Mid-Week Update #17(b) - 'Cerebus' & 'High Society' Reprinting

Previously on 'A Moment Of Cerebus':

Dave Sim, working with George Peter Gatsis, has remastered the first two collected volumes of Cerebus to restore details and quality in the artwork lost over the thirty years since they were originally published (as detailed here and here). After Cerebus' original printer Preney Print closed its doors, Dave Sim moved his printing to Lebonfon in 2007 as at that time they were still capable of working with photographic negatives and making printing plates as Preney had done. And then Lebonfon switched to digital scanning and printing - a technology which struggles to faithfully reproduce Cerebus' tone without creating moire patterns (as detailed in Crisis On Infinite Pixels). Dave Sim continues to work with Lebonfon to ensure the print-quality of the new Cerebus and High Society editions (as detailed in Collections Stalled). Now read on...

--  FAX TRANSMISSION --

12 February 14

Alain Auberge
IMPRIMERIE LEBONFON
c/o Patrick Jodoin

Bonjour M. Auberge!

Thank you for your phone message this morning. Very much appreciated.

I'm afraid that after not much happening for months things changed -- potentially -- last Friday when Sean Michael Robinson suggested that there might be a better way to produce digital files in the restoration of CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY, so I now have to examine that possibility at the A MOMENT OF CEREBUS website which I will be initiating THIS Friday.

TENTATIVELY, I think the way to avoid another situation of the printing not matching the proofs is to print ONE of the problem signatures George Gatsis has worked on and see if it now matches the 600 dpi digital proofs or if the same problem(s) exist that did when the unbound books were printed.

Except now I think it makes sense to see if the same signature can be produced by Sean Michael Robinson's suggested method and to compare all three: the original unbound copy, the 600 dpi proof, George Gatsis' method's signature and Sean Michael Robinson's signature.

I regret that with both books being out of print for close to two years now, I'm unable to justify devoting more than an hour or so every Friday to trying to "move things along" since I don't really make money from CEREBUS at this point.

I also can't really justify spending time on the phone with everyone concerned and then reporting what they said to everyone else and then reporting back to them what everyone else said. Discussing progress at the A MOMENT OF CEREBUS website seems the easiest way to keep everyone -- including all the fans and readers and stores that have been waiting so patiently -- informed about what is going on.

I appreciate your understanding of the tres dificile situation in which I find myself and look forward to reading whatever you might have to say to me, to Diamond and all the CEREBUS fans and comic stores who support both our businesses regarding the situation as you see it at this point and what you envision Lebonfon's role being in making further progress.

Merci!

Dave Sim

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Originally serialised within the pages of the self-published Glamourpuss #1-26 (April 2008 to July 2012), The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond is an as yet uncompleted work-in-progress in which Dave Sim investigates the history of photorealism in comics and specifically focuses on the work of comic-strip artist Alex Raymond and the circumstances of his death on 6 September 1956 at the wheel of fellow artist Stan Drake's Corvette at the age of 46.