Because SUPER MAX (Muscle Fight Chronicles) is so heavy on the production side of things, I tried to remember to document the process of putting it together. Not pictured: measuring, more measuring, uncooperative materials, prepping cooperative materials, and so on.

Anyway, imagine, if you will, pictures of me thinking hard about how I am going to put together a side-scrolling comic. Then imagine me wandering around Home Depot looking for suitable materials. Think about what it looks like for an employee to tell me that they can’t cut hardboard that small. Picture me panicking because that’s a pretty darn essential material. Surely there must be some other sort of wooden strip available.

Ah ha! Yard stick! Cheap and plentiful, good choice.

Back to the room, I use an itty-bitty hand-saw to cut the yard sticks to size after attempting to sand them down a little. More on that later. Drill dowel-sized holes in the top and bottom pieces. You know, for dowels. Use liquid nails to put those suckers together, and you end up with something like this:

Now take your dowels, the same diameter as the holes (though those will have to be sanded out for wiggle room anyway), cut them to length and paint one end red. Slap a washer on there and put some extra liquid nails inside for a sort of cool transparent coat.

Recklessly cram the dowels into the frames. Or sand the holes so the dowels fit nicely. Would you look at that?

Spray paint frames (sans dowels), realize you didn’t sand them anywhere near well enough and that the imprinted measurements still show, hide your error with black masking tape, which looks pretty nice anyway. Make sure the dowels still rotate smoothly, then jab a pushpin into the top end of each. Glue neat knobs to the pushpins. Try to rotate the dowels and end up having to reglue every one of them two or three times. Think of a better way later.

Take your comic rolls, lovingly assembled earlier from 11×17 prints, and glue one end to the first dowel.

Roll it up and glue the opposite end. Make sure everything works. It doesn’t. Glue again.

Hey, the covers sure look cool, though.

Hand-made hardcovers from Davey board, paper silkscreens, and (if I were the kind of guy that says “hella”) hella bright red book cloth. PVA that thingamajig to that other doohickey, mask off the edges with some matteboard, add a piece of magnet tape (which isn’t very strong, find a better solution next time), and what do you know, it’s a book!

Admire your handiwork, hope everything holds together for a while.

(Nice photos taken by Chris.)

Questions? Comments? Concerns?