European-style comics

[Christian_R]

Hello everybody,

I'm an artist working on a color graphic novel. I'm painting directly in Photoshop. As I plan to first publish it on the web and -if successful- eventually in print, I'm trying to cover the technical bases.

All the info I've found about comics printing assumes the US-style of Marvel/DC Comics, with black line art and flat areas of color, trapping, separations, etc., but I'm doing something painterly, with zillions of colors mixed and intertwined sometimes pixel-by-pixel. How are these types of comics (like many French or Belgian books) printed nowadays? Of course, no need to scan, I'll have everything in digital from the start...

[RichardK]

Well a good start would be to talk to your local print service provider, explain what end product you'd like and then take the advice given.

But as a guide, create your CMYK color model Photoshop document about 3mm oversize all round to accommodate bleed and set the ppi to 350, this ought to be enough for your images.

If you're setting text in Photoshop too, then leave the text as vector layers.
Don't be tempted to merge text layers to save disk space you'll end up rasterizing the text which will end up pixellated.

Talking to your provider is the key, they'll tell you what file types they can handle (some prefer native files whilst others will prefer Press Quality PDFs)

Hope that helps... RK