A recent post by Dave Sim here on A Moment Of Cerebus describing the difficulties he faces restoring Cerebus Vol 2: High Society seems to have touched a nerve with other comic-book writer/artists faced with the same prospect of reprinting their own artwork from the 1980s and 1990s.
COLLEEN DORAN:
(from the A Distant Soil blog, 19 June 2013)
...I’m sort of appalled at how badly many classic BW comics are
reproduced, particularly those which use original hand applied tones.
Much of the manga I’ve seen looks pretty awful, especially some of the
classic manga I bought more than five years ago. Many publishers just
didn’t have access to good scans of higher then 400 dpi. You really need
1200 dpi for this sort of work. In the 1990′s, my printer could not do
more than 400, and we opted for photo-reproduction instead. This was the
better option for BW printing at the time, but both Sim and I, and a
number of other creators, later found ourselves without those negatives.
Which was bummerific. This cost me about $20,000 in production work. The restoration, alas, will cost significantly more than that. I hope
you’ll take a look at my art sales HERE, and check out this most excellent book sale HERE.
Tone sheets are a unique holdover from the photographic printing
process. Art looks better shot from a negative. It’s very tricky to get
the pages to look good scanned on computer. But thanks to Allan, the
book looks better than it ever could have before. The technology simply
wasn’t up to the task 17 years ago. Where flaws showed up in my original tones, I went in and cleaned the
pages digitally (or Allan did,) and then I, pixel by pixel, picked out
the flaws. This was not funny.
Anyway, as you can see, getting good quality books to you isn’t just a
matter of scanning something and throwing it online, like your random
digital pirate. It takes hundreds and hundreds of hours of meticulous
labor. The restoration on Volume I of A Distant Soil took four people over 500 hours of work, and that’s just since November. It’ll be out next month! Watch for it!
(from The Comics Reporter, 26 June 2013)
...The ability of cartoonists and interested archivists to restore material
to publishable form is often assumed, and can be way more difficult
than initially realized due to all sorts of reasons including the state
of the original art, the ability to get to copies of older art from
which newer copies can be derived, and publishing effects that modern
publishing techniques are ill-equipped to facilitate. All of these
things can result in books that may be impossible to execute to one
hundred percent satisfaction, or that merely price themselves beyond the
resources of those seeking a new edition.
This isn't a a new thing. For instance, newspaper strip reprints have always had a lot of these problems, or similar ones. There aren't always copies available of every strip that people want to see reprinted, and features that ran in the post-War era were sometimes truncated and have material literally cut out of them on the right side or on the bottom to fit into shrinking places on the comics pages from which copies were clipped and saved. It's frequently a testament to the skill of people that help make these strips available, and the same goes for comic book work like Doran's, that we get a lot of the comics made available to us.
This isn't a a new thing. For instance, newspaper strip reprints have always had a lot of these problems, or similar ones. There aren't always copies available of every strip that people want to see reprinted, and features that ran in the post-War era were sometimes truncated and have material literally cut out of them on the right side or on the bottom to fit into shrinking places on the comics pages from which copies were clipped and saved. It's frequently a testament to the skill of people that help make these strips available, and the same goes for comic book work like Doran's, that we get a lot of the comics made available to us.
EDDIE CAMPBELL:
(from a comment posted on A Moment Of Cerebus, 26 June 2013)
Hey Dave,
The horrors just came back to me. I went through this with the big Alec book (as you can imagine). On one panel I replaced a wide background screen of tone dot by dot. I zoomed in big on the
computer screen and replaced a small area. Once I had a square 16 by 16 i copied and pasted and moved the copy sideways to cover the next 16 by 16, and then I had a big 32 by 32. etc. It was the only way I could think of to do it, and that one panel took a couple of days. I figured it was at least an interesting experiment. In the end I had it down to just four or five places in the whole book that had a moire pattern. When printed, a new one appeared that had been fine in all the proofing. But I was happy with the average in the end.
Best to you, old friend!Eddie Campbell
1 comment:
Self-publishers of the 90's unite against the Forces of Moiredor!
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