World Famous Comics: Digital Prepress for Comic Books : The Definitive Desktop Production Guide
Digital Prepress for Comic Books : The Definitive Desktop Production Guide
By: Kevin Tinsley Publisher: Stickman Graphics Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 208 Publication Date: November 01, 1999 Studio: Stickman Graphics
Product Description: This book is the ultimate reference used by professionals throughout the industry. With over 300 illustrations, and detailed instructions, this manual will provide the answers and solutions you will need to successfully print a magazine. Whether you are planning to publish your own comics, or want to provide the best reproducable art possible, this item is a must have for your professional library.
Rough ^ I was quite disappointed by this book, I was expecting something with more professional level content. It's all very amateur however, the artwork used in the examples is sub-professional at best. I was hoping that the book would deal with some of the specific Pre-Press issues relating to comics artwork, but the chapter there was frustratingly slight. You would be much better to buy a a more general pre-press book. The quality of the packaging and printing were also quite poor for a book that cost this much.
Digital walk-through ^ This is a very informative and well presented, step-by-step guide to self-publishing. It covers all the complicated printing process and colouring stuff in a clear manner. Highly reccomended.
A Specialty Use of Photoshop ^ This book is on how to get your comic book ideas from out of your head onto a disk that you can take to a printer and get him to produce the comic book for you. The advent of powerful personal computers has meant that the hand drawn, hand lettered, hand colored prints from the past no longer are what the printer wants. Instead the book now goes to the printer on a disk.
Doing the work on a computer means software, and the author uses Photoshop. Most of the books on Photoshop are on manipulating photographs. Here the emphasis is on producing the art work for comic books. Photoshop obviously can do both, but the techniques and the particular tools used are different. For one thing there is a lot more information here on the printing process, including inks and paper.
While the author uses Photoshop, which is the professional software used throughout the industry most of the techniques could be used with less expensive software packages, or you might try buying an older version of Photoshop through eBay.
"Quark Xpress and Photoshop Four Comic Books" ^ This book is more a specialized "how to" manual for specific software than a "definitive guide" for computer owners who want to make comics.
It is assumed by the author that the reader has three programs: Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark Xpress. No other programs are ever mentioned, if you use anything else, this book was not written for you.
The author provides excellent information about how printing in color works, his hints on getting your colored artwork to look good on paper (as opposed to on your monitor) make "Digital Prepress for Comic Books" a worthwhile investment.
The book is, however, plagued with childish spelling errors--"there" instead of "their," "use to" instead of "used to" etc. Considering the cost of the book, it could have benefitted from a proofreading.
If you read something read this!!! ^ Ok I'll be brief because my written English is not so good. If want to actually print your comics and you own or have access to Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop then this book is very useful to you. The book explains pre-press procedures so that you can understand how to get the juice out of your work. Now, the information is very technical so I wouldn't recomend this book to people that are not really interested in taking comics seriously. There is a fair amount of lettering tips in Illustrator and a huge amount of information about improving your scans and "retouch" your work in digital format. It also contains a chapter on Quark Xpress to achieve a good composition (having worked in comics myself I know this chapter is important).
Bottom line: If you are an independent comic book artist with a small staff and you want to do the pre-press yourself then this book is a must. If you are only interested in the area of color and lettering then "maybe" you should get this book, it will definitely help you, thats for sure. Please also note that this book will not teach you how to pait using Photoshop but it will show you how to balance and work with color FOR PREPRESS.
He could have used another penciller for the examples but thats just my opinion. :)
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