I finished the comic that started with the Charlottetown Comics Club “Cookbook” project, so it was time to look at printing options.

At Staples, it was going to be $16 for this slim little 18-page double-sided booklet. There’s no way I could charge $16 for this thing. Even if someone could do the job for half the price, it’d still be way too much.

I can’t print it with my laser printer because:
a) the toner flakes off the card-stock cover, and
b) the masses of toner consumed by the full-colour interior were already making the cartridges show signs of streaking. They’re $250 for a cheap knock-off set of replacements, $800 for the branded HP ones.

So I looked at the “mega-tank” printers. These things have giant ink cartridges that contain a lot of ink — like, a big flowing reservoir of it instead of what you normally get with inkjets: a tiny thimbleful of colour saturated in a big sponge cased within a thirty-dollar plastic shell. Mega-tank printers cost more up-front — in the neighbourhood of $300. But remember Staples’s printing price? That’s what it would cost to print just twenty of these comics.

The first mega-tank printer I bought was the Epson ET-2720, which came with fecking HUGE bottles of ink that were so satisfying to upend into the cartridges — glug, glug, glug…

But the printouts were terrible — really washed-out, almost a halftone, unless I told the printer to pretend we were using photo paper (instead of the special inkjet printer paper it was loaded with), and then they came out dark grey and washed out.

Thankfully, Staples is really good about taking things back, so back it went.

They didn’t have the Canon Pixma G6020, only the lower-end models that don’t “duplex”, that is, print on both the front and back of the sheet. And duplexing is a non-negotiable: I ain’t standing there as every sheet comes out, putting it back in while trying to remember “Does it go back in upside-down and facing back, or right-side-up and forward?” So I got the other printer from my research list, the Brother MFC-J995dw. (Just trips off the tongue, eh?)

I printed off the comic, and it’s beautiful — exactly as it appears onscreen. (Not to compliment my own work, it’s just nice seeing the vibrant colours I expected.)

I spent so much time on Saturday twiddling the settings for the other printer every which way I could think of, scared I’d stepped into a hole of disappointment and regret, so I’m very happy to have found a solution that works so nicely!

Plus I’m back in the publishing business, which feels cool.