In this week's bonus, Glenn Fleishman discusses the mechanical journey of a comic strip, from the cartoonist’s ink to the final newspaper page. We look at why Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson drew close to size to save money on paper and how a political resignation in 1973 led to a week of "Doonesbury" strips that never ran.
In this week's bonus, Glenn Fleishman discusses the mechanical journey of a comic strip, from the cartoonist’s ink to the final newspaper page. We look at why Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson drew close to size to save money on paper and how a political resignation in 1973 led to a week of "Doonesbury" strips that never ran.
🔗 Share your familect recording in Speakpipe or by leaving a voicemail at 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475)
🔗 Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
🔗 Subscribe to the newsletter.
🔗 Take our advertising survey.
🔗 Get the edited transcript.
🔗 Get Grammar Girl books.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook. Threads. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon. Bluesky.
[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription. Greetings, Grammarpaloozians! I am here with Glenn Fleishman. We just finished talking about the history of shouty caps and quotation marks in the main episode, but for the bonus today, we're going to talk about his book, "How Comics Are Made," which is obviously about how comics are made. Glenn is a type historian, a printing historian. He has been a printer with ink on his hands. He's written more books than you can probably count. Besides "How Comics Are Made," one of his recent books is "Six Centuries of Type and Printing." Glenn, welcome to the bonus segment.
Glenn Fleishman: Thank you so much.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, so I was excited to learn there's actually a comics museum.
Glenn Fleishman: Oh, yeah, this is an amazing place at the Ohio State—since we're on a grammar podcast, Ohio State University insists they are the Ohio State University. It's a trademarked term. So at the OSU in Columbus, Ohio, there's the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, which is an amazing institution. It's full of curators who are doing scholarship work or teaching about and doing scholarship on the history of comics from all different angles. So it can be the history of gay and queer work, it can be what was the earliest cartoons and newspapers, comic book development, the history of how comics influence novels—all this kind of thing.
And they also have an incredible museum space that, unfortunately, as we speak, it's being renovated. So I don't think it opens again until later this year, maybe even 2027; it's closed for several months. It was a great space and they're actually improving it and putting some more permanent exhibitions in. But I've been there, I think I've seen three or four different exhibitions there during my research trips to go and work on the library part and get them to pull from their holdings.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And you have made this amazing resource about the production of comics. So what was it that sort of set you on this path?
Glenn Fleishman: I always come back to this word: flong. It's F-L-O-N-G, which is my favorite word, and I learned about it in 2017. And a flong is the technology that allowed the syndication of comics along with many other things. In the 1800s, type was all set by hand until late in the 1800s. And whenever you wanted to print a newspaper page, you had a bunch of typesetters working crazy hours and every typesetter setting part of a page. It's incredibly tedious.
But then once you have a page, you have a bunch of loose type that's locked into a frame and it's printed onto a press, and those presses were printing a sheet at a time and they were fairly slow. So of course if you could use a roll of paper—continuous rolls of paper were invented in the early 1800s—surely you need a press that is also rotary; it's a cylinder. So how do you take flat type and stick it onto a cylinder so it rolls around as the paper goes by?
And the answer was a flong. And a flong is a wood pulp material originally, kind of more like papier-mâché, but kind of sheets of glue and tissue paper interweaved. And they would be pushed down against a page of type, put into an oven, and then peeled off, and you would get a mold of that type.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Glenn Fleishman: Then you could bend this flong around a semi-cylinder and pour lead alloy into it and get a semi-cylindrical plate that you would then lock onto a round press. And then you could just print; it would go around in a circle as paper flowed through, and suddenly you speed up the production of, say, newspapers or even some kinds of books by an order of magnitude, if not more, because it's just whisking through. There's not sheet after sheet going down. It's just this incredible, endless, super-fast stream of paper.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow. It sounds like they would be super fragile—the flongs.
