Marvel’s Dark Tower assistant editor, Nicole Boose is talking about the things that you won’t see in the upcoming first issue:
At the end of last week, we released Dark Tower #1 to the printer. The usual procedure goes something like this:
–We get all the material in from the artists
–We give it to our production department, aka “The Bullpen”
–The Bullpen puts it all together, along with the ads and covers
–We run it around to everyone who needs to review and approve it
–We send it back to the Bullpen for any necessary corrections
–Once all the corrections are completed, we send the final digital files to the printer
–The printer sends us a black-and-white final proof of the completed bookNormally, this last step is very simple because at this point, everything should be completely finalized. However, this step gives us a chance to notice any serious problems that might have been overlooked—for example, if the pages are out of order or we sent the wrong version of a page to the printer.
We very seldom make changes at this stage, because of the additional expenses for Marvel and the additional steps it requires in the printing process.
But because of the public attention to Dark Tower, we need to be extra careful with this one. So Marvel’s Print Logistics people, Amy Vandevender and Raphael Rodriguez, have taken additional steps to get us high-quality color copies of these final printer proofs before the books go on press, just to be extra sure.
So today, we had a chance to look over those proofs for issue 1. We also invited Jae Lee over to the office to take a look as well. Sure enough, Jae found something.
More in the link. It’s a fairly minor problem, but an insight into the attention that Marvel are putting into this spotlight book (and, in a strange way, the things that wouldn’t get noticed or changed on other books).
