I may have been a bit unkind to the IDW editorial team in my review of their Carlos Ezquerra Complete Collection Volume 1. I was bothered by how the original pages that were printed in colour in the Prog were poorly reproduced in the book with huge areas of black obliterating any detail. It turns out that those problems may pre-date the IDW book.
Let’s start with a scan from the original Fungus story in an actual copy of Prog 277.
Some nice detail visible on the two judges, their bikes and the Fungus infected victim.
Now here’s that panel from the recent IDW book:
All very blocky blacks with a lack of detail. But here is the same panel from my iPad version of The Judge Dredd Case files 6:
Which, allowing for my reproductive efforts, is just the same. So the fault would seem to lie further back with the plates used for the Case Files volume in 2006. I know next to nothing about the reproduction of classic comic art in new volumes but it would seem to me that a little more effort could have been made to the black and white rendering of original colour pages. For comparison here’s what my crappy scanner made of the colour page when I set it to B&W and fiddled with the settings a bit:
OK, it’s not perfect but there is a lot more detail visible. Anyway IDW are not completely off the hook as they did miss out the last page of the final story in the book.
Anybody who knows more about the plates used to produce these collections and the processes involved, do please get in touch.
Eamonn
Yeah I had a quick go from your scan (median to remove the moire, then keying out the colours)
My background is 3D/Video rather than print, so I’m presuming there are quicker/more elegant ways of cleaning it up.
It’s a shame they just went what looks like the existing scans for what is supposed to be an artist’s collection.
Steve Cook has an amazing selection of colour covers – no spreads though.
http://secret-oranges.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/2000AD%20Production%20Art
Nicely done. It is possible then. Wonder why they didn’t ?
I don’t know. It could have been they didn’t think it was possible, or didn’t have the time/money to remove colour from the spreads when they did the originals, and that’s just got passed on rather than taking another look at the best way to present them.
It would be nice to have a rolling restoration of what amounts to a limited number of colour centre spreads.
In a perfect world it’d be great to re-scan the original art, but a better clean-up of the prog seems a tad more realistic.
You can’t beat the original versions printed in 2000AD!
I under stand the problems 2000ad is having with reproduction and it started with leaving IPC, who were very experienced publishers, I worked in a printers when a lot of printers were changing from analogue to digital and if you not clear the old processes, you can really down grade the quality of analogue printing materials.
Rebellion did save 2000ad but they don’t appear to know how to use their own archive.
They have been scanning the printed comics since 2003 or their abouts, when they should be scanning the transparencies separations in their archive in both black & white and color.
This can be seen in all their current line of colour graphic novels, most were scanned from the 2000ad comic, just compare the current Slaine the horned god printing to the 1990 GN printing, you will see that it is darker and more blurred, because you can directly scan and print, you have to remove the tiny dots first before reprinting , otherwise you will see patterning in the new print, and the only way to remove the dot is to blur.
What 2000ad need is an experienced print maker to show them how to correctly archive the stuff they have in their warehouse digitally, its not just about scanning, its about knowing the correct scan resolution & file formats for reproduction.
All the 2000 ad material after 2002-04 was handled digitally so these problems do not accrue.
I love 2000ad & print making and it pains me to see a lot of the beautiful colour work from the 90’s not looking its best in the new graphic novels.
The above black & white reproduction in the idw book is pure lazy reproduction and probably scanned & filtered by batch scanning, nobody checked the results until the printed book I bet.
OK rant over
I under stand the problems 2000ad is having with reproduction and it started with leaving IPC, who were very experienced publishers, I worked in a printers when a lot of printers were changing from analogue to digital and if you not clear the old processes, you can really down grade the quality of analogue printing materials.
Rebellion did save 2000ad but they don’t appear to know how to use their own archive.
They have been scanning the printed comics since 2003 or their abouts, when they should be scanning the transparencies separations in their archive in both black & white and color.
This can be seen in all their current line of colour graphic novels, most were scanned from the 2000ad comic, just compare the current Slaine the horned god printing to the 1990 GN printing, you will see that it is darker and more blurred, because you can directly scan and print, you have to remove the tiny dots first before reprinting , otherwise you will see patterning in the new print, and the only way to remove the dot is to blur.
What 2000ad need is an experienced print maker to show them how to correctly archive the stuff they have in their warehouse digitally, its not just about scanning, its about knowing the correct scan resolution & file formats for reproduction.
All the 2000 ad material after 2002-04 was handled digitally so these problems do not accrue.
I love 2000ad & print making and it pains me to see a lot of the beautiful colour work from the 90’s not looking its best in the new graphic novels.
The above black & white reproduction in the idw book is pure lazy reproduction and probably scanned & filtered by batch scanning, nobody checked the results until the printed book I bet.
OK rant over
It’s not just the colour pages that are causing problems. Sometimes it seems that the nearest file to hand is used for reprinting rather than going back to the original. Both Flesh Book 1 and Shako have some pages reprinted using the re-sized versions created for the reprints in the old Fleetway annuals. The annuals occasionally missed a title page with a new caption added at the top of the page to cover missing action. In Shako the original title page has been re-introduced (at original size), but the caption has been left from the annual reprint. The episode of Flesh that begins with a full page of the giant furry spiders creeping into the dormitory now has the spiders hissing where previously they were silent.
The JD Case Files reprints are mostly at the original size, bar the 3 Error of Judgement stories. What’s worth noting is that Case Book 5 first edition used the resized pages for Brain Bolland’s Block Mania episode (with way too much black, and poorly drawn panel extensions at the top of the page. However, these were replaced with much better prints, at the correct size, for later reprints, suggesting that somebody is aware of the problem.
A new problem that was introduced with the Zenith reprint is the removal of the ‘Next Prog’ caption. This has led to a trimming of the panel where the caption appeared. This is most evident in the Mek-Files Vol 1, at the end of Kevin O’Neill’s Deadlock episode, where it looks as if the artist thought it would be acceptable to draw only the top half of Deadlock’s head.
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