The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

In part one we looked at perhaps the most unloved of “minicomics”, the current crop of “new” minis, which are often viewed as the “wrong size” and too professional-looking by some traditional minicomics creators, and not professional enough by some mainstream publishers.  And in part two, we looked at how some creators are developing a much more professional product through a combination of new technologies.  In The Changing Face of Minicomics Part 3, we will look more closely at the costs involved in producing traditional and non-traditional minicomics.

What we need to bear in mind is that when they talk about the “low cost” of producing a minicomic, many creators are talking in relative terms.  They do not include the time it takes to produce the publication because they are often seasoned minicomics creators, or full-time, or part-time, professional illustrators, writers, or cartoonists, and they often just “tack” the tasks involved onto their normal working day – which unless a tight deadline is looming, can often be a moveable feast that can easily accommodate a little extra drawing or scanning or printing.  It’s not thoughtlessness, it’s just that after a time, tasks like drawing the thing in the first place, balancing the page count, producing the master-copy, and scanning and printing, have all become second-nature.

The fact that many other minicomics creators might not be able to afford the time demanded by a traditional minicomic, because they have to fit all the tasks involved in making the thing around a demanding full-time job, real life pursuits, and maybe raising children, is often as overlooked – as is the fact that the job of producing the minicomic yourself, actually requires quite a few specialist skills.  Again, this is not thoughtlessness, I’m afraid that experience has taught me that cartoonists simply, routinely, undervalue the skills they have, and the work they do.  In my opinion, whatever else the self-publishing lark may be, it is far from simple, and not always an enjoyable and stress-free hobby.  In fact, an illustration of just how many ‘skills’ the average minicomics producer uses, and takes for granted, was demonstrated to me when I saw just how many students at Teacher Training College couldn’t produce the most basic photocopied 4-page booklet, as a teaching resource, despite being able to access the very best equipment available.  Imagine then, how they would have coped if the booklet they were producing was the same size as just one volume of Gerry Mooney’s Sister Mary Dracula comic, pictured in progress below.

(Gerry Mooney’s studio as he works on his comic book Sister Mary Dracula)

Of course if you already have some of the tools of the cartooning trade at home, the paper, the pens, the ink or the graphics tablet, the computer, the scanner, the printer, a paint programme like Photoshop, a layout programme like Acrobat, or Quark Express, or In-Design, or even a trusty old copy of Pagemaker, the time and effort it takes to do the job will be lessened.  Okay, I’m playing the Devil’s Advocate here, it’s not absolutely necessary to have all that stuff at home, but it is the basic kit that someone like me has, and quite recently I found myself opening my big mouth and telling someone who might not have this sort of gear how quickly and easily they should be able to turn-out a page or two of artwork for an anthology we are working on –  I apologise, it’s just that cartoonists do tend to take it for granted that everyone involved in comic work will be tooled-up.

(Cartoonist Bill ‘Stik’ Greenhead, at work, in his studio, on his World of Cow drawings.  Note the dual-screen set-up, the Graphics Tablet and the scanner or printer, nearby)

Yes you can make your minicomic without all the equipment cartoonists tend to have, and you can access a lot of the tools outside, but again that comes at a not inconsiderable cost, in time and money.  I just can’t help but feel that the cost involved in self-publication, and the sheer hassle it can often be, must be discouraging some and perhaps even many, really talented individuals from getting their ideas down on paper.

If the first-time minicomics creator does intend to produce a lot of minis, then the additional cost of say, a guillotine, a Print Gocco, plus bulbs inks and paper, a long stapler, or some other kind of binder, additional laser cartridges, or the printer inks, will all be money well spent in the long run – but it still makes the set-up costs for that first minicomic alarmingly high.  One thing’s for sure, whilst the end result can look charmingly traditional, even amateurish and folksy, you certainly need to know what you are doing in order to put the thing together yourself.  So whilst the relative cost of producing a traditional minicomic can be cheap, if you know what you are doing and providing you are not going out and buying £800 worth of hardware, and £1200 worth of software to produce 10 copies of your one and only comic; that ‘relative’ cost, also cloaks a number of otherwise hidden factors.

