Answers to FAQs

Q:

What do the terms “bleed”, “trim” and “safety” mean, in terms of manga pages?

A:

“Bleed”, “trim” and “safety” applies to most sequential art pages, though only if they are going to be printed. If you’re doing webcomics you don’t have to care so much, but if you’re drawing for print, you have to get these dimensions right if you don’t want awful things happening to your pages. Firstly, these are the dimensions you’ll have to draw your page to. They refer to where certain things are supposed to go on a manga page, because the edge of the page will be cut off by the printers when they go to print, and certainly you don’t want that to happen to a dialogue balloon. The dimensions of each are accessible here, and the page looks like this:

Safety Area: Where the dialogue balloons, panels and important things go. It’s a certain length away from the edge of the page for a reason - if it’s too close to the edge, then the speech balloons will be in an area where they could be cut off by the printer, or too close to the binding of the book (where it will be hard to read).

Trim Area: The edge of this area is where the printer will cut. Everything beyond the trim area will be gone.

Bleed Area: Called the “bleed area” because if you have a panel that “bleeds” right to the edge of the page, when you’re drawing it, the panel should extend right into this area. This is because if you only draw your bleed panel in the trim area and go no further, the printer can very easily trim a few millimetres off, and you’ll have white space on the page where the bleed panel was supposed to go. Drawing right into the bleed area makes sure that doesn’t happen. Ofcourse, everything in the bleed area will be cut off by the printer if they do it properly.