Shelf Bound: The Bind EVERY Fan Needs!

“What bind belongs on every comic fans’ bookshelf?”

Here we are, kicking off Shelf Bound‘s spotlight columns looking at custom-bound books as a way to rescue your comics from longbox purgatory, and Your Faithful Columnist decides to swing for the fences on the first pitch. EVERY fan’s shelf — on day one? What do you do for an encore? While I take the next month to figure that part out, let’s focus on the challenge I set for myself today . . . what bind DOES belong on every comic fan’s shelf?

Not another copy of Watchmen.

Which isn’t to say I don’t have a Watchmen bind idea or three, because honestly, of course I do. But a surprising amount of people, including even some ardent comics fans among them, still don’t realize comics are a medium, not a genre. So saying every comic fan is a superhero genre fan and therefore has to have a copy of Watchmen on their shelf is ludicrous. Not even every superhero fan needs a copy of Watchmen on their shelf. That book, at its best, showcases some unique storytelling tools of comics over, say, prose or film. At its worst, it still manages to deliver a better narrative experience than you’ll get from most mainstream comics. But you still end up with a superhero comic (or, more accurately, a science fiction story examining the basic superhero premise), and not everyone is a fan of superhero comics. Or any other single genre, for that matter.

As the column deadline approached and I kept trying to untie this particular Gordian knot (Watchmen Easter egg!), my brain kept conjuring up a comics every-fan’s bookcase crammed with books I couldn’t make out any titles of! Like those panic dreams we find ourselves in, about to give a speech but realizing at the lectern, with all eyes on you, that your script is just blank pages.

So I pulled the mental camera back and imagined it was someone else looking at the bookcase. They’re looking for some connection, spark, or entry point into the terra incognita in front of them. They want the answer to the question: “Is this whole comics thing for me?”

And as comic fans, regardless of genre preferences or company allegiances, we want to show everyone that yes, this comics thing IS for them. Because comics can be ANYTHING. Medium not genre, remember?

THAT’s the bind every fan needs on their shelf, and that’s what we’re going to cover today.

COMICS 101: UNDERSTANDING THE FORM AND HISTORY OF THE INVISIBLE ART

Written by: Scott McCloud and Fred van Lente
Drawn by: Scott McCloud and Ryan Dunlavey
Inked by: Scott McCloud and Ryan Dunlavey
Lettered by: Scott McCloud and Ryan Dunlavey

Cover by: Scott McCloud and Ryan Dunlavey

Published by: Tundra Publishing | Evil Twin Comics

Collecting:

• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art OGN (Spring 1993)
• Comic Book Comics #1-6 (February 2008 – November 2011)

If there is a single work more often cited as THE textbook on what comics can encompass and accomplish than Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, I can’t think of it. UC was as much the popular gateway into comics as Carl Sagan’s COSMOS was to science. It made the case for comics as a medium worthy of discussion and debate, while providing a vocabulary to have those discussions and debates with.

Before some of you light torches and raise pitchforks: yes, UC did not invent comics scholarship. There absolutely were other insightful works on the mechanics and language of comics before 1993 (such as Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art), and there have been more in its wake. Not everyone took McCloud’s word as end-of-story gospel, and argument over his conclusions and definitions started as soon as the first copy was read. But even assuming every UC criticism is 100% valid (which I personally don’t agree with), these challenges focus more on fine-tuning the work than erasing it. We’re 25 years out from UC‘s initial publication, and it’s in every survey of comics course syllabus for a reason: there’s no better comics theory starting point than this book.

From UC. Art by Scott McCloud.

(We kid the superhero fans because we love . . .)

UC was the culmination of years of McCloud’s thoughts on comics, but it wasn’t his first comics work. After spending the previous decade or so working in DC’s Production department, he struck out on his own as a cartoonist with the black & white indie comic Zot! published by Eclipse in the mid-Eighties. Even then he was looking at comics differently than most, with Zot! and the superhero-fight parody one-shot DESTROY!! as reactions to the grim-dark superhero landscape.

