You learn as you go kids

Someone on Face Book asked whether it was easy going from Small Presser to Independent Comics publisher.

Simple answer: No.

I started out at school using the old "wet" Gestetner for the school magazine "Starkers -The Magazine That Tells The Naked Truth" (1971) which then, because of a prude school secretary and religious maniac school headmaster got banned.  Stencil typing and making the illoes was a learning curve as was "fixing" problems: no Typpex so we had to use nal varnish and that in a small room....

Then photocopying became the thing. Unfortunately, in the 1970s to early 1980s that meant going to an office supply store or an office where they ran off copies for you. Only the people there were allowed to adjust the machines so you got to learn a lot of new terms and how things worked. By 1984 we were all using photocopiers to put publications together. The Ryman's near the location of the Westminster Comic Mart was a real hive of activity on a Saturday morning once a month!

Ben Dilworth did a lot of experimenting with photocopiers including being the first I know of to print acetate covers ("One Bright September Evening") and this led to acetate covers using stencils and spray paints for the Preview Comic.

Cutting and pasting and learning how to hide "ghost-lines" was a skill to be perfected and I was still using that method up until Comic Bits (volume 1) in 2004...and for Adventure (volume 1) until 2007.

Yes, I had a computer back in the 1990s but never used it for comics. Things back then were far more complicated and I read several desk-top publishing books that, honestly, made no sense to me. But when Print On Demand (POD) came in  I thought "give it a go" but ignored the books! It was try-and-fail or try-and-succeed and my first attempt was not a comic but a book -Some Things Strange & Sinister and a 300+ page, illustrated book was a very sharp learning curve. No real problem since that could be uploaded as a Word Doc but comics were a different matter.

PDF...my arch nemesis. I learnt very early on that not every system accepted the same PDF program. I also had to learn the ins and outs of resizing. Eventually, once a page was scanned and lettered I resized it in Microsoft Office Publisher then converted it to the 300 dpi required...then everything had to be combined.

Look, it was a nightmare but the first book appeared -Krakos Sands of Terror (24th July, 2010) and was then followed by The Bat Triumphant (30th July 2010) and since then 103 other publications have appeared.

But 10 years on there are still problems with people using outdated systems that will not accept newer programs and fiddling about to 'improve' things that simply did not need improving.

The difference between 2020 and 1984 is that 99% of the Small Pressers I've spoken to do not get hands-on with the nitty gritty: scan pages on to disc and take it to your printers or upload it to their site. Not a whiff of photocopier goes up their noses!  I once mentioned photocopier plattens to a small group who had no idea what I was talking about -until I said "The glass plate you put the document on to copy". 

Even more shocking was discovering that there were people at printers and the now (in Bristol) rare photocopy shop that had no idea what a platten was or had no idea that their toner was running out ("isn't that streak on the page?") or having to suffer a delay because pages with paste-ups have to be hand photocopied in case anything comes off the page and gets into the machine...then find they had auto-fed pages out of laziness.  "How do you know?" I was asked. I produced the ten pages on which one of my paste-ups which had fallen off was sitting bang smack in the middle of. A second time this happened again because "no one really wants to do the copying".  I bought a Mustek A3 Pro scanner.

You learn as you go kids.