Description
Comics and graphic novels are big business for publishers right now—perhaps including your existing clients!—but the conventions that govern them can be mysterious to the uninitiated. If your favorite publishing client launches a graphic novel imprint, will you be ready to take on those jobs? In this webinar, attendees will learn the answers to questions like: Why do some (but not all) of these letter Is have serifs? Does this caption box require quotation marks? What are these weird whiskery punctuation marks? WHY IS EVERYTHING IN ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME (and what does that mean for using periods in acronyms)?
This webinar introduces editors and proofreaders to the comic book and graphic novel conventions they’ll need to be aware of, and eventually master, in order to put their existing skills to work for these unusual projects.
Participants will be introduced to the many idiosyncrasies of proofreading comic books and graphic novels, which have typesetting and punctuation conventions unlike anything else in the publishing world. The object is to introduce editors to all the conventions they’ll need to recognize in their first comic or graphic novel project, and provide them with the resources and tools they’ll need to act on that knowledge during a project.
The target audience is experienced editors and proofreaders who are looking to add a specialized area of expertise in order to pick up new clients or get more work with existing ones.
As a result of attending this session, attendees who wish to work on graphic novels/comics will be able to distinguish between “that looks odd but is correct,” and “that looks odd and requires my intervention” on a comic book page. Advanced editors may also take away knowledge they can use to make house style recommendations to clients or employers who are dabbling in comics and graphic novels for the first time.
There will be time for Q&A after the presentation.
Resources: The instructor has arranged permission to use Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now for demonstration in this webinar, and attendees may find it helpful to have their own copy to refer to during the presentation. It’s freely available to download as a PDF under a creative commons license. There will also be a 2-page handout to go along with the presentation.
Instructor Allyson Rudolph is a staff proofreader for a major international comic book publisher, a dream job she landed after ten years of bouncing around publishing jobs in New York and Washington, DC.
