more debt

on october 20th I decided to go to BEC, which is a comics festival in brooklyn that takes place november 14-15.

on october 26th I decided I would make a new zine for BEC, and I did! so now I will tell you how to make a 32 page zine in 2 weeks, or at least how I did it.

I am a person with "executive dysfunction," putting it generously; if someone wanted to be mean they could say that I am scattered, forgetful, stupid, and easily overwhelmed. many times in my life I have wanted to work on a grand long term project, but I find it extremely difficult to focus on any project for more than a couple weeks, and when I get out of the habit of working on something, I become very blocked about hopping back in.

I hope there's still time in my little life to learn new skills, but in the meantime I have developed a big array of harebrained coping mechanisms, so that I am able to accomplish – not everything that I want, but at least something.

where comics are concerned, this means compressing medium-sized projects into a few weeks, following a pipeline that I have honed over many years, so that 1. I don't have to hem and haw about the logistics of printing and assembly because I always do it exactly the same way, and 2. I don't have any spare time to second guess my drawing decisions.

just do it! ✔️ for better or for worse. this forces me to do things that are difficult for me, like letting go of the fact that I do not like my drawings that much. if I can get my output up despite my neuroses, then I trust that I will improve over time, even if it's not as much as I want, but it will definitely be better that than lying around getting intimidated and depressed.

IDEA!

last time I posted on garden variety I shared 3 drawings inspired by the book "debt" by david graeber. I originally intended for these drawings to accompany an excerpt I really liked, but it turned out to be too much text / too few drawings, so I left the excerpt out. I decided I would return to the excerpt and properly realize my initial inspiration by fully illustrating it.

LAYOUT!

I had a vague idea of a little landscape book where every page would be 25-75% text with a big drop cap, so I laid that out in indesign.

I use a signature method for my zines to save time, which I will detail later, but the short version is that my zines must have pages in multiples of 16. so I only make zines that are 16, 32, or 48 pages. I did a 64 page one once I think, but it was hard to staple. this one worked out to 32 pages quite painlessly.

THUMBS!

while looking at my layout for rough reference, I did some very gooey thumbs. this took a couple days.

PENCILS!

I am a tight pencils person, I wish I wasn't. I read something once about how chris ware also hates being tight, bemoans it, wishes he could be freer, looser, easier, happier. penciling takes me about as much time as inking, sometimes more? my friends often tell me my pencils are tight enough that I should ship them as is! I just look at my friends and smile with a single tear running down my cheek because I can only be myself, as much as I may wish otherwise.

penciling the lettering is one of the more insane things I do. why not just go straight to inks with the lettering? I can only tell you that I feel compelled to do it this way.

I used to make fonts of my lettering:

... but reached a point where I was too haunted by the knowledge that doing it all by hand would make it better, though not everyone may know or notice this.

when pencils were done I sent them to Eleanor for her thoughts. when I am submerged in a project I completely lose hold of my judgement and everything looks like a muddy pile, so it helps to have a friend give me some feedback and encouragement.

INKS!

I inked about 4-6 pages a day while listening to the audiobook of seveneves by neal stephenson.

recently, to help me stay organized and motivated, I use this silly little homebrew spreadsheet system to keep track of inking.

I enter the due date, check pages off as I go, and it will tell me how many pages I need to ink every day up until the deadline in order to stay on track, so that I know if things are getting out of hand.

FORMATTING!

everything from here on out was done over one day.

back in my teaching days I made a bunch of template .psds for zines in the signature method. so I just drop everything in. a 32 page zine will be on two signatures, each double sided, so I export a 4 page .pdf.

since it's a little landscape zine I was able to double up on the tabloid sheet.

PRINTING!

I usually do my printing at fedex on the self serve printers so I can fuss off in a corner without having to talk to anyone, but athens, GA (where I currently live) has a famously wonderful print shop called bel-jean. I was a little frazzled explaining my weird system, but the person who helped me was not only kind, but extremely competent. turns out they have lots of fun paper colors too.

and it was cheaper and higher quality than fedex, GOD BLESS YOU BEL-JEAN!

FOLDING!

this is the point of the signature method. instead of having to collate everything or pay someone to collate for you, you just do some folding and the zine assembles itself. you have to chop the top and side edges or the pages remain trapped in their folded state, but if you like an edge trim (and I do) it's all part of the process.

Aaron helped me fold, thank you Aaron!

I staple with Eleanor's saddle stapler and cut with David's guillotine.

then I stack all the zines and put heavy objects on them overnight so they will be nice and flat.

because of the signature method and doing all this shit myself, it is a cheap operation and I can sell the zine for $2 which is not so much!

I finished just in time, my flight to NYC is tomorrow!

once I have reached the finish line with a zine I do not usually have any brain juice left to do things like "mail it to people" but I will have some copies at BEC, at hannah k lee's table and possibly at youth in decline's table? maybe I'll make an effort to mail people some zines. and then I'll just post it online later at some point.

thanks for reading!