Phantom Lady 17 enhanced and corrected book and possibly printed

[bminor]

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.

[Snard]

Hi,

I wish I'd known you were interested in doing this. The scan that is posted here is mine, which I did after purchasing said book for another collector. I still have the raw, unedited scans, which are much higher resolution than the final files (I did the scan at 600dpi). Note that the front & back cover is from Heritage, since the issue I scanned had a huge piece of binding tape on the cover to reinforce the binding.

If you think you would be interested in the raw files, send me a PM and we can work out the details.

  - Snard

[RJ Bowman]

Maybe you could make the book available through a print-on-demand service.

[tbdeinc]

I looked at the archive and all I found was 4 issues of PL... where is 17?

[tbdeinc]

ok.. never mind... found it.

[builderboy]

bminor,

This was exactly what I had done with my editing of Jo-Jo Congo King #24.  Fox's budget printing job botched the artwork totally.  It took me weeks to painstaking fix the mis-registrations and over-pressured plate markings and stray ink blobs.

A work of passion...thanks for doing it bminor.

[bminor]

Snard, Thanks for the cd! It arrived last Saturday. Love that original cover with the brown packing tape spine!.
I think there will be at least 1-2 hours editing on each page when this project is all done. I am just about done though, on page 28 of 32!
Whether I redo it all on your hi-re scans Snard (which are beautiful hi-res scan by the way) is another question.
I am such a perfectionist though I imagine I will break down and re-edit the whole thing.
Your pal in comics.
BMinor