Pre-Order How Comics Were Made

The Kickstarter campaign for How Comics Were Made ended yesterday, and it was a rousing success, raising nearly $170,000—over 110% of the goal I’d set to make the book financially feasible due to the overhead involved. This puts it in the top 150 publishing projects at Kickstarter of all time (out of nearly 70,000). Thank you if you backed the campaign, provided moral support, or are just reading this post!

Even though the crowdfunding stage is over, I’ll be selling the book as a pre-order until it’s printed later this year and offering limited-edition/quantity high-tier rewards while they last. You can go to the pre-order store for more information! I don’t have to give the printer a final number for how many books I want printed until this summer, giving me time to expand based on demand.

Live Cartoonists’ Interviews Now…Live!

As part of the work to promote my Kickstarter campaign for How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page, I scheduled four interviews with cartoonists and a curator to talk about newspaper comics through the lens of their work. I had the fourth session this morning, and you can watch (and comment and ask questions) all of them now on YouTube. You can use this playlist to find them all, or use the following videos to play in your browser or click through to YouTube. You can also watch this freshly produced video, “The Week in Doonesbury That Wasn’t” that connects “Doonesbury,” Garry Trudeau, John Ehrlichman, and newspaper comics reproduction.

The campaign has another 8 days to go—would love your support!

How Comics Were Made Reaches ITS Goal!

Updated 26 March: I have passed the 100% goal with a couple days left! The campaign rewards remain available for pledging through 28 March at 9 am PDT!

Original post:

A short update on the crowdfunding campaign for my book How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page: we just hit 50% today, an exciting milestone. Based on Kickstarter data, about 80% of campaigns that fund halfway reach their goal by the end! So while there’s plenty of room to go, 50% in 10 days with 20 days left feels achievable.

If you’re interested in comics history, printing history, or the way in which stories are told through technological transformation in both analog and digital dimensions, I think you’ll love this book.

Are We Having Flong Yet?

I vaguely remember when I first encountered the “Zippy the Pinhead” comic strip. I am sure I was in my teens, when I was reading some underground stuff, though my interest was largely mainstream. Zippy was in the middle: started by Bill Griffith as a character and then a heavy focus of his underground/alternative work, the strip was picked up by his local San Francisco paper and then, not long after, put into syndication by King Features nearly 40 years ago. It blew my mind: something this surreal and not-at-all-square (except the panels) in regular newspapers?! Zippy scratched an itch in my head similar to when I discovered Dada and surrealist art when I was a little older. I became a lifelong fan.

In preparing to launch How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page, I knew that Bill would be a key “get” as an interview subject and for his permission to reproduce material. He had worked in production, starting as early as the late 1960s, and collaborated on publications, performed all his own graphics production work for Zippy, and had—as I recalled and then confirmed by reading old collections of the strip—several times referenced printing, scanning, and other aspects of reproduction in his work.

I went to the Small Press Expo in Maryland in September 2023 and managed to chat with him briefly and hand over a card explaining my book while I was getting him to sign a copy of Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy, his great graphical biography that came out last year. He was intrigued, and we spent nearly two hours on a Zoom call a few weeks later. You can read excerpts from that interview in the first installment in November of my (free) comics-history newsletter.

Well met in London!

When I was thinking about something special to create as a higher-tier and somewhat unique reward for the Kickstarter project, I kept coming back to flong. I thought of how I might work with Jessica Spring, a letterpress printer, artist, and educator in Tacoma (about 45 minutes away by car), who I’ve known for over a decade. We had a fortuitous and accidental crossing of paths in June 2023 in London, when we had both arranged to research at the St Bride Printing Library, which is open only on Wednesdays. I introduced her around—I had been there before and wrote a book that encompassed St Bride and kept in touch—and that was a hoot.

Last fall, I got in touch and went to visit her studio, and we talked about the possibility of re-creating flong: using a debossing plate and a thick paper to create something that looked and felt like a mold used for comics syndication (along with distribution of ads, clip art, and other stuff) from about the 1910s to 1980s. I don’t think flong (also known as a “mat” for “matrix”) has been made in any quantity since the 1980s. But what art to reproduce?