Glenn Fleishman: They're actually pretty robust. I mean, I've only seen one historic flong because they were all just thrown away or burned, of course, because they were an ephemeral material. There was nothing valuable about them. But in my reading of them, they were actually pretty rigid because once they were dry—because they were full of paste and other substances—they held their form enough to pour hot lead in and have the lead come off as a piece and not get residue off the plate.
So, this sounds like it's totally unrelated to the history of comics, but I discovered flong. And the reason flong is important is it shifts from being this very elaborate process with paste and other stuff into being an industrial process where companies would produce flong as raw sheets that were called "dry flong" versus the older "wet flong." And dry flong as an industrial product could be used much more readily so that each printing company, each newspaper, didn't have to pour and make its own flong. They just bought it from the—literally called the Wood Flong Company—and they'd buy massive sheets of this stuff and then they could just use it in their process as they went from setting type to going on the press.
But the other use—it's kind of like a photocopying machine. I mean, very primitive. So if you're a comic syndicate and you're distributing your comic to 2,000 newspapers in 1920, my question was, how would you do that? I know you could make metal plates, which are etched in acid, but each time you do that, it's this long, elaborate process. It requires zinc plates, it's very expensive, it just takes a long time.
So I thought they must have had some kind of mass reproduction technology, and the answer was they would make one plate. And from that, this hard metal plate would be then pressed against flong material. And then the syndicate would make a thousand, 2,000 pieces of flong—these pieces of essentially something like a thick cardboard. And they sent those out to newspapers, and the newspapers would take the flong and then cast a metal plate from that and then lay it out on their newspaper pages.
So without flong, that's also how advertising copy spread mostly, or advertisements and even some other miscellaneous material, like a primitive kind of clip art. You could buy clip art as a newspaper as sheets of flong. And they would send you—these companies would send you a monthly subscription of things like Santa Claus and candy canes and whatever. You just cut them out, pour them in lead, and then just stick them on your newspaper layout.
Mignon Fogarty: So how long would it take from when a cartoonist drew the comic to when it would actually be printed in the paper if it had to go through all these different processes?
Glenn Fleishman: It took weeks, but for most of that, nothing was happening. The cartoonists are always the bottleneck; I can find all these notes about syndicates begging cartoonists to get their stuff in on time because they needed weeks to go through each step of the process, but the process itself didn't take weeks. So, cartoonists were supposed to turn their strips in as much as nine weeks out from when they ran, but that was because they didn't trust the cartoonists to do it.
But there was this whole process. So the cartoonist would hand a strip over after it had been approved by the syndicate—you know, make sure there were no language issues or typos or whatever—it would go through this process where a photographic negative was made. The negative is then handed off and reduced in size. And sometimes different newspapers had different size requirements; they might do a negative reproduction at different sizes of the original strip, which was drawn sometimes two or three times larger than the size as it would appear in the newspaper.
The negative would be handed to the etchers who would take a zinc plate and, with an acid process, after exposing a plate onto a photosensitized surface on the zinc, they would literally etch the metal away to produce a plate with a raised surface. That was the comic. Then that would be sent to another part of the operation that would make the flong. The flongs would be sent off by railroad car or U.S. post to the newspapers. The newspapers would get them, cast them in metal, put them on their pages, and finally go into newspapers.
But each step, like the engraver—it might only take an engraver a half an hour per strip; they were working in a mechanical process. So maybe they would process, I don't know, like 50 strips a day or something like that. They make that many plates because there could have been 10 different people involved. There could be multiple vats of acid. I mean, we're talking about—it's such a funny thing where you're like, to make a comic strip, you needed a lot of sulfuric acid.
Mignon Fogarty: And you kind of talk about the changing technology and how that sort of changes what people are doing with comics.
Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, because this process—this whole weird thing—even though there are literally eight steps between a cartoonist's hand and ink and it appearing in a newspaper, you would think the fidelity would be so poor. Sometimes it was. If you look at old comics, sometimes you're like, "Wow, this looks like it was printed by a potato." And sometimes you're thinking, "Gosh, how do they preserve this much detail and beauty in something that had this many mechanical reproductions, you know, this many generations?"
