How do old comics get reprinted?

[Fan of Bronze]

Todd Klein has a great blog post about this.

This is what the guys had DC had to work with:

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In the 80s they added a fourth value, 75%, and the palette expanded to this:

(image omitted)

I wasn't aware of the addition of the 75% value. Was that for all the books, or just the Baxter/Prestige/New Format books?

Thank you for bringing this to the discussion!

[NZ_InFerno]

There are two problems, as I understand it, with digital. Neither is insurmountable, but both can be labor-intensive to overcome.

The first problem is instability of the data carrier. Specifically, consider the writable CD. Consumers may assume that such discs are good "for life," but in fact, depending on them to store data more than 3–5 years is a big roll of the dice. (Note that this applies only to writable CDs. Prerecorded, manufactured-in-a-factory music CDs are good for decades.) DC is already having problems in this area. A year or two ago, I read an obit for a DC employee who worked in production. The employee was commended for his ability to coax usable imagery from a CD that was going bad. While it was some comfort to know that skill could overcome failings of a dicey carrier, the sad fact is that those CDs are only going to get worse. At some point, all the skill in the world won't be able to pull data off an old writable CD.

The answers are 1) more stable carriers, or 2) more frequently making fresh copies. Neither option comes without cost.

The second problem is that software file formats are constantly changing, and there is no guarantee that Photoshop of 2099 will be able to read a file created in Photoshop in 1999 (even if the bits are immaculately preserved on a stable carrier).

The answer to this problem is to open and re-save your data every time your software vendor offers a new release. For one file, that's not a big deal. Multiply it by the number of pages DC has published, and you're talking about a department of employees.

Quite apart from concerns about preservation of comics pages, all this isn't without implications for consumers. Few photographers use film anymore. People save their photos on computer hard disks, a notoriously unstable medium (who here hasn't suffered a disk crash? only newbies, I expect). People think they can get around the risk of hard drive storage by saving to a photo website; some sites save storage by downgrading image resolution. That image that looks great on screen may not look so great when you try to print it on photo stock.

I would imagine they have moved the files onto servers now, with HDDs in RAID for redundancy. They should also have offsite back ups too.

Also there shoud be no problems with the image format, .bmp or .tiff or .raw whatever they use will stick around for several years. Much like how MS Word still reads and saves documents in .doc format.

[CrazyOldHermit]

I wasn't aware of the addition of the 75% value. Was that for all the books, or just the Baxter/Prestige/New Format books?

Thank you for bringing this to the discussion!

Unsure, and according to Todd Klein (should have linked to his blog earlier, it's fascinating and everyone should read it) it wasn't really that useful on newsprint anyway. But on better quality paper this is what that same chart looked like:



One of the commentators shared this interesting tidbit:

Another thing worth mentioning is that Marvel colorists had one less color tone available during the Silver Age, while DC colorists lacked two. 1950s and 1960s Marvel books didn’t utilize the 50% yellow, while DC colorists weren’t permitted to use the 25% or 50% yellow tones. This severely limited the color palette available. (I suggest your readers scroll back up to your color charts and imagine dropping any lines of color that included the 25%, 50% or 75% yellow tones, coded Y2, Y3 & Y4.) Neal Adams successfully lobbied to use all three yellow values when he started coloring some of his own stories, which is why we finally saw Batman’s costume colored a dark gray (25%Y, 25%R, 50%B) rather than the earlier light purple (25%R, 25%B).

Imagine having only a single tone of yellow to work with.

I regret that printing quality improved industry wide at the same time computers became prominent. I love the look of hand coloring and wish it could have had at least a few years in the spotlight in American books before being replaced by computers.

[Jim Kelly]

On the slick covers, the production department used a much greater variety of colours. Likewise, there were colour slick magazines that featured coloured comics with a wide palette. So it's not like the letter press age of comics was totally without the possibility of sophisticated hand colouring.

I understand that a wider variety of available colours can give some colour artists greater freedom, but a limited palette is not such a bad thing and there is a lot of great art that has been created using a limited range of colours. The aesthetic of classic comics developed with the knowledge that only so much could be done with colour and therefore the penciller and the inker compensated for this in the kind of black and white art they produced. Often the penciller and the inker were also colour artists and they would put notes on the original pages for colorists to indicate what colour values to use.

