Seeing the news on this, I have to admit to being a tad torn. Including the colour spreads makes it a bit tempting but then again the Titan Hardbacks (missing poppy notwithstanding) are a thing of beauty. Now if Rebellion had decided to release a hardback 100th Anniversary edition with the colour spreads, as a box set even, then I'd have my slightly well worn kidney on eBay in a heartbeat.
This the perfect edition for me, happily, having been sorely tempted by the Titans but unable to scrabble up the cash for the first few at the time. Can't wait.
I'm afraid the Titan editions, with all their commentary and whatnot, are the perfect ones for me, and they sit happily on the shelf and won't be replaced by new editions any time soon. Colour bits or not.
SBT
The Titan editions are beauts, but I always though the covers were too academic. They certainly don't advertise the content, lapsed readers could easily pass them by.
There's one book of the Titan collections - I think book four but I'd have to check (it's the one with Blue) - where the reproduction seemed a bit below par. Considering the later books looked excellent (as did Titan's one and only omnibus), I'm really hoping these new editions will fix that.
Aye, there are some muddy pages in volume 4. To be fair to Titan, they did print a disclaimer that sourcing the material meant that quality was likely to be somewhat variable. I'm not sure a new edition would sort that. Am I right in thinking that comparisons between Titan and Rebellion have not always been favourable?
I do take your point maryanddavid with regard to the covers. There is a risk with the choice made that fails to convey the dynamism for a new audience, never mind capturing old readers who need a bit of a visual prompt to remind them. Then again, does it not convey the seriousness of the material?
Quote from: Tjm86 on 31 October, 2017, 08:33:14 AM
Am I right in thinking that comparisons between Titan and Rebellion have not always been favourable?
Yes, you'd be right. And understating the situation!Although, to be fair, it's mainly the early Rebellion reprints that doubled up the Titan reprints. The Treasury reprints have been well done. Just frustrating that Leopard from Lime Street has a quality reprint, while Bolland Dredd and B&W Slaine... doesn't.
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Can someone illuminate me as to if there is a link for more news on this? I'd like to know what format these are being released and in how many volumes...and when. I have just over half of the Titan collection but would consider picking this collection up instead. I do enjoy those hardbacks, however.
Quote from: Tjm86 on 30 October, 2017, 06:09:23 PM
Seeing the news on this
Where did you see this news? Google has failed me...thx
Try the forum search option! (http://forums.2000ad.com/index.php?topic=44880.msg972479#msg972479) :D
Quote from: Tjm86 on 31 October, 2017, 08:33:14 AM
Aye, there are some muddy pages in volume 4. To be fair to Titan, they did print a disclaimer that sourcing the material meant that quality was likely to be somewhat variable. I'm not sure a new edition would sort that. Am I right in thinking that comparisons between Titan and Rebellion have not always been favourable?
I do take your point maryanddavid with regard to the covers. There is a risk with the choice made that fails to convey the dynamism for a new audience, never mind capturing old readers who need a bit of a visual prompt to remind them. Then again, does it not convey the seriousness of the material?
A new Rebellion edition could possibly sort that. They have apparently been working from scans of the original comics for much of their Treasury line and they clearly have the process down well - there's an art and a technical challenge to scanning and cleaning up art from printed pages, and between their repro staff and whatever software they're using (some early interviews specified custom software built by Rebellion for the work) they seem to be on top of it.
Some of Titan's reprints from the comics themselves have been pretty iffy - I have the first Major Eazy and I was incredibly disappointed with a lot of it, with a number of pages soft and blurry (I think they may have originally been colour pages, reprinted greyscale, but the result wasn't great) - and I would expect any books that were heavily reliant on that kind of material to look better in a Rebellion edition.
As for the covers... I do like the Titan edition designs, but they aren't entirely true to the presentation of the strip in Battle. The bold title, with its reversed "S", the handwritten letters... it was all linking into the strip's young lead, and I think that kind of innocent, naïve look worked really well. Replacing it with the more sombre, formal approach, using period photos and the poppy motif was respectful and distinct but I don't think it quite hit the mark.
