This is a very very important topic for comics creators, but very little attention is paid to it. Comics, as we all know, are created basically for print. It does not exist as original pieces of art. Webcomics are an exception, but who would not want to republish webcomics in book form? So, basically, comics come to life mainly in printed form. The choice of printing technology is crucial in fixing the cost of a comic book, or comic magazine. This fact is generally given little importance to by comics artists/authors. Paying attention to printing technology can greatly help in developing comics aesthetics.
Offset lithography is the most commonly used printing method for books, including comic books. In offset printing, the method used to transfer images onto paper involves the conversion of a continuous tone image into ‘halftones’. Check out the Wikipedia entry for Halftone. A photograph is a continuous tone image. For it to be printed, the image is screened in a process whereby the same image is recreated in a grid pattern of dots. In colour halftoning, the dots are in 4 different colours (CMYK). For the purposes of this article, I am going to focus on black & white halftones. The reason for this will be apparent soon enough. In black & white haftones, grey-scale is replicated through the size of the black dots. The bigger the dots, the darker the gray.
Black & white offset lithography is the cheapest method of printing available for large quantities of books, magazines or newspapers. No wonder that the Japanese comics publishers chose black & white. In Japan, manga magazines are published in the lowest possible quality. Below is a photograph of a double page spread of a manga magazine. The print quality is exactly what you see here. (and yes, it is pink coloured paper 
) It is this quality that all the great and not-so-great Japanese comics go through before some are chosen for re-release in collected edition books in fine printing.
The manga books that we get in India, translated in English, is in higher quality offset. It is because manga magazines are printed in cheap offset that manga authors drawing their comics on paper use ’screentone’ to create greys. Screentones are transparent sheets with adhesive on one side, on the other side of which are printed halftone patterns. Screentones are readymade halftone patterns. Using screentone saves time and money in printing because then there wont be continuous greys to convert into halftone. ONLY black is printed, that is, one-colour printing. This is the technical reason that 500 page manga magazines can be produced on a weekly basis, and very very cheaply. A 500 page weekly manga magazine like ‘Weekly Jump’, costs 240 Japanese Yen which is today about 125 Indian Rupees!!!! Cheaper than any comic available in India today, and containing about 10-15 serialized stories!
Coming now to our COMIX.INDIA magazine, this is being printed digitally as of now. In digital printing, the advantage is that short print runs, or even a single copy can be made with ease. It is this technological advantage that we are using for COMIX.INDIA, even though the cost of digital printing is higher than offset. In digital printing, the same halftone technique is used to print images, just as in offset. Digital printing in black & white is way cheaper than digital printing in colour, but still more expensive than offset printing in black & white.
Right now, grey-scale is allowed for comics authors submitting their work to COMIX.INDIA. But in the distant future, if COMIX.INDIA manages to go ‘pro’ and we want to print it as a regular monthly or bi-monthly print magazine, then we would go for cheap black and white offset printing, which means grey-scale is out. So in such a case, comics authors must prepare their digital image files in halftones. What this means is, all the greys in the image must be converted into halftones. Of course, an in-house graphic designer could do this, but it will be a time consuming thing, and its better that comic authors know exactly how their images will be printed on paper. Both Photoshop and Gimp softwares have methods to create halftones. Here are some tutorials I found on the Internet that tell you how to do them.
– Halftone effect in Gimp 01 (DeviantART tutorial)
–Halftone effect in Gimp 02 (DeviantART tutorial)
–Halftone effect in Photoshop 01- how to change colour photo into halftone b&w image
–Halftone effect in Photoshop 02 – a good intro to haftones
–List of Photoshop halftone effects tutorials
OK. End of post.
Happy halftoning!
Editor.
