Paper Again

I posted about paper here. I didn't re-read it, but I wanted to do a follow-up because I got some new paper.

For all my drawing life I've used Strathmore Bristol*, when I use Bristol at all. Strathmore pads come in smooth and vellum (vellum is toothy... not as smooth, duh). Smooth is nice for markers, pens, inks, etc. Vellum is nice for pencil... and charcoal, I guess. Come to think of it I've only used it a few times and I don't know what you vellum weirdos get up to but you keep on rocking that shit.

So anyway, Strathmore pads come in sheets of 20. Now, I'm not so god damn poor that I can't buy Strathmore. But they are more expensive than many other brands. And I wondered... is there a reason?

As I got further into this new comic project, I needed to get some more paper. I settled on 11x14 smooth Bristol and I went with Canson instead of Strathmore. Because Canson comes in pads of 25 sheets and they cost less. Not a ton less... but less.

I've drawn 5 or 6 pages on Canson now and I gotta say the differences between it and Strathmore are negligible at best. I can barely tell the difference. I do think Strathmore FEELS just a tiny bit better. Just a tiny bit more substantial. But that might be an illusion caused by the higher price point. I don't know.

My honest opinion is if you want to save a little money, go for the Canson. If you don't care about that and you want the best, go for the Strathmore. You won't be able to tell, but you might get that psychological bump from it. I dunno.

*Side note: It always bugs me that you can't type "Bristol" with a small "b" without spellcheck going "no no no". I thought that was dumb. Then I finally looked it up and learned that Bristol board is called Bristol board because it's a type of paper that used to be primarily produced in Bristol, England. Who knew?!

Paper

I've always had this weird creative roadblock related to paper size and art format.

I love seeing comics that use the American standard 8.5x11 format well. It's the size of paper we were most likely to have lying around the house, so it's got a nice stripped-down vibe to it. A no-frills, can-do kind of paper. Don't gimme no gimmicks, I ain't fancy, just get a sheet of paper and start drawing!

But also... a standard pack of white 8.5x11 paper is really shitty to do any finished art on. A standard sheet is about 75 GSM (25 or 27 Lbs). That's just typing paper. Very thin and fragile. A few too many erases and you've got shredded paper. Plus it takes ink like a whining child.

My preference is for something like a 270 GSM (100 Lbs) bristol board, smooth. I can live with cardstock, which is 225 GSM (80 Lbs), but it tends to be less smooth. I am a smooth paper guy, probably because I've always been mostly into pen/brush and ink, not so much into the graphite or paints.

One of my favorite papers is Borden & Riley Paris Paper for Pens, an ultra-smooth, ultra-bright white paper. It's not thick like bristol, but is durable and dense. It's designed to take ink very crisply, without any bleeding. And it does the job. But if you work wet, you might not like this paper. It'll buckle with heavy applications of wet media. If you're using a lot of pens, like Microns or brush pens, it's the bee's knees.

Standard comic compared to 8.5x11

So anyway... I am a bit obsessed with format. I need to know before I go into a comic book project exactly how I'm going to print it. Because that shit matters. If I just start drawing on an 11x14 pad, for example, and I take advantage of the whole page, then I've established a comic book format of the American standard magazine size. It'll convert to an 8.5x11 book or perhaps a European comic format, like Heavy Metal or Tin Tin.

But American comic books are typically 6.625 x 10.25... they are taller and skinnier than 8.5x11. Your 11x14 comic page, when shrunk down to fit a standard comic book, will have a huge area of white space above and below the comic... much more than you probably intended. To combat that, if you are going to print in standard size, you need to have larger margins on the sides. Use as much of the page as possible on the top and bottom, but you need to squeeze up your sides to fit that comic format. When working on 11x14, for example, you might go with a live area of 8.4x13.

Ok... see I'm down in the weeds here. I just wanted to express my thoughts about paper size and format.

Right at the moment I'm staring at a pack of 11x17 smooth bristol. Very nice. And 11x17 is a fairly standard size to work on for classic comic book making. At least that's what I've been told many times. I have used it and it's great, but it's bigger than I'm used to and it takes longer to finish a page. When I work on comics I like to feel the vibe quickly and move fast, cranking out pages as much as I can because I know that iron is going to cool down and be less workable. I try to strike while it is hot.

Then I start thinking about paper and... oh boy.

Hey, FYI... most of the pages of Pan-Gea were drawn on that Borden & Riley paper I mentioned above. I bought pads of 11x14, then cut them in half! So each page of Pan-Gea actually only measures 7x11. They fit very neatly into that standard American comic book format. But they are drawn basically 1:1 ratio... and most comics guys will tell you that you need to draw larger than your printed final version. The shrinking of the art to fit the format helps clean up your lines and makes everything look tighter.

And it's true. But also, it's a bit of bullshit. It's only good advice if that is the effect you are going for. This is an art form, not a science. If you want to draw comics on little post it note and BLOW THEM UP to fit a comic page, that's your bag, man. Do your thing. Could look rad. I don't know.

Comics is a wide open medium for creating. You should do what you feel like doing.

This post... is an example of turning on the nozzle too high and trying to fill a small Dixie cup. You're welcome.

