TV: Some books can be tricky to set because the story beats don’t fit easily into boxes, for some of the reasons I mentioned above. We want to make sure everything looks great, is easy to read, and preserves the creators’ work, so we tend to agonize over every pixel if we have to cut into the artwork too much.įrom CONAN THE BARBARIAN, available on comiXologyįS: What kind of challenges do you sometimes run into in the conversion process?
If you can’t show the entire panel, what do you prioritize? We slow down when we’re working with these factors and although certain decisions become second nature, it can take a while to get it right. But if you constantly zoom in and out it can interrupt the story, so you have to play around and make some decisions about what gives the best reading experience. Or sometimes the font is a cursive hand written 6-point font and you have to zoom in close to read it. We do our best to minimize the distraction by how we decide to frame the central panel, and this can take a little extra time. We try to avoid cutting into adjacent panels because that can get distracting to the reader but there are times it’s unavoidable. Then you have more complicated books with diagonal layouts, overlapping panels, very narrow gutters, things like that. A straightforward single issue can take 15-20 minutes from start to finish. Some books have wide, straight gutters and big lettering so it’s a matter of putting the panels in order. This depends entirely on the layout of the book and the legibility of the font.
It’s rarely as simple as it sounds because very few comics are comprised of just boxes.įS: How long does the process usually take from start to finish? It sounds so simple, “Oh, yeah, we read comics and draw boxes.” But it takes a lot of time and consideration to get it right. When we finish, we go back and look at the book in GV to check that it reads well and perfect any adjustments we feel are necessary. We use boxes as that correlates to the screens on mobile devices and computers. Then the editors use a proprietary tool to draw boxes on each page and arrange them in the order we want the reader to move through the book in GV. When the editors get the digital files from publishers, we first make sure the format and file size/quality is correct. TV: Internally, the staff here that “authors” the Guided View are called digital editors. FS: Can you explain the process of taking a comic book as we generally understand it and converting it for readers on comiXology?
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