Thank you!
A big thank you to everyone who got a copy of Mostly (h)Armless! I think that for an obscure little fancomic it did really well! About 30 copies have gone where none can ever take them away again. I've also finally received my own version and I am happy about the quality.
I've now unpublished it but turns out you can never entirely take a book off the store once published. You can't edit it to be something else either. (which is what I had hoped to do, I have a bunch of unpublished original comics lying around). So it's just kinda going to sit there for all eternity, unavailable for sale. I sincerely hope it won't give me problems later on.
Anyway, if anyone is curious about one day printing their own comics, here are a few things I have noticed that I will definitely remember for my future printing endeavors:
Most glow and blending effects like Lighten, Color dodge, Hard Light, Linear dodge (add), etc don't look that nice in print despite looking awesome in digital.
Make your line art thick enough.
soft shading looks bad, cell shading looks good. (But it's better to fully fill shapes with a contrasting color rather than doing fancy lighting.)
Consider shading in black rather than color. (optional)
Details and soft lines are usually lost and a waste of time (Mostly in case of a colored book. Black and white may be different)
Keep panels spaced far enough apart.
Draw big panels. Small panels aren't as nice to look at and the eyes are naturally drawn to the larger panels.
Gradients don't look very nice either. Unless they have a light color.
Vintage comic textures and effects actually looks nicer in print than digital (which surprised me).
In dark scenes, rim lights are essential to make the character pop out. M(h)A would've looked like ass if I hadn't added those.
Stay away from the borders of your page, especially the left and right ones. Not just for the text but for the drawings too.
Keep track of which side of your page will be closest to the spine, keep a distance from that side especially. Because your book will be folded and part of the page will be hidden (the thicker your book, the more will be lost).
fancy panel compositions are cooler in digital...
contrast contrast contrast...
Don't be afraid to use pure black a lot.
Don't be afraid to use white a lot.
The 3D shake effect is also not that cool on print. But looks gorgeous on digital.
To myself… keep the font size consistent…
If text is outside a text bubble, it should have a high contrast stroke
Text should always be high contrast in general.
Motion blur is really cool in digital but not so much on print.
Keep black silhouettes black, avoid adding any kind of subtle glow or texture.
Text bubbles can have color but they should be light (again high contrast) watch out for saturated green or blue or red. Test in greyscale. Contrast should be more than 70%.
Line art should not be colored. Keep it black for print.
Hard borders are better than soft borders. On everything.
white panel borders are better than black panel borders.
But white borders with a black stroke are probably the best (cause more contrast).
Again light colors are better than dark colors. To do dark scenes it might be better to just use black and contrast with a lighter color.
Line art perfection is not that interesting, especially in regards to hard surface shapes like robots. (Might be personal taste though. I enjoyed looking at robots with messier line art more than those where I did perfect brush strokes.)
Beware dark blue and purple...
Compositions and colors of both the left and right page should always fit together. I think I did that pretty well here at least.
If possible make your total amount of comic pages devisable by 4. (so 24 pages total, or 28, or 96, you get the idea) not including the cover and back. Or else add a little extra drawing to fill the remaining pages.
I think that's about everything I can see based on my own print. I'm sure that a fair few of the things that I found looking worse in print than digital could be resolved by just being... better at converting your files. There's the whole CMYK color mode thing but in my personal experience that has been such a pain to work with, and each time my prints looked worse attempting to convert the file rather than had I just left it in RBG and let the printer do the guessing work for me.
So if you're like me and you're hopeless at this technical mumbo jumbo printing stuff, I think just avoiding the things I mentioned while drawing should get you well under way to having a nice print. The most important thing to remember is that digital and physical media are two entirely different beasts and if you are interested in getting your comics printed it's easier to adapt your workflow to that from the start rather than going back and altering. A lot of the mistakes I made here are rookie ones and I should have known better. But it's very easy to get lost in the process once you've started. I hope to improve my next print significantly. Once I can make RBG look good, I might try CMYK again.... Maybe. Potentially. No.
Hope these tips can be of service to somebody. They'll be a useful archive for myself in any case. If anyone wants me to elaborate more on a specific point, I'm happy to explain.
