I have read a lot about Phantom Lady #17 over the years and was pretty excited when DCM finally got a hold of a copy.
It has a unforgettable cover, one of the greats in the history of comics. When I looked inside for the first time there was the great Matt Baker artwork. What I was not expecting to see was the terrible printing job! Color registration problems and red blotching. Overall terrible printing and on such a iconic book.
I have been involved with printing and pre-press for the past twenty-five years and have quite a bit of knowledge of Photoshop.
I decided to do a little experiment.
Actually it is turning out to be more than a little work.
For the past several months I have been taking each individual page for the infamous PL #17 and digitally fixing the botched printing job. I have not been recoloring the work. What I have been striving to do is keep the artwork as true to the original as possible while eliminating the horrendous mis-registered color (especially the red blotches) in the book. I have also tried to make the black less of a dark grey, more a rich black.
This has been a tremendous undertaking and has taken a lot of time.
I am a about 3/4 of the way through. I have thought about printing a few books off of DCM and trying to sell them. I never knew exactly what books to print. That is to say what books would appeal to fellow collectors and make it worth doing.
Now I think that I have found the book.
I plan on printing Phantom Lady on Exact Ice, acid free 70# acid free paper. 70# text is what I would call a real
"meaty" paper, nice and thick. It feels very luxurious and supple. A Cadillac instead of a Pinto.
I printed out a test book a while back with the few corrected pages and it does look very, very nice.
It is nice to read a book on your computer, but there is something about holding it in your hand and actually turning the pages.
What do you think would be a fair price to sell this book at? Would it be worth printing at all?
Any ideas?
I hope to put up some comparisons of a few pages of before and after pages for everybody to look at.
Yours,
B.