Month: August 2013

Dear readers,

Thank you for spending a bit of your valuable time with me. When I post an update and folks come over to read the latest. When someone stumbles onto my comic, starts at page one and works their way through. It’s the most amazing feeling.

I often feel like a bumbling fool, figuring it out as she goes along and probably doing most things wrong. That I can be a bumbling fool of service makes me smile from ear to ear. Know that when a creator says every reader is important, they mean it. I certainly mean it, with all my heart. You are important, and thank you for popping by and spending a bit of time with the Things. We notice when you do (in an anonymous, website stats kind of way) and it makes us grin right down to our toes and/or ground contacting body parts.

<3 <3 <3

Liz, the Things, and friends.

I showed the rough mock ups to my sweetie and we had a good discussion about layouts, margins, the foibles if printer technology and the strange land of American sizing. We come from a land of the A1, A2, A3, A4 etc system and American sized paper seems so mysterious and arbitrary. I know printers in Australia use or cut down paper within the A system, all neatly stackable. I assume places like kinkos work of American letter, but what do printers who use more than glorified photocopiers use?

Anyhow, this discussion got me thinking about different formats and sizes, which lead me to this mockup. It’s concertina shaped. No staples, less fiddly margins and allows me to add two extra comics!!!

I’ve created my first digital mockups for the mini-comic. I was dreading this part of the project. I don’t have a working version of inDesign and Adobe products are expensive.

I screwed my courage to the sticking-place (after all I couldn’t waste all the time and effort people had put into voting I HAVE to create a mini-comic) and investigated the world of alternative software. I was prepared for something confusing and awful… GIMP may be fine and dandy on a linux machine, but on a mac it was a miserable experience. A quick trawl of the internet and wikipedia’s page on desktop publishing software led me to Scribus. I haven’t done anything super fancy with it, but thus far I’m really enjoying its simple elegance. I haven’t figured out how to create my own rulers, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

Here are the first printed mockups, accidentally in color. Alas, the final version will be in black and white. I don’t have a duplexer, so I glued pages together. AFTER I printed and assembled a page worth of comics I realized that I’d inserted the wrong flowering head comic (aka beginner’s mind). Fortunately that’s an easier thing to fix.

From here I just have to write the back page and endlessly fiddle with sizing and margins. Then it’s deciding how many to print, deciding if I want to pay a printer for two cuts or do all the cutting by hand and filling any idle hour with a stapler and a razor to slash open the pages.