Digital Comic Museum
General Category => Comic Related Discussion => Topic started by: MAitchPrice on June 08, 2014, 08:35:46 PM
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Memo to Fiction House collectors: Mike Price, here, writing in connection with a project that Craig Yoe and I are contemplating for Yoe Books' Chilling Archives of Horror series at IDW Publ. We're considering the development of a 150-page anthology of the pioneering Ghost Gallery stories, as published in Fiction House's Jumbo Comics from issue No. 42 onward.
We wish not to distrupt anyone's valuable collections, but we do request that any owners of good-condition first printings consider providing us with high-res (300 DPI or greater) scans in TIFF files, actual size or larger, of whatever Ghost Gallery yarns might come to hand. (Craig and I have not yet begun to select specific stories; better to find out first what issues might be available from this seldom-seen magazine.)
We'll be looking to compile 10 or 12 of the eight- to 10-page Ghost Gallery stories.
Contributor credit will be given in print to all who participate.
Collectors can make contact via Facebook (page: Michael H. Price). The Ghost Gallery book will tie in, as well, with myForgotten Horrors series of movie-history books.
Craig and I look forward to hearing from anyone who can assist in the compilation.
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Hi, Mike! It's good to see you here.
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And thanx for the welcome. Glad to be here. Hoping to see some traffic on this search.
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Hi Mike,
I'll email you soon with a lead on the JVJ Jumbo issues scanned by Snard. Hge has his raw files still.
-Yoc
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And thanks for the memo. Looking forward to whatever develops. -- Mike Price
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Hi Mike,
I have forwarded you Snard's email.
Good luck!
-Yoc
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Yoc --
All thanks for your assistance in rounding up a selection of "Ghost Gallery" yarns for Craig Yoe's and my project. Most grateful. Restorations all but complete, and just now finishing up the accompanying manuscript.
-- Mike Price
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Congrats on this Mike and please let us know when it's available for purchase.
-Yoc
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Greetings, Aitch!
This is your horror friend Tillmann from Germany.
I sadly have no GG scans.
But if you should hit a dead end with Snard's existing scans, I might ask Jim V. if he can provide me with JUMBOS to scan.
First, however, someone should read the stuff and decide what to choose.
::)
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Tillmann --
And thanks to you for the memo. Craig Yoe and I are by now well-equipped with representative "Ghost Gallery" materials; two sets of restorations are in progress -- one, recapturing the weathered-page look; and the other, with more extensive color-correction and re-saturation, and with pure-white margins, more emphatic word-balloon placements, and crisper lettering. We are retaining the authentic captions and dialogue in both instances, of course. I've just now finished the historical text and identified the key artists and some of the assembly-line inkers. Just about to ship the Foreword, well ahead of deadline. The anthology should see publication by autumn.
-- MHP
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Hi Mike,
Sounds interesting! Will both sets of restorations be available to people?
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"Will both sets of restorations be available?" you ask... Smart question, and thanks for the show of interest. We'll probably go with the weathered-page appearance for the Yoe/IDW series, for the sake of consistency with the earlier volumes. I'll be stockpiling the leftovers for eventual use, possibly in my "Comics from the Gone World" series at Cremo Studios. I like both sets of versions about equally, but of course when restoring or reworking a page I cannot resist the temptation to beef up a weak panel border or correct a misspelling or an imbalance in the original hand-lettering/kerning/leading. Same goes for the clunky syntax and grammar of many such stories, which often were composed so hastily as to let the finer details slide. (I carry this approach to the extreme in most of the "Gone World" books -- replacing trite and overobvious dialogue with absurdities and Vaudevillian wordplay.) Our pal Tillmann Courth has written some insightful words on the "Gone World" project at the Fifties Horror site.
