Reproduction issues and discussion in trades

[Magnetica]

I think we probably need a separate thread on the reproduction issues. I think there are a few different things being discussed here which are wider than the Mega Collection.

1) Re-production on the Mega Collection.

Personally I am perfectly happy with it. Let's take Trifecta as an example. I think someone said the reproduction on the Simping Detective was poor. Well I have just compared it to the original Progs and it looks perfectly fine to me in terms of quality.

There is an absolutely minuscule amount of cropping of the art on the full page Henry Flint Dredd pages, presumably due to aspect ratios. I have noticed this before, but I guess it is bound to happen as the Prog has varied in aspect ratio over the years where as the Mega Collection books are all a standard size. It really makes no material difference and is only noticeable when comparing it with the Prog at a fine tooth comb level of detail.

2) Loss of quality / resolution in general.

I think IndigoPrime has done a good job explaining this one, and I accept that. To me it is all about expectations. The one that rankles with me - and I know its not a Rebellion publication - is the IDW Complete Brian Bolland Judge Dredd volume.  I bought this as I absolutely love Bolland's art and the whole point was to have a good quality copy of it.  But it seems to me it suffers from murky reproduction in places e.g. Father Earth - especially that page with the droids watching the election and isn't quite what I thought I was buying.

3) Poorly printed copies. This is a totally different thing and not fundamental to the argument as to whether a good source has been used. And as others have said Hachette are good at replacing stuff.

4) Loss of next prog text boxes.

Now this one I don't get. This surely is different to whether the available source is good quality. The Mega Collection sometimes seems to include them and in other volumes takes them out. Personally I would rather see them retained but guess it goes hand in hand with whether the logos are retained. I would guess they are retained when the original Prog had double page spreads e.g. The Cursed Earth and OZ, and are otherwise dropped.

I actually don't mind except:
- on Zenith they added something
- so long as their removal does n't crop the art work. With Zenith it didn't (well almost) but in the Mek Files, they seem to have cropped some of it "quite a lot" It is that aspect that I don't understand. Why do it? I can't see that has much to do with the quality of the available source, more a conscious decision was made at some point to crop.  Again it is about expectations:

It's also worth noting that The Mek Files aren't a 'complete ABC Warriors' series in the same vein as the Case Files and aren't listed as such - they're just nice hardcover reproductions of the main stories - so sorry if that's caused any confusion here. The Solo Missions collects one-off and sidebar stories in much the same way as the Restricted Files do for Dredd.

and that is the point - when I got the Mek Files I wanted "a nice hardcover re-production" and actually on the whole it is, just with a few examples of over cropped art work which annoys more far more than it probably should, especially as I also have the non cropped Titan volumes. (Ironically I am less bothered about the reproduction on the Black Hole).


On a separate note, I agree the Mega Collection is good value. The Trifecta TPB is twice the price and doesn't include Family Man, which is actually pretty important to it.

[IndigoPrime]

To follow up on a couple of points, sometimes the loss of 'next prog' boxes in pre-digital material is also down to the sources used. Collected editions often omitted them, and now those editions are in some cases the best remaining source for repro and clean-up. In the digital era, things are rather different, because it's often a case of clicking a button to 'lose' the page furniture. This has caused some problems in the past (mostly notably with the original Red Tide, which managed to lose a bunch of its captions and dialogue balloons as well), but broadly speaking works fine for modern fare that's written with collection in mind.

Bringing up IDW is an interesting case, and it highlights Rebellion versus another indie. If anyone here has seen the Transformers Classics series, they'll know bad things could be. The UK run has an additional page gutter around the gutter, making the reproduced comics absurdly tiny in what's already a US-sized trade. (The actual repro is frequently poor, too, with tons of moire.) And then there's the US collection, which had some kind of bizarre filter whacked over the entire lot. The dot patterns are eradicated in favour of solid colour everywhere, but the inks are muddied to hell at the same time.

There have been issues in Rebellion reprint. Some of the old Dredd doesn't fare too well, and nor do some classic black and white series, which have levels ramped up too high, thereby losing some of the fine details. But looking at other reprint from the same era, I'd say Rebellion's doing better than most.

[Magnetica]

Re the Next Prog boxes, yes thanks for explaining that - it makes a lot more sense now.

[The Monarch]

I think the only time i got irked by missing repro was the removal of the various bits of flavor text in nikolai dantes early trades...i don't even know if that was ever fixed

Oh yeah and the eurocrash gn but thats not for this thread....

[IndigoPrime]

That happened only in the new version of the first trade, and the explanation was something to do with appealing more to the US audience. I've no idea if it was ever changed back.

FWIW, Robo-K33F posted the following on this subject in the Mega Collection thread:

To the people complaining about repro/removed elements: as far as I'm aware, reprint at Rebellion works on the basis of the best available source. In a lot of cases for pre-digital strips, the art's no longer available. The originals are long gone and the films are too damaged to be usable. That leaves the option of scanning the comics (which is often not viable, due to the nature of the original printing, moire, and so on), scanning from a collected edition (typically better), or in some cases using films from later editions.

In a perfect world, there would be a complete, pristine set of prints of every single thing 2000 AD ever printed. The reality is, we get what we get, which has usually involved a significant amount of unseen clean-up and attention.

Spot on IP.

Funnily enough I have been approached by several readers who hate it when the next prog boxes are included. They feel it upsets the flow of the story in a trade. Swings and roundabouts innit...

Knowing what goes into getting some of the older stories ready for publication, I believe that Kat-Scan is the real unsung hero of the 2000 AD team.

