Sundays 3 Production

As we said in the last post, Sundays 3 is actually three small, pocket-sized volumes banded together with a tight band, a loose theme about the times of day, and lots of love.

The inside of the band contains a short strip about a lion, by Chuck Forsman (story) and Melissa Mendes (art).

In the above photo we see Sean Ford collating and cutting copies of his portion of the anthology. Each stack is 56 pages, there will be 120 stacks. These production photos are all taken in the basement lab of The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, where the printing and binding of the books took place.

Covers

Here we see Sean screen-printing the covers, at each color stage.

To create a sense of cohesion we decided to use our covers’ paper colors to determine the ink colors. So each book has its own version of the midnight blue, pink and yellow inks.

Above is the progess of my (Joe) covers, starting with yellow on yellow, then pink, then the dark blue.

“Sundays-Binding”

Below I’ll show the process used for binding two of the books. This is a technique I came up with last year for Sundays 2 because the book was too big to be saddle-stitched and the binding style I originally came up with was baloney. Sometimes when I talk about this binding with friends I call it the “Sundays-Binding”, but if anyone has every seen it used before (or better) please let me know (Joe (at) SubmarineSubmarine (dot) com, or comment on this blog).

The process uses staples, glue, and folding.
– First a stack is made with the Back Cover on top, face down. Next is the Cover, face up, on top of the Guts which are also face up and in the order you want them read in. On the bottom of the stack is what I call a Scrap Flap. This is just a piece of the cover stock that should be shorter than the Cover and Guts, but long enough to apply glue to. I think at least 2 – 4 inches is enough.

– Next the stack is stapled. For my Sundays 3 book I used 3/8th inch heavy-duty staples through one of those heavy-duty staplers with the lever-style handle. The staples should easily go through the whole stack: the Back Cover, front Cover, Guts and Scrap Flap. The staples are what hold the book together. With this book I stapled about 1/8th of an inch away from the edge, which was plenty. Be sure to make sure the inside margins of you guts’ pages have enough room for the stapling.

(note in the below photo the top sheet looks blank, but it’s actually the Back Cover face down. The corner is bent upwards a little bit for the photo, you can kind of see the Back Cover art peeking through.)

– The Back Cover is folded back around the staples (see above). If you want you can make a score where the fold will go, but you don’t have to. I usually make the fold right up against the staples, but you can give it a little room, especially if the staples are uneven, or not parallel with the edge. It’s important to make this fold parallel with the spine edge so that the Back Cover matches up with the back of the Guts.

(in the photo below you can see what it looks like when the back cover is folded all the way around the book.)

– Next glue is applied to the Scrap Flap. We used some kind of white, craft glue applied with a brush and we covered most of the Scrap Flap. I tried not to put too much glue though, so that there wouldn’t be any squirting out of the edges and sticking to the Guts. It’s a good idea to put a piece of scrap paper between the Scrap Flap and the Guts just in case there is any excess glue.

You can then put the books in a press or under a stack of books, or simple press the spine with your fingers until the glue sets a bit.

With this type of binding, though, you don’t want to put too much weight or press too much on the spine or the staples will press into the paper that is wrapped around the spine and make little marks, or even tear the paper.