The weater was absolutely sweltering, and it was much the same inside the hall on the Saturday with people everywhere.

It was far quieter on the Sunday and we got to take in more of the exhibitors and generally arse about!

We’re looking forward to (hopefully) the next expo in October, and anyone we didn’t meet, make sure to pop over to us then!

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!

‘Leek and Sushi’s Manga Show, 150 Years of Friendship’ is now out! Published by ITCH, the awesome small UK manga publisher, it’s an anthology book of about 200 pages of glorious comicky goodness!

If you’re wondering why we’re plugging it here, it’s because two of the comics are by IndieManga’s very own Sally J. Thompson and Kate Holden. These are comics you can’t see anywhere else, so if you want to see them, you’ll have to buy a copy! As well as our work, it contains work by a whopping 21 artists and writers, all collaborating to celebrate 150 years of peaceful cooperation between the UK and Japan.

To get hold of your copy and see some tempting previews, head on over to ITCH:

http://www.itchpublishing.com/news/leek-sushis-manga-show

If you’re looking for some good reads, you could do far worse than have a little look through their shop, too. ITCH are very supportive of new talent on the scene, and definitely worth a look!

Real life isn’t simple, there are lots of things all happening at once in a constant flow. Your story ideas for a comic may not be simple. You probably have a tangled mass of ideas about what happens, the relationships between characters and the story.
With a comic, it’s very important to try to weave these threads into a clear narrative so that the story can be told visually.
The Sequence is the heart of a comic. Everything happens snapshot-by snapshot.
This means that scenes involving action can turn out much longer than they would do in prose, a fight lasting three sentances can turn into more like three pages. It also means that events have to be meticulously ordered.
Writing a comic is writing sequences within sequences.
At the top level, if you’re writing a serial or epic, there’s the overarching plotline. This is the ‘big picture’, it’s what happens in your storyline.
ie. A knight goes to find a lost Princess. He meets two friends. They fight a dragon and save the Princess. Knight Marries Princess and all are happy.
It’s a big, simple sequence.
The next level down are the ’story arcs’. That’s where you take each of the parts listed above and turn them into sequences. So ‘A knight goes to find a lost princess’ can turn into:
Knight hears about lost princess. Decides to go and find her. Prepares for his journey. Gets advice from mentor. Sets off.

The next level down, and the first level if you’re writing a self-contained short, is the episode sequence. A self-contained story is pretty much the same as a single issue or episode or chapter of a serial comic, except you don’t have to worry about linking. You will always need a punchy start and ending, no matter which you’re writing. So first decide on the sequence. Let’s go for ‘Knight hears about lost Princess’.
Introduction of a young squire in the middle of a battle. He performs admirably and saves his mentor. Afterwards he is beknighted on the battlefield by the King. The King is so impressed with the young knight that he asks a personal favour. He explains about the Princess. The knight promises to find her.

