Today’s Black Plate Special – The Daily Cartoonist

I used to set up a full-page educational comic feature each week. I would start with the black plate and then lay the color plate over it and blow it way up to make sure I was matching everything up precisely. I don’t think it mattered what order you laid them in, and I can’t remember if I flattened it or not before sending it out. This was about 20 years ago and we certainly weren’t at straight-to-plate yet.

Our comics page was B&W, and they could pull in each strip with a command, but I don’t think they could fill the whole page with a single command yet. It’s hard to mess things up when it’s only one image, but the less hands-on you are, the easier it is to let screw-ups get on the press and out to the public.

Another innovative way to screw up: We printed CMYK in those days and a lot of stuff came in RGB. If I forgot to convert something, I’d get a call from the back shop that began, “Hey, Dumbass ….” I got along well with those guys, so they’d be laughing when they said it, but thank god they were paying attention when I wasn’t.