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!

Monkey & Bird…a Love Story by Joe Williams and Tina Garceau is AVAILABLE NOW!!!

The highlight of my week was receiving a copy of Joe Williams and Tina Garceau’s printed mini comic, Monkey and Bird, in the mail. Snail mail, that is.

Back in August we featured a couple of posts by Señor Williams that outlined his experience personally  making the mini comic. He peppered his posts with so many juicy details that almost anyone could go out and make one themselves.

I’ve known Joe and his lovely wife Tina for years, we go all the way back to our college days at PCA and I am well aware of both of their incredible attention to detail and quality not to mention their brilliance as designers yet I still did not expect to be so taken by what a gem their mini comic turned out to be.

Holding Monkey and Bird in my hand as a mini comic was a defining moment for me especially after having published it as a web comic here at CO2 Comics for the last two years. Maybe my reaction is a reflection of my long history of publishing on paper or just evidence of a generational  preference for things printed on paper, but I liked it. A lot!

The web affords us comic creators so many options to be able to present our labors of love to a potentially vast audience with minimal expenses compared to the printed product. Everything about making comics for the internet is so much more convenient and spontaneous that it has given us the opportunity as creators and readers to be able to witness the biggest creative explosion of the medium in its history. All those virtues, however, in my jaded eyes, do not supersede the experience of reading comics in print. I will always have a warm place in my heart for the tangible paper package.

mathmanauts

Mimeograph machine

It has always been clear to me that a comic is never complete until it is in front of an audience. The reader’s experience is a much a part of the final execution of the comic  as any step taken in the creative process along the way. Because I have always felt so strongly about this I began publishing my own comics almost as early as I began creating them. My first published comics were printed on a mimeograph machine. My audience had as much fun smelling them as they did reading them. I slowly graduated to photocopiers and small offset presses before finally dealing with  large, commercial, four-color presses to make Comico comics.

Comico Covers

As I sit here holding Joe and Tina’s  32 page (including covers),  full color, 4 x 5.5 inch, landscaped pamphlet that  is hand folded and saddle stitched with a good old-fashioned Swingline stapler I can’t imagine what my comic producing  experience would have been like if I would have had these production capabilities available to me back in the seventies. I would have traded tracing mimeo stencils and hand cranking purple inked copies for full-color pages spat out of an ink jet or laser printer in a heartbeat!

I did not have an opportunity to go to SPX this weekend but my fond memories of past shows include my amazement of the array of unique and creative packaging techniques that are always displayed. Monkey and Bird would have fit right in! Today’s community of independent comic artists and publishers take full advantage of the technology available to make comics that deliver an experience well beyond panel-to-panel sequential art.

Many people are pondering what is to become of the familiar pamphlet style comic that has been a fixture in the industry for over seventy years. Most believe that digital content will force it into extinction in the not too distant future, watching the sun set on a beloved package.

When I look at my little copy of Monkey and Bird, or think about what I witness at shows like SPX, APE, MOCCA, PACC and Stumptown, I see a different horizon, the shimmering rays of a new day cast by the lights of endless creative opportunity that will offer comics in print and digitally in infinite shapes and sizes. Each format, unique to its creator and not limited by the constraints of a few publishers or a single distributor.

I remember the first glimpse I ever had of this expanding possibility. In 1980 I was mesmerized by the first issue of Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman‘s anthology comic magazine RAW. The full color view out the window of a man committing suicide had been pasted on to the black and white cover of the tabloid sized periodical publication that featured an insane amount of groundbreaking comic art between its pages. The simple collage of the cover alone was enough to have numbed my creative mind for decades, especially in regards to packaging.

RAW

That, to me, was the beginning. Now, the art of making comics has firmly expanded from mastery of designing a page to the mastery of designing the whole package wether in print, on the web, or digitally for a specific device. The day where packaging that requires an entire production team is passing. The comic artist, if they choose, now has the ability to have complete control over the reading experience of the audience if they want it.

As a publisher, like CO2 Comics, today’s technology gives us the opportunity to open new doors of creative discussion with the artists that makes making comics more exciting than ever before. We plan to enjoy every minute of it!

Making Comics Because I Want To

Gerry Giovinco

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!

Can you believe it? Two years have gone by since we launched CO2 Comics hoping it would become a unique cooperative of comic talent featuring a collective of great comic features. Naturally we initially turned to our long time friends and allies that have had ties with us since our days as founding publishers of Comico the Comic Company.