But instead of being a bad photocopy, typically the quality was preserved remarkably well. But over time, those steps reduced. So instead of, at a certain point, photographic processes start being used instead of the flong. So newspapers, instead of receiving something they have to cast, they get a photostat, which is just like a black-and-white photograph printed on a flat, non-reflective paper that was shot in a special kind of camera from the original artwork. And so some newspapers would take that and then they might make a plate, or they might actually do some work on their end, but three generations of reproduction were removed on the syndicate's part.
And then eventually you get to a point where the layout is all photographic—so all the type is being set photographically, or phototypesetting—all the artwork and the comics are all being laid out in a page as essentially physical visual elements that are then photographed as a sheet. And from that full page, the printing plate is made.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and you talking about the size of the drawing reminded me: you interviewed the creator of "Calvin and Hobbes," who is famously very private, and one of the things you asked him was about the size. So talk about how—how did you even get to talk to him?
Glenn Fleishman: Well, it's interesting. I'm just this random person. The first edition of the book was a Kickstarter. Now it's the second edition, which is very similar, is being produced by Andrews McMeel Publishing, which is itself a sibling company to the biggest cartoon syndicate in the United States that syndicates "Calvin and Hobbes" and "Doonesbury" and a lot of strips that are popular strips. I think King Syndicate is the number two, and Andrews McMeel Universal is the number one.
But when I was on my own, I thought, how am I going to get cartoonists to talk to me? And so I just—I have some friends who are cartoonists; I got referrals. But I also just said, "Hey, here's something I think you've never been asked: I'm writing a book about how you think about a line. Tell me how you conceive of a line for reproduction. How did you think about how color worked?" Because until relatively recently—the late '90s—cartoonists had to specify color and someone else, engravers or other people, did the work in a production stage. The cartoonist never drew their final color; they could only indicate it. And then also: How did you think about reproduction? Did you go and look at newspapers and change how you drew or your process based on what came out?"
Apparently, many cartoonists said to me, "No one has ever asked me these questions before." And some were like, "I've been dying to talk about this part of the craft," because everyone just asks, "Where do you get your ideas from?" They want to talk about the story. But a lot of cartoonists are craftspeople or artists—a combination, obviously.
So I went to Bill Watterson's editor and said, "Do you think Mr. Watterson would answer these questions?" And he said, "I don't know, let me ask him." And within a day I got a response. And so through the editor as an intermediary, I sent a couple rounds of questions back and forth, and Bill was just—I feel like he was tickled to be asked about something that no one had asked him about.
He doesn't give that many interviews. He used to do much more when "Calvin and Hobbes" was running and for a little bit after that. And it was lovely to find out his process—partly the idea that he drew pretty close to size because it was cheaper to use smaller paper. And I'm thinking, "My God, man, you sold 65 million copies!" He sold 65 million copies of "Calvin and Hobbes," but he was parsimonious because he started out as an illustrator at a newspaper—the Cleveland newspaper. And I think he always—at some point, huge success came in, but I think he was always kind of like the struggling artist. And so, why would he draw bigger? And then once you get used to drawing close to size, you just keep drawing close to size.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. What else did you learn that would surprise people?
Glenn Fleishman: Oh, gosh. I am trying to think about that. It was interesting to talk to cartoonists about how dissociated they were from the production process. For many of them, it was just a big black box. They would send their cartoon in to the syndicate and then it would show up in the newspaper, and they didn't—some didn't care, some didn't know.
