Part Five - Printing

Printing

The next part I had to consider was looking at printing a physical book. Because I now had a specific idea in mind that I wanted to go for with paper stock and type I went through two different options. bookprintingUK and Mixam were two different viable options I had come across. Initially I was going to avoid Mixam because I believed it did not do the type of paper I was after for the comic whereas bookprintingUK did however they only did it in 80gsm. Also for the initial concept there will be colour inserts between chapters as a sort of breakaway and a way to visualise the characters shown in colour. 

I have a specific concept for the book itself, I want it to look like a Bible, almost to the point where you think, 'oh is this religious propaganda?' then you open the book and bam trans serial killers making out with nonbinary gangsters. Its the kind of subversion of expectations I like to live for, I'm not going to lie. 

Below is the sample I received from bookprinting UK of both the off white black and white paper and the coloured inserts. There is an option on bookprintingUK to go with two paper stocks for coloured and non coloured pages. However the limited options on the paper stock for the main body of the work is? kind of an issue. 

The second option is, of course, Mixam, which has proven to be a reliable option as well as the website being more intuitive to use and understand with editing and creating the book itself to be easier to produce from what I've gathered from messing around the website. I also have more options when it comes to paper type and stock, this kind of helped me towards making a final decision towards working with Mixam when I'm ready to produce the books. 

When the sample pages for Mixam arrived, I decided to take a look at them and see just in case if they had the paper type I wanted. I found the recycled natural paper to be  what I would like to use, and I can go for a heavier stock as well which is part of the appeal for me. As well, I can add more colour to pages if I would like to seeing as the option i had to go for was colour throughout. However I am still going for an overall monochrome look just out of a stylistic choice more than anything else (also its a lot more efficient to draw.) 

While printing might be more expensive through Mixam, I believe the thicker stock paper and the option to add colour to print and knowing they are a reliable printing source means I am a lot more confident going with them.

I had a few options when it came to sizing, obviously going to ignore the A4 size, although it was appealing to just work on that size and move on. I realised that comics themselves were not a standard A4 size but rather its own size which is 175x266mm (though when I looked it up it was in inches, bloody typical) Another size I was looking at were the standard sizes for a Bible to be printed, just to really hammer home the theme. The size I found was 142x223 (which I will just say is A5? its close enough anyway) But that felt a little too small for what I wanted, eventually, I landed on a site that actually recommended 157x240mm for comics, which, for whatever reason, I decided I liked when I measured it all out. The size is adaptable as well with scaling if need be, to go bigger, closer to the standard Americano size.

(a proof of concept this is definitely how it will look yes.)

The Finals

The size I actually ended up going for was 129x156 I believe, the total came to £130 (with shipping) the cost of each book is about £3.53 which is actually insanely cheap considering the amount of pages etc that are inside. The total book length was 112 pages (+4 for the front back cover and inners)