I’ve created my first digital mockups for the mini-comic. I was dreading this part of the project. I don’t have a working version of inDesign and Adobe products are expensive.
I screwed my courage to the sticking-place (after all I couldn’t waste all the time and effort people had put into voting I HAVE to create a mini-comic) and investigated the world of alternative software. I was prepared for something confusing and awful… GIMP may be fine and dandy on a linux machine, but on a mac it was a miserable experience. A quick trawl of the internet and wikipedia’s page on desktop publishing software led me to Scribus. I haven’t done anything super fancy with it, but thus far I’m really enjoying its simple elegance. I haven’t figured out how to create my own rulers, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out.
Here are the first printed mockups, accidentally in color. Alas, the final version will be in black and white. I don’t have a duplexer, so I glued pages together. AFTER I printed and assembled a page worth of comics I realized that I’d inserted the wrong flowering head comic (aka beginner’s mind). Fortunately that’s an easier thing to fix.
From here I just have to write the back page and endlessly fiddle with sizing and margins. Then it’s deciding how many to print, deciding if I want to pay a printer for two cuts or do all the cutting by hand and filling any idle hour with a stapler and a razor to slash open the pages.
