I’ve mentioned the Hugo Tate re-issue a couple of times here before, but this Forbidden Planet blog post by creator Nick Abadzis is weirdly fascinating for the technical aspects of “repairing” original art so that it can be re-used:
When I pulled the original art out of storage a few years ago, all the pages from this section of the story were an archival disaster. I’d used a lot of zip-a-tone (or as we called it in the UK, ‘Letratone’) and this stuff hadn’t stood the test of time well. Letratone came in big sticky-backed sheets and you stuck it down over the area you wanted to cover and then cut out the bits that you intended to remain white with a scalpel. Every single page of O, America that had dotscreen tone on it (most of them) needed some kind of restoration work done.
Ink had also changed color – these are pages almost 20 years old, after all – or bled outwards over the course of time, and everything, it seemed, required some level of crack Photoshop touch-up in order to keep it presentable. “Photoshop and the advent of digital image manipulation technology makes undertaking this kind of meticulous work easier, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t laborious,” Abadzis notes, adding that “Realistically, it took me years, on and off.” Think about that next time you wonder why a collected edition of classic material ships a week or two late…
May 4th, 2012 at 12:21 pm
Interesting behind-the-scenes stuff.
I did a comic for my college newspaper in the mid ’90s. The black ink and duo-shade tones on the originals have turned a sickly yellow. And they were in storage away from light/heat.
May 13th, 2012 at 11:33 pm
Every single page of O, America that had dotscreen tone on it (most of them) needed some kind of restoration work done.
Campgrounds Georgia
May 14th, 2012 at 4:41 am
Graeme, thanks for the link to the FP blog, glad you enjoyed Nick’s guest post, it’s part of an occasional series called Director’s Commentary where I basically give the creators a guest spot to talk us through whatever aspect of their new book they want to, in their own words – if anyone wants to read more click on the Director’s Commentary tag at the bottom of Nick’s post to see the rest, some interesting creators in there (well I thought so!)