A little bit of background…
So, around mid-last year (2021), I embarked on a journey to make my first ‘real’ doujinshi. I had been making comics casually for a long time (webcomics and photocopier zines I would mail to friends), but I suddenly happened to get into a fandom that was more active on the Japanese side. I made several mutuals who were like-minded and were very into lore/theorycrafting, and doujinshi (which they would put out event after event at astonishing speed) was how you expressed it. I too was getting very enamoured and passionate about the story crumbs we were getting, that it wasn’t long before I had a real itching to draw everything that was forming in my mind. I wanted to join them, badly(!!), despite the language barrier and despite living across the sea. I wanted to make my own book and share it with the little community we had going on Twitter.
And so I started to draw…
(Spoiler: I did actually finish the book, print it in 2 different languages, and the Japanese ver. is on sale on Toranoana — more on all this at a later post but I wanted to keep it general for now. Actually, if you saw me this year at local conventions, you may have seen me sell my last few English copies…)
Anyway. The tone of this blog really isn’t supposed to be me coming off as an authority on anything, but rather, I’d like to take you on a journey of things I’ve had to learn and teach myself. In fact, I feel like my journey is just beginning now that I’ve opened myself up to really studying things, and I have keener sense of how much room for improvement there is!
Also, to be honest, some of this is very specific information and I don’t know a lot of people who are going to go out of their way to print in Japan. I guess if you want to peek behind the manga/doujinshi curtain (so to speak), then read ahead!
The first and most important thing you really have to form an awareness of is…
The correct file formatting for Japanese doujinshi printing!!!!!!
If you only realise later after you finished that the printer wants your files to be set up a specific way, then you will be in for a world of pain.
DPI
For example, for black-and-white comic work, did you know that the standard in Japan is actually 600 DPI? The covers (colour) are typically OK as 350 DPI, but the internals are 600 DPI as a standard.
Colour? Greyscale? Monochrome?
It’s up to you if you want to produce a book in colour or in black-and-white, the difference is just that colour printing is a lot more expensive than black-and-white.
A key differentiation you do need to know about is Greyscale vs Monochrome.
- Greyscale = All the different shades of greys between black and white are present.
- Monochrome = Only pure black OR white pixels in the picture. No greys in between. I know. It sounds scary, right? Believe it or not, this is actually the norm.
You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
(It’s OK, you can’t really tell when it’s zoomed out.)
Some printers will explicitly say they’re happy to take both greyscale or monochrome files, but I remember this one printing company my friend tried out that actually asked us to convert the pages to monochrome. CSP has ways to convert greyscale art to pure line and screentone, but it’s never nice to learn this after you already drew everything and have it looking a certain way.
Screentone Frequency (and Avoiding Moiré)
This isn’t really something printers will tip you off about, but it’s part of your checklist before you send off your files.
Moiré refers to the weird distortion patterns you get with dots/lines that are very close together and something is just slightly off (google it — you’ll know what I mean!).
The easiest way to avoid it is, particularly if you are using very fine screen tone, is to use the same frequency and angle of rotation. Otherwise if you overlay different types they can result in weird patterns. This also applies to overlaying tone on top of a grey fill since the grey fill will get printed as very fine dots and can clash with your screentone. It doesn’t happen all the time and I’ve done it myself with no problems, but you do it at your own risk.
Bleed Line, Cut Line and Margin Line
There are typically 3 different lines you see on manga paper (and also CSP comic pages by extension). The first 2 you are probably already aware of if you’ve printed anything.
- Bleed line = some few mm extra outside of the artwork as buffer in case the cut is not perfect, usually the printer will say their preference (like 3mm or something).
- Cut line = where the paper is meant to be cut (it’s rarely exact).
- Internal margin line = this is there to be used as a margin for your panels. It’s kind of up to personal preference and it also varies from genre to genre, but typically you want to stick with using this because it makes your pages look cleaner and save your big panels that extend to the very edge for when it really calls for it. Again, though, that’s up to you if you do want to use it (and you can also change the size on CSP if you want). Keep in mind though that it’s probably a good idea to keep the left and right margins as is so you have a personal guide of where your gutter danger zone is, since you are probably going to be printing a perfect-bound book. You don’t want any text or art there because they will get hidden!
A lot of printing companies also offer their own templates with these lines already on it.
Anyway, that’s roughly it in terms of the big printing points to keep in mind! Next I’ll write about how I go about setting it all up on CSP EX! ✿
nanalog 