It is easy therefore, to see the attractions of publishing your comic through a POD service like ComixPress, or Lulu, or Ka-Blam, instead of printing the thing yourself.  Instead of searching around for a small copy shop with a good attitude, a good photocopier, and maybe a stapling service, you can simply create one virtual comic, turn your comic into a PDF file, jpegs, or tiffs, and upload it to the POD Company’s website and then sit back and wait.  And for around $160 (I don’t know, one minute that’s £80 and the next £90 – let’s call it £90, or 90p a copy) you can then have 100 copies of your own 24-page, black and white, comic book with full colour cover, delivered to you, or delivered elsewhere, or sold online through your own shop-front on the Company’s website.  And whilst, I’m sure that route is not totally hassle-free, it is nonetheless, as far as I am concerned, an option that any serious minicomic creator has to consider.

Of course I’m slightly partial; the last time I produced a 12-page minicomic, it cost me around £100 (say $180) for hardware, because I had an inkjet problem, and then had to have a new scanner sent over from France (yes, I bought a scanner that was made in Britain from France and paid duty and tax and it was cheaper than buying it in Britain) plus around another £15 ($28) for paper and ink, to produce around 20 copies (x 12 pages) – which works out at £5.75 (around $10 a copy), which is ludicrously expensive – and that figure doesn’t include the 5 days I stopped earning whilst I drew the thing, and then planned it out, and put it together, and then my postage costs.  And what’s more, I wasn’t sure how to work my new scanner-software and printed many of the pages below print-quality at around 150dpi (dots per inch, 300 is the start of print quality); so it was expensive and it still contrived to look pretty bad.  That episode caused me to pause, and led me to rethink my attitude toward self-publishing, and I haven’t made any traditional minis since, and I don’t think I’ll be making any traditional-style minis again.

Other advantages of farming the job out are, you have an additional shop-window through which to sell your masterpiece in hard copy, or as an eBook; you don’t have to store lots of comicbooks in the garage, unless you want to, and you can meet up online with your fellow creators between Comics Cons.  A quick trawl through the sites tells you that the POD Companies are becoming more and more sophisticated, boasting point-and-click online stores, news blogs, and forums.  The forums are a particularly good idea because networking is important for self-publishers and in general the buzz between the various creators on those forums seems to be very lively, and supportive.  Self-published work has always thrived on friends and community, and there certainly seems to be a good community spirit and plenty of moral support on the various boards.

Publishing with 4 of the best known POD Companies

With most of the POD companies, when there is a set-up cost, you pay that cost only once.  The set-up cost is calculated according to the specifications of your book, and one proof copy; and it’s a charge for the work involved in getting your files ready to print. Your proof can be in your hands very quickly, in most cases within around 10 days.  If you find there are corrections that need to be made, the setup fee should cover those corrections – and you should not be expected to pay additional “set-up” fees for reorders.

1. Café Press – The example that Café Press gives is for a 100-page perfect-bound book, so, maybe a comic book creator should think of this as a “graphic novel” or a collection, or anthology, of 3 issues of their comic book bound as 1 volume.  Viewed like this, the base-price that Cafe Press quotes, of $10.00, around £6 or £7, does not sound so high.  Pricing is based on the number of pages in your book, plus the type of binding you choose, and base prices are the same for all book sizes.  You have the benefit of no setup fees, or minimum quantities, for your black and white book with full colour cover, and in addition, you can choose from Saddle Stitch, Wire-O, or Perfect Bound, binding, and from 5 different book sizes.  According to their press, the pricing, in this case $10 per unit includes book production, order management, fulfilment, and customer service.  As with any means of POD production, you choose the retail price; and sales from Cafe Press’s site earn you the difference between the retail price, what you charge for each copy, and the base price charged by Café Press, in this case $10 per copy.

2. Ka-Blam – Ka-Blam boasts that their price for POD colour is “the best around”.  KA-BLAM offers 100 full colour comic books, with full colour cover, inside and out, and full colour artwork, with a Kablam advert on the back page, for around $2.64 (£1.50) per copy.  The same specs, but with a cover that has full colour on the outside with black and white insides and black and white artwork, with a Ka-Blam advert on the back cover of your comic, brings your unit price down to around $1.55 (around 80p) per comic.  Of course, you may feel that you can find a business that will pay you more than that to advertise on your back cover, so you would do your own bit of business there and the cost with no Ka-Blam add would be  $3.29 (£1.70) and $2.20 (£1.20) respectively, meaning you would want to sell your ad-space for at least enough money to cover the difference.  There is also the bonus that all new Ka-Blam customers get a $20 credit when they register.

You can publish standard-sized comics or manga-sized comics, saddle-stitched to a maximum of 52 interior pages, or fill their perfect-bound trade paperbacks with up to 800 pages of comic adventures.  They do not handle PDF files, preferring instead Tiff files, PC formatted, flattened with no extra layers or channels, and RGB colour mode, for best results.  The work should be archived in a Zip or Rar or StuffIt file.  You can sell your published comic through Ka-Blam’s online store, IndyPlanet.