With the switch from letter press to offset printing, it's now impossible for any reprint book to duplcate the kinds of colours that appeared inside those vintage comics. At best, colour reconstruction artists can approximate the colours. However, I don't think they should try to extend the colour palette and introduce a wider range of hues. Since, as I say, the original art was formulated to work with the colours available at the time; the black and white art looks how it does, because the penciller and inker knew how it was going to look once the production department added the colours for the letterpress priinting. To change the colour now is to in turn have some impact on the black and white plate of the art. They should try as best they can to present the art as it would have appeared originally and that means limiting the palette in the reconstruction.

[CrazyOldHermit]

The question of whether or not to recolor is one I struggle with. On one hand, I'm big on preserving history and the original color was part of that artwork. On the other hand, the remastered Watchmen and the Simonson Thor omnibus look amazing and to be honest I'm just not a fan of old school colors in general. When I look at the color in most old comics I see a compromise and I see coloring that isn't worthy of the artwork. But at the same time I know that artwork was designed for those limited colors with their maximum iconic appeal, so even if I don't like the colors the artwork probably wouldn't look as good with subtler hues.

On a related note, one of my most out there fantasies is to see Ditko's Spidey recolored with the funky palette of the 60s show, complete with psychedelic wet-on-wet watercolor skyscapes.

[ohmshalone]

A quick detour from the discussion on coloring: I also have Book 2 of Age of Apocalypse and I was shocked at how bad the quality was, even more so because it was from a company like Marvel. The line work on the Avengers Omnibus is crystal clear, while this X-Men TPB looks like some bootleg photocopied version. I'm not completely new to collections, but I don't collect Marvel much. I don't recall anything else I own looking so poor. Maybe I'm slowly getting used to a high standard that I didn't notice it before, I don't know...

[CrazyOldHermit]

A quick detour from the discussion on coloring: I also have Book 2 of Age of Apocalypse and I was shocked at how bad the quality was, even more so because it was from a company like Marvel. The line work on the Avengers Omnibus is crystal clear, while this X-Men TPB looks like some bootleg photocopied version. I'm not completely new to collections, but I don't collect Marvel much. I don't recall anything else I own looking so poor. Maybe I'm slowly getting used to a high standard that I didn't notice it before, I don't know...

If I'm not mistaken those issues were colored by computer and the files don't currently exist so all they have to work off of are scans. Or something like that. I know it's the same reason why the later X-Men Essentials are the colored versions in greyscale rather than the original B&W artwork.

[Jim Kelly]

Gray Morrow was the artist on the Spider-Man cartoon show. If you see some of his art in the comics, I believe he often handled the colours himself, because the colour palette on his art is unique and eye-catching.

A basic difference between classic comics and today's comics is in the shading. In vintage comics, the inkers indicated the shading through line weight, feathering, cross-hatching, etc. In other words the shade (and light) was in the black and white plate. The colourist didn't get in the way of that. Colours were just there to support the black and white art (I think of them as being background mood music). In today's comics, the colours are used to indicate the shading. I haven't bothered to compare, but I'd guess that today's inkers pull back on the amount of shading they do, because they know that the colour artist will do all that work.

I'm a fan of old school comics art and the skill of the inkers. So I don't like it when the colours in reprints overpower the work of someone like Dick Giordano or Murphy Anderson.

[CrazyOldHermit]

There has definitely been a shift in power from inker to colorist, to the point where the colorist is second only to the penciller in defining the aesthetic of the book and in the case of certain painted styles I would argue that they are the most important element.

You're right that inkers today don't do as much shading but thats because inkers today don't really do much. Gone are the days of an inker actually having a practical purpose. We are in the age of super tight pencils, where the pencillers draw everything right down to the freakin line weights and the poor inkers have to xerox it. We also live in an age where more artists are inking their own work, particularly the cartoonier artists. Of that crop I think one of the absolute standouts is Chris Samnee. His work with colorist Javier Rodriguez on Daredevil is stunning and IMO they do a great job of keeping the old school aesthetic with a modern twist.





When I think of the best modern coloring has to offer this is what I think of.

