Hi – thanks for clicking through
Back in 2020, I came up with an idea for a collaborative project, based on the Turkish Map Fold. It’s an A4 sheet that folds up into an A6 cover and then pops open. Here are some photos of my prototype:
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I thought it’d make a nice little print format for something akin to a series of 7-inch singles. Other more comicsy influences include mini kuš! and Ley Lines, providing a wide variety of material within a tactile and hopefully collectible format.
So…we’ve been asking people whose work we admire if they’d consider producing something for the series. Essentially it’s a single A4 page (with other small sections around the edges on the reverse), but how you fill it is largely up to you – eg comics, photography, illustration, collage, word art, visual poetry.
The ‘map’ concept might lend itself to explorations of place, journeys etc, but it’s entirely your choice. And obviously you retain all copyright. I have them produced in colour on decent stock and do all the folding and sticking myself, in my guise as the shadowy legend Sausage Fingers.
Unexpectedly, we’ve now published more than 50 issues: I guess the best way to see what people have been doing with the format is to have a poke around here.
They’ve been well received: the peerless Andy Oliver at Broken Frontier has been a big supporter of the series, and has written lots of nice things about them. Elsewhere, Nicholas Burman wrote a cerebral assessment of the format (with some very nice photography) on SOLRAD, “The online literary magazine for comics”.
Here are some notes about formatting, etc (and please bear in mind that I’m not any kind of art director…)
- The format of the main interior bit is straightforward enough: A4 (210mm × 297mm). If you want to do a full-page bleed, add 3mm on each side (ie make it 216mm x 303mm), but don’t put anything important in that cut-off border.
- Also, please leave an ‘quiet zone’ of 5mm inside each edge that shouldn’t contain text or anything else vital.
- 300 or 600 dpi, CMYK.
- We also need a 65mm x 65mm illo for the front cover, and a brief biography and links for the back.
- Also, remember these will be folded and stuck by hand, so don’t rely on machine-like precision; if possible, include a millimeter or two of tolerance around any important folds.
For royalties, you’ll receive a pound from every issue we sell (they’re still only £2 each or £10 as for each ‘series’ of six), which is paid around every six months. We’ll also send you six copies, as well as a set of the series in which yours appears.
Many thanks for reading this far. Let us know if you have any questions. If you give us a postal address we’ll happily send you a loosely glued dummy copy to take apart and play with. We can also email you templates showing the folds etc.
TTFN
Tom Murphy
colossivepress@gmail.com