If you’re an artist looking for an affordable way to print your own comic book, look no further. Publishing Xpress is an online publisher that offers an easy, affordable way for you to self-publish your work. As experienced comic book printers, learning lessons from both our clients and comic book legends, we can offer great customer service every step of the way. Take a look at these insightful lessons from Comic Book legends.
When you research printing companies, be sure to explore printing and binding options. Depending on the size and nature of your work, we offer a number of choices.
Our online calculators can give you an instant quote on your printing project:
We have published numerous comic books for various authors. We invite you to take an in-depth look at comic books we have printed that are highlighted in our Spotlight on Clients series:
If you are working on a comic book that you want published, consider these tips:
Decide on the final size of your comic book. Although you are not required to make your comic book a specific size, the standard comic books size is 6 5/8″ by 10 1/4″. For this size, you would select our 8 ½” x 11″ size for pricing and ordering purposes.
Consider what binding style you want to use. Due to the relatively low page count with comic books, most of them are saddle stitched. However, we have printed a number of perfect bound comics and even one or two that were plastic coil bound. We can use perfect binding with as low as 8 pages, so that is always an option. One thing to keep in mind with saddle stitch binding is that we have to print in increments of 4 pages (8, 12, 16, 20, 24, etc. pages). This is due to the way that saddle stitch binding is done — 4 pages are printed on the front and back of a large sheet of paper, then folded in half and stapled in the spine, to make 4 pages per sheet of paper. If your comic ends up not being a an increment of 4 pages, you can always add pages with advertisements, author and illustrator bios, information from your website, etc.
Make sure that all of your images are high resolution (at least 300 dpi) and that the colors have been converted to CMYK. Colors on computer are usually RGB (red-green-blue), but when printing, must be converted to CMYK (cyan-magenta-yellow-black). If you don’t convert the colors yourself, the printing presses will do it, which might cause unintended variations in color. It is best if you convert the colors, so you can make sure that the color looks right after it has been converted. Comic book art is unique, so getting the colors and images right is essential.
Comic books tend to have a lot of images and text on a page, so it’s important to make sure that you leave large margins between text and graphics and the edge of the page. Your comic book will be printed on a larger sheet of paper and cut down to actual size, so you don’t want any images or text to get cut off. If you have images right at the edge of the page, make sure that your file has bleeds, again so that images and text aren’t cut off.
Although you can print your comic book with a self cover, meaning that the inside and cover pages are printed on the same paper, you may want to use a heavier paper for the cover. This will make your comic book more durable. Our lightest cover stock, 80#, should be sufficient as a cover. Inside pages can range from 60# uncoated text stock to 100# gloss or matte text stock. Not sure what paper you should choose? Just order our free sample package, which has a plastic coil book that has samples of all of our paper stocks in it. Many clients find this very helpful when deciding on which paper stock to use. The sample package also has samples of all four of our binding styles — perfect bound, plastic coil, saddle stitch, and wire-o.
Be careful of images that are spread across two pages. With saddle stitch binding, the center two pages and the outside cover pages will print perfectly with a spread. If the spread is on any other pages, be careful of how the image is positioned. The image can shift a little while printing, which can throw the image off. This is even more of an issue with perfect binding, where part of the image gets caught in the spine of the book. In those cases, you need to make sure that the fact or eyes of your character aren’t exactly in the middle of the page. Place the character off center on the left or right page, so the image isn’t distorted.
Please check out our articles regarding printing:
If you’re here, chances are this is your first time working with a comic book printer—and you might have a lot of questions. We’ll work with you to make the process transparent and as simple as possible. Have you already worked with other publishing companies? We invite you to try working with us and compare your experience!
Contact us to learn more about our online printing services and what we can do for you. You can chat with us online (our chat feature is located in the right hand corner of every page on our website), call us at 1-877-977-3779, or email us at help@publishingXpress.com. You may also want to check out our other book printing ideas. We’ll be happy to explain your different printing and binding options.
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