How Comics Were Made, a Kickstarter by Glenn Fleishman

I’ve had the privilege of editing some of the material that my longtime friend and colleague Glenn Fleishman is assembling for a new book project, How Comics Were Made. He’s currently in the middle of a Kickstarter Campaign to bring the book to fruition and which has already raised $91,000 as I write this. If you have any curiosity about comics or the not-so-long-ago world of publishing, you’ll love this book.

Here in 2024 the publishing process is so vastly different that it’s almost difficult to comprehend the amount of work that went into publishing even one day’s newspaper. No computers, no Internet, but a whole lot of photo reproduction and hot metal and sheets of flong (stiff paper used to create molds). Glenn starts from cartoonists’ drawing boards and follows the entire process. As he’s researched this project, he’s talked to some of the most notable people in the business and collected a wealth of physical artifacts.

Glenn has also just published an article in TidBITS about the crossover between traditional and digital tools used by cartoonists: Newspaper Cartoonists Rely on Digital Tools, but Not as You’d Expect.

Go check out the article and the Kickstarter project and help fund it to get it over the finish line. There’s even a higher-tier support level where you can have you (or a friend) drawn as a comic into the book! I leant my likeness for the example, below. I’m looking forward to seeing the final hardcover book in print. (As a reminder, Glenn also shepherded the massively successful project Shift Happens, a multi-tome book series all about keyboards written and produced by Marcin Wichary.)