New page of
Monkey & Bird by Joe Williams and Tina Garceau
is now available.

MONKEY And BIRD Update

Click here to read this comic NOW!

Cover of the finished product.

Last week I covered the digital side of producing our Monkey & Bird Mini-Comic. I told you about the layout and printing process of our little book so we wouldn’t arrive empty-handed when we went to the Philadelphia Alternative Comic Convention. Going to PACC gave me the impetus to actually go ahead and get it done!

The digital work was all out of the way. We had two stacks of signatures fresh from the printer. Now came the hand-done part of folding, assembling and stapling our Monkey & Bird Mini-Comic! Tina and I cleared the dining room table of dinner dishes; got out our supplies; neatly stacked the two signatures within easy reach; tuned in Pandora on the Roku box, and had ourselves a folding party.

So we folded the signatures down and placed the inner signature into the outer which doesn’t sound like much, but it took a couple of hours, and we listened to a lot of Bowie and Lou Reed on Pandora.We used a bone folder to burnish the folds so that they were nice and crisp. They are called bone folders because they are made of real bone. I’m not sure where they get the bones, but it does a nice job on folds and saved Tina and I some blisters.

Bostitch 615

We got all of our books together and now it was time for stapling. I borrowed a Bostitch #615 saddle stapler that has a metal V where the book sits and a helpful little guide so you can put your staples in the same place every time. Unfortunately, it was a well-worn stapler which had seen some better days. It would stick every now and then. The V was also giving me a hard time in that it was scratching the toner from my center spreads which was really annoying after all of the work that went into the books. Tina reassured me that nobody would notice, and we were giving them away for free anyway. I couldn’t get around my annoyance so I pulled out my Swingline Long Reach Stapler which I didn’t think would be as good as the Bostitch.

It was better. Much better. It sailed through my booklets.

I was going to buy a #615 which is 2-3 times more expensive than the Swingline depending on whether you could catch a deal or not. I’m glad I didn’t.

Swingline Long Reach Stapler

As I was merrily stapling along I ran out of staples and learned a valuable lesson: Don’t go cheap on the staples. I loaded store brand staples into my Swingline and loused up a couple books. Fortunately, I remembered having a box of vintage staples from the early 1970s. I put the old Staples in, and they worked beautifully!

Thanks, secretary lady! I love you, and I love your Speedpoint No. 4 Staples in the convenient plastic box (not pictured.)

I did the stapling and soon we wound up with what we thought was enough books for PACC.

Now they needed to be trimmed. I decided against risking a fingertip or two cutting them myself with a utility knife or a No. 11 blade. Besides, they would probably come out ragged. Why risk ruination at this stage of the game? I took it to the printer and their cutter chopped down almost a hundred books in what seemed to be less than 10 minutes.

It cut the top and bottom through the folds on the signatures, and it was cut on the right side making a beautiful, neat and even little 32-page comic book.

…and now a BONUS, of sorts. After completing last weeks installment of Creating the Monkey & Bird comic, I realized that I may have some of you confused as to how to create the map or dummy for the little booklet. I had a diagram of the comic with page number indications, but I figured I’d prepare a little something that may give you a better idea of how to create that little mock-up. So here’s an annoying animated GIF that will hopefully clear the air. Again, your layout may vary, but this is how I did mine:

Part I: How the Book was Built

by Joe Williams

Bill Cucinotta told us about the Philadelphia Alternative Comic Convention a while back, and Tina Garceau, Bill and I all planned on attending to see what the other kids are up to as Tina put it in her articles at Willceau Illo and Bleeding Cool. I decided that I didn’t want to go empty handed so I decided to turn the first chapter of Monkey & Bird into a printed mini-comic. It would be small enough so that I could do it inexpensively and easily. I knew it would look awful in black and white so I wanted to do it in full color. I explored my options and looked into pricing.

I got quoted a price that was more than fair so now it was time for the hard part – the layout.

We had 24 pages worth of story in chapter 1. Throw a cover on it, and that makes it 28 pages which I could have stuck with, but Dan Love, Master of the Layout Arts, gave me the notion of making two 16-page signatures so that they could be folded down, one placed inside the other, stapled, and finally chopped down for a nice, clean and even little book. I padded the book out a little with a sneak preview of chapter 2, and I wound up with the required 32 pages.

Front and back of Signature #1

I did the layout in InDesign as I do with the regular cartoon installments that you read at CO2 Comics. I created a high quality PDF from my comic and placed the pages at a reduced size into the 12×18 layout. Originally, I had an idea for doing the mini-comic on a smaller scale possibly at home on an inkjet printer. My thinking was to fit the two-page spreads across a typical 8.5″ x 11″ sheet so I made the individual pages 5.5″ across by 4″ high with a decent white border. Of course, trying to print these out at home would have been an expensive and painful process on an inkjet printer. Being I was offered a price I couldn’t refuse, and Tina and I were going to assemble the books ourselves further lowering the costs, I decided to have the book printed on a Ricoh C-900 which is a toner-based printer. It’s similar to a color laser copier, but it doesn’t have the glass or a scanner so you can’t make copies. It’s a huge color laser printer that prints on a number of different stocks. It prints mainly on 12″x18″ stock which is nice for tabloid prints with a bleed. It handles color nicely, and after trying a test print, it was going to be perfect for my needs.

Ricoh C-900

Front and Back of Signature #2

Obviously, the comic was printed without the Bingo balls. I placed them there so you, dear readers, could see my imposition. Your imposition may vary depending on the size of the book, but I wouldn’t want to go with anything more than 32 pages as far as stapling this baby. I know that the big comic companies would churn out saddle-stitched 80-Page Giants but they would print that stuff on toilet paper. I have a few long boxes filled with yellowing newsprint that can attest to the quality of paper that comic publishers used back in the 1970s and earlier. I went with a 70#, uncoated, text weight stock which is a beautiful paper, and Monkey & Bird looks great on it. Maybe they have lighter paper that will still work with that machine. I’ll have to explore that aspect of the process in future iterations of the mini-comic.

In short order, I had a nice,  fresh stack of printed comic book pages that needed to be assembled.

NEXT WEEK: It’s a folding party! Learn about bone folders! I take the Pepsi Challenge as far as two different brands of staplers are concerned, and learn that they don’t make staples like they used to!

New page of
Monkey & Bird by Joe Williams and Tina Garceau
is now available.

MONKEY And BIRD Update

Click here to read this comic NOW!

New page of
Monkey & Bird by Joe Williams and Tina Garceau
is now available.

MONKEY And BIRD Update

Click here to read this comic NOW!

New page of
Monkey & Bird by Joe Williams and Tina Garceau
is now available.

MONKEY And BIRD Update

Click here to read this comic NOW!

New page of
Monkey & Bird by Joe Williams and Tina Garceau
is now available.

MONKEY And BIRD Update

Click here to read this comic NOW!

New page of
Monkey & Bird by Joe Williams and Tina Garceau
is now available.

MONKEY And BIRD Update

Click here to read this comic NOW!

New page of
Monkey & Bird by Joe Williams and Tina Garceau
is now available.

MONKEY And BIRD

Click here to read this comic NOW!

New page of
Monkey & Bird by Joe Williams and Tina Garceau
is now available.

Click here to read this comic NOW!