Dark Horse Comics:
Secret Mac Superpowers
These days, comics and graphic novels are practically defined by creative experimentation. Over the past two decades, the genre has exploded with thousands of titles featuring sophisticated artwork and nuanced story lines.
But at Dark Horse Comics, some of the most interesting developments are behind the scenes, in the way comics are created and produced. Dark Horse’s innovations in graphics production, prepress, and data management have helped them grow into the largest independent publisher of graphic novels and comics, with retail sales of more than $50 million in 2007.
The source of the company’s superpowers? A network of nearly 150 Macs serving every department, including a complete in-house graphics and prepress operation.
Dark Horse publishes around 30 titles each month from their Milwaukie, Oregon headquarters, from original stories to licensed series like Star Wars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The company has also expanded into film and television production, producing blockbusters from 1994’s The Mask to this summer’s Hellboy II, as well as branching out into merchandise sales, non-graphic novels, and comics-related nonfiction.
Macs have been Dark Horse’s computer of choice for more than 20 years. “For people who had no experience with computers, Macs were just easier to learn and use,” says founder and President Mike Richardson. “And once we had the Macs, we began exploring other ways we could use them.”
Many Paths to Production
The 120 desktop Macs and 25 Mac laptops at Dark Horse get a workout in every department, starting with the editorial group. Production for a new comic begins here, whether it’s a pitch from an outside creator or an internally generated book idea. Once the idea gets the go-ahead, a script is written and sent to the chosen artist, who uses pencils to create rough layouts and initial drawings. After the rough layouts are approved, work on the final art begins.
Before computers, comics creation followed a set course, from pencils to ink to lettering to coloring. But in the digital age, a comic can take any of several paths to production. For example, Dark Horse Design Director Cary Grazzini explains, the letterer might get scans of the final pencils at the same time as the inker and load them into Illustrator to add the words. In that case, the design crew is responsible for merging the Illustrator files with the rest of the page when they come back. Then they send the completed black-and-white pages to the colorist, who is likely working in Adobe Photoshop.
Another possibility is that the pencils don’t get inked at all. Currently, a popular artistic style is to add the color right to the pencils. In that case, Dark Horse is responsible for merging the lettering with the color pages to create final artwork on the Mac.
Service with a Mac
Today’s streamlined, Mac-based print production workflow is a far cry from the way comics were published when Richardson established Dark Horse in 1986. Back then, panels were hand-drawn, inked, lettered, then sent to outside vendors for coloring. But quality at these external shops was uncertain. Meanwhile, new possibilities for desktop publishing were emerging.
So in 1989 Richardson decided to bring Dark Horse’s color production entirely in-house, something no other comics publisher was doing. “We were way ahead of the curve in our use of computers in our business,” he says. “From that point on, we started building our own service bureau.”
That in-house service bureau has grown to include 21 people under the supervision of Design Director Grazzini, all working on Macs: a mixture of Mac Pros and Power Mac G5 towers, most with Apple Cinema Displays.
The design department is broken into three groups, all using various components of Adobe Creative Suite 3. The graphic design group relies on InDesign to produce internally generated elements such as tables of contents, credits, and letters columns. The digital art team assembles each title’s interior pages using Photoshop and Illustrator. And the prepress group uses all three programs, plus Adobe Acrobat Professional, to put the entire book together and generate PDF files to send to the printer.