Zot! and DESTROY!!, both from Eclipse Comics. Art by Scott McCloud.

Ideas were clearly percolating, and as the Eighties drew to a close, McCloud started bouncing those ideas off fellow comics creators like writers Neil Gaiman and childhood friend/about-to-release-Marvels Kurt Busiek, and cartoonists Steve Bissette of Swamp Thing and Taboo famy, the aforementioned Eisner, Beanworld‘s Larry Marder, and more. After an opening-chapter preview in Amazing Heroes #200 in April 1992, the late Tundra Publishing published UC‘s first edition in early the next year.

UC‘s only real drawback, in my opinion, is a consequence of its strength. By design and by necessity, UC is all theory. McCloud would go on to correct this somewhat with Reinventing Comics (2000) and Making Comics (2006), but here he had his hands full just defining comics in 224 pages. Readers get an inkling of the medium’s origin story and context, but comics has decades of history more bizarre and fantastical (and heartbreaking) than anything mentioned in UC. Someone else was going to have to step up and tell that story.

Fred van Lente (left) and Ryan Dunlavey (right), from the Comic Book Comics #1 bio page.

Art by Ryan Dunlavey.

Enter these two guys with Comic Book Comics.

CBC is an idea so good I’m shocked it didn’t happen sooner (and apologies if I’m forgetting that it did): recounting comics’ history and trends in a non-fiction comic narrative. And coming from the team whose Action Philosophers series made philosophy students everywhere rejoice, CBC would be just as heavy with the solidly researched facts as it would with the laughs and gasps.

Action Philosophers trade (above), and a sample from Comic Book Comics (below). Art by Ryan Dunlavey.

Readers quickly realize Dunleavy & van Lente did as much of their homework as McCloud did of his. van Lente does a great job synthesizing vast swathes of material into a manageable information stream playing to Dunlavey’s strengths as caricaturist and cartoonist. Edu-tainment gets thrown around a lot, but there are few things as simultaneously educating AND entertaining as a van Lente/Dunlavey comic. And nowhere is that more on display than in CBC.

When someone asks me for recommendations on books about comics, CBC and UC are my top two answers. They’re well-researched, engaging, easy to follow, and namedrop a lot of other great comics for interested readers to follow up with.

Most importantly, though, is that UC and CBC are themselves both comics. UC is a legit original graphic (non-fiction) novel, and the only thing keeping CBC from getting the OGN designation from me in its trade form, is it collects work originally serialized and I’m hopelessly literal when it comes to these things.

Strip away these work’s messages and you can just appreciate the vessels those messages arrive in. How McCloud uses weaves his on-page narrator in and out of panels, or the various changes in rendering technique to make this point or that point. How Dunlavey can simultaneously make you recognize so many disparate topics, properties, even people . . . all while staying within his defined artistic vocabulary. Cartooning this clear and this engaging always LOOKS effortless but never is for the people at the drawing and key boards. But the comic booking (yes, that’s a legitimate phrase) on display with this bind is worthy of attention and scrutiny.

And that gets back to point about why this primer had to be made out of comics. I have stacks of prose books about comics, and they are a wonderful resource. But how can any argument about comics as legitimate communication medium (for fiction or non-fiction) delivered strictly via prose not be undercut on some level, even a subconscious one, by the fact it isn’t using comics to make it?

This is the bind every fan needs because when the opportunity to show someone why comics are worth all this time and attention presents itself, this bind makes that case best.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

STEP ONE: Build The Text Block

Since I have been in the habit of loaning both these books out in the past, I had a few different combinations of the material on hand that I could make the text block out of. That’s a charitable way to say I clearly have a laissez-faire attitude about double- or triple-dipping. This will be a Shelf Bound recurring theme, but I’d advise against making it into a drinking game unless you’re a masochist looking to stress-test a cast-iron liver!

For UC, I had both my original 1994 TPB printing (left) and the most recent printing (right).

I just couldn’t bring myself to sacrifice the 1994 UC so I went with the newer, identical-interior printing.