Yes, you can still get all sorts of plates made for use in engraving, pressing down (debossing), and up (embossing), printing, and much more. We used Owosso Graphic Arts.

We created a test run-through using a public-domain Krazy Kat (George Herriman) strip and liked the results. Creating the “fake” flong involves using a thick paper (in our case, a handmade one from Porridge Papers) that Jessica dampens to make more pliable. She then puts the debossing plate with padding in contact with the paper in a nipping press, a hand-cranked device used in binding to compress pages while glue dries and for other reasons. She then lets the sheet dry. The letterpress print is made from the same plate, raised to the necessary height to receive ink and make a clean, solid impression on one of Jessica’s historic presses.

For the actual strip, Jessica was a big underground comic fan and, I found, loved Bill’s work. I thought, what the heck. I emailed Bill with photos and details, and—in part, because it didn’t require him to create new art—he agreed. You can see a proof of the flong and a letterpress print made from the same plate below.

A test preview of the print and flong combination that are part of a high-tier Kickstarter reward for my book.

A piece of the debossing plate for the Zippy print—so shiny and bizarre looking.

The actual print that backers of the campaign at the “Are We Having Flong Yet?” tier will get will be a single larger sheet with both the mold and print on it, as well as metal typeset text that explains the print and identifies the installment of Zippy referenced.

I picked a Zippy strip that was the first in a series of five that Bill explained came about when he went to his local copy shop where he’d been photocopying Zippy for years to send to his syndicate. I asked him about this series from 1991 and he said:

That was my cry of pain. I would go to the copy center nearby in San Francisco and suddenly the resulting image—it wasn't what I put onto the plate. Yeah, what's going on here? This is slightly fuzzy. What's going on? And they said, “Oh, that's a laser scanner. That's the new copy we have.” I said, “Where's the old copy machine?” They said, “We’re not using that anymore.” So I saw this as a disintegration of the process, not an improvement, and that’s why I did that strip. And I actually brought the first strip in that series to the guy in the copy center and said, “Make this progressively so that it's just breaking up into pixels.”

The strip is identical across all five days, but gradually breaks down, with the final day dissolving into something almost abstract. I thought it was a great commentary on technological change, and a particularly head-jarring strip to re-create using the previous methods, which had become obsolete years before Bill drew this series in 1991! I’ve included a low-res preview below.

How degrading!

If you’re interested in getting this flong/print combo, the Kickstarter tier is $500, reflecting the cost of materials, fees to Jessica and Bill, a copy of the book, and a special bookplate that I’ll be revealing later in the year. Backing the campaign at this tier helps with the high overhead in producing the book, too: every bit of each reward above expenses gets me closer to having the right funds in place to proceed.

How Comics Were Made: Get a Copy on Kickstarter!

Cover of the book, How Comics Were Made

Years in the making, How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page launched this morning on Kickstarter! (Watch a replay of a live session in which I answered questions and showed printing artifacts.)

The book is based on research into the history of printing I’ve been in engaged in for the last several years coupled with visits to libraries and archives and dozens of interviews with cartoonists. It covers 130 years of newspaper cartoon history, showing original art, printing artifacts, and newspaper reproductions, examining how an artist’s drawings make their way through the production and reproduction process into print. I hope you’ll take a look!

Working with designer and cartoonist Mark Kaufman, we have a preview of a full chapter of the book for your downloading and reading pleasure.

This two-page spread from the preview chapter gives you a sense of how I’ll tell the story of cartoon artistry, production, and reproduction. Download the whole chapter for more.

How We Crowdfunded $750,000 for a Giant Book about Keyboard History

I’ve just published a massive essay on Medium detailing how I helped Marcin Wichary run a $750,000+ campaign on Kickstarter for his book Shift Happens. I explain our strategies, hard-won lessons, unexpected problems, and budgeting within the parameters and fees collected by platforms—and making sure you consider a post-campaign service to help deal with the actual job of managing deliveries. (The book sold out its final tranche of copies on 8 February 2024.)