-- MHP
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Interesting! Thanks for sharing your thoughts on restoration Mike. Mistakes in the actual stories is not an area I had thought of. I was more wondering about the artwork side of it. Being frank, I've never been a fan of the DC/Marvel school of bleach white page backgrounds and much prefer the weathered look you mention. I can tell you how many times have I heard 'all the scans need is the musk smell of a 50 yr old comic!' There newsprint is part of the experience. Sure a reprint can't capture the smell but it could appear to be on newsprint. As an editor I try to lessen the yellowing or tanning of a book when it's excessive but I still try to leave it looking like it was printed on newsprint. I understand there are technical considerations for these collections but is there really a need for the bleach white and garish colouring of a typical DC/Marvel archive?
It's all in the eye of the beholder I guess.
Thanks again for sharing a please do feel free to elaborate on any of the aspects involved on producing such a collection.
-Yoc
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Yessir -- two schools (or more) of thought on the restoration issue, each with merit. I often deal with high-res scans from original artwork, but the greater volume lies in the mouldering newsprint, itself. My preference is to make the colors (or greyscale conversions) stand out more strikingly from the page, rather like framing a painting. When I have a full-bleed project, I'll probably go with the newsprint texture. Learned much of that approach, recapturing the look of the pulp page, from Bill Blackbeard, back when he and George Turner and I were still working with plates from the engraving plant.
When dealing with the no-bleed format, I lean toward the white margins and gutters and then reinforce the black borders with true blacks in regimented dimensions. Uniform framing is my preference, rather than the diminished borders that come as a consequence of the aging and deterioration of the newsprint. De gustibus, and all that, y'know. A full-color restoration requires several layers (notably, the separate layer for restored lettering), and a great deal of oversaturation (on one color layer, for example) to override the gamma-filtering that deepens the blacks. (Blues and red-blue dot-screen areas turn extremely muddy on those grainy newsprint pages when sufficient gamma-filtering is applied to pop the blacks.)
I ordinarily blur the dot-screens into a more painterly texture, often augmented with the standard filters (watercolor, embossing, etc.) at varying intensities according to the size of a panel. For this one set of the "Ghost Gallery" stories, I am preserving the coarse dot-screens but correcting the more remarkable color-bleeds.
Haven't really codified my proprietary process into a Restoration Manual, but probably will do so during the year ahead. It's basically a PhotoShop translation of the organic techniques I use when restoring damaged oils, acrylics, and watercolors for my gallery clients.
Just occurred to me to mention that my Foreword credits the Digital Comics Museum among our sources of encouragement and practical assistance for this "Ghost Gallery" effort. Would you like to be mentioned by your given name? Please advise.
-- MHP
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Hi Mike,
Fascinating stuff. I'm quite enjoying this and very informative. I've been helping with editing raw scans from others since late 2005. I've used three versions of PhotoShop starting with 6.0 and know the app as a tool is very powerful but I've never dug super deep into the guts of it or the theories behind how to make a page look as good as it might. I've always just gone by 'does it look good to my eye'. I've saved some Actions that I turn to and will try in combinations to try for the best I can get while not creating a super sized jpg. I've never tried using the watercolour or embossing filters. These days I've got more raw files than I can cope with so speed has become an issue. I can edit a typical Rangerhouse raw scan of 52pgs down to between 25 and 45mins depending on how beat up the original book is. I'll never be as good as JVJ, Darwination or Cimmerian32 are with their work but I can only imagine the time they (and you) must need to get such good results.
I hope you don't mind me rambling on here. One of the biggest jobs I ever had was correcting terrible colour registration problems in a scan of Fox's Phantom Lady #19. The printing was just awful in that book. This one took me months with long breaks between efforts on it. I kept thinking 'why isn't there a filter available that can correct these kind or errors?'
Do you you use a set font for the lettering or try to match it as close as possible and have several to choose from? If you do one day produce a Restoration Manual I'd Love to read it!
Thanks for the offer but everyone online knows me by my Yoc or full Yocitrus name. Including DCM in your forward is very appreciated. I think you will agree GA collectors and scanners are among the best people you could meet. Helping run this site and getting to know the people that are integral part of our GA hobby has given me immense pleasure since I joined the staff many years ago now. Long may we continue!