I'm not entirely convinced by the covers I've seen so far for the Rebellion reprints, but I've only seen what may be unfinished/mock-up covers on the MCM slides. That said, the focus on Colquhoun's art as a major cover element, and the reinstatement of the original reverse-S logo, give them a look that I think is more true to the strip than Titan's editions. Will be interesting to see how the full range looks when they're more formally announced.
Thanks Tjm!
I like the new covers, but based on what I see I will continue to collect the Titan hard back editions. I like Pats annotations and the histoical extras add a lot of value to me. As much as I like the color spreads the B&W works fine.
Quote from: The Amstor Computer on 26 November, 2017, 01:49:48 PMthere's an art and a technical challenge to scanning and cleaning up art from printed pages, and between their repro staff and whatever software they're using (some early interviews specified custom software built by Rebellion for the work) they seem to be on top of it.
One thing that has really come on is Rebellion's work on colour pages. Things still aren't perfect. Luke Kirby has some moire, and there are some other issues with pre-digital art now and again. But mostly the colour stuff is looking very nice indeed, not least centre spreads in the likes of Dredd.
Black and white still seems a bit more of a crapshoot. When I was reading through City of the Damned recently, some of Dillon's art lost details here and there. Still, the book was still broadly strong throughout, and it's interesting from a technical standpoint to see how this stuff is gradually improving. (It's a pity they don't use one of the Meg text slots to explain the process. It's a bit geeky, sure, but I imagine quite a few readers would be happy to read about how saving British comics history is happening in Oxford, and gain some sunlight into how it's done.)
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 28 November, 2017, 09:43:22 AM
interesting from a technical standpoint to see how this stuff is gradually improving. (It's a pity they don't use one of the Meg text slots to explain the process. It's a bit geeky, sure, but I imagine quite a few readers would be happy to read about how saving British comics history is happening in Oxford, and gain some sunlight into how it's done.)
Seconded. I know it's well geeky, but in many ways it is this process that is going to be the best way to preserve so many strips.
broken quote fixed — IP
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 28 November, 2017, 09:43:22 AMOne thing that has really come on is Rebellion's work on colour pages. Things still aren't perfect. Luke Kirby has some moire, and there are some other issues with pre-digital art now and again. But mostly the colour stuff is looking very nice indeed, not least centre spreads in the likes of Dredd.
Black and white still seems a bit more of a crapshoot. When I was reading through City of the Damned recently, some of Dillon's art lost details here and there. Still, the book was still broadly strong throughout, and it's interesting from a technical standpoint to see how this stuff is gradually improving. (It's a pity they don't use one of the Meg text slots to explain the process. It's a bit geeky, sure, but I imagine quite a few readers would be happy to read about how saving British comics history is happening in Oxford, and gain some sunlight into how it's done.)
Yes, I'd love to see a feature in the Meg on their process - even just an interview with the staff working on repro and design on the Treasury line and a brief overview of the challenges involved in reproducing these strips would be welcome and would maybe keep it on a less-niche level for the general Meg readership.
The colour stuff certainly has improved in leaps and bounds. Moire can be a nightmare to deal with, and there are still some gnarly bits in recent Mega Collection reprints of pre-digital colour strips, but it's far less common than it was in earlier Rebellion reprints.
B&W art should be easier to deal with in theory (not quite "scan, level adjustment, threshold adjustment, convert to bitmap" though!) but I suspect - and I'm happy to be corrected if I'm off-base - that the issues with some of the iffier linework repro in things like the Dredd Mega Collection is to do with the budget for preparing those books. There probably isn't the time and money available to go back and do completely new scans/clean-up for everything in those books, so while you'll get some fresh elements (colour spreads in some Dredd tales, or strips that have never been reprinted before and were likely scanned for these books) some of the material seems like it may be from an existing, older digital archive which was scanned/processed with less-than-ideal techniques, or sourced from less-than-ideal material.
I'd expect slow improvement with already-scanned material though as Rebellion revisit it for new editions - in fact, I believe there's an upcoming reprint of The Black Hole due, as Smuzz/SMS has been trying to source his original art and scans of the old Titan edition of the book to provide Rebellion with better digital files for it.