The tweet that set off a several-year project, culminating in a three-volume set of books, Shift Happens

Typing classes in the 1800 and 1900s, from a spread in Shift Happens

Sheets pulled from the press in Maine while the book printing was underway

2023 in Review

Last year was a rare exception among adult years in it that it was a little quieter. This year was a return to “normal”: busy, fulfilling, and new projects a-blooming, although with a far tighter focus than almost any year in my career in which I didn’t have a part-time or full-time job or the equivalent contractor position.

Shift Happens

After several years of editing and project planning with my author client, Marcin Wichary, his book Shift Happens finally went from bits to atoms. Shift Happens recounts the history of keyboards, with Volume 1 devoted mostly to typewriters and similar things and Volume 2 covering keyboards from the dawn of computing through the glass and mechanical masterpieces available today. Every chapter is a story about some piece of history or aspect of keys and keyboards. Marcin did a wonderful job of researching, writing, photographing, and designing this massive work. Each hardcover volume is 608 pages long. This was his first time writing a book, first time designing one, and first time crowdfunding.

We went to Kickstarter in February 2023 to fund it, blew through stretch goals in hours, and raised $750,000 for about 4,500 copies. That allowed Marcin to have a larger print run and to add a third 160-page “making of” volume (in softcover) that contains the nearly 60-page index as well. The entire set arrives in a slipcase wrapped in a gorgeously printed design.

Most of the copies of the book have sold. We’re sitting on reserve units now against the potential of damage in shipment—so we can replace those for buyers before selling out—before releasing the final ones for sale. (You can sign up to get notified when we open those up to sell by signing up at Marcin’s site to get a single notification.)

Your intrepid correspondent examining proofs hot off the press under a color-calibrated viewing hood.

Eric Filion (General Manager, Penmor, the third generation running the company), left, with Marcin Wichary. They’re looking at the endpapers and discussing color and balance. We had a lot of conversations like this!

Producing a book project that big wasn’t easy. Marcin handled all the design and licensing; I handled editing, from developmental work through to the final finished draft, and provided project management for crowdfunding, printing, and fulfillment; Marcin hired a proofreader and indexer as well. We went on press for nearly two weeks—about 100 hours total—at our printers, Penmor Lithographers, in Lewiston, Maine. (Yes, that Lewiston, that was later in the news. The folks at the plant weren’t injured, but everyone in that area will be affected for the rest of their lives.)

Books started shipping in early December after some delays by the slipcase maker—the final product looks gorgeous—and after our initial shipping tests revealed we needed a better plan to ensure books arrived without any dings or scuffs.

Press pages pulled to ensure close matching on other spreads in the book with similar colors

Finished pages waiting for binding

How Comics Were Made

I unintentionally started researching a book about six years ago, when I fell in love with some outdated materials used in print production, specifically in distributing advertising to newspaper and syndicating comics in the metal printing era. This led to me slowly acquiring newspaper comic strip detritus, learning about processes, and making a video for the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, which I mentioned in last year’s update. This video explained in an abbreviated fashion using public-domain images and video, and examples from my and Billy Ireland’s collection how syndicates managed to get a strip from an artist’s drawing board into hundreds or thousands of newspapers every day.

The video is online and ran continuously for several months as part of the “Man Saves Comics!” exhibition, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the acquisition of Bill Blackbeard’s 75 ton, 2.5 million item San Francisco Academy of Comic Art collection. (The video started running again in a new exhibition about printing comics that opened 13 December 2023.) The library invited me out in April 2023 as part of a papercraft and printing day, which was a big hit. I returned again in early December 2023 for more research.

Cover mockup, subject to change, but ain’t it a beauty?