Some were kind of fascinated when I started to send them materials. I’d be like, “Hey, you know…” The guy who created "Funky Winkerbean," Tom Batiuk, who gave me a lot of his time—"Funky Winkerbean" and “Crankshaft,” which are two kind of…You know, they’re sort of funky strips. Like “Funky” is a good name, and he did very interesting things with. “Funky” is not, has run his course after, I think, almost 50 years, where the characters grew up in big time shifts; he would stop the strip and then move ahead a number of years. I'm like, "Hey, I found a stereotype—which is a name in printing for a metal plate cast from a flong—on your strip." And he's like, "Ha, I've never seen that before."
You know, and this is how I came to think of it as a weird thing that cartoonists were so removed from the production of their work because what other field of art has ever existed in which the people who created the art never really touched or were involved in the final product? And so a lot of the cartoonists had that. I guess I figured cartoonists would have more involvement or be talking to their syndicate more, have conversations with the printer.
I did find some great things. Like the great Caniff, Milt Caniff, who did "Terry and the Pirates" and "Steve Canyon"—if I’m getting those strips right. Someone listening will be a comics fan and correct me. He was an adventure cartoonist and did beautiful, beautiful work. I found letters at the Billy Ireland Library from him writing to a syndicate saying, "I'm down in Florida, and the paper reproduced down here did a terrible job on this. Are you going to talk to them about it?" And then a letter back from the syndicate saying, "We have limited control of what they do. We've informed them of your displeasure; we're going to keep monitoring the situation."
Or, I'm searching around for Bill Watterson material and I find someone had posted literally a Post-it note written in Bill's handwriting that was pasted on top of a memo from the company that did most of the color work—putting the color specified by cartoonists onto their Sunday comics. It was a company based in Buffalo, American Color. And it was a note from the desk of the guy who was kind of in charge of that part of the division to somebody in production saying, "Hey, some people really do care. Bill Watterson had written a note to the syndicate saying, Tell American Color great job on these two comics."
And it was two different ones. So in the whole scheme of things, I got permission from Bill to reproduce his handwriting so I could include that note. And from Andrews McMeel, I got permission to reproduce those two comics—both in newsprint reproduction form and in their original line art form. So the book demonstrates exactly what Bill was complimenting and what was the complexity of those colors. So, that was sort of exciting to close this weird loop.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice. Well, I was going to ask you if the changes in the technology changed the way the artists work, but it sounds like maybe it didn't.
Glenn Fleishman: Well, I actually have something in the works in my head about that is, there's an issue of resolution—not scanning or photo resolution, but how cartoonists used to work with incredible detail. The classic example is the guy who did "Prince Valiant," his name is escaping me. It’ll come back to me. He worked at an enormously large size; he drew these huge original Sundays, and the work is gorgeous. And if you find old newspapers and you find "Prince Valiant" and the detail—because he worked at huge size, he could work in detail that when shrunk would actually be reproduced through this absurd process I was describing.
Over time, as comics shrunk and the production process narrowed—and cartoonists became more and more responsible for, then eventually became fully responsible for producing the final digital form of their work—the amount of detail disappears. You see strips get smaller and lose detail. "Peanuts" is an interesting exception because “Peanuts” was created, partly the brief that Charles Schulz had was to create something that was simple in line art and would reproduce at a bunch of different sizes. So his style didn't change very much over his 50-year career with “Peanuts” because it reproduced so well, and at some point they demanded a minimum size so it wouldn't get smaller, like as tiny as some of the strips appear today.
But for other cartoonists—like if you look at "Beetle Bailey"—I know this is a funny example, but I was tracing it over a period of time, and it used to be the backgrounds weren’t, it wasn’t like photorealistic backgrounds, but when would run and they would be, I don’t know, four inches wide versus two inches today, and there was a lot more that could be expressed. Even in a strip like that. But the more intricate strips just lose resolution; you can't see the detail. It’s so small. So the cartoonists have to then reduce the amount of detail they put in, and I think the strips become less rich.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, I think the story of your eBay purchase is also really interesting and highlights some things about the process of creating comics.