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Yoc --
And many thanks for the insights. My basic approach is to treat a comics page (deteriorated or not) with the same respect I bring to a gallery painting, whether original or a restoration. Art is art is art is art, just as there is only one Show Business, whether sideshow or honky-tonk or highfalutin' opera house. Your discovery of the PhotoShop filtering tools will prove immeasurably helpful, I believe. I keep several versions of PhotoShop in communion with one another, including some primitive (now antiquated) prototypes from 'way back when the studio was doing Carnival of Souls and Holiday for Screams for Malibu Graphics. Each has its advantages, and when harnessed together they can deliver results finer than any single program by itself.
When restoring lettering as a separate layer or separate file (the better to place a restored balloon within the final page), I try to work with the authentic material. Sometimes, this is impossible, owing to many factors that might include, for example, a layer of original coloring over a caption. This requires a higher density (400-600 d.p.i.) and a willingness to crank the Gamma (one stage), then lighten it with Contrast and the Lightening tool (one stage), then blur it (one stage) to remove traces of pulpwood distortion, and then sharpen it (one stage) and then adjust Gamma, Contrast, and Lightening (another stage) until pleasing to the eye (an instinctive judgment). A good desaturation, or bleaching, is the final step before an original balloon's lettering is ready to plunk into the correct place upon the final page. Misspellings, bad kerning and line spacing, and even poor grammar and bad syntax can be corrected (in the original letterer's own handwriting) by the Cloning tool or even a simple cut-and-paste procedure. I developed this technique several years ago when restoring my Prowler series (with Tim Truman, John Snyder, and Graham Nolan) for an omnibus edition; Tim Harkins' lettering was integral to the authenticity, but it required scattered corrections.
When applying original lettering, I use a customized keystroke edition of my own hand-lettering alphabet (I learned the craft from Ben Oda), in addition to several prefabricated fonts, modified in Real Time. Fanboy Hardcore is evocative but usually requires narrowing; its lower-case setting can yield the all-important lower-case "i" in places where an upper-case serifed "I" is inappropriate. A Leroy-style font (called Squa Tront, and best used in lower case) is available as a free download. The lowly and over-used MS Comic Sans can become a vibrant and evocative comics-page font if double-bolded and adjusted for kerning and narrowed line-spacing. (A single-stroke "i" can be found in MS Comic by using the lower-case "L.") Nothing beats hand-lettering on Strathmore, of course, but a digital-lettering job can be made to appear organic with patience and the right attitude.
A most delightful exchange of ideas, here. Thanks. And yes, the Digital Comics Museum will receive its due in the forthcoming volume. Your service to the field of research is irreplaceable.
-- MHP
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Thanks for elaborating on this Mike. I'm loving it.
Working on my edits for sharing on DCM feels like a walk in the park beside what you must have to do for printing requirements. Just doing the lettering sounds like a huge task! You worked with Ben Oda? Very cool! And you say you run several versions of PhotoShop? Interesting. Does this mean you have several computers or have you figured out how to run the older versions on newer machines? Having to upgrade software is one of the bigger reasons I'm always reluctant to migrate to newer PCs and operating systems. I'm still using an ancient PC running XP Pro here. The idea of jumping to Win 7 or 8 scares the heck out of me. (Being a cheap s.o.b. doesn't help either.) Running PShop CS5 on 1.5gig of ram can try ones patience.
For my edits I rarely have to worry about any of these things you obviously must dissect so closely. On some rare occasions like that Phantom Lady I mentioned, I've had to recreate lettering and yes, the clone tool is heavily used. Cloning is likely the heaviest used tool for me removing thumbs from page edges and the odd stain or ripped edge. Generally I've tried to preserve books as-is 'warts and all'. When working with Soothsayr he's sending out massive raw tiff files which need more work than a typical Rangerhouse scan. Colour correction is needed on a Sooth scan due to a green hot-spot created by the scanner on each spread. After a lot of trial and error I've managed to work out a fix using gradient fills with hue and lowered opacity. The unfortunate side-effect though is muting the overall colour of each page which I try to correct with curves and brightness/contrast tweaks. I might use the sharpen filter but that's about it from the PhotoShop filters section.