Paper and Book Sizes

Here's a blog post about my history in the fine world of art and publishing, as it relates to paper and book sizes in particular. Because this shit really matters if your goal is to print something.

Earliest memory of making a zine: 1980, trailer park by a river. In my room, which was really a hallway portion of the trailer in which I had a bed and dresser, sitting on my bed with pencil and typing paper and some comic books.

Actually, now that I think on it, I'm not sure how many comics I had at that time. But I did have a full BOX of Marvel Comics Super Heroes Rub-A-Tattoo packs! These were like bubble gum trading card packs, but with dry transfer images of the various characters. At this time, my experience with comics was limited to a stack of old Donald Duck, Hot Stuff, and Archies some cousin gave me. Plus whatever cartoons and TV shows they had, such as the Hulk and Super Friends.

Anyway... I knew I liked Spidey and The Thing and Hulk. And I was fascinated by the comic book as an object. So I took my typing paper (8.5" x 11" cheap white paper... equivalent to A4 but slightly different because we Americans can't just adopt the most universal stuff like everyone else). I folded a sheet in half so it was now 5.5" x 8.5" and I drew a battle between The Thing and Spider-Man. I have no memory of what happened in the "story" or to what degree I actually finished it. I believe I only did one sheet and I marveled (get it?) at how much like a comic it didn't look.

Fast forward to teen years. I didn't try to make a book again for a while. But I was very interested in doing it. When I got into RPGs I made my own games and the format was usually just a sheet of typing paper or whatever kind of paper I had. Often it was loose leaf binder paper from my school stash. Or a spiral notebook. Whatever worked.

But a few years later, in 1987 or so, my friends and I decided to make a REAL comic. I had seen copies of an APA, so I knew people were doing this kind of thing. People were just making their own comics and books and printing them on Xerox machines (that's what we called photocopiers). Then they would trade them or sell a few locally, mostly through the mail.

This was the "small press" scene. Our comic, called Fast Lane, ran for 3 or so issues. I can't remember exactly how it went, but some of them were full size (8.5x11) and some were "digest" size (5.5x8.5). They were all photocopied when we used the machine at a friend's dad's place of work. That was a fun memory, laying out the pages on the office floor on a Saturday morning to collate and staple them. I think we ran 50 copies. Some were sold to kids at school, most were just given away.

I'm not even sure if I have copies myself anymore. In fact... I'm almost certain I do not. Pity.

So anyway, pretty much all small press folks (I didn't hear the term "zine" until the 90s) worked at some iteration of 8.5" x 11" in the USA because that was the by far the most common and cheap paper you could get. Every Xerox machine used that size by default. And when you're doing guerilla publishing, you use what is available.

The three common paper sizes in the USA are:

Letter: 8.5" x 11"

Legal: 8.5" x 14"

Tabloid: 11" x 17"

Every photocopy machine would handle these paper sizes and every place with a machine almost certainly had a pack of each. So you could plan your book in the following easy increments:

Full size (stapled flat): 8.5" x 11"

Full size (tabloid folded once): 8.5" x 11"

Digest (letter folded once): 5.5" x 8.5"

Mini: (letter folded twice): 4.25" x 5.5"

Printed on my desktop, c. 2004.

Virtually all comic zines of that era were black and white because the cost of doing color was incredibly high by comparison. And to get GOOD color was even more expensive. This is why I have been a black and white line artist for much of my life, though the internet sort of changed that for me and I've done my fair share of color work in the past 20 years.

There are other options, of course, such as folding a legal sheet in half or folding a letter sheet down the long way to make a really tall, skinny zine. But those were rare to see. Most folks stuck with the variations listed above because they were easy, common, standard. And one thing that us comic book folks really enjoy is a standard format*.

My zines have taken on various formats over the years, but I'd say the bulk of them were "digest" sized. This was, in my experience, the most common format for small press comics. All through the 90s I was involved in various small press co-ops, making and trading my comics with other creators. It was fun times. I have a TON of old zines in storage I should bust out and share pics of.

One huge leap forward for me was when I got a black and white laser printer. It's just as good as a photocopier (of its time... this is an older printer now), so I could make zines all day long. But there was one problem: the INTERNET happened. Suddenly print books were not all the rage and zine folks were doing a lot of digital stuff. The small press networks I had grown with over the years flagged, sometimes fading away entirely. I retreated from that scene, feeling like the connections I craved there were now being met more readily online. Over time, we would also see the cost of mailing books go up and up and UP until it made no sense at all to mail a single digest sized comic to anyone. The cost of the book was far, far less than the cost to mail it.

To close out on this rambler, in the USA, in my own experience, it was most common to do your comics and zines in black and white in size formats compatible with 8.5x11 sheets of paper. Because that's what we had to work with.

*Hey, calm down. I'm not saying weird formats are bad. Hell no! I published some zines in weird formats. I did the tall skinny thing with Random Order Comics & Games issue 1, for example. And if you went to any small press conventions you'd see all kinds of weird books! People are super creative about this stuff. This post is just talking about the most common uses of the materials that were available, filtered through the lens of the small press comics world. Most small press comics folks were not interested in having a weird format, they wanted something as close to a "normal comic book" as possible, to be honest. But it was super expensive to do a professional print run. We slummed it with Xerox machines.