Press Checks: A Visit to the Printing Press!
Return of the Condor Heroes: The Making (6)
Return of the Condor Heroes: The Making is a blog series documenting the people and processes involved in the production of Return of the Condor Heroes Collector’s Edition Boxset. Discover first-hand some of the behind-the-scenes work and the art of creating comics in Singapore.
As part of the making process of the Return of the Condor Heroes manga, we visited the printing press where the production of the manga volumes takes place! We conducted a series of press checks for the pages and colours of the manga, as one of the final steps to ensuring that all artwork images, margins, colours, and paginations are accurate and consistent, before the manga volumes are being printed and bound.
The Return of the Condor Heroes manga series is printed with Offset Printing, a type of print method that is commonly used for the printing of books in large quantities. In the Offset Print technique, an inked image is transferred from a printing plate to a rubber blanket, and finally to the printing surface, which in this case is paper. Offset Printing requires one to manually lay out individual printing plates and pre-mix colours beforehand, in order for all the manga’s images and pages to be transferred onto the paper.
One of the key things we had to take note of for the black and white images was that the artwork does not appear pixelated and that the lines are clear and refined. When it came to coloured artwork, we focused on colour saturation and accuracies to our digital files.
