Comic Book Page Technical Specifications
This is a post for comic book artists preparing their pages for their publisher or colourist. I’m aware that many pros still don’t know some of this stuff, often because the bigger publishers have production teams who will take the incorrectly sized or shaped pages and adjust them before passing on to colourists or for print. However, this a) is giving more work to people that you can easily do yourself and b) reduces the amount of control you have over how your work is printed. It makes sense to provide files that will present your work in the best way possible.
So, the basics of a digital page file:
A standard US comic book page size is 6.875 by 10.438 inches bleed, 6.625 by 10.187 inches trim, with a live image area of around 6 by 9.5 inches. The DPI depends on your publisher, but the higher the better. 600dpi is standard at DC, Image and Dark Horse, Marvel prints at 400dpi (or did when I worked for them – if that’s changed, someone please let me know). What do those terms mean?
TRIM: This is the final page size of the printed publication. The paper isn’t cut to size before printing, it’s done afterwards. Now, with mass produced offset printing, pages are trimmed at speed and in batches. This means that the trim on the digital file isn’t EXACTLY where the trim will be in real life. Closely compare two copies of the same comic, where art extends to the edge of the page. You will more than likely see that they’re not cut at exactly the same part of the artwork. This means that, when you’re providing art that extends to the edges of the pages, say with a cover, it’s not good enough to have art that just goes to the edge of the final printed page. The cut will more than likely not land exactly where you’ve drawn to. This is why we need the…
BLEED: The bleed is the area of art that
extends beyond the final trimmed comic page. To compensate for
shifts in the cutting process, it is 0.125 inches around the entire
page. You’ll note in the image above that panel 3 extends past the edges of the trim to the bleed, so that it reaches the edges of where the page is cut.
LIVE AREA: This is the area of the page where
it is safe to assume that wherever the trim cuts fall, everything
inside this area will be safely on the printed page. Now, modern
printing presses are MUCH better at this than in the past, so it’s
not as much of a worry as it once was. But all lettering, for
example, should ideally fall within this area, at least 0.25 inches
away from the trim.
DPI: Dots Per Inch. This is the “resolution”
of a printed comic book page. Literally how many dots (pixels on
screen) of ink there are in each inch of page. A DPI of 600 means
there are 600 pixels across or down in every inch of printed paper.
It’s worth noting that if you’re zoomed into 100% in Photoshop or
whichever art program you’re using, this will look massive on most
screens. That’s because your screen probably isn’t 600dpi – at
most, in modern screens, it’s 300dpi, so your art will look about
twice as big as printed at 100%. This is very important to note.
Print requires MUCH higher resolution than screen. Your 72dpi image
that looks great on your computer will print like blurry crap.
If your linework is aliased – meaning
it’s pure black and white pixels, with no grey edges – 600dpi is
essential to print smoothly, with no jaggies (the visible square
pixelated effect). If you use anti-aliased lines then 300 to
400dpi is OK, but still, the higher the better. This also applies to
more painterly styles. I personally don’t use anti-aliased lines when
inking, for sharper images, and it can be easier for the colourist,
but that’s down to personal preference.
For digital artists, it’s probably easiest to set
up your page dimensions for the canvas you work on, so you don’t have
to do anything afterwards. Manga Studio/Clip Studio only goes to two
digits after the decimal, so after drawing a page in MS and exporting
it, it must be correctly sized in Photoshop using Canvas Size. For
traditional artists, the standard board is 150% bigger than the
printed page. An easy way to make the art the right size before
you change the Canvas Size to the exact inch size in Photoshop is to
scan at 400dpi, then use Image Size with “resample” unchecked to
change the DPI to 600. This keeps the number of pixels in the scan
the same, but tells the computer that they will print in a smaller
space.
It’s worth noting that many artists don’t like to
scan at this low a resolution, and prefer to scan at a much higher
res then reduce the image size in Photoshop, to better control the
quality of the scan.
File format: Pages should NOT be provided as jpegs or PDFs. Both these formats compress the artwork to reduce file size (PDFs can be set not to, but it can make the file size enormous). What this means is that the art is degraded, with artefacts appearing especially around the edges of big blocks of colour. JPEGs are fine for the web, as they reduce the file size for quicker downloading, but are not at all suitable for print. If you’ve got a painterly style, and your jpeg quality is set to maximum, you can juuuust about skirt this, but it’s not preferable. Especially if they’re not CMYK (see below).
Printers do often use PDFs for printing, but that is the final product, NOT the page you’re providing for your colourist. If in doubt there, talk to your printer or publisher.
Your pages should be provided as CMYK files (Image>Mode in Photoshop). CMYK is the format used for offset printing, with each letter representing one of the four colours of ink used in the process. RGB is the format for screen work, with each letter representing the three colours of light used to make any screen colour. This is worth noting when you colour your own work too – some people colour in RGB because there are more effects available in Photoshop, but always have a CMYK preview window open so they can monitor how it will look when it is switched to CMYK for print. If you send off a RGB colour file, prepare to be disappointed in how it will print – inks just aren’t capable of recreating some of the colours that a screen can support.
If you can – this is easy for people who work digitally, less so for traditional artists – separate out linework that you want coloured or have a special effect – rain, lightning, reflections, speed lines, explosions etc. This can be done either by having the lines a different colour in the file, or saving them as layers. Layers will increase the file size, but your colourist will be very grateful that you made their life easier.
The best format for providing linework is TIFF. When saving as a TIFF, check the “LZW compression” box. This will usually MASSIVELY reduce the file size, without affecting the quality of the image whatsoever. For “byte order”, select Macintosh. Why? I dunno, possibly because the publishing industry used to rely on Macs so heavily.
So, there you have it. It’s all very easy once you grasp it, but you’d be surprised how many people haven’t learned these specifications. Doing so will make the lives of your whole team easier – the colourist, the letterer, the production team – and your work will print beautifully.
