Of Flongs and Comics Production

My background is in graphic design. I went to college in the early 1990s and got a Bachelor's degree in it, before working in the field for several years. The timing of my education is particularly interesting because that is precisely the period when the profession was changing from traditional, analog materials and processes to digital ones. When I started school, they had just opened a computer lab and it consisted entirely of three computers, one of which was hooked up to a flatbed scanner and was allowed to be used for that. And despite only having that few machines, it was never full. By the time I graduated, the lab had expanded to about 100 computers and you frequently found yourself waiting for someone to finish up so you could jump on the machine they were using. During my internship between my sophomore and junior years, we had a local photographer give us a tour of his studio to drum up business and his main selling point was that he had the only digital camera in the tri-state area.

This timing meant that we were among a pretty small group of graphic designers who were actively trained on BOTH traditional and contemporary techniques. I don't doubt design students today get history lessons on how things were done before computers, but we were basically the last group of students who actually had to practice those techniques. Corrections made by hand on physical paste-up boards that then had to be photostatted for a final piece. Taking tours of printing presses which still largely relied on processes that had been in place for the better part of a century.

This background has proven to be immensely useful in my comic book hobby. Because I have a pretty intimate knowledge of old production techniques, I can look at old comics and understand precisely what went into making them and why they look the way they do. When I learned about the pink/green variant of Fantastic Four #110, just one glance told me exactly what happened. Because I'm familiar with those printing processes, it was immediately obvious what had happened; there was essentialy only one way that could've happened. I was formally studying graphic design, not comic books, but the printing process remains basically the same whether you're making newspapers, magazines, fliers, posters, record album covers, cereal boxes, stickers, menus, greeting cards, election ballots, and just about anything vaguely paper-ish that has printing on it. Including comic books.

All of which I use as a preface for today's post to say that I'm very familiar with printing production processes. But it's still only within the past year or so that I've learned about flongs.

Flongs are an intermediary step in the printing process. They were basically a way to get printing plates that were set up in an even, flat format into a curved one that would fit on the rollers used in massive sheet-fed presses. I had always assumed that the original flat plates were heated just sufficiently enough to to bend them into a curved shape without appreciably distoring the details for printing. But that is not the case. Instead, these flexible flongs were made off the flat plate and then used to cast a curved plate from. Glenn Fleishman has this pretty comprehensive post about the history and development of flongs. The reason they're generally not discussed in printing process histories likely multi-faceted. In the first place, they were essentially a very minor aspect of the printing process that you wouldn't need to know about unless you were the person who had to make them. In the second place, they were generally made out of paper or a paper-ish material that often got damaged in their use and discarded. Even when they weren't simply burned after usage, they're fragile enough that they'd get damaged in the same way that old newspapers and comic books might if they're not cared for.

Earlier this year, Fleishman actually ran a Kickstarter campaign to write about the entire production process of comics. It's called How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. Following his work on the book is where I first heard about flongs. (The flongs I have pictured here were ones he sent me as part of my backing the campaign.) His book is printed now and shipping as we speak. He was kind enough to share with me a digital copy shortly before it went to press and, again, even with my comfortable background in printing and production processes, I learned a great deal. I'd like to suggest if you want to know about how comics were produced for basically any time during the twentieth century, I can assure you this is the best book on the subject. And while his focus is primrily newspaper comics, the exact same techniques were used for comic books as well. So if your interest is more in X-Men than Peanuts, just pretend it says "Wolverine" instead of "Snoopy" and you'll be good. Despite the book being a Kickstarter project, Fleishman is selling copies directly from his site for $73.50 US. Which might sound a little steep but it is an impressively long and detailed look at the process -- more detailed than I've ever seen anywhere for comics -- and I can all-but-guarantee you'll learn something new because it's just that well-researched and comprehensive. I am 100% certain he'll get an Eisner nomination at least for this, if he doesn't outright win. Seriously, if you have any interest whatsoever in the production side of comics, I highly recommend you check this out!

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