With CBC, things got a little trickier. I ended up with:

• A full 6-issue set of the original CBC run (top),
• A The Comic Book History of Comics trade from IDW (bottom right) collecting those CBC comics, and
• A full set of IDW’s subsequent re-release of that material in full-color single issues, appropriately titled The (Four-Color) Comic Book History of Comics (bottom left, not all shown here).

The CBHC trade won out because its paper stock gives it had a cleaner presentation that felt more of a piece with the UC material than the more newsprint-y CBC issues. It also updates and reformats the original series’ bibliographic material, so even though it skips over the original Dunlavey series covers, it still has benefits outside the brighter look.

The color conversion in CBHC reprints is done well, and they are worth getting in either floppy or (upcoming) trade format, but I ultimately wanted to keep the whole book black & white (barring UC‘s small color chapter). Some folks automatically lend legitimacy to color comics over identical black & white material and I wanted to avoid prejudicing the CBHC section over UC.

All this leaves me with one UC trade and one CBHC trade. (And before anyone says anything: yes, the irony of starting a column about rescuing comics from your longboxes with a bind made up of comics not coming from said longboxes is not lost on me.)

Let the paper rending begin!

STEP TWO: Prepare The Text Block

Removing the covers before binding isn’t technically necessary; the binder can make a book with them still on. But as I mentioned back in the Binding Primer column, the cardstock REALLY hinders final product readability because they just won’t bend nearly as much as paper.

If there’s a particular cover or image you can’t bear to lose, just scan it at 300 dpi, print it out at 100%, and put it in your text block where you want it. Much easier read experience, trust me! (This comes into play a lot when dealing with Prestige (or “Dark Knight”, as you might see it referred to) Format sqaure-bound 48-page comics from the mid-Eighties onwards).

I’ve heard stories of people heating up the spine glue with a blow dryer or a hot frying pan to weaken it and simply pull off the covers, but I’ve never really had trouble just ripping the covers off. And the cathartic release is just too satisfying to give up, to be honest.

That said, you might want to go with the glue-softening method for a reason I’ll point out in a minute.

Either way, we end up with these stripped books for the text block:

Don’t forget to stack the block with the material in the order you want it bound in! First thing on top, last thing on bottom.

Which one do I put first?

CBC is the more engaging read (simply because histories have a built-in forward narrative motion that theoretical examinations like UC usually lack), but starting with UC right off the bat makes the case for comics legitimacy. And that seems key if your reader doesn’t already take that as a given. After settling that fact, then CBC lets the reader know of how long, circuitous, and heartbreaking the road to that legitimacy has been (or still is, depending on your point of view). So UC goes first.

STEP THREE: Fill Out The Binding Slip & Ship

Here’s what my binding slip to Herring & Robinson for this order looked like:

And just as I mentioned in Binding Primer column, you don’t need to do full-on mockups of the cover/spine for your slips. Printing clearly and legibly is fine. I’m only showing this slip in particular to point out that, since I had a fair amount of smaller text on the spine image, I included a larger-sized version of it elsewhere on the slip. This helps the typesetter (in this case, Joel) ensure the correct spelling with much less hassle.

Overall, I went with oversewn binding, white text on black Buckram covering, no additional stamping, black & white headbands, no ribbon, no trimming, and white endpapers. Basically a no-frills, straight-forward textbook look and feel.

TRIMMING

Since this bind was just two ALMOST identically sized & trimmed books, I skipped trimming the overall edges. Originally I was a tad worried the misalignment would bother me, but it never has since getting the book back.

Using the CBC floppies would have made me consider trimming, as their trim sizes are a little all-over-the-place. Had I gone that route, the binder would have used a machine to cut away enough material around the top/bottom/outer edges of the assembled text block to even everything out. Any material on the edges of the larger book further out than at least the size of the smallest book would have been lost in this process.

Some binders, primarily the smaller shops like Heroes Rebound or Herring & Robinson, will offer specific trimming (only a particular side, for instance). Say you want the top & bottom trimmed but the outer side left alone to accomodate text? They can do this.