See how once again, things are elaborated upon and broken down into smaller pieces. It’s like zooming in on a map and discovering more complexity the closer in you get. Even if you’re writing a part of a series, try to give each section a strong beginning and end . Imagine people may read your comic chapter by chapter as it’s released, it should be readable as sections. Like how chocolate comes in pieces! The chocolate lasts longer and is savoured more if you eat it a square at a time, right? It’s nice to have the chance to just dib in and eat one square when you want and then wrap up the bar nice and tidy for later. Oh man, now I really want some chocolate…
Er, anyway. The next stage down is breaking this sequence into pages and panels. If you didn’t know much about comics, you’d probably just think ‘oh, well, easy, a page for each of the sections you wrote above!’ you might be able to do this in an American comic or european comic, which have larger pages and more panels, but in a manga, you’ll need to stick in extra pages here or you’ll have a very rushed, simplistic story.
When putting panels to pages, there are some important things to consider. Firstly, each page should have a point. Whether the point is to move the story along, to introduce or develop a character or to tell a joke. A page with no point is a waste of time and energy. Secondly, think carefully about panel count. What’s the usual number of panels per page in a manga? Go on, get out some manga, let’s count… Well, from my count, a typical manga page is 3-6 panels. Four or five is most common. Yeah, that’s not an awful lot, compare to Ditko and Lee era Spider-man with it’s 9 panel pages and you really have to pull out the narrative because you have half as many panels. Mainly because your pages are half the size! The fewer panels you have, the more detail can fit into each panel, but the more panels you have, the more seperate moments of action you can fit onto the page. You’ll find that at seven or more panels, things get REALLY uncomfortable, unless some of those panels are really tiny!
Drawing fewer pages with more panels is not nessesarily faster or easier than drawing more pages with fewer panels! Don’t be fooled by page count! If you can’t fit your action sequence into one page comfortably, make it two or three. It really won’t take much longer and it’ll read much more comfortably.
How do you decide what should happen in one panel though? Well, imagine that you’ve got your favourite film and want to turn it into a comic by taking screen caps. Each screencap worthy moment is a panel. You need as many panels as it takes to make the action obvious. Then you should always consider an extra panel on the first page of a scene for an establishing scenery shot, and maybe some pacing and reaction shots in places. It’s a skill you’ll develop as you go. Try to break up the actions like this:
“The Monster leaps at the young knight, who, gritting his teeth, draws his sword and kills it’.
That is not one panel. If you draw that as one panel, it would come out more like “leaping monster is stabbed by grimacing knight”. Which doesn’t give the timing or importance of the action the original text implies. How you should do it is:
‘Monster leaps’-'Close up of Young knight, intense expression, grits teeth’-'Knight draws sword’-'Big panel of Knight with monster impaled on sword’. Now the monster fight becomes an important event, worthy of a page, rather than a minor event, which would be more suited if it was just one unimportant kill in the context of a big battle and only meriting one panel. If you want to show a character easily dispatching many opponents, make them one panel each, and it’ll look fast and effortless. Put several opponents being dispatched in one panel and suddenly the warrior looks like a superhuman killing machine, beating everybody in the blink of an eye! Time in manga is relative to the importance of the moment, not to the actual time taken!

So in summary, start big and then zoom in. Make each portion count, then make each portion of that portion count. Don’t be afraid to increase the pagecount and to trim stuff that’s irrelevant or dragging the pace.
Good Luck! Ganbatte!
-Kate

Some people start with a plot and write characters, then design them, other people draw character designs first and make a story to go with them. I wasn’t sure whether to do the plot tutorial or the design tutorial first for this reason, but design won over because that’s how I work personally. There’s nothing wrong with you if you prefer to write the plot and plan the characters before designing how things look, I just had to pick some kind of order!

So, character design. Some people find it more important than others. Personally, I’m crazy about character design, I love it. Some people find it comes very naturally, others find it difficult, so let’s go over the basics:

1. Don’t over-detail.
You’re designing a comic, not a video game. What’s the difference? Well, you may notice that in many 3d games, particularly RPGs, the characters have very complex designs. While it’s tempting to make designs like these you should remember one thing: You usually only have to make a character model once, maybe two or three times at most. A comic character on the other hand, you will have to draw tens, maybe hundreds of times over the course of a comic.
Obviously, the level of detail anybody can stand to draw repeatedly varies from person to person, so you need to find your level through practice. If a character is frustrating to draw and seems to take ages, they may have too complicated a design. Serialised manga in particular (like Naruto, which in Japan updates about 20 pages per week) need strong, simple designs to make the characters quick to draw. To simplify a character design, try drawing them quickly a few times without a reference. Any details you consistently forget to add or get really bored when drawing them this way are probably superflouous and you should consider their removal or at least their simplification.
Remember how in the old CLAMP ‘Rayearth’ comics, the characters spent huge amounts of the books chibified because their designs were so complex? Personally I think that’s not a great way to do things. The simpler designs they used in later works like ‘Tsubasa Reservoir’ were more effective as well as less labour intensive!

