Journalis, author and Boing Boing contributor Glenn Fleishman has launched a Kickstarter to fund an upcoming book, How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. The book is scheduled to be released October, 2024.
Fleishman describes the project:
If you love newspaper comic strips, you will love my new book How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. I've combined years of research and the diligent collection of unique comics printing artifacts with dozens of interviews with cartoonists, historians, and production people to tell the story of how a comic starts with an artist's hand, and makes it way through transformations into print and, more recently, onto a digital screen.
Online distribution has become much more important for my own comic strip, Tom the Dancing Bug, but when I first started it in 1990 it of course appeared only in print. At the height of its print distribution, it was in about 150 newspapers every week, including some of the very biggest dailies in the U.S., but I had and still have no idea how it got from the copies of my original drawing that I mailed out to newspaper clients (and later to a syndicate who then sent copies to clients) to millions of printed newspaper pages.
Maybe I'll find out soon.
Fleishman's book will show the process and how it changed over the decades. It looks to be a really interesting peek into the black box that was a mystery even to participants in the industry. Some sample pages:
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All images posted with permission of Glenn Fleishman