Comico The Comic Company owners, Top: Dennis LaSorta, Phil Lasorda, Bottom: Gerry Giovinco, Bill Cucinotta

Chris Kalnick, Joe Williams, Andrew C. Murphy, Reggie Byers, Bernie Mirealut, Bill Anderson, Rich Rankin and Neil Vokes all contributed to the early success of the realization of our goals for CO2 Comics. The faith that they all had in our ability to  present their work while respecting their rights as creators, supporting their complete ownership and actively promoting their features and services as artists was a complete and humbling honor.

It became our duty to surround their works with with other great features and talent. CO2 Comics was always intended to be a place where readers could come to enjoy one feature and discover other comic treasures that they may not have found if those works had stood by themselves.

In just two years the list of contributers has grown to include twenty-two talented creators and two dozen exciting comic features. The impressive list of talent yields a number of nominated and award winning creators along with brilliant new talent that will deserve recognition for their mastery of the medium.

Take a look at the roster of creators here at CO2 Comics and you are bound to be amazed at the comic book pedigree and variety that exists on our site:

Bill Anderson – Skrog

Kevin Atkinson – Eaten by Planet 29

Mike Baron – The World of Ginger Fox

Reggie Byers – Crescent

Bill Cucinotta – Death for a Dollar

- Skrog

Tina Garceau – Hot Topics

– Monkey and Bird

- There’s No Escape From A Deadline

Gerry Giovinco – Slaughterman

Robert Jackson, Jr. – The Amazing Liberteens

Chris Kalnick – Depth Charge

- Non

Onrie Kompan – Yi Soon Shin

Steve Lafler – Dog Boy

- El Vocho

Mike Leeke – The Amazing Liberteens

Liberteens Update

Don Lomax – Captain Obese

Bernie Mireault – Cable

- Death for a Dollar

- Isaac vs. Eli

- Of the Spheres

- To Get Her

- The Jam Lives (a motion comic)

Andrew C. Murphy – Pressed for Time

- Reflections

- Victor

Mitch O’Connell – The World of Ginger Fox

Rich Rankin – Gauntlet

Raine Szramski – Heaven and the Dead City

Frank Thorne – Ribit

Giovanni Paolo Timpano – Yi Soon Shin

Neil Vokes – Gauntlet

Joe Williams – Hot Topics

- Monkey and Bird

- There’s No Escape From A Deadline

Besides having published over 800 pages of comic art in the last two years we have also taken on the monumental task of publishing David Anthony Kraft’s COMICS INTERVIEW: The Complete Collection. The first of the eleven volume set had 680 pages that were painstakingly cleaned and reproduced in both paperback and hardback editions. Volume two is currently in the works. This project is the testimony to our love of the comics medium and its rich history.

COMICS INTERVIEW: The Complete Collection

Our commitment to the history  of comics and the current state of the industry is also highlighted weekly on our CO2 Comics Blog where we feature a  weekly article covering everything from our Comico history, production techniques, creator’s rights and frequent editorializing on the state of the market have drawn a lot of attention industry wide.

As if publishing a ton of great comic related material on the web and in print is not enough for two guys,  we needed to create a new imprint, CO2 Publications so we could publish a 372 page literary book, FOR THE CONVENIENCE OF THE GOVERNMENT A Memoir of Veteran discharged from the Navy for being Gay  written by  George Richard Phillip Zimmerman, Jr. which was just released over Memorial Day Weekend.

For The Convenience Of The Government

Over our first two years we have published nearly 2,000 pages of material and maintained a rigorous schedule on an exciting site that has attracted over 4.6 million hits to date.

The best part is, WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED! Last year, as we celebrated our first anniversary, we compared our accomplishments to our early publishing days with Comico and noted that we were far out front and we still are, thanks to the support of all the great talent that joins us and allows us to present new work daily.

We also need to thank our readers who continue to grow in numbers. Thanks for stopping by and for sharing with your friends. We became comic publishers nearly thirty years ago because we believed our comics were not finished works until they were experienced by the readers. We recognized early on that as publishers we played a significant role in the realization of a comic as a completed work and we intend to continue to be that conduit. CO2 Comic’s mission is to get great comics in front of as many eyes as possible. Please help us with your enthusiasm by continuing to share the comics you enjoy here with your friends and by returning often.

Finally, it is no mistake that we celebrate our anniversary  over the Fourth of July weekend. As publishers we have always been motivated by the spirit of the Independent movement with our emphasis being on creator’s rights.  Comics, for us, are a medium of freedom. Free thought, free speech, free enterprise.

We want to turn  Independence Day into Independents Day for comic fans and make it a time to celebrate the diversity that all of the Independent comics publishers have brought to the world. There are a lot of great comics out there that are not brought to you by the usual pair of suspects and we hope hat you will continue to find some of the best of them right here at CO2 Comics.

