With my recent experience of making comics at home, I thought a small HOW TO would be interesting for anyone who wants to learn about my process for the creation of a fold out mini comic.
Materials I used:
1: A Brother: HL-2270DW, (reliable and fast printer, toner cartridge will burn out if you are printing a lot of black, however cartridges are  cheap, does not do double sided automatically, you need to manually feed the pages)
2: New toner cartridge:(they have a regular and high yield, the regular one did a lot of books before it finally kicked out)
3: Colored paper (red and yellow, 8.5 by 11 inches, My advice buy off of Amazon, avoid Staples.)
4: Stapler: (you can use a regular everyday one, or if you plan to do more a complex book I suggest getting a book binding stapler. For this project I used a regular stapler I got from Walgreens)
5: Comic book art:Â For this book I drew the art the same size it was going to print at.
6: Scanner: canonscan lide 200, (works perfectly every time, Amazon has them for cheap, highly recommended)
7: Photoshop CS2: Adobe still has CS2 available free, for those of us who want to save some money. But any version of Photoshop will do.
8: Scrap paper and a pen: I used this for making a dummy book.
9: Papercutter: You can get this anywhere, very cheap ones are great for small projects like this, but for more complex books a large scale cutter would be better.
10: Ruler: for measuring my cuts when needed
11. Rubber Cement:For assembling the banner after printing.
Making a dummy book:
On a piece of scrap paper I drew how I would assemble my finished book, the idea was to have a visual representation of what I needed to make, before cutting or printing anything. Below is an example of how it looked:
I used the ruler to measure and the papercutter to cut out a blank cover and back page, along with cutting three other long pieces of paper, to represent how the interior work look. I glued the 3 together, making a long banner type sheet, and stapled the book together. Using the pen, I wrote what image needed to print on each side, as a reference for later when printing the actual books.
Once I had the dummy book done, I began preparing my art files for printing.
Preparing the files:
Scan: Scanned the original drawings at 150 DPI directly in Photoshop.
Editing in Photoshop: Took the art, converted it to grayscale, then proceeded to crop the whitespace from the images. Next I increased the image DPI for each piece to 1200 and changed the color mode to BITMAP, with the option of 50% threshhold selected. (This erases all grays from your file and leaves behind a solid black and white image for print). I then changed the file back to Grayscale and decreased the DPI to 300.
I placed the files next to each other in the position they were going to print. The front and back cover will print on one side of a sheet of paper and the interior covers on the other side, as seen in the image below.
The interiors required a lot of work in this aspect. Since our small printer could not do 2 sided printing on a long piece of paper (trust me I tried) we had to split the banner image into 3 pieces and print each of them on separate 2 sided sheets.
PRINTING!
Before the final pieces were printed I did several test prints. Due to the complex cutting and measuring needed to make this darn thing, I had a lot of bad attempts and ended up filling a few bags with mistake prints and poor cuts. Most of the problems were associated with the printers inability to print large images straight. When I finally managed to get a book done correctly the process was simple to make the rest.
1. Print font and back covers on one red sheet of paper.
2. Print interior front and back on the other side of this same sheet.
3. Print part one and two of the long image one a yellow sheet of paper.
4. Print the other sides of these images on the other side of the yellow paper.
5. Repeated this process for the third part of the banner.
Cutting
Using the paper cutter, I stacked all the covers and sliced away the excess paper leaving just the covers and backs. I did the same thing with the banner piece. At this point I had all the pieces of the book ready to assemble.
Assembly
Laid out all of the covers, back and pieces of the banner. Using the dummy book I made earlier I glued the banner pieces together then stapled and folded each book.