[banky]

Unsure, and according to Todd Klein (should have linked to his blog earlier, it's fascinating and everyone should read it) it wasn't really that useful on newsprint anyway. But on better quality paper this is what that same chart looked like:

Thanks for the link! My estimate was generous based on memory from another site. I think total colors varied dependent on printing company. 124-136 colors seems to be the ceiling in pre-digital era.

Regarding the debate on re-coloring; I feel the updated coloring on modern reprints is a huge plus. If I wanted to see old-school colors I'd just pull out the floppies. I can see the argument about the difference in terms of shading (cross hatching old school inking vs. modern gradient) but all the collections I've seen so far haven't obstructed linework in that way. Having worked in advertising on a trade publication which used an offset printer (color replication was often sketchy), I'm curious when the switch was made from letter press.

Regarding Age of Apocalypse 2 and some other poor quality trades; I think the fact that they used scans and had to compensate for artifacts explains the shoddy reprints. The worst I've seen were actual moiré patterns when the halftone screen was not properly compensated for.

Re; modern coloring of Samnee & Rodriguez. I agree that cartoonier artists have taken full advantage of digital coloring techniques to achieve a retro look. It's not to everyone's tastes but it works. The current trend toward tighter penciling, cleaner linework & coloring always makes me long for the darker, scratchier artwork from artists who used mixed media like Sienkiewicz, Mckean & Kent Williams.

[Jim Kelly]

If I wanted to see old-school colors I'd just pull out the floppies.

With anything before 1988, I prefer to have the original back issue. But let's be serious, a lot of us can't just pull out the vintage comic so easily as that.

One of the big reasons why I started buying ARCHIVES and other collected editions was to save myself the trouble of pulling out my vintage comics (if I had them). The bothersome thing was when I realized that those collected editions didn't actually reproduce the pages as they exactly appeared. I then had to pull out my back issues and compare--which defeats the whole purpose for me in having the collected edition.

Just pulling out the floppy is not that easy because 1) some vintage back issues are worth a lot of money and not all of us can afford them 2) if you have a high grade back issue, you don't want to decrease its value by pulling it out all the time 3) to pull out the back issue a collector has to go through his boxes, which can be a real headache.

One of the things that recommends collected editions is that the paper doesn't age as quickly as newsprint. I don't like high gloss, snow white pages--prefer the buff, off-white paper (see THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES for my favourite kind of paper for collected editions)--but I like to see the page looking like it's fresh from the printer. With even well-preserved back issues, the newsprint has aged and therefore you're not seeing the colour as it appeared when the comic hit the newsstands. That's one of the basic problems with scanning--you're scanning a page that has yellowed or browned and the scan isn't going to be as sharp for that reason.

[Great O.G.U.F.O.O.L.]

Personally I don't understand the virtue of keeping the original colors in old comics, in all cases. I've been reading the marvel masterworks volumes and Galactus original colors don't look good in his first appearance. Furthermore, they change in the very next issues without an in-story explanation. Keeping it that way it feels like the stories are treated like historical artifacts, meant to show the readers how they were when kids were reading them for the first time in the 60s, rather than valid stories, presented in the best way possible.

[CrazyOldHermit]

Personally I don't understand the virtue of keeping the original colors in old comics, in all cases. I've been reading the marvel masterworks volumes and Galactus original colors don't look good in his first appearance. Furthermore, they change in the very next issues without an in-story explanation. Keeping it that way it feels like the stories are treated like historical artifacts, meant to show the readers how they were when kids were reading them for the first time in the 60s, rather than valid stories, presented in the best way possible.

They are historical artifacts. The point of the Masterworks is to replicate the original issues in an archival form, warts and all.

[Great O.G.U.F.O.O.L.]

They are historical artifacts. The point of the Masterworks is to replicate the original issues in an archival form, warts and all.

I understand that point of view. I just wish there were alternatives (the masterworks volumes was just an example), like with Barks's stories, where Fantagraphics is reprinting them with the original colors, but I also have recolored editions (the Gladstone comic albums, foreign reprints etc.)

[Great O.G.U.F.O.O.L.]

Speaking of recoloring, I have found online pictures from Byrne's Man of Steel #1 where Lois is a brunette:

clark-kent-saves-plane.jpg

Yet in my Man of Steel trade she has the traditional post-Crisis brown hair. Was she a brunette in the original mini series and they changed it for the trade?