My only gripe is when we have to greyscale colour pages because of (mainly) financial constraints. I understand why it has to be done though and it does mean I get to release material that otherwise would probably never see publication again.

I agree regarding Kat-Scan. Cleaning up old comic pages is not simple (I once tried to do this with Zenith, for a POD collection I was going to make for myself, and also UK Zoids — moire was always a huge problem, as was the lack of pristine originals). And while there have been issues in the past (Red Tide's lost captions; one of the Kingdom books being oddly jaggy; some loss of detail in black and white art), the majority of the trades have been really good, and better than the majority of the competition. It's funny to think that I once hoped Rebellion would be able to match the stunning Dark Horse hardbacks for the likes of Kingdom of the Wicked and Scarlet Traces, and now we have the likes of Brass Sun.

EDIT: It's also worth noting that some of the problems occurred way back — the Red Tide cock-up, for example, wasn't down to any of the current staff.

[glassstanley]

This is an example I've used more than once on this forum, but it's worth repeating. The original printing of Case Files 5 included a very poor reproduction of the final episode of Block Mania, which had been extended at the top or bottom of the page by an unknown artist. I happened to come across a later edition and all bar one of the pages had been replaced with much better quality pages. Only one wasn't changed and so (for reasons I cannot fathom), the image was squished slightly so it was the same height & width of the others.

At the end of the day, the Next Prog boxes aren't deal breakers for me (though it seems to be a waste of someone's time to remove them from the older strips). There are some improvements that could be made to the older editions of the Case-Files, even if it's just replacing a jpg in the digital file. Bolland's Father Earth strips really suffer for some reason, and it seems to be a problem that's been introduced in the preparation of the Case-Files (not deliberately, I hasten to add). Someone has also mentioned the missing page of the Fink strip, which would again could be amended. I understand that these problems took place years ago, but those files are the current 'go to' ones, hence they re-appear in the Mega Collection reprints.

In most cases the pages are available in Titan reprint form and a scan from these would provide a better image which could be introduced into the digital archive for future reproduction.

I'd also like to see the contrast fixed with some of the current reprints so that we don't lose as much detail as we currently are. For example, in the scene in Ro-Jaw's Memoirs outside the house of the family that adopted him, Mike Dorey drew a whole street which is now just a black blob in the recent hardcover reprint.

The one thing that has baffled me is the Judge Dredd logo in every strip in the 10th Anniversary Case Files 1. Every strip as originally printed had the little white squiggle on the 'J' to make it look like a Judge in profile. This squiggle has been removed for every strip in the reprint. Wish I'd  been paid to do that

At the end of the day, I think that a  lot of work goes into the reprints and I appreciate that there are issues with original sources. I appreciate there are time pressures as well, and it isn't always possible to find the best possible copy of a strip. I just wish that some of the more obvious problems could be revisited at some time.

[Jim_Campbell]

EDIT: It's also worth noting that some of the problems occurred way back — the Red Tide cock-up, for example, wasn't down to any of the current staff.

I think you'll find it was almost certainly MOLCH-R's fault.

Cheers!

Jim

[jrdd]

Firstly, and importantly, my thanks to Rebellion on their trade line - as someone who never really got the point of buying trade collections I've been impressed over the years and am now struggling for shelf space...

Like Magnetica said I don't mind the absence of 'next prog' boxes too much, as long as the art doesn't suffer for it.  What irks me is missing story logos, titles and end-captions.  Not so much where individual stories are collected on their own, but more so in Case File collections where distinct stories are collected together.

At a minimum surely the logos and titles should be shown for the first episode of a story, and the end-caption for the last?

Otherwise we have presentation like that in the Psi Files 4, which has a large run of Arthur Ranson art (in itself not a bad thing of course!) where it's impossible to find where one story starts and another ends.  Same for the Megazine material in the Case Files.

I just don't understand presenting it in that style.  I've got a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's Of Time And Stars which collects twenty or so of his short stories, but they each have titles, it's not just 200 pages of continuous text.  I also think with something like the Case Files part of the attraction is seeing how the presentation changes over the years.

While we're talking trades I also have to mention missing stories...  Rebellion are 99% of the time very complete and comprehensive in their approach, but there is the odd frustrating exception.  *cough* Sinister Dexter *cough* - complete SD Case Files pleeeeease!  It's really worth reading in one lot.

I hope this doesn't come across as too much of a complaint though, as Rebellion have released some stunning collections and look like they have exciting plans for this year - I can't wait and it's very much appreciated.

[TordelBack]

I think you'll find it was almost certainly MOLCH-R's fault.

That makes it sound like he made a mistake. When in fact all issues with everything are deliberately engineered because he hates us all, and lives only to further show his disdain.

[ZenArcade]

S'true man. Z

[Jim_Campbell]

That makes it sound like he made a mistake. When in fact all issues with everything are deliberately engineered because he hates us all, and lives only to further show his disdain.

Oh, you've met him, then?

Cheers!

Jim

[IndigoPrime]

At a minimum surely the logos and titles should be shown for the first episode of a story, and the end-caption for the last?

This stems from a period when the Meg had full-page intros for every strip, every issue. Perhaps it would have been better to include one at the start of each strip, but you can bet people would have griped about the reduced strip count in those books had that happened. (Note that I'm also not a fan of the collections where this happens. In the Dredd volumes, it looks very odd. I'm not sure what the best solution would have been though.)

[Tiplodocus]

OK, I admit it. I'm a jaffa.

[Dash Decent]

...okay...

(Humour him guys and move towards the exits slowly.)

[Dash Decent]

OK, I admit it. I'm a jaffa.

That's probably why there aren't any more dinosaurs.