Interested in process pieces? If you have the one of the most celebrated graphic novels of all time, what happens when you have to remaster it?
Corey Breen, senior pre-press artist at DC Comics and all-round nice guy, has written a blog post over at Master Digital Coloring detailing the whole experience of working on Absolute Watchmen. With 1980s artwork having to be reworked for an oversized format, it proved to be a tough process — here’s a highlight:
Since we no longer have the original art to older comics such as this, what we have are the pages in the film library. Back in the day, all our books were shot using film on acetate. Our film library has extensive books all on film, and when we need to reprint them, it is shot from that film, and made digital for us to use. But this poses a lot of problems. Since the film is well, film, and it is old, when you make a digital file from film, it can be dirty, have scratches, and have sections missing, depending on how well the film was originally made. This was the case with the Watchmen ‘film’ we wound up having to use.
Breen goes on to discuss the main theme of remastering Watchmen — not noir, but moire, an unsightly and jagged form of lines that unfortunately crops up with high-res images of old half-toned art. It’s a cool process piece, especially for anyone interested in the production side of comics. Give it a read!
