It's done. I've finally finished printing and binding the first Comic Pie, a compilation of students' work from my Cartooning and Animation class for 9-12 years olds.
They chose the title "Comic Pie" after some convoluted stream of consciousness discussion about teamwork and multiple comics (ingredients) being mixed into one. I think I will keep it for my future compilations with this class. I'll print one per season (as the class runs that often) and probably look into joint projects with the library art gallery and local businesses to get it distributed to other children besides those who contributed to it. I would love for children to be able to borrow it from the library and become inspired to make their own and print their own books from home. The world needs way more independent comics and zines floating around!
I do have some lessons learned from this run, it being the first and all. For anyone thinking of making a class publication may find these tips helpful as well.
- Size and scale are key. Pre-plan what size the book will be, how many pages and what kind of binding.
- For anything over 75 pages, use a gum or coil binding, staple or codex binding is slightly more more time than it's worth.
- Allocate the page maximum as a calculation divisible by four (especially if using folios, because they save quite a bit of paper). For example, if there are 10 kids in the class, they can each have 4 (or 8) pages in the book, totalling 40 (80) pages bound and 10 folios (4 images per page of paper).
- Title pages are cute, but use up space and paper that can be better allocated to content
- No "The End" pages, waste of paper
- Set up the assignment with margins to ensure that no content gets cut off during copying (a 1/2-1/4 inch margin on all four sides is pretty good).
- With comics, everything should be inkined or it might not show up during copying
- The originals should be large and then shrunk, getting 9-12 years old to write in tiny spaces is a bad idea.
