Enda
Enda lies at the end of a road; what befalls her visitors?
Enda is a screen printed comic
This is part passion project, part self-improvement exercise, part story concept.
My Role(s)
writer, storyboard artist, concept designer, comic artist, screen printer, and book binder. Basically everything.
Year
24/03/2025
Why am I making this?
Why do people climb mountains? Does it really serve them? I say yes, we all have our own mountains that we need to climb.
I had this question,
How can we use silkscreen to print a book? I’ve screen printed (loads of) shirts and prints, but never a book.
Here’s the process
I want to screen print a saddle stitch the comics into booklets. To do that I must print the correct pages beside each other as a spread.
To solve this problem, I make a dummy comic in newsprint paper. Then I can separate the signatures to use as a guide to draft the acetate drawings. In total, there's about 20 spreads that I’ve had to make.
the rough comic sketched onto newsprint
Each spread is drawn freehand using the draft comic as a guide
A view of the acetates I’ve drawn for this project
There are a lot of spreads to draw, so to be able to make this comic within the span of one semester I’ve toned down the detail of my artwork and reduced the printed layers needed down to just one.
Since I want the story to be happening at night, I also coloured in the gutters on most of the pages.
I’m super grateful to have been able to use the university’s studio space for this project, which includes a fun dark room.
After some very quick math, I’ve found that I printed about 260 prints for this project *OOF
After a lot of printing, I finally finished printing all my pages! While printing I had to double side print most of the pages. To minimize the risk of making a printing error and losing a lot of work, I would first carefully set up my station. Also during printing I would double check that I wasn’t printing anything upside down. Thankfully due to my careful setup, I made no errors of that sort.
After drawing out all the spreads, I exposed them into the screen in batches.
I’ve printed the comic onto two paper stocks. The first is Stonehenge printmaking steel grey, and the second is Johhanot. In total I planning on printing 13 comics, 7 in Stonehenge and 6 in Johhanot.
A small Timelapse of me printing away :)
To book bind the comics I invested in linen thread. I used a bone folder to make crisp folds and bulldog clips to hold the pages together as I threaded them. To hide the knot along the spine, I glued the cover on separately with starch paste, and pressed the comic under some weights.
Here’s some shots of the final spreads!
The comics are a little different from what I envisioned but that’s the joy of making things. Many of the comics have small printing and alignment errors. (As I went through this project I gradually made fewer and fewer errors.) In a way they remind me of the old comics I would pick up from the thrift store. Those suckers had loads of printing errors and misalignment issues. To me the print errors in these comics lend a nod to the mass produced ones I enjoyed as a kid.
By far, the Stonehenge comics are my favourite. The deckled edge and grey tone really add to the mood of the project
Success!
Any last words?
I made this project by myself, but making it was really only possible through the mentorship and encouragement from a lot of people.
Here’s a few of them:
Jason Gress, who helped me hone my skills in the art of comic making.
Gregory Ball, who taught me how to screen print, and gave me the space to explore this medium.
Cory Landels, who shared a quick efficient method of bookbinding.
Also a big thank you to the people who showed interest and encouragement in my project. (This includes the people who were scared/concerned about the amount of work I was putting into this.)