Dark Horse Comics:
Secret Mac Superpowers
”For prepress, one of the biggest advantages of the Adobe suite is its ability to export PDFs with different printer settings,” says Grazzini. “You can save all your export settings for crops, resolution, down-sampling, and so on. We’ve even sent our settings out of house, so someone can send us PDF files made on their machines.”
CS3 for Comics
Working with CS3 on the Mac has built-in advantages, Grazzini observes. “With OS X, there’s not all this concern about ‘do you have the right service pack, and which version of the OS are you running?’ There’s a lot of continuity from version to version, and the environment is pretty much the same. If a person’s using a Mac, you know you’re speaking the same language.”
Grazzini’s department acts as the nerve center of the production process. The bulk of the artwork is done by outside contractors — artists, letterers, and colorists — and flows in and out of Dark Horse, mostly via FTP, as needed. The digital art group manages the workflow, handling everything from pencil sketches to finished color pages to transparencies of cover art.
The Adobe suite helps manage these different workflows as well, says Grazzini: “The palettes are relatively the same in each program, the key commands are the same, you can sync color preferences, and so on. We’re making changes to the pages all the time, and that consistency really helps. We’ve started to cross-train the departments, so they can make changes in the originating program if they need to.”
Color Done Right
Grazzini and crew rely on the Mac’s color capabilities to produce accurate proofs of the finished color pages. The Dark Horse editorial department needs to see proofs that reflect the printed color as closely as possible. And the prepress department requires color-corrected proofs so the printer has a clear idea of what the final pages should look like. “As a result,” says Grazzini, “everybody’s invested in color management.”
The group profiles its Apple Cinema Displays and Epson large-format printers with X-Rite EyeOne spectrophotometers and ProfileMaker Pro software. “When we use the profiles with the Mac’s ColorSync color management system, we can be sure that whether we’re viewing onscreen or printed proofs, everything will look the same,” Grazzini says.
But the benefits of ColorSync don’t stop at Dark Horse’s door. “We get press profiles from our printers,” says Grazzini. “One in China, for instance, has profiled their press with our paper. So if we’re working on a book that we know will be printed there, we can set up our profiling and proofing to match that press. Then we can do soft proofing onscreen and hard proofing on our Epsons, all in that same color space.”
Saving and Serving
After a comic is sent off to the printers, all the digital material is archived to Dark Horse’s servers: 18 Xserves and five Xserve RAIDs, for a total of 50 terabytes of storage. According to System Administrator Shawn Welter, the new, digitally produced material gets archived automatically, while old books are scanned as needed — for example, when they’re published as a reissued collection.
”Everything we’ve done since 1992 is available on the servers,” says Welter. “Our Macintosh systems have made it possible to build an efficient and user-friendly network infrastructure, which gives our users access to all the resources they need. Thanks to the Xserve and Xserve RAID systems, users can access materials we have produced over the last 20 years — and everything is fully searchable using Apple’s Spotlight.”
The Dark Horse IT staff appreciates the network-friendly features of OS X — especially OS X Server’s OpenDirectory and Kerberos capabilities. “We’re able to leverage these tools to provide a centralized authentication system with single sign-on support to all our network resources,” Welter says. “This makes it possible to have remote home directories and centralized management of laptops.”
With this setup, adds IT Director Tom Kishel, each user’s primary workspace resides on the server and is accessed over the network. “That way, if someone’s system goes down, they can walk up to any other computer and start working,” Kishel explains. “Once they log on, all their files are there. It saves a lot of money and a lot of time. Plus we don’t have to install backup software on all 125 workstations and back them up separately.”
From head office to design studio to server room, the Mac’s many advantages have made die-hard supporters of the Dark Horse staff, letting them turn their attention onward and upward to new creative challenges. “We do have a couple of Windows PCs,” says Kishel, “but if we had more, we would never be able to maintain this number of workstations and servers with only three IT people. We’re spoiled by the luxury of being an all-Mac shop!”