Making Comics Because We Want To

Bill Cucinotta and Gerry Giovinco

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!

Over the last few weeks I took the time to outline the Process of Penciling for Comics. There were no lessons on how to draw or develop a sequential story line. It was just a quick look at the actual physical process of preparing to work and a description of the essential tools that make the job easier. It was a look at the traditional way of making comics that many people who have not converted to an all digital workflow enjoy and are comfortable with.

More specifically it was a description of how I like to work when creating comics while deferring to many other options that are available. How each individual artist works is a very personal ritual and I will be the first to say that there is no right or wrong way provided the final image is the intended expression of the idea that the artist was attempting to convey.

Coincidentally the very talented Raine Szramski, whose comic Heaven and the Dead City graces the web pages of CO2 Comics, was haggling with someone on Facebook over her own process of creating comics. Her reactionary post read like this:

Painting by hand obsolete and old-fashioned….?
I just had someone ask me why I’m bothering to paint my comic by hand since (as he says) my style will become obsolete and I’ll “learn to jump on the Photoshop bandwagon.” And he used the strange example of Borders Bookstore as being “old-fashioned” as opposed to digital and “that’s why they went out of business.” Umm, there are many OTHER reasons they went out of business and it has nothing to do with not using Photoshop.
GRRRRRR….. Anyway, to say the least I was a bit offended. Thoughts??

Well, it is nice to know that the creators who give us the opportunity to post their work here on CO2 Comics stick together and have each other’s back.

Joe Williams to the rescue!

Joe, who is responsible for the very clever Monkey and Bird comic that he co-creates with his lovely wife Tina Garceau launched into a witty defense of Raine on his own blog at Willceau illo. You can read his lambasting here:

Raine! Raine! Don’t Go Away! or Pigments Versus Pixels

Joe follows up the next week with another protective zinger:

Raining on Raine’s Parade

Joe even suggested that we follow up the Process of Penciling feature with a look at Raine’s Painting Process which she happily agreed to allow us to present as follows:

If anyone is curious, this is how I paint my pages. Up on the easel is an upcoming page in progress, with a photocopy of my unpainted pencils taped next to it for reference. (I could get in closer, but it would be a story spoiler…)

Necessary for ongoing work…Dog Under Computer Desk…
Note as well as my Waterhouse print that I haven’t hung up yet because I have to buy some nails. Um, I’ll get around to it…

Cat at Drawing Table…
There always needs to be a cat in the vicinity of the drawing table. Very important.
This is GoGo.

Box o’ gouache, sketches, paper towels, props…
That’s Yaira’s hat, by the way. I got it at a Rennaissance Festival years ago.

A shelf of brushes, Pigma pens, inks, templates, pencils, etc.,etc. The big daruma on the far right was given to me by my friend Satomi. For those who don’t know it’s a Japanese tradition to give one eye a pupil and make a wish. If your wish comes true, you fill in the other pupil. (You can see that the smaller daruma has 2 eyes filled in!)

Lots and lots of gray gouache. Very messy. But that’s why it’s more fun than Photoshop!

The next 50-plus pages of “Heaven & the Dead City” that need lettering and the pecilling finished before I even begin to paint them… Yup, I’m in this for the long haul. Mind you, this is just for Chapter Three.

And most importantly–FUEL. Coffee and keep it coming. The cup was designed by Mark Trepel (and is available at Cafe Press) and actually features 2 black Maneki Nekos.

This is a rough sketchbook drawing of Yaira that will be turned into a color painting. It will be a bit like the Swamp painting, with a decorative border and background architecture. The color scheme will probably be rose and gold (sunset colors.)

What did I tell you? The creative process is very personal and Raine just proved it. I can guarantee that I have never heard that a cat and a dog were a necessary element of a productive studio! Fortunately I have a few of each. I can’t wait to see how my work may improve once I get them into my studio space!

Speaking of studio space, Raine says, “I only wish I had a cooler, less sloppy studio space to show off rather than a corner of a studio apartment. Maybe it will let people know that yes, you too can be this messy and still be creative.”

Raine, my studio is in the garage, and I am so messy that on a good day you’d swear I was a refugee from the A&E’s Hoarder’s show. I think the creative chaos breeds entropy which results in progressive works.

The bottom line is in the final quality of the work. How you get to that point is ultimately your call and regardless of how you do it the important thing is that you actually do it. Most people just dream of doing things. By doing it, and doing it your way, you are already head and shoulders above the crowd.

Making Comics Because I Want to

Gerry Giovinco