Manga From Scratch 4: Specifications

Manga From Scratch 4:
Working for Print or Web

Hello again and welcome to Manga From Scratch. It’s been a while, but that’s because this one is a tough one. Print specifications! Can you hear all the tormented screams of agony? …Okay, mostly mine.

Until I made ‘Fell’ the comic you’ll find in ‘Origins’ which was originally a ‘Rising Stars of Manga’ competition entry, I was strictly a webcomic artist. My first time seeing the technical specs for the competition, it was like reading an alien language! I had no idea what I was doing, and yet, couldn’t find any tutorials about it! Print specifications are tough, so I’ll try to be as clear and thorough as possible here.

You may be thinking it’s a little early to be talking about printing when we’re only on the fourth tutorial, but I assure you it isn’t. How you’re going to publish should be one of the things you consider very early on, before drawing any pages. The dimensions of your pages, choice of colour or tones, what dpi and format are used, these all depend on whether you’re making a webcomic, print comic or both. Yet despite this, many ‘making manga’ books focus just on drawing characters, not on the hard part of actually making a manga book or webcomic! I had to learn through trial and error and asking other artists how they do things, which lead to many problems I could have avoided if the info was easier to get.

So the first question is ‘print or web’? In my opinion, it’s harder to rejig a webcomic to work for print than it is to rejig a print comic for web. Sizing an image up is always harder than sizing down, after all! If you have any desire to print your comic, even if it’s going on the web first, work as if for print and make web versions. This is my advice for you. Due to my own inexperience, I rendered my webcomic pretty much unprintable from the outset, so if you’d like to print, always keep your high rez files seperate from the low rez web versions! What I did was to keep messing with the size of pages, working without a proper bleed, switching between black and white and colour and only keeping the web versions, not the print-size files. If I ever want to print that comic, I’ll have to rescan about 40 pages and redo all the CG effects and dialogue…ugh.

I’m going to discuss print methods first, because it’s harder.
Working for print requires a little understanding of how printing works. Why do they need your files so huge? What’s this ‘bleed’ thing that means I have to draw stuff that probably won’t be printed? Why’s everybody telling me some screentones are okay, but others aren’t?
Most printing nowadays for ’short runs’ (and believe me, unless you’re printing thousands of books, you’ll be doing a short run) is done digitally. Digital Printing is one of the best things to happen for small press groups, allowing quick, affordable print runs for self-published books. A digital printer, if you’ve ever seen one, looks like a giant version of your home printer. The quality does still range from printer to printer, as does the price, so be sure to request samples and shop around. The printer is not only bigger, but generally more sensitive than your printer at home (unless you have a nice expensive photo printer of course). It can copy your lines to the nearest fraction of a millimetre, and that’s why you need to scan your files and have them ready at such a big 600dpi figure, because the printer picks up every detail and copies it. What may look passable on your monitor displayed at 72dpi may look very fuzzy when printed! If you happen to like your Sweatdrop comics, and own a copy of Sonia Leong’s ‘Once Upon a Time’ open it up and see how clean and sharp those lines are, she did that at 1200dpi! Sonia’s lines are so fine that she wanted to give the printer as much detail as possible to make them come out accurately, so worked at a huge dpi to achieve this. 300dpi looks fine for colour printing generally and is passable for greyscale or pencil work (unless you have a very fine, precise pencil style like ‘Megatokyo’) 600 is best for traditional manga work with clear, inked lines and tones, going above that isn’t common in small press. We printed ‘Origins’ at 300dpi, which, if you look carefully, lead to a slight fuzziness around the edges of my work, particularly ‘Rake’ which was inked digitally for sharper lines, while there’s no visible degradation on Anna’s softer greyscale work. So if you want sharp lines and tones, and especially if you use fine, clean lines (mine are still chunky by manga standards so I can just about get away with 300dpi) and particularly if you’re working in pure black and tones and white rather than greyscale, scan and print at 600dpi.
While we’re on the subject of DPI, let’s talk about screentones. Most of us nowadays use digital tones. You may have noticed that most digital tones have a DPI number with them, usually 600 or 300. Always be sure that when you’re toning your image, it’s at the size and dpi you plan to print at, and that the dpi of your tones matches the dpi of your image. If you put your tones on and then size down, the tones may merge together into strange checks, criss-cross patterns or have lines running through. This is called ‘moire’ and we hate it. Modern digital printers often print in greyscale, which tends to combat moire to some extent, because the tornes just merge into greys. Still, it’s worth being careful and getting into good habits now, right?

