New Book Design Project: How Comics Were Made: A Visual History From the Drawing Board to the Printed Page
Cover design for the upcoming book How Comics Were Made
Kickstarter campaign for new book
Announcing a new Kickstarter campaign for a book project I’m collaborating on. I am fortunate to be working with the author, editor, and printing historian Glenn Fleishman. This is a deeply researched and heavily illustrated book on how comics get to newsprint or your computer screen. This fun and interesting book is filled with rarely seen artifacts, interviews with cartoonists, historians, and print experts. The feeling of joy you derive from reading comics is a mere blip in the long, arduous journey a comic makes to get it from the cartoonists hand onto the printed page or your inbox.
The author and cast of characters
Glenn has been traveling the country on research junkets, meeting with me at the Small Press Expo in Maryland in the summer, heading to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at The Ohio State University, The Charles M. Shulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California, even a trip to his local newspaper production facility. He’s been conducting interviews with a bevy of heavyweight cartoonists such as Gary Trudeau, Derf Backdorf, Lynn Johnson, Barbara Brandon-Croft, Bill Griffith, Brian Walker, and Matt Bors. Also on board are academics, historians, and production veterans including, Eric Reynolds, Paige Braddock, Steven Heller, Susan Kirtley, and the list just keeps getting longer.
My Role
What exactly am I doing you on How Comics Were Made? For months Glenn and I have been collaborating on design and production ideas for the book. We’ve designed the book cover, and a sample chapter, selected typefaces, tested out ideas for layouts, color, legibility, scanning and retouching techniques. Additionally, I’ll be illustrating section dividers in a variety of styles, and doing caricatures of some Kickstarter campaign backers. Glenn has been great to work with, open to some of my wilder ideas, and as a savvy editor, knows how to reel me back in to keep the project focused and on track.
The road ahead
We have a long road ahead of us if/when the Kickstarter campaign is fully funded. In addition to design and production, and dozens of illustrations on my plate, Glenn will keep plugging away at his keyboard writing, obtaining, and photographing artifacts from museums, archives, and his own collection, negotiating licensing agreements and print costs, working with our editor Harry McCracken, and a proofreader, indexer, and archivist.
The campaign has already garnered a great deal of support and interest, I for one would appreciate your support and backing as I would love to bring this fascinating and lost history of comics and comics production to life. Please check out the Kickstarter, and support at any level. This is a fun project and fits right into my wheelhouse of design, illustration, comics and lost the production technologies of yore. I think you’ll like it too.