Tuesday 18 June 2019

Positives, It's all Positives Around Here



Sean Michael Robinson:

Hello all!

Cerebus uber-fan and collector Steve Swenson recently sent me some very interesting images of a few items in his collection, and I thought I'd pass them on to you all.

I'm sure you recognize the image, but any guesses as to what the actual objects are?






Above, you can see Steve's hand as he demonstrates how all three of these pieces of film interact. Yes, you guessed it, these are color positives made by Preney Print & Litho for the purposes of proofing the cover of Cerebus Issue #26.

After they shot the artwork for the cover, they would have used these printed color separations to take a look at the cover without having to make any plates. In this case, given the additional elements that needed to be added and given they had just taken over the printing of the book, I'm guessing that this was both a demonstration to their new client of the separations, and possibly also a tool to aid the stripper in adding in the additional elements (logo, issue number, etc).

Just for fun (and for Steve!), here's the elements added back together in Photoshop, using "Multiply" as the blending mode, so you can see how the image progressed. Note, this process isn't perfect, as the different transparencies were scanned at slightly different exposures...

Here's the black plate only:


And now the magenta added on top of the black:


Adding the cyan now:


And finally, the yellow on top!


Whenever  we get to the end of the Cerebus restoration project, and I finally get to put together the long-fabled Cerebus "Miscellaneous" volume, I'll be doing this process many, many times, as I use the existing Epic production negatives to recreate the pages that we don't have original art scans for. As opposed to these color positives, those are actually negatives, each neg representing a black-on-clear toned image. Should be fun (or "FUN")! :)

Thank you to Steve for sending these images, and for his many years of help and nerdy printer watercooler chat!

10 comments:

jonbly said...

There's a long-fabled "Miscellaneous" volume? How long have you been fabling this?

Sean M Robinson said...

Dave has been talking about it for more than a decade :) the old Yahoo group even put together a team to assemble potential lists and running orders.

Tony Dunlop said...

Glad you seem to be on the mend, Sean. Yoah plagenta ain't outta whack no moah, anh?

And see the recent We Talk Comics interview to hear Dave himself explain why the Miscellaneous volume won't see the light of day any time soon.

JLH said...

I would've thought IDW could've done a Cerebus Miscellaneous. I guess the Covers book really did that poorly (though considering how much money IDW is losing on publishing, it's not surprising).

Michael Battaglia said...

JLH said...
"though considering how much money IDW is losing on publishing, it's not surprising"

Am I right in thinking there's a direct correlation to Ted Adams stepping down as CEO and the company taking massive losses? Either way, I think that guy is great and I'm interested to see how his new Clover Press venture fairs.

Jeff said...

Can somebody (Matt?) fill us in here about IDW and Mr. Adams? Ted, that is? I thought that IDW was a pretty good idea and a growing company.

But, then, what do I know? I'm just an increasingly obsolete old fart, wafting away on the wind.

Michael Battaglia said...

@Jeff -- most of it is available online. I'm not sure that Matt would have any greater insight into it than what is already out there.

Of note: Ted just recently launched Clover Press, which will focus on publishing boutique lit. The aesthetic they seem to be angling for reminds me a lot of Tom Devlin's old Highwater Books, which in and of itself seemed to be somewhat inspired by the now-defunct Black Sparrow Press. Either way, it's very exciting, because this type of publishing seems to have otherwise vanished over the past ten years. The world needs more cool stuff.

Michael Battaglia said...

@Jeff --
Perhaps I spoke too soon... I just received an email from Clover saying they aren't going to be publishing much prose. Maybe I'm the one wafting?

Jeff said...

Well, as a wise old man once said, "We shall see what we shall see."

Steve said...




...well, I thought the film proofs were interesting...


Steve