For format, most printers will love you if you bring pdf format files. You can save files as pdfs in Photoshop or Manga Studio, the two most popular packages among manga artists. They open with Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer generally. For colour, put them into cmyk colour mode if you know how, this will make the colour printing more accurate, and when you see an image in cmyk on screen, you get a better idea of how it will look printed than rgb (computer monitors use red green and blue to make colours, like a TV. Printing with inks uses cyan (light blue) magenta (pinky purple) yellow and black). If you’ve ever printed an image and been disappointed at how the colours came out differently, you’ll understand this problem. Be aware that CMYK images when saved take up more hard disk space, and also that, when working in CMYK, some Photshop filters don’t work.

At the printers, the images are printed on paper that’s slightly larger than the size the finished page will be, like on paper a bit bigger than a4 or a5, and then put into a machine that cuts them to the desired size. The machine will cut the paper down to the correct size, leaving the bleed panels to bleed right to the edge of the page without a gap. Machines (and people) aren’t infallible. The machine will not be able to cut pages accurate to the last millimetre, usually they’re accurate to within about 3mm. The bigger your bleed, the lower the chance of the machine or person cutting accidentally slicing off important stuff like dialogue. So bleed is all about reaching a reasonable balance between drawing enough extra that some can be lost and it’s still okay, and not wasting your time drawing loads and loads that will just be cut away. Even if your printer specifies a 3mm bleed, I’d recommend keeping your dialogue much further away from the edge than that if possible. A 1-2cm bleed is far safer!

Let’s see a couple of pictures to show how it works! Here’s a page of a comic I did for ‘Leek and Sushi’s Manga Show’, an Anthology published by ITCH publishing just a couple of weeks back. This was drawn on A4 paper. The safety zone was simply ruled 2cm from each of the edges of the sheet, and panel borders drawn on the safety zone lines, and anything I wanted to bleed drawn right to the edge of the paper. This simple, effective method I call ‘Morag Specs’, because Morag Lewis from Sweatdrop taught me it. The anthology was printed at A5 size, which is very common for small press comics. The big bleed on Morag Specs pages mean that they resize really well.

So, for print, work big, high DPI, nice big bleed, if you use colour, CMYK format. How about web, then?
Webcomics are gradually gaining popularity on the UK scene now. In early days they were looked upon as kind of inferior to print, an ‘easy’ option. They are, though, a really good way to practice, due to instant feedback, freedom to quickly edit mistakes and the fact that they’re free to make. You can also use colour at not extra cost and try some really different techniques with layout.
The main things with a webcomic are to make it fit on the screen, be comfortable to read and load quickly.

One difference with webcomics is that you don’t need  to worry about bleed and safety zones. If you’re doing a comic with no intention to print, just draw the comic as you want it to appear. No need to draw anything extra, since the pages won’t be cut! If you do intend to print, work as if for print first with a bleed and THEN crop off the bleed and size down. Easy.

Remember, that when you view an image on your computer, often the computer will automatically fit it to the screen. When put on the web, it will display at full size. Also, be sure to note that while monitor resolutions are increasing, not everybody reading your comic has a brand spanking new computer. The lowest normal monitor resolution is 800×600 pixels. Note, that unlike print comics, now we’re working in pixels rather than measurements like millimetres or inches! I urge you to make your comic 800 pixels wide or below. It can be any height. “But Kate!” I hear you cry, “The monitor is landscape, so why not make the comic wider than it is tall!?” Well, that’s okay if the comic is a nice size to fit on the screen all  as one thing, BUT if it’s wider than that…look at your mouse for a second. If you have a scroll wheel, that glorious invention, which way does it scroll? Vertically, right? horisontal scrolling is more of a bother. Also, if you have two tiers of panels AND horisontal scrolling, the reader must click scroll all the way across, then go back and go across again! What a pain! So, yeah, either all on the screen at once or portrait format, please. Chances are, if you’re working for print, you’ll be in portrait format already anyway.
Resolution is worth mentioning. 72dpi is fine. Images will be smaller and will display perfectly well on screen. For format, try to find which is best while keeping decent image quality. Common file types are png, gif and jpg. See which gives the best balance of looks and file size.

…Okay, I think we’re done here! Whew, that was a tough one. I hope you followed all that! Now go forth and make comics!