there are questions, review the work as it comes in and provide any feedback – but at this point, changes should be pretty minimal, since we’ve already done our heavy lifting changes in the earlier stages.
Since our earlier conversations had been detailed and Jeong understood exactly what I was going for in the story, getting to the final pages was very quick and easy.
So after all of this work is compiled, he sent over the .jpgs to check out and approve the final artwork. Upon approval, he sent the finished hi-res files ready for me to take to the printer. Below is an example of Page 3 in it’s final form.
Now that I had received the final pages, since I was self-publishing this comic, it was time for me to get to work on finding a place to print this thing. There are several places to look (a few defaults I have that make the process quicker for me), and we’ll be reviewing that next time.
Making of Junkyard Chase 8 – The Collaborative Process (layouts)
March 18th, 2011 |Posted In: writing
We have our artist and they’ve provided our character designs. Now it’s time to get into the meat of the project – making comic pages. But how do you communicate the story you want to tell to your artist? This is where that script we wrote a few steps back comes into play.
The script contained every action, motion, sound effect, etc that I wanted to communicate to Jeong. While the script is your primary communication tool to the artist, there are sometimes details that are difficult to communicate – and this is where tools like Skype (or the phone) can come in handy.
Based on the script, Jeong started to put together what are called layout pages.
I won’t make you relive the full script for our favorite example page (page 3), but I’ll show an segment of it for reference:
PAGE 3 panel 1: Horizontal panel with a large open space to the left. The dog stands on the edge of the cliff of scrap on the right of the panel, looking like he’s about to try to jump
down.1. ROBOT (off panel): Do not jump, you have so much to live for.
From this direction in the script, Jeong knows he has to make room for the action and the dialogue, and keep the action flowing in a way that’s natural for the reader’s eye. Not wanting to burden himself with a lot of excess detail on something that may not make sense (or agree with the vision the writer has for the story), Jeong makes a page layout to show the general actions taking place and approximate dialogue placements for the letterer.
Below is the example:
While the final artwork will not include the balloons (that’s the letterists job, which I’ll be taking the role of for this particular project), it’s a good idea to know where that dialogue is going to fit on the page.
For this particular page I thought Jeong was spot-on with the layouts, and I gave him the green light to go into the pencils. But what if something had needed tweaking? Either something I saw or something he noticed?
Well, that happened on another page of this very story, actually.
Just like with this page, Jeong sent through the layouts and they looked fine – but I wasn’t getting the feeling I wanted from the page. He and I spoke about it, and together agreed that there needed to be a slight rewrite in order to make the page stronger.
After a tweak or two, he sent back some revised layouts (the benefit of layouts is the artist doesn’t have to spend a ton of time on them, and can get them to the writer pretty quickly for review), and eventually we settled on a final layout.
Next, Jeong got the okay to go ahead and start with the pencils on the final pages. We’ll cover that in our next update.
Making of Junkyard Chase 7 – The Collaborative Process (character designs)
March 16th, 2011 |Posted In: writing
Now that we’ve selected an artist (in this case, Jeong Mo Yang), we start the collaborative process.
The first step Jeong and I took were in character designs. I had my list of characters and the setting, so based on that I reached out for some quick character concept artwork to see what his thoughts were on the visual look-and-feel of the characters.
The first design he sent was based on my description of the robot character (originally called JON-E V, a combination of my love of the movies Short Circuit and Wall-E).
Below I’ve included my original description of the characters (from earlier steps, while putting together my own internal documents), followed by Jeong’s designs for them. As a testament to his creative genius, the guy even included a textured background resembling crumpled paper (alright, it was crumpled paper – but it was still a great touch and one we both agreed should be included throughout). Seriously, I love collaborating with awesome creators!
JON-E: A security robot for the junkyard, JON-E is an older model and has been fixed several times by spare parts found around the junkyard. There may be some wear and rust around the joints – he’s not this year’s model, after all. He’s a very pleasant machine, and enjoys working the beat. Because he’s a blue-collar worker, he probably has a set of overalls or a hat – something like a junkyard worker would wear. I see him as having legs, so he can easily get around the piles of junk. He tries to keep everyone and everything out of the junkyard for their own safety.
The Dog: A year old Golden Retriever, this dog is full grown but has the energy of a puppy. He enjoys playing, and thinks that playing in the junkyard is a fun game. Always with his tongue sticking out, tail wagging high in the air, and a smile on his puppy face.
So now we have our characters, it’s time to move onto the meat of the story…starting with the layouts!