This has all led to my plans in 2024 for How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page, a book I’ll be crowdfunding this coming February with an expected shipping date of October 2024. The book will start with the first regularly appearing newspaper comics in the 1890s—the Yellow Kid, first by Richard Outcault—and then proceed through each era of technology and creation through to the hybrid of print and webcomics today.

I’ve both researched and looked at cartoonists’ and newspaper archives and interviewed contemporary artists, so far including Bill Griffith, Lynn Johnston, Derf Backderf, Barbara Brandon-Croft, and…about 20 other people! I’ll wind up talking to at least 40 folks…maybe 50 or more.

You can sign up to get an alert when the book launches on Kickstarter, and separately receive a regular but not frequent newspaper about comics history.

Take Control Books

What would a year be without a host of updates to Take Control Books? For the first time in years, I didn’t write any new book in the series in 2023, but I did update seven of my eight active books, in many cases producing new editions. (An update for Wi-Fi Networking and Security is coming in the near future.)

In 2024, my publisher/editor and I have some new titles planned and ways to rework older titles that have gotten very long as Apple and other companies have added features and hardware.

Other 2023 Events

• Flong chapter! I contributed a chapter to a book called Printing Things: Blocks, Plates, and Other Objects that Printed, 1400–1900 (edited by Elizabeth Savage and Femke Speelberg) on my specialty subject—flong! Really, about historical printing molds (called flongs or mats/matrices) and plates (called stereotypes) that were experimented with for centuries but became part of standard print production in the very early 1800s. This is my first academic work! The book will appear in late 2024 as part of Proceedings of the British Academy, published by Oxford University Press. (I wrote a more approachable account of how the flong/stereotype process worked and posted it on Medium; I update it regularly as I gather new information.) Due to good timing, I was able to see some very old flongs and stereotypes in London at the St Bride Printing Library and at the Stationers’ Company.

• Journalism: A new normal for me is that my reporting days are not quite over but in strong abeyance. This year, I wrote two long features: one just came out on 14 December (see next item); the other was sadly canceled (I was appropriately paid) because of a change in editorial requirements. I continue to contribute my Mac 911 how-to columns to Macworld and regularly write technology stories for TidBITS, but it’s a big change from a few years ago when I had features in the Economist, Fast Company, and other publications. The reason? Publications have shed freelance budgets (or entirely shut down), editors I worked with have left, and it’s harder to find unique topics as a freelancer. The wheel of change keeps grinding, resist it as we may.

• Yahoo! Pipes history: Commissioned earlier in 2023, I wrote a long-form history of Yahoo! Pipes, a web app that was way ahead of its time in 2006 by letting you drag and drag connectors and text processors into a workflow that could produce custom RSS feeds, output text, and do a lot of other mash-ups. It’s a much-loved and much-mourned service that hasn’t quite been replicated. (This was for Retool, a visual programming tool company that’s running a series of historical articles about tools in their field.)

• TWiT: Privileged this year to continue what started in 2022, becoming a regular guest on the videocast/podcast network This Week in Tech (TWiT), appearing several times throughout the year on the flagship This Week in Tech and on This Week in Google.

• Travels: I was away for home more in 2023 than at any other time in my adult life, as far as I can tell. We took a three-year delayed family trip to Europe; I was on press for weeks in Maine (see above); and went to Columbus twice to the Billy Ireland library (see above, also!); to the Small Press Expo, an indie comics event in Maryland; and to visit my older child in Boston, where he just started college this fall. Whew! The good news is that I hit enough miles on Alaska to gain MVP status (i.e., free upgrades). The bad news is, wow, that was a lot of travel. In 2024, more writing, fewer airplanes.

Visiting La Giaconda, a very popular person.

We had a lovely trip to the U.S. Embassy in London due to a lost passport of one of our children. It was truly a great experience seeing our tax dollars at work!

A New Newsletter with an Excerpt of a Bill Griffith Interview

The long and short: subscribe to my new newsletter about how newspaper comics were made or read the inaugural issue.