Another binder trimming ‘trick’ to save content is aligning the text block material flush along the spine and one other edge, then only trimming the two other sides. So if, for example, you want that all-around trimmed look but your text block favors wordballoons at the top of the pages? The binder can align the pages at the top and spine side, then trim/even-off the bottom and outer sides. This gives an overall trim look without losing material from the top of the book. Something else to think about!

GUTTERS

Gutter loss wasn’t a huge concern on this book, as both UC and CBC use grid layouts with fair amounts of gutter space.

UC (above) and CBHC (below). Tight, but nothing lost.

BINDING TYPE

I went oversewn on this, given the gutter leniency. I’m happy with that choice, but if I take another crack at it, I will probably try DFAB glue binding for these reasons:

• It would help the book lay flat when opened. While the book is perfectly readable and enjoyable as an oversewn bind now, laying flat would be a nice option.
• The paper stock isn’t glossy, so the long-term structural issues of glue versus sewn binding on glossy paper would not be an issue.
• There’s no real gutter loss, per se, but some of those gutters are really tight. Glue binding would alleviate some of that.

Remember when, lo those many paragraphs ago, I said removing the covers by glue-softening rather than paper rending might be a good idea?

Doing so for a bind you want glue-bound might give you a better product. Your softening/removing of the glue ‘by hand’ might give them more original page to work with when they start their glue-binding process. If they have to cut off the glued material beforehand, that’s additional text block you lose before the additional 1/8″ removed to facilitate the glue binding. I honestly haven’t had a chance to verify this yet, but definitely something to ask your binder about!

The Earth-2 Multiversity Edition

Last week I talked a bit about using Shelf Bound to play Fantasy Publisher in the tradition of the late, lamented Multiversity Collection. So I’d like to end these bind spotlights with a peek at how the imagined Multiversity Comics of Earth-2, in its role as comics boutique publisher, might put out this material. These are less official Multiversity Collection entries, and more what you might see on your next trip to your favorite alternate-world comic shop. The one nestled between a theater running Eric Stoltz’s Back to the Future trilogy and the club where four lads from Liverpool will put on a surprise gig celebrating the 50th anniversary of their album “Abbey Road” . . .

COMICS 101: UNDERSTANDING THE FORM AND HISTORY OF THE INVISIBLE ART

Technical Details:

• Anthology release
• Hardcover
• 11.2″ x 7.3″
• 70# matte paper stock
• Sewn-binding free from spine

Back Matter:

The Impact of UNDERSTANDING COMICS: A series of critical essays & short comics originally published in The Comics Journal #211 (April 1999):

• Dr. Joseph Witek, “Ramses in the Ivory Tower”
• Greg Cwiklik, “Understanding the Real Problem”
• Bart Beaty, “The Search for Comics Exceptionalism”
• Tom Spurgeon, “Six Steps, Leading Nowhere”
• Ng Suat Tong, “An Open Debate About Closure”
• Spiros Tsaousis, “What Comics Do”
• Ethan Frome, “Identification in Comics”
• Charles Hatfield, “Thoughts on Understanding Comics”
• “Critical Focus: Understanding Comics,” response comic
• James Sturm and Art Baxter, “A Response to Chapter Nine: Build a Beach Head”
• Scott McCloud, “First Impressions”

Interviews (accessible via QR code):

• Scott McCloud – TED Talk, 2015
• Fred van Lente – Wordballoon, 2012
• Ryan Dunleavy and Fred van Lente – Robots From Tomorrow, November 2013

Cover Gallery:

• All Comic Book Comics covers, from the original run through the IDW “Four-Color” reprints, including variant or subscription covers.
• All Understanding Comics editions.

That’s All, Folks!

That brings us to the end of this week’s column and also the end of our 4-week introduction period. Shelf Bound will be coming out the second Tuesday of every month from now on, meaning the next column will go up on November 12th.

I hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve seen so far. While I have ideas for future binds and binding-related content, I really want to hear from you! Give me some ideas about comics you think are shelf-worthy! Shoot me an email at greg@multiversitycomics.com or follow me on Twitter at @gregmatiasevich and let’s have some fun!