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Underground > Comic Books >

Marvel graphic novel recolorings

at the scarwash

23:44 / 14.01.03

So I've bought the recent collections of the 60s Steranko Nick Fury, and the coloring has been redone. It seems to stay more or less true to the original schemes, except that the shading is smoothed, the blending is less harsh, and the palette made a little broader. These changes--do they essentially make these reissues a different work? Is it an intrusion upon the conception of the original colorists, or is it more akin to a simple crackle pop and stereo reimaging of a classic jazz 78 in a digital remaster (and is that example possibly also intrusive?). The original colorists were presumably conscious of the limitations of the four-color process, and worked within those restraints in composing these pages. No one would ever intrude upon the moody colors of The Watchmen or V is for Vendetta (Did Gibbons do all the coloring?), or any of the other great 80s Britisher comics (which I find to be the pinnacle of pre-computer comics coloring). Is this revision an improvement upon technological limitations, or a devaluation of the work of some of the most undervalued oarsmen in the Marvel galley?

01:05 / 15.01.03

I've noticed this too in some TPBs - Daredevil Born Again was one where I thought the original issues looked far superior to the book. There have certainly been others and I have wondered about this question just as you have. In particular, what of each issues' credits, where the colorist is listed but the actual colors don't represent their original work? Perhaps it is a printing/paper stock issue. I don't know. My personal feeling on this is that I don't mind coloring which varies from the original source IF the coloring is improved (I seem to recall a reprint of Giant Size X-Men 1 where the coloring was far more vibrant than the original I'd seen - again this could be a paper stock issue). Good topic.

02:00 / 15.01.03

I'm not sure who recolored the Scorpio collection but Estudio Fenix handled the Agent of Shield one. Steranko was none to pleased with the color reproductions and felt that Marvel produced a substandard work that would have looked better with more care. I don't think Estudio Fenix had the originals to work with though, since Steranko felt that Marvel was playing games with him; apparently, he was told a few different stories about the type of book being produced. I think the Scorpio book is the worst of the lot because it has some truly awful cover reproductions. You can see through one cover, the others are mostly muted, and then they reproduce a mistake on #2's cover that was originally made in the early 80s. I happen to own issue 2 and it's color scheme doesn't look like the one in the collection.

side note - they also, inexplicably, reproduce a lost panel on page 27, the panel only in black in white on the bottom right corner. The original is completely different. I can only assume that they had an earlier version of the page since the Comics Code had Steranko make at least one other change - they wanted the phone receiver on the phone.

I'd say that the color repros in the Nick Fury books is fairly poor and is certainly disrespectful of the original stories and to Steranko. The Steranko Visionaries collection is a better example of how these reproductions can be handled with good paper and respectful coloring that uses the advantanges of technology to add some power to older work. I think anyone involved in reproduction should follow a "First Do No Harm" approach and first attempt to reproduce the work as faithfully as possible. That won't always work though - see the troubles surrounding the reproduction of Crisis on Infinite Earths for details - and concessions should only be made in those situations. Still, i don't see how or why Marvel fudged the coloring on those Nick Fury covers .

09:56 / 15.01.03

I agree with Gergsnickle – good topic indeedy.

I recall that the Kitchen Sink reprints of Eisner’s Spirit in the 1980s tried to use the original colouring wherever possible, but that there were odd occasions where this wasn’t possible, and the difference was quite striking; perhaps because of the art originally being done for newspaper colouring, the new colouring looked somehow heavier, more as if it was cloaking the artwork, and so I preferred the original stuff overall.

But generally, I guess my approach would be one of whether the artist and/or original colourist are involved, or if the reproduction was so wildly far from the original intention that it in some way needs ‘mending’ (an example that springs wildly to mind was the UK title Mighty World of Marvel in the early 80s, whose first issue – reprinting the first part of the X-Men tale ‘Days of Future Past’ had such wonky colouring that all the colours were something like half a centimetre to one side of the lines the blocks of colour were meant to be within. Something like that would merit going back and fixing, to my mind).

As for Watchmen and V for Vendetta, the colourist on Watchmen was John Higgins, a very good artist in his own right, who – in my opinion – has never really received the exposure/acclaim he deserves, and I’d guess that his creative input on Watchmen, allied with Alan and Dave’s vision, was an important part of making Watchmen the cohesive work it is. If memory serves, John actually painted the backgrounds of the french Watchmen portfolio plates over Dave’s pencils, but I might be wrong on that (not the US portfolio, which had the covers, the french one which had the different european covers).
And V for Vendetta was originally in black and white in the pages of Warrior, and there was much worrying (…) about it being reprinted in colour, though David Lloyd supervised the colouring, I understand, and I think it came out very well – which I guess might be in some way an example of the benefits of re-involving the people who were involved at the start ? Dunno. Offhand, I can’t think of any reason why it would hurt…

DBC

12:50 / 15.01.03

If some TPBs werent recoloured I probably wouldn't buy them. The main reason for this is that during the 80s they used that 'dotty' shading. Coloured dots printed on top of a solid coloured background. It was okay but as soon as you notice the dots you can't turn the dots off! It used to happen when reading my Transformer weeklies and it was very annoying.

at the scarwash

04:27 / 16.01.03

Right, right, but those dotty shadings (aren't they called "screens" or sommat?) were a useful technique for applying even tones and gradations across a page, much more quickly than say, pen and ink stippling or cross hatching. And as they were one of the most used artistic media witin comics, they were part of the ongoing dialogue between the various techniques used at the time, and hence played an integral part in the evolution of comics illustation. If a title is to be collected based on its merits as a classic of the genre, shouldn't it be preserved in an as original state as possible?

at the scarwash

04:28 / 16.01.03

But then again, you were talking about Transformers.

14:16 / 16.01.03

How can I argue with such a strong case for the validity of using dots! As a personal preference I still don't like them though.

Incidently, the Transformer graphic novels have been reprinted dots and all, hence collecting the issues based on their merits as a classic of the genre, and preserved in an as original state as possible.