Glenn Fleishman: Oh, the Garry Trudeau one? That was a great journey. I had just found out about flong and I saw this sheet of six daily "Doonesbury" strips from 1973 go up for sale on eBay. I think I spent $175 on it, which is a big purchase for me. But I was doing research and then I wound up writing an article, um, that never ran, sadly, for a publication, but they did pay me, which was very nice of them. And talking to Garry Trudeau via email back in 2017 and then again for the book—he was so gracious with both permissions and his time. He's famously a person who doesn't do interviews, but I was asking about something that was not the thing that everybody asks him about, so he was happy to respond.
This sheet was six strips that had never run in their exact form in print, even though they were in flong. That means the syndicate approved them and had sent them out. Newspapers would get a sheet with all six strips for the week and cut them up for the dailies. Every week.
Mignon Fogarty: And when you bought them, you didn't know this?
Glenn Fleishman: No, I learned this in the process, because I didn't know, I thought they were sent out one at a time. Because everything I'd seen was a little strip. It turned out that John Ehrlichman had resigned in the period between when the strip was written and when it was produced in flong and sent out.
The week before the strips were to run, Ehrlichman resigned. So all the newspapers have this flong in hand, and the strips were all about John Ehrlichman. It was one of Nixon's key aids. So they didn't make any sense anymore. So they swapped and the syndicate swapped in a different set of strips that were slightly out of, didn't make sense beause they were about alumni reunion, which would've taken place weeks later.
And Trudeau, we reworked some of them and then ran some of them later talking about Ehrlichman Moore in the past tense when it made more sense. But. It was funny to see comics that had, I mean, these are comics that had never run. Trudeau had sort of forgotten about it a little bit, and when I reminded him, he's like, “Oh yeah, that was the week that made me tell the syndicate I'm only working like a week ahead of time.”
There was a technological change there too, which was that in 1973, newspapers were in the middle of a slow burning change from metal and flong to photographic methods and offset printing, which uses thin, flat metal plates. It’s a very different process—everything is much faster, and there’s almost no acid, no lead. So Trudeau was able to make a demand and the syndicate was able to. Let him do it because their turnaround time could suddenly be much faster in most cases.
And the newspapers all just coped in it. But there was a lot of, FedEx didn't exist in 1973, but there was a lot of occurring and a lot of, uh, last minute work done and maybe some mistress when, uh, when he kept the deadline that short 'cause he did not want to be behind a news story.
Mignon Fogarty: Right. Yeah, politics overtook the political cartoon. I imagine that doesn't happen nearly as often today with things happening so much more quickly. Well, with webcomics. Do you want to talk a little bit about webcomics and their role in the industry?
Glenn Fleishman: I would say too, it's like some comics are so much less political today, and I mean, "Doonesbury" has been in reruns for the daily strip for decades now. For the Sunday one, he still has to do somewhat advance, more in advance than the regular. But I think there's so much less contemporary information in comics that there's less of an issue with that. But webcomics started in the late '90s or early 2000s, and some of the strips that were created then are still in existence this many years later.
And I think they started really as an imitation of newspaper strips and a lot of people who were early web cartoonists really wanted to be syndicated because that was how you "won." You know, you're syndicated. Suddenly you can be making a hundred or $200,000 a year if you were very successful. Or you might make, you know, in 2000 you might make $30 or $40,000 a year and it's a side hustle or something you do partly in your spare time or, you know, maybe you do illustration as well. And that went to being impossible.
There's only a handful of cartoonists to make any real money today, and there's just so few strips that are still out there. But, so web comics, I think, fill that gap is that over time the form evolved from being an imitation of newspaper comics into something that is now, uh, a much broader array.
So some people still do a newspaper format or they do a single panel format. Other people do. They might vary at like XKCD, which is, you know, a long winning favorite strip. Randall Monroe might do a, one day, it might be like a standard cartoon strip, and the next day it might be a scrolling zoomable, you know, five mile long examination where you can go and just keep scrolling and zooming in and out. And he has all the freedom in the world because he's using a medium that he doesn't need to deal with any of the reproduction constraints for.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. He was also a guest on the show, actually.
