How Much Bleed Does a Comic Need?

0.125 inch, on every edge that gets cut

Almost every comic printer asks for 0.125 in (3 mm) of bleed. That is art that runs past the trim line on purpose. Books are cut in stacks with a guillotine, the blade drifts by a few hundredths of an inch, and without bleed a drift outward leaves a white sliver along the edge. With bleed the blade lands in ink no matter which way it drifts.

Bleed only matters on edges where art goes to the edge. A page with a white border and floating panels technically needs none, but printers ask for it anyway so the file is the right size, and you should include it because the day you draw a full-bleed splash you will want the template to already be right.

The exceptions

• Ka-Blam uses a 7 x 10.5 in full-bleed template for a 6.625 x 10.25 in trim, which is 0.1875 in on the sides and 0.125 in top and bottom.
• IngramSpark wants bleed on the three outer edges and none on the bind side, with a generous 0.5 in safe area.
• Perfect-bound covers usually want 0.125 in on all four outside edges, regardless of what the interior spec says.
• Some offset printers ask for 5 mm. More is never a problem; less is.

The print presets carry each of these so you do not have to remember them.

What bleed does to your page count of pixels

Bleed adds to the canvas, not to the trim. A 6.625 x 10.25 in page with 0.125 in bleed is a 6.875 x 10.5 in canvas: 2063 x 3150 px at 300 DPI, of which the outer 38 px on each edge will be thrown away. Draw those pixels anyway; that is the point.

Art drawn without bleed

This is the single most common file problem. A page exported at exactly trim size looks fine until the printer scales it to fill the bleed box, at which point about 1.8% of the art disappears off every edge of a standard comic page and the effective resolution drops. You have three options:

1. Go back to the working file, extend the canvas by the bleed amount, and paint the edges out. Best, if the file exists.
2. Synthesise the bleed by mirroring or stretching the edge pixels. The image validator detects trim-shaped pages and does this in the browser.
3. Accept the crop. Fine for art that does not reach the edges anyway.

Bleed and the safe area are a pair

Bleed protects the outside of the page from a cut that lands outside the line. The safe area protects the inside from a cut that lands inside it: it is an inset, usually 0.25 in, sometimes 0.5 in, where lettering and faces must stay. Put together, anything between the safe line and the bleed edge is "might be cut". The bleed calculator draws all three boxes to scale for any size.

Questions