Print, Production, and MAMA CAME CALLIN', written by Ezra Claytan Daniels, illustrated by Camilla Sucre

Failure is the rule in publishing. If you think about books published by the biggest publishing houses, (aka not indie houses like Fieldmouse Press) the industry average sales for a book over the course of its lifetime is somewhere between 300 and 3,000 copies. Reporting by the New York Times in 2021 indicated that “98% of [traditionally published books] released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.” Data from similar sources suggests that 96% of all traditionally published books sell between 0-1000 copies. In the antimonopoly trial against the potential merger of Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, discovery data indicated that 75% of all authors do not earn more than their initial advance on royalties.

There are dozens of reasons a book can fail. Some of them are the fault of the author(s), like poor characterization, shoddy writing, or inconsistent illustration. Other failures are outside the creative team’s control: things like poor editing; a lack of promotion; an inauspicious publication date; a shipping container stuck in customs for months; a missile strike on a shipping barge in the Strait of Hormuz; any of these things can crush a book’s launch and its subsequent sales.

Very rarely does a book fail because it was printed on the wrong paper.

The latest graphic novel written by Ezra Claytan Daniels and illustrated by Camilla Sucre from Harper Alley looks like a prose novel, at least on the outset. The cover image has a nice splash, but the text and the front-cover blurb feels off. It’s a cover that would have really appreciated some spot gloss, and a second thought from the design team.

Anyway, the design work isn’t ideal, and I don’t think it “sells” what Daniels and Sucre are putting on offer. I have some quibbles about the art and about the storytelling too but overall I would say the book is “fine.” I don’t think it’s Daniels’ best work, and I don’t think it’s Sucre’s either. It feels rushed, from top to bottom; I’d bet good money that editorial and publishing teams put both artists under pressure to produce, and specifically pressured Sucre to get the book done as quickly as possible.

But the real problem with the book rests in the way it was printed. The comic uses a two-toned color scheme, a deep blue paired with a mustard yellow. Shades of dusky green populate the book, and it gives the book an overall dark tone. This feels right, tonally. The book is a meditation on institutional racism and legacy in a Florida county known for its brutality against black people. Baked into the storytelling is the well-known Southern slur “gator bait,” used to describe black children or babies. Sucre’s color choices specifically are well suited for the boggy, bloated dampness of the Florida coast, with all its sawgrass marshes and coastal mangroves.

It’s important to say at this point that it appears that the art of Mama Came Callin’ was all made on a screen. I have no animosity towards digital art — we’ve published a few books where the art has been all digital (see Bread Tarleton’s Lambda Literary Award-nominated Soften the Blow, as an example). There are plenty of advantages to working digitally, but one of the disadvantages is the way color works on a screen. Drawing in an app, on a screen (say in Procreate or Photoshop) naturally distorts the way you view what you’re making.

The difference rests in the way light makes color and ink makes color. Light color spectrums start in RGB (Red, Green, and Blue), and the more light you add, the brighter the color gets. In contrast, printing is done in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK, and the more ink you add to a page, the darker the color gets.

Because screens are backlit, and because of the difference between color from light and color from ink, comics that are made on screens have a tendency to print darker than they appear on a screen. It’s clear whoever did the production design on this book wasn’t thinking about that.

If you compare the digital version of page 112 to the picture I took in my office at home, can see almost immediately how the yellows are darker and the greens that arise from the blend of the blue with the yellow are duller, almost black. It makes details from the same page much harder to parse visually, and ends up causing you to miss specific pieces of Sucre’s art. In the top right panel, you can barely see Sedale’s head. This has a significant impact on the readability of the first few pages of the book, as the reader is supposed to see a masked figure approach a young Kiara’s home, throwing a menacing shadow that grows on the horizon through a window, setting up the trauma and the hook for the rest of the narrative. But the darkness of the printed page makes it difficult to see the change in the window, so the buildup and the drama of the home invasion is less palpable, and when the alligator-faced man shows up, it’s less interesting.

While I think there are things that could have been done to fix this in the printing stage, such as decreasing ink densities or lightening pages after reviewing the proof stage, I think the major issue here is unexpected; the problem is the paper stock.

Mama Came Callin’ is printed on a nice paper; my guess is the stock is an uncoated woodfree white somewhere between 100 and 140 gsm (grams per square meter). If I had to pick, I’d say 128 gsm. After printing, it’s been sprayed with a matte varnish, to keep the ink from smearing. You can tell that it’s been varnished because the darkest parts of the page, when twisted in the right light, will glisten or sparkle. The paper feels nice in your hands. But uncoated papers are potentially problematic, especially with books that are inky and dark.

We ran into this problem with Julia Gootzeit’s Golem Pit 224. We initially intended for the book to be printed on an uncoated stock, and the problem was quickly evident when we got the print proofs. Uncoated paper allows more ink to absorb, and high saturation means darker color. The tans and slate greys were darker, and the beautiful and intricate linework that defines the book was muddy and unfocused. Switching to a coated matte paper at the proof stage helped us salvage the project and led to an improved readability. I think that this would have helped Mama Came Callin’ although I think some of the work to improve legibility needed to happen after Sucre turned in the final pages to production.

Unfortunately, there’s no fix at this point. Harper Alley got a massive print run of books printed the same way, using the same stock, and those are the copies people will be getting at bookstores and libraries. People reading the book digitally, on a backlit tablet or on a PC, will likely have the best experience and have a better understanding of what Sucre hoped the art would convey. For the rest of us… well, what you see is unfortunately what you get.

All this talk of print production and ink saturation does lead to my final evaluation of the book; sadly, Mama Came Callin’ didn’t click for me. The paper stock, while not the only problem, made the reading experience disagreeable and difficult. The art was muddy and the lack of solid clean color made everything seem washed out and unreal. It’s easy enough to pick up the story, and I appreciated the character writing and the dialogue, but without a good grasp on the art, Mama Came Callin’ never captured me, and the end result was a shrug. If you do pick up this book, make sure you read it in a very well light room, preferably with overhead lighting. Better yet, read it digitally. Otherwise, be prepared to miss a lot of detail...

Detail that I believe that could have been saved given the right production choices.

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