Glenn Fleishman: Oh, that's great. I really like his writing too. He's amazing. He's an amazing combination of somebody who took, I mean, I don't know what his real cartooning, artistic ability is, if that makes sense. Like he draws with a stick figure. He also sometimes will reveal how he can kind of quote unquote, actually draw, like if he is trying to draw something more realistic and you're like, oh, this guy could kind of do what he wants.
But his writing is so good and he's developed an iconography. Of characters and forms that are, I think, are so rich, even though they seem so simple.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, after hearing this, I think a lot of people are gonna wanna read how comics get made, get made, is it? Yeah. Are made. Are made.
Glenn Fleishman: Let me tell you how many discussions I had about that title with other people because I was like, I don't know what to call this thing. Even my Kickstarter version was called "How Comics Were Made." Andrews McMeel said, "We think 'How Comics Are Made.' Let's use the artificial present." And I said, great. You guys are the people who sell to bookstores. Whatever you think.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I keep having to go back and check the verb every time. "Are Made," because it's still happening. Get that book by Glenn Fleishman. Glenn, after people are finished reading your book, you books, because you have more—which they can find at glenn.fun—what are some books that you recommend? What are some of your favorite books?
Glenn Fleishman: Oh gosh. I have to look over at my bookshelf and say what that is. Well, as a Dunes Barry fan, I'm looking over because it's right there. But it's true, I'll use the Dunes Barry theme. Brian Walker is a comics historian who let me do hours of interviews with him. He's the son of Mort Walker, who created "Beetle Bailey." And so Brian is both a comics historian. He was a curator at a comics museum that ran for decades that his father created and the Schultz family was instrumental in funding. And then their whole collection is now at the Bailey Ireland. So Brian also now continues to be part of the team that writes and creates “Beatle Bailey.”
There's “Beatle Bailey,” “High and Lois” and “Hagar the Horrible,” which are two different families. One does “Hagar,” one does “Beetle Bailey,” and the two together do high, and Lois and I think they're at the third generation of family doing those strips. So Brian has done a series of books about comics history, including a massive.
Two-volume set that's been reprinted as one, that's kind of the entire history of newspaper comics. And it's, he did the thing that I love, which he's, he's able to get permission to reproduce so many strips that you're not just reading about a strip. You get to see what he's talking about over pages. So he'll mention artist, he'll talk about a change, he'll be looking at history and then show you page after page of examples from that period.
Um, so, but I particularly like, he's got a book called, uh, dunes Barry and the Art of GB Trudeau, which was, um, he had known Gary Trudeau. I think he interviewed him when he was in, when Brian was in college in the seventies. He know he's known Gary for decades and he put out a book that looks into Gary Trudeau's art because Gary Trudeau's used an anchor since the early seventies and he started to miss deadlines as, and people have said, oh, Gary Trudeau doesn't draw his comics.
In fact, Gary did what they call the pencils. He does the original work for all of his comics and he sends them to the inker. And so this was sort of a celebration of Gary as an artist. Even though he doesn't do the final production work, and it was also sort of dispelling some of the myths. But it's a very interesting book if you love Trudeau.
I mean, I've been reading Trudeau since I was a teenager and, uh, when I didn't understand all the politics and still read him today.
Mignon Fogarty: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Glenn Fleishman. Again, his books are "Six Centuries of Type and Printing," "How Comics Are Made," and many more, actually. So you really need to go to his website, which is Glenn, that G-L-E-N-N dot fun. And you can see all the things he's up to. Glenn, is there anything anywhere else you'd like to send people or anything else you'd like to recommend?
Glenn Fleishman: Oh, gosh. No. I just hope everyone is donating to food banks and mutual support societies right now. Yes, we're helping everybody else in the world.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, thank you so much for being here. This was delightful. Thank you very much!