2. Give distinctive looks.
I’m talking from experience here. Try to make each character clearly different. Even if your cast are all close in age and background it’s still very possible. Giving each character distinctive eyes is a good start, hair and clothing are obviously important, but try not to rely soley on different clothing and hair stuck onto cookie-cutter characters (imagine if you drew all your characters having just walked out of the shower wearing just a towel and their hair all wet. are they still all recognisable?). Try to give people different heights and builds. Even if you’re set on the whole cast being attractive, different people are attractive in different ways. Perhaps one character is petite and elfin and cute looking, while another tall, elegant and majestic.
If you want to make an iconic, memorable character, try giving them a distinctive visual ‘hook’. If you can make a character who a person could draw a stick figure version of, and they’d be recognisable as that character, you’ve probably got an iconic design. In the Manga Shakespeare ‘Hamlet’ drawn by Sweatdrop’s Emma Vieceli, she gave Hamlet white hair with a black fringe and big white sleeves with slimline black trousers and top. This was a very simple and effective character design and is very memorable. The great thing about a character with a good visual hook is you get lots of fan art because anybody can draw them in any style and with any skill level and it’ll still be recognisable! Of course, not all designs need to be iconic. If you’re creating an everyman figure for a short comic, you may not want him to be all that memorable or stand out from the crowd. But for an ongoing series, it can really help draw in readers (and sell merchandise!) if your character can be instantly recognised.

3. Think about media.
If you’re using colour, you don’t need to worry about ‘which characters have dark hair and which have light’ because you can have light haired characters of all different colours. In black and white, however, you’ll need to think about which characters have white hair (generally anybody with white, blonde or pale hair colours) which have black (black or dark brown hair, or any other dark colour) and, if you’re using them, which characters you’ll use a tone on their hair (for mid-tones).
For pure, toneless black and white, you ideally want each character to have clearly defined areas of light and dark on them. For colour, you’ll need to think about their design in a different way, based on which colours look good together. With tones, try not to have more than one pattern on their clothing. Stripy shirts and checked trousers together will make your eyes spin! Also, don’t make everything grey when you’re using tones. Using lots of close mid greys just makes characters dull. Try to use some strong areas of light and dark, since contrast is eye-catching. Remember with black and white that colours which can be rendered as black aren’t just black, brown and grey, but any dark colour. You may notice that in Naruto, Sasuke’s blue shirt becomes black, as does Sakura’s Red tunic. It’s all about how dark the colour is in comparison with the colours it’s put with, not how dark it is in general.

4. Context!
If your comic is set in medieval times, and you want to keep consistent with the technology, don’t have characters with zips on their clothing! Zips, though relatively simple, require mechanical assembly, so though in a fantasy you could say they were invented before somebody in our time thought them up, at least consider that to make a zip, you need some sort of machinery.
Try to think about levels of technology and types of culture in your setting. Do your research, think about fabrics, particularly about how a character puts on and takes off their clothing. This may seem annoying, but actually can lead to really interesting bits of design, like a row of buttons on a glove to show how it fastens may become a cute detail!
Characters in a cold climate should dress for cold weather. Always consider practicalities, as these help immerse the reader. Cultural details can give visual clues about a character, tartan, for example, is not only associated with Scotland, but with Punk music and culture, pigtails and blonde hair tend to make people think of northern europe and also innocence, since often children of north european descent have lighter hair than adults, bottle blonde however, can have very different connotations to natural blonde! Even something like a box of pocky poking out of a non-Japanese character’s bag could perhaps indicate they’re an otaku! Consider what you’re trying to tell the reader about a character. If you see somebody wearing a baseball cap and branded tracksuit and bling jewellery, you know they’re probably a chav, and if you draw a character dressed like that, the reader will likely also identify them as such.
If you have trouble coming up with clothes and hairstyles, break out the books and magazines! History books are great, as are fashion magazines . Plus there’s always the internet.

So, to sum up, a good character design should be simple, communicate information about the character’s background and personality and clearly differentiate them from the rest of the cast, and should be rendered in a way that makes best use of the medium you’re using to create the comic. Not so hard, right?

Give it a go! If you have any problems or suggestions or want to show us a design your proud of, why not post on our forums!
Have fun and good luck!
-Kate

PLACES ARE NOW ALL FULL!

Sorry if you missed out, but it’s looking likely there will be another one of these in the not-too-distant future! So keep your eyes peeled, people!