Go, Read: Colleen Doran On Restoring B&W Comics

The cartoonist Colleen Doran has an interesting post up here that I nearly missed save for her calling it to my attention on the problems with restoring black and white comics that depend on certain effects of tone. She is pivoting from a post by Dave Sim here.

The ability of cartoonists and interested archivists to restore material to publishable form is often assumed, and can be way more difficult than initially realized due to all sorts of reasons including the state of the original art, the ability to get to copies of older art from which newer copies can be derived, and publishing effects that modern publishing techniques are ill-equipped to facilitate. All of these things can result in books that may be impossible to execute to one hundred percent satisfaction, or that merely price themselves beyond the resources of those seeking a new edition.

This isn't a a new thing. For instance, newspaper strip reprints have always had a lot of these problems, or similar ones. There aren't always copies available of every strip that people want to see reprinted, and features that ran in the post-War era were sometimes truncated and have material literally cut out of them on the right side or on the bottom to fit into shrinking places on the comics pages from which copies were clipped and saved. It's frequently a testament to the skill of people that help make these strips available, and the same goes for comic book work like Doran's, that we get a lot of the comics made available to us.

 
posted 12:10 am PST | Permalink
 

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