The Seventh Session

April 15, 2014

This week, Mr. Chan asked me to assist him in checking the work on two trade paperback issues after initial layouts and checks were completed. As my mentor explained to me, several people review the work laying out and checking the color saturation, the porportions of the files and the pages, and the resolution as I mentioned in last week's work. Most of these things are checked again in what they call an inside office pass around, but is more formally called a production checklist. I went through the checklist for the first trade paperback of Burn the Orphanage and the Invincible Universe trade paperback that Mr. Chan helped me lay out last week. The checklist consisted of identifying the title on the inside cover of the book, the volume number of the collection, the numbers of the issues that the book collects, the legal rights and credentials for the creators and the office, and the place it was printed and published. It then goes into the content of the work: checking to see if any pages were duplicated. Mr. Chan went through the first part of the checklist for Burn the Orphanage with me dealing with the interior of the book fairly smoothly. The content check was much more tedious. I first went through the entire book checking for duplicate pages just by flipping through the sample print-outs. At this time, Mr. Chan also told me to make sure the basic structure of the story that could be inferred from the art made sense. As I went throught the pages of the paperback, I appreciated the all aspects of the work done to produce this comic from the creative to the production point of view. Whenever someone sees a comic, they usualy see the book and think about the work put into it from the creative standpoint. Most people don't realize how much work is put into it in production. Working in production really has brought to my attention how much creators rely on production to get their hard work out into the public in the way that they want it. Going back to the checklist, after I went through the book phyisically, Mr. Chan assisted me in going through the links list that shows the document(s) names that are on each page of the book. We made sure that each document was on the correct page. After we went through the first book's checklist, we moved onto the next trade paperback: Invincible Universe Volume 2. I went throught the same procedure for this book as for the first. This time, however, I found a mistake: I accidently placed the same page twice. This mistake was an important one to catch, so I was immediately thankful for the checklist. This step in the production process may take up lots of time, but in the end it is very much worth it. I feel that this checklist can be very much useful in pretty much every job by making sure your own work is thorough and correct.

Next week, I hope to learn a slightly different aspect of comic book making while also reiterating what I have been working on throughout these weeks.

Time logged for this session: 3 hours

Total time logged: 21 hours