3. Lulu – Lulu has much more choice when it comes to formatting your work than the other POD companies.  Their shop-window is excellent, and creators can have their own shop on the Lulu site.  The Lulu forums are lively, and the site has a good collective spirit about it.  However, Lulu is the priciest of the three POD companies we are looking at here, and each one of our 100, 32-page (32 is the minimum amount of pages) black and white comics with full-colour wrap-around cover costs around $3.57 or £2.00.  There is mention of a bulk discount of 31% for ordering more than 25 comic books, and I would assume that is not included here, so that brings the cost down from $357 (£180) to $249.90 (£130) or around $2.49 (£1.30) per comic book.  The collection of World of Cow cartoons by Stik is an attractive 45 – page, full colour book, printed on nice heavy gloss paper, with a full-colour cover, but the unit cost reflects that quality and it is a hefty $15 (£7.50) or so per book.

4. ComixPress – ComiXpress offers a 24-page black and white comic, with full-colour outer cover and black and white insides, and a ComixPress advert on the back page, for $1.43 (around 80p), plus there’s a set-up cost of $16.90 ( around £10).  For a full colour cover, with black and white insides and full colour pages, carrying a ComixPress advert on the back page, the cost is around $2.56 (around £1.40), with a set-up fee of $19.20 (about £12).  With ComixPress, a new customer referred by an existing customer will receive a 10% discount on their first order, with the referrer receiving a $5.00 credit on their account, which brings the price for our black and white comic, with full colour cover on the outside and black and white cover on the inside, down to around $1.29 (maybe 70p) per comic.

If I’m to be completely honest, for me, the hitherto best argument, and the main selling point of the traditional minicomic, is the very personal quality it affords.  A traditional minicomic has a very personal touch; it often comes signed and personalised by the creator.  It can also be hand-coloured, be personalised with different added inserts for every different buyer, or be presented in a completely non-traditional and surprising way, such as Mark Campos’s one-page story about a frog – which was also folded as an origami frog (I love this idea.).

(Mark Campos’s charming mini comic unfolds to reveal a one-page story that features a frog)

Just knowing that a highly skilled and talented illustrator/musician like Marcellus Hall actually goes to the trouble of signing his comic, and dropping his promotional postcard into the package he sends you when you buy his book from his website, somehow makes the whole thing less like commerce, and more like a shared secret, or like belonging to an exclusive club.  Although I think Marcellus’s book Legends of the Infinite City, which is filled with his drawings of New York, was printed by a booklet company, the paper is really nice, it still retains that folksy homemade minicomics appeal.

(Marcellus Hall’s illustrations can be found in the New Yorker and other publications)

Nowadays though, it is perfectly possible, and not at huge expense, using POD, to have your comic book printed in a variety of ways, shapes, and styles.  If you wish, you can have just one copy of your comic printed, and so theoretically make a different and unique insert for a hundred copies of your comic, and even a different last page with a different ending for each one if you so wish (Has POD made the labyrinthine book, in Borges story The Garden of Forking Paths, where everything that can possibly happen does, possible?).  You could even, if you had a mind to, create an entire comic book of stories with pages that can be assembled into a Mark Campos-style origami frog, or whatever object the story was about – there are many exciting possibilities – and you can even have your comic books printed, sent to you, and then you can colour every page by hand, if you have half a mind to do so. In other words, the fact that the comic isn’t printed out on your own printer, or photocopied and stapled in the local Xerox, but is instead photocopied on a digital copier and stapled somewhere else, provides no bar to the creator providing a personal touch.  All you have to do is take shipment of a batch of your comics or books, and then sell them from your own website, or provide them to shops that sell independently produced comics, with signed issues and/or different inserts and other personal touches added.

Having said all that, there remains one reason for digging our heels in and arguing the case for self-publication, and it is, I think, the loudest and best argument; the worry about ceding editorial control over to another body – the POD Company.  Well, we are all adults, and it looks as though at least one of the POD publishers is content to label any mature work as such, and print it, but it is unlikely that any will print work they consider to be outrageously obscene.  To get round this problem, we just have to admit to ourselves that some minicomics are better off being produced the traditional way, although I have to say I have seldom if ever seen a minicomic as obscene as the Tijuana Bibles, which were perhaps very much a product of their time.  To my mind, neither POD nor self-publishing diminishes the status of the minicomic, and as far as I’m concerned the new POD services enrich and empower us as creators.