Hello and welcome to Comic Comics weekend edition. This week I asked the great John Porcellino to talk a little bit about drawing his comics at print size – or as John likes to say working “100%.” Please enjoy.
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Hey all,

Mr. Frank asked me to write about making comics at 100%, or the same size as the published form.

I started making lots of drawings as a kid, using scrap paper I found in my Dad’s office. So I grew up drawing on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper. I also began making little booklets… paper of various sizes folded in half and glued along the “spine” which I’d then fill with stories and drawings. When I was a freshman in high school, I realized that if I folded letter-sized paper in half, and drew my comics on them that way, my Dad could photocopy them at his office and I could hand them out (without staples or binding of any kind) to my friends. Thus was created my very first zine: a D&D/Cerebus inspired comic called Tales of Hogarth the Barbarian Pig. At the time I was almost wholly unaware of the comic book world. I played D&D, and the hobby shop in my area carried copies of Dragon magazine, which featured a satiric comic in the back called Phineas Fingers. Somehow I saw a copy of Cerebus too, and lifted the animal idea without ever reading the comic itself.

My later zine, Zo-Zo, was just letter-sized paper, double-sided and stapled in the corner. When that ended, and I started Cehsoikoe, in 1987, I had the bright idea of going back to the previous Hogarth format… by going to what I found out later was called “digest size” I could get twice as much content for the same amount of copying. I had no idea how to bind them though, and for the first very many years of Cehsoikoe and King-Cat, the way I bound my zines was to fold the collated sheets, then lay them open, spine up, on a block of styrofoam and with an unlatched stapler, staple them through the paper into the block. Then I would turn the book over and BEND THE STAPLES DOWN WITH MY BARE THUMBS!!! I had no idea that such a thing as a Long Reach Stapler existed until my darling girlfriend bought me one for my 22nd birthday. I still have it. All self-publishers need one.

(One time when me and Zak and Mr. Mike were visiting Seattle for the first time — in ’94 — we were visiting Megan Kelso, sitting in her room chatting. While we talked, Mr. Mike was absent-mindedly tapping the end of her long reach stapler, making it bounce up and down. I could see the anxiety in her eyes building, until finally Megan blurted out: “PLEASE don’t mess with my stapler like that!!!” Spoken like a true zinester.)

Anyhow, at the time I started making Cehsoikoe and King-Cat I found these notepads in my Dad’s desk, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inch glued pads with “From the Desk of Charles Porcellino” printed on them. These were the perfect size for drawing my comics! For many years I drew all my comics on the backs of those notepads, and in fact on some of my early pages you could see the inscription bleeding though backwards onto the drawn side.

I was trained as a fine artist, but one of the things I liked about comix and zines was that you could get away with using the cheapest materials in the world. All you needed was some typing paper and a pen and a copier. I still like that about comics. They seem more basic and direct to me for that reason.

But to me, drawing 100% was never really a philosophical exercise, just simply a practical one. I had access to things that size. Also, not knowing anything about the comics world, I had no idea that most cartoonists drew much larger and shrunk their comics down to fit the printed page. As my style developed I realized anyhow that that wouldn’t work for me. My comics were so sparse and simple that reducing them was unnecessary.

After years of drawing on my Dad’s notepads, I graduated to Laser Paper around 1995. I could buy a ream for less than $10 and have enough paper to draw comics for 5 years. As printers got better though, I felt like the quality/smoothness of the laser paper got more unpredictable, so just last year I started using Bristol board to draw my comics on. I buy the Strathmore “Manga” stuff, which is 11 x 17 so I can cut it down and get 4 KC sized pages out of each sheet.

There have been occasions where I’ve drawn larger for reduction. Usually to get the effect that comes from the xerographic reduction process, a kind of crudity and flatness that occurs. But it’s just not usually the way I think about comics.

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Frank:
Can you go into the mechanics of how you paste things up? One of the things I also think is interesting working same size is that it is possible to print-marry the original pages together without losing a generation – which happens when reduction is necessary.

I’m also interested in how you compose issues – like if the pages are all on individual sheets how do you mock up the issue or even one story – can you walk the reader through how you make an issue of King-Cat? Like, do you compose pages as spreads? Working on your dad’s notepads and tells me you worked single pages at a time. But now that you are working on Bristol are the spreads together on one sheet? I ask because the beauty, I think, of working on a folded 8 1/2 x 11 sheet is that you can see the spread together as it will be printed.
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John:
I used to just fold a letter sized piece of paper in half, and draw page “1” of a story on the left hand side, and then carry over to the right hand side for page “2” and so on. Seeing the spread allows me also to gauge the margins (I don’t measure anything, but eyeball the margins from page to page to maintain consistency.) When all the stories are done, I cut apart the joined pages and lay them in a stack in order, Story One page 1, 2, 3 etc, Story Two page 1, 2, 3 etc…

Then I sit down and try to figure out the sequencing of stories for the issue. I read through the comics and try to find a “flow” between them. Sometimes this is a conceptual flow, like the idea in one comic flows into the idea in the next. Sometimes it’s simply a rhythm thing. I pay a lot of attention to the way the stories unfold into each other when read in printed order. For instance, depending on the issue, I’ll try to vary the length of the stories, so a longer strip is balanced by shorter ones etc. Sometimes I like to bunch up a lot of one-pagers together. Whatever works. I also consider the Catcalls/Top 40/letters pages kind of the “spine” of the issue. They provide sort of a “breather” between the front half and the back half. Sometimes they’ll separate two conceptual phases in one issue, like before and after a certain event or experience that’s depicted.

The sequencing is super important to me. So much so, that if I can’t get it right, sometimes I’ll pull a whole story. I also arrange the stories to consciously have left facing or right facing first pages. I factor the breaks the reader feels between pages, with their eye moving from the bottom of one page to the top of the next, and between page turns, into the rhythm of the story. So I consciously edit the issue to account for these pauses. When I make the collections, like King-Cat Classix, this becomes kind of a puzzle. I want to include certain strips, but I have to arrange them in the book so their page-facing integrity remains intact.

Once the sequence is finalized, I put the stories in order and lay them out, so for instance the front cover lays to the right of the back cover. Then I tape them together on the back side to attach them. Next, the inside front cover lays to the left of the inside back cover etc and I attach them, etc. Then I mark the backs of each “doubled” page in order, 1A, 1B; 2A, 2B etc. So if they get jumbled at the printers they can re-sequence them.

Nowadays most printers don’t want to handle the originals, they want digital files. Even so, I still do this taping/layout thing when scanning the pages for the printer. It’s just easier for me to keep track of things in my brain that way, I’m so used to it. Plus it’s half as much scanning (two pages are scanned at once).

Now that I’m using Bristol, I don’t work on the two page attached spreads like I used to, I draw on individual digest sized sheets. But I still use the previous page when completed to lay out the next facing page, so I can see what the spread will look like when printed.

Anyhow, the way I do it either the issue gets printed off the original art (less often nowadays) or off a first generation scan. One thing I have learned, through much pain and suffering, is to make a photocopy of the new issue before going to the printers. I saddle stitch this “mock copy” and sit with it for a couple days. For some reason it’s much easier for me to find mistakes when the pages are in a printed booklet form. Then I fix anything I find wrong and drop the pages/files off at the printer. I leave a mock copy with the shop to use as a reference when printing.
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Please check out John Porcellino at these fine establishments:
www.king-cat.net
www.spitandahalf.blogspot.com
www.johnporcellino.blogspot.com

Labels: John Porcellino, Megan Kelso, Mr. Mike, process, Zak Sally