If you’re anything like me, I would be surprised. (I stole that joke in part from the late, great Mitch Hedberg. “If you’d like to see me after the show…I would be surprised.”) But, if you’re of the same era, you may remember the glorious surrealism of Zippy the Pinhead. Somehow, in our universe, this comic strip was syndicated by King Features and ran daily in hundreds of papers. Even more bizarrely, nearly 40 years later, it still does!

I loved Zippy and used to pore over old collections of it. Thus it was a huge pleasure to meet Bill Griffith briefly at the Small Press Expo (SPX), an indie comics event, back in early September, and intrigue him enough about my upcoming book, How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page, to set up an interview. I knew Bill had a passionate interest in reproduction: he wasn’t that into printing, but rather wanted his work (and that of cartoonists in publications he edited long ago) to appear as good as possible in print. We had a long, far-ranging conversation, parts of which will inform and wind up in the book, along with production material he’s offering from his personal collection, and appropriate Zippy strips.

To capture some of my working process and share interviews, I started a newsletter also called How Comics Were Made that you can subscribe to. I’ll be producing issues regularly as I move towards the February 2024 target of a Kickstarter campaign for the book. Subscribe here, or just click this link to read the first issue, which includes excerpts from my interview with Bill.

A 1991 comic, third of five in a series, that Bill created after his local copy shop switched from regular photocopying machines to scanner-printers. He had them scan, print, and scan the same background five times, showing the degradation from Monday to Friday that week. The above is the third strip in the sequence of five.

$5 Take Control Sale to Celebrate 20th Anniversary

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Take Control Books is discounting all titles it offers to just $5! This includes eleven books by yours truly! No coupon is needed. The sale ends on 26 October 2023 at the end of the day Central Time. What’s that again? This:

$5 off all Take Control Books!

My current eight actively updated books. Four were updated in September and October. The rest will receive updates in the next few weeks and months.

Back in 2003, Tonya Engst of TidBITS asked if I wanted to be part of an experiment in ebook publishing. Several computer book authors and I had been talking about whether someone could launch an author-oriented publishing company that split profits fairly due to a far lower overhead for ebooks. Tonya and her husband, Adam, decided around that time to take the plunge—I can’t recall if inspired by that discussion or independently!—as they already had a dedicated and loyal audience through TidBITS. Some people had been reading TidBITS already for over 20 years at that point. (TidBITS started in 1990, and is likely the longest continuously published email newsletter and is among the oldest internet news sites.)

We launched with a handful of books that hit pain points for readers under the Take Control Books banner. The Engsts had set it up so that every sale produced an email receipt for each author. I left the “ding” sound for incoming email on and had a steady “ding, ding, ding” of sales into the thousands over a few days. It marked a significant change in my career, and Take Control ebook writing has remained a solid or large portion of my income for 20 years, with ebbs in flows in reader interest and my areas of expertise. I currently have eight actively updated books at Take Control! (Three others moving into retirement.)

Adam and Tonya split proceeds after expenses with authors (with no advances), a model that continues to this day under Joe Kissell, who, as the best-selling Take Control author, purchased the publishing company from the Engsts when they were ready to make changes in their careers.

The best part of writing Take Control Books is email, real-world conversations, and social-media posts from readers for whom some tip, set of instructions, chapter, or entire book has made a difference to them—solving a frustration, letting them set something up safely for a relative, or giving them a new technique or strategy to pursue their work or joy.

Thank you to readers old and new for 20 glorious years!

Panel from the Museum of Printing

It was my distinct pleasure in July to meet in person with Doug Wilson (Linotype: The Film), Jeff Jarvis (media critic, professor, This Week in Google, too many credits to list), and my friend and author-client Marcin Wichary (Shift Happens). We took the occasion of Marcin and I flying through Boston to head up to two weeks on press in Maine to meet at the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Mass. (say HAYvrill, please!), and Frank Romano, the founder and an incredibly important figure in modern printing history, teaching, and research, was so kind as to invite us to do a panel and interview us.

The video from that is up, split into three 20-minutes pieces. Links are part 1, part 2, and part 3, or you can use the embeds below.