Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Love issues, printing issues and what it all really means

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Mike Peterson Published: October 14, 2012 1 minute 4 comments

My final comment on yesterday's unscheduled discursion into healthy relationships, via Deflocked:

Meanwhile, a technical screw-up allows for an explanation of how Sunday comics work. Here's how today's Barney & Clyde looked on GoComics:

Strange, no?

For those not immersed in the business, here's what's up:

Printing involves working with CMYK files, meaning that, while a color picture can be created in the same RGB (red-green-blue) format your digital camera uses and that is generally used in PDFs and for most on-line graphics, printing it requires four plates, one for blue (Cyan) ink, one for red (Magenta) ink, one for Yellow ink and one for blacK ink. 

(Separating the colors to create these plates used to be a whole process on its own; today, changing from one format to the other is a click of the mouse, and the separation itself is done by the image-setting equipment.)

When it comes to sending these files electronically, or (more often) posting them to the password-protected download site from which clients then retrieve them, you can't use the whole thing, because it is too large and would clog the Intertubes (let me know if I get too technical here).

You could send each color separately, but, if you were using a high-resolution version at 150, 200 or 300 dots-per-inch, (A) one or more of them might still be pretty massive — for instance, the blue portion of a "Sherman's Lagoon" — and (B) they would have to be re-assembled at the other end, and getting four files lined up just right is going to fail as often than not.

However, the color portion does not have to be high-resolution in order to work. So you can create a lo-res version (typically 72 or 100 dpi) of the blue/red/yellow portion and it will sail right through.

The black portion, however, with all the wording, frames and outlines, has to be high resolution because it needs to print in sharp focus in order to be legible and to look right. Fortunately, it doesn't carry a lot of image — just lines.

So each Sunday comic is posted to the syndicate's download site in two pieces — a hi-res copy of the black portion and a lo-res copy of the color portion. The two parts are then re-assembled at the print facility, the black portion being lined up ("registered") exactly atop the color portion.

What obviously happened in this case is that somebody was asleep at the switch and placed the new color image but never placed the new black image. Check it out:

Here's last Sunday's Barney & Clyde:

… and here's this week's:

Now, given that I was able to get the current, correctly-registered image from a website directly serviced by the Washington Post Writers Group, my guess is that nobody opened their newspaper this morning and found the messed-up version and that the error occurred only at GoComics.

Which is still not the ideal, but we'll all survive and I wouldn't have brought it up if it weren't a good excuse to lay a little technology on everybody.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

And I hope that everyone at GoComics will be cool like little Fonzies and share Wiley Miller's attitude towards life, because, well, everyone ought to anyway.

This is a keeper:

Nicely done, man.