Hopelessly Lost, But Making Good Time #32
Small is really beautiful
©2003, 2012 Pam Bliss
Last time we talked about cartoon short stories: complete comics from one to about 12 pages in length (anything much longer hardly qualifies as short!), and the advantages of making your first stories short ones. So perhaps you’ve decided to make a short story. What will you do with it when it’s finished?
You could put it away in a file or a box or a drawer and start immediately on the next one, until you have enough to burst onto the scene with a whole book. You could put it in your portfolio, and show it to your friends and to people who might be able to offer you work. You could submit it to an anthology, perhaps one that is especially designed to showcase new talent, or one associated with a convention, or one where cartoonists donate their work to support an organization or a charity. These anthologies can be a wonderful way to get your work out in front of the readers.
But one of the best things you can do with a cartoon short story is to make your very own minicomic.
In praise of minicomics
I love minicomics. I love making them; I love reading them; and if I sound enthusiastic about them, that’s because I am. I’ve been making comics, most of them short stories, for almost 15 years [make that almost 25 …], and almost all of them first saw the light of day as minicomics of one kind or another. The minicomics form is almost infinitely flexible, offers a degree of creative control unequalled in any other reproduction-based art form, and is financially accessible to anyone who has $20 in his or her pocket. (Although elaborate efforts can consume a much larger budget!)
So, what is a minicomic? Basically, it’s a comic made from one or more double sided photocopies or laser prints. [There is very little different between the two these days. Modern “copy machines are really digital scanner/printers.] The copies are shot, or the laser prints printed, from masters made up of the pages of the story arranged so they will print in the right order. While black and white copies on plain white paper are the most economical, many minicomics creators also use colored paper, especially for covers, and you can use color copies and ink jet prints, or even silk screening, to create minicomics with color covers. It’s even possible to make full color minis if you can find a color reproduction method you can afford.
An 8 ½” x 11” double sided copy or copies folded in half, nested and stapled make the half page size minicomic, commonly called a digest, or sometimes an ashcan or a chapbook. A copy or copies cut in half, then folded, nested and stapled, make the quarter page size minicomic, usually called a mini. Minicomics also come in other sizes, like the half-legal or mid-mag, which is made from a legal size (8 ½” x 14”) copy folded in half, and various forms of micro-comics with pages smaller than one quarter size. But the half size digest and the quarter size mini are the most common, and by far the easiest to make. I would recommend that novices stick to these two sizes until you have some experience with the technical aspects of layout and assembly. The above descriptions are based on US paper sizes, but minicomics can be made exactly the same way anywhere—just substitute your standard letter size paper for the US standard 8 ½ x 11 inches.
A note on terminology: the terms used to refer to minicomics are constantly evolving. When I first started out, the term “minicomic” meant only the quarter size, and the half size was always called a “digest”. It was only our Canadian friends who confused us by calling both sizes minicomics. But it seems they were in the vanguard, and now most readers refer to all homemade comics, whatever their size or shape, as “minicomics”, or even “minis”, which is also the current common name for the quarter size format. Jeepers! To avoid confusion here, I’ve decided to call the whole class of comics “minicomics”, and refer to the two most common formats as “quarter size” or “mini”, and “half size” or “digest”. Minicomics creators as a whole sometimes refer to themselves as the “small press”.
Why make minicomics?
The most important reason to make minicomics is because it’s ten pounds of fun in a one pound bag, and it gets you a finished product fast. I’m a slowpoke, and I once did the art for an eight page mini in four days, and made an entire 12 page mini, from idea through script, breakdowns, finished art, typesetting, layout, printing, and production, in exactly three weeks. But if fast and fun aren’t enough to convince you, there are serious reasons, too. [Ha. I am so much faster than that now it is not funny. Since I originally wrote this I have made an eight page mini in eight hours, and several in two days.]
Making a minicomic will teach you more about the process of making comics than you could learn any other way in a thousand years. This is why I recommend making at least one to anyone who is seriously interested in comics, whether he or she wants to be a cartoonist or not. It’s one thing to read about page design or inking, and another thing to actually do it and see and read the result on the printed page. Later we’ll be discussing the technical aspects of laying out, printing and assembling a minicomic—and it’s exactly the same basic process used by commercial printers to print glossy color comics or trade paperbacks; just on a much smaller scale. There is no better or more compact form of comics education than making a minicomic.
If your goal is to work in commercial comics, or to get a publisher to work with you on your creator-owned full-sized book, well done minicomics will make a valuable addition to your portfolio. Not only do they show that you understand the process, but that you also know how to tell a complete story. That’s the one things good editor always wants. Plus, making minicomics is a valuable skill. No matter what kind of cartoonist you turn out to be, chances are that sometime in your working life you’ll have a story idea that won’t work any other way.
Minicomics are a great way to get your feet wet in comics, to get your first work out in front of some readers, and gather feedback and advice. Most minicomics creators will trade their work for yours, either at cons or through the mail, and will usually offer constructive criticism.
Beware, though—minicomics can be addictive. I thought of my first ones as samples: steps toward working in “real comics”. But they rapidly became the main focus of my career, and I even think of my trade paperbacks (one currently available and several more on the way) as a way to present minicomics in a bookshelf format. What makes the difference for many cartoonists is creative control. When you make a minicomic, it’s all yours. Not just the story and how you tell it, but the book itself: from its size, shape, color and texture, to what fonts you use for the typesetting, to the title logo, to how dark the art is printed. Each minicomic is a new adventure, full of new things to try with the lessons you learned from the last one and new horizons to explore. How thick can I make a mini? How do I lay out a flip book? Can I silk screen my covers onto brown grocery bags?
Finally, minicomics are comics art for the people. You don’t need anybody’s permission or approval to make minicomics. No editor will tell you to change what you write, no marketing gurus will tell you to draw what sells. And you don’t need major capital either.
Anybody can use a ruler to lay out a page on plain white paper, and draw on it with black ink or a marker, and almost everyone has access to a photocopier. A basic eight page mini is made out of a single double sided photocopy, which, in monochrome on plain white 20 pound paper, will cost you around 12 or 14 cents each at a copy shop, and 10 to 20 cents at a walk- up copier. [You may need to double this in the current market, although low prices like this can still be found if you hunt around. Office supply store copy shops often have sales. Home laser printer per page prices are roughly similar to the ones quoted here, with pages with a lot of solid blacks costing more.] This means that you can print 100 copies of your comic, and probably get change back from your $20 [or $40?]. And don’t let anybody tell you an eight page mini isn’t a real comic, any more than a haiku or a sonnet isn’t real poetry. In fact, I see that eight pager as comics in its purest form—the medium pared down to its absolute essentials. Anybody who can tell a good story in that format is a true cartoonist.
Hopelessly Lost, But Making Good Time 