Perhaps I'm wrong but I'd gotten the impression that a typical comic today is almost entirely made on computer for speed and cost reasons. I'd figured hand lettering must be a mostly lost art.
What's your thought on books going digital with iPads and Comicology growing more important?
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Not much pondering going on here about digital books. I've licensed a few of my film-history books as iPad editions, but those have yet to outperform the printed-and-bound versions. No desire to see my art or my restorations reproduced as pixelized images. Tried that with one title at ComicMix in 2007 and was appalled at the loss of detail and lack of clarity. The flourish of the page and the weight of the binding are as key to the experience as the printed matter itself.
PhotoShop system here is all-in-one, although I do maintain a Virtual Machine (the ghost of a deceased favorite PC) within the new (2012) framework, which is kept deliberately off-line. Any techno worth his salary can install antiquated software on a newfangled platform. The primitive iPhoto+4 (a forerunner of PS) and PS itself do not like one another, but they can be made to commune against their will if kept in separate operating paradigms. Offline operation protects everything from Internet glitches and annoyances, and also from unwanted intrusions from the software manufacturers. Adobe is most annoying in its discouragements to offline installation, but the task can be accomplished with patience.
First step on any page is to achieve the right size (in CM or inches) and density, and then to create backup layers (or copies) for density, color correction, and restoration of lettering. The primary-source image takes a beating while the backup duplicates are there for cannibalization and experimentation. I generally go to about -45 Gamma, +30 Contrast, and -10 Lighten after a general blurring to minimize the internal rough edges; save that; blur again; resume Gamma at about +140, Contrast at +10, and Lighten at -3; save that; and then cannibalize the blues and blue-red dot-screen areas from one oversaturated layer or duplicate file. Basic steps, subject to interpretation and personalized style. The imperative is to Work Big (like 1.5X, I mean), or as big as the Memory Bank will allow.
And yes, you are correct: Computers have taken over. I resisted until about 10 years ago, then found that I enjoy the digital processes, which enable a lot of new work that might be otherwise impossible. Still keep quite busy at the drawing table, and in fact the new Prowler story (forthcoming as a bonus track in Leo Kragg: Prowler Vol. 2) is entirely organic, including the lettering. Same for a humor book that Todd Camp and I have in preparation called Stitches. Lost Art Forms are fascinating, but there is no excuse for allowing an Art Form to become Lost.
-- MHP
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Hi Mike,
Thanks for sharing a typical work flow for a page. I'll give it a try.
I'm always behind the curve on computer technology. Bleeding edge is too expensive and the thought of trying to reinstall or upgrade all my programs... well I put it off for as long as possible. Even when it's silly not to upgrade anymore. I've always been PC but all I've heard about Win8.1 isn't positive at all.
The print vs scan debate has shades of the LP vs mp3 one doesn't it? One aspect that so far hasn't been touched is the cost to readers. I've long felt comics have priced themselves out of reach as a cheaper form of entertainment. With less and less pages on much more expensive paper sold in less locations it's no surprise to me the number of readers has been shrinking for decades. How many generations have no exposure or interest in the medium now? But with digital I thought here is a chance to really reach the masses and do it at a lower price. But it's not happened yet has it? I'm sure as a creator you've got strong feelings on the economics of it all. Music, magazines and newspapers have been struggling to find the solution for a while now. An all-you-can-eat NetFlix sort of idea has been running for a bit in Canada called NextIssue but I don't know if they are making a go of it yet. The digital age must be a scary place for traditional media companies and workers. One aspect that worries me is the death of accredited reporting and news media being gobbled up by a select few. 24hr news channels have been bad enough but now it feels worse.... BUT, that's a whole other ball of wax.
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Yessir, well, speaking as one who keeps a hand in comics and music-making and egghead cultural scholarship, I've found that Hot New Trends are hardly what they used to be. Print will out, as will the physical handling and collecting of palpable objects of communication -- paper, vinyl, smartly packaged CD-albums -- even though the art of collecting itself has deteriorated into more a matter of hoarding. (Old-school collectors do not merely acquire; they amass meaningful objects and keep them in a practical array: Curatorial instinct, even among those who have no curatorial training.) The "collecting" of MP3 audio files or digital funnybooks only lends itself to chaos, for there is no physical beauty to array into a display. My digital files (works-in-progress, raw material, etc.) require special chronic handling and file-naming, lest they collapse in a heap of unnavigable data. The "Download" folder on one's hard drive demands frequent rearrangement and cleaning, accompanied by the transfer of kindred files into coherent thumb-drive collections (or "primitive" CD-ROMs) that can be filed physically as books or binders.
Haven't collected comic books, per se, in years. Too much like work, a second job that drains one's time and resources. If some publisher should exhibit the gumption to revert to newsprint at ten cents per title, then that industry would resurrect itself in short order. Reclaim the shirtsleeves audience. The contempt of Big Publishing toward comic books is demeaning and arrogant -- a dime's worth of entertainment each month for $5? Ridiculous. Small wonder that DC Comics is re-couching itself as an Entertainment Company and moving to Burbank. Even when overpriced, the funnybooks are now but loss-leaders, bound for extinction at the present rate. One can almost hear some bean-counter addressing the Board of Directors: "And why are we still publishing these pamphlets?" A return to genuine comics, reasonably priced, would cause a popular stir and re-justify a back-to-basics movement. One page of a Wayne Boring Superman story is worth the entire running time of Man of Steel.
Just my opinion, of course. Anyhow, keep up the good and valuable work. I am always pleased to make connections between the dedicated enthusiasts and the production sector. Used to do that in person and in Real Time as a comics-convention exhibitor and lecturer, but even the dear old comics-cons have deteriorated into show-business deal-making and costume pageantry.
-- MHP
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Got a point. Most of my comics are stored on CD's or DVD's, which are a lot lighter than the equivalent amount of paper comics and take up less space. Paper comics are about to die the death, but collections and gn's will still work.
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Good coherent storage -- that's the ticket. Just like maintaining an air-conditioner or a washing machine. I'm just on the point of regathering my last few original-material comic-book books (mid- to late-1990s) into one final TPB omnibus, with new material culled from hitherto unfinished stories from that period. A nice hefty 300-pager has a better plop-factor than an ordinary funnybook, anyhow.
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Sounds like you must have a very well organized collection there Mike. I'm envious.
I hope you're right about the future of print and media. The comics will hold on at least until the end of the Hollywood love-in with comics ends anyways.
GL with your new project!
:D
Careful with DVD/CDs there DM. They can get 'disk rot'. Saving on the now much more affordable HD's or flash drives is a better bet.
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Yaz um. Main storage now on a humongous Flash Drive. The CD- and DVD-ROMs will work as long as they work, and the shelf of binders looks fine in the studio. (Still got 30-odd years of newspaper and magazine bylines archived on floppy disks; gradually transferring those, insofar as they pertain to new projects.)
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Solid State Drives are coming down in price, no moving parts makes it an excellent choice for saving files/large files to store for longer times. I have a solid state drive on my laptop and it's strange not to hear it during startup.
Geo
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SSD's are still $$$ to my eye but I do love the idea of them. And completely silent?! Wow!
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A most excellent topic... thanks Mike and Yoc. I would be very excited if a Restoration Manual was produced !! I enjoy the “pulp” look of a comic and have been using PhotoShop to do some minor restoration to my scans. Thanks to Yoc and other scanners, I am learning more and would be very interested in a forum topic dedicated to PhotoShop techniques.
I did a reconstruction on a very damaged GA book using a Pixel by Pixel transfer of color from an undamaged section of art from the comic to restore damaged pages. Thanks to Yoc for a fiche page of the damaged pages, I was able to overlay the damaged page and “fill in” the art using PhotoShop. Very time consuming but I think it was worth the effort.
I agree, paper seems to be a thing of the past, but I still love to hold a book in my hand and “smell the pulp” ;)
Best of luck with your restoration projects. I look forward to hearing more about them.
Ed
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A fine contribution to a sequence of considerable interest. Mightily grateful for everyone's work, which also makes my research a great deal more efficient. -- MHP