Is Mrs Mills laddie getting a cut this time? :-X
Quote from: The Amstor Computer on 28 November, 2017, 12:11:13 PM
B&W art should be easier to deal with in theory
Speaking from experience when I have scanned the odd early prog page, the big issue is with the thickness of the paper which means that the reverse side image distorts the output. IIRC it requires a high brightness / contrast setting to compensate which is what produces some of the results we are seeing. Very much depends on the quality of the material in question as well as the scanning tools I would have thought.
Of course now I'm going to sit back and see my understanding torn to shreds by more knowledgeable minds! ::) (For which I will be grateful).
Quote from: Proudhuff on 28 November, 2017, 01:51:28 PM
Is Mrs Mills laddie getting a cut this time? :-X
He claims so, in some limited capacity based on morality rather than legality. Joe Colquhoun's estate likewise. If this is the case, I tip my cap to Rebellion.
Quote from: Tjm86 on 28 November, 2017, 02:22:29 PM
Speaking from experience when I have scanned the odd early prog page, the big issue is with the thickness of the paper which means that the reverse side image distorts the output. IIRC it requires a high brightness / contrast setting to compensate which is what produces some of the results we are seeing. Very much depends on the quality of the material in question as well as the scanning tools I would have thought.
Of course now I'm going to sit back and see my understanding torn to shreds by more knowledgeable minds! ::) (For which I will be grateful).
No tearing apart here (not sure I qualify as more knowledgeable, mind ;) )
Bleed-through can be an issue with scanned pages, and it can take a bit of care to either (a) avoid it in the first place (I've had some limited success using a white backing on a page, IIRC) or to (b) correct it in processing. From experience (repro on Library of Death, Baker's Half-Dozen, Thirteenth Floor, Dracula File, Tower King, House of Daemon and some miscellaneous other bits and bobs for Hibernia) B&W linework can be relatively straightforward to process
depending on how good a result you want.The simplest method I've found, and what I'd use for something like posting an example page or panel at reduced size online, is to scan the page at something like 300dpi (to keep file size down) in greyscale. Run that through a level adjustment in Photoshop (crush either end of the range to get clean whites and deep blacks) then a threshold adjustment to push that further, then halve the resolution, sharpening on reduction. That will give you a quick & dirty "clean" page for online use etc. but it will still have some major issues - if you're that aggressive with threshold and level adjustment you can end up with severe loss of detail, thickened lines and ruined cross-hatching etc. and none of the other issues with the art will be dealt with.
If I was preparing a page for a new reprint, I'd start with a higher-resolution scan - I've experimented with 1200dpi and 600dpi for my starting file, and to be honest I think 1200dpi was a crazy overreach and I wouldn't bother now (with two exceptions, more on which below). Take that greyscale scan and run a fairly aggressive level correction, being careful to check for loss of detail on fine lines, hatching etc. I'd then run a fairly full-on unsharp mask pass to sharpen up some of the finer detail and - depending on the source DPI and intended final use - resize down to 300/600 dpi (with bicubic sharpening if appropriate - not always needed, I find)
If the source is good - a nice, near-pristine page of strong, simple linework on newsprint, say - then that might be about all that's needed and it's pretty much done barring some final conversion and tidy-up. Unfortunately, most of the available source material isn't in that condition and you'll normally be dealing with a range of issues, from damaged pages, to misprints, or simple deterioration from age, and more detailed art doesn't take that brute force approach well.
By way of example, the most common issue I have is that characteristic "patchy" look you get on old newsprint pages, where the whites have specks of grey-black "scruff" and the blacks are full of flecks of grey-white. You can compensate for this a bit by being extra-aggressive on tweaking levels and running a threshold adjustment, but the downside of that is that it can end up thickening thin lines and making fine detail run together. The only way I've found of dealing with it (to my satisfaction, natch :) ) is to make manual corrections - that is, going in with the paintbrush and painting in/out any scruff, comparing all the time to the original scan to make sure that I'm correcting the right things.
That correction and manual clean-up will give you what I think is a pretty damn good result (the B&W strips in the Eagle Adventure Special, for example, were done like this and I think they look pretty good side-by-side with the source material) but it is pretty bloody time-consuming, and more so if you decide to try and fix particularly fiddly issues like patchy lettering (which can sometimes mean manually redrawing sections of the lettering/balloons) or damaged art. I suspect there is a way to automate a lot of the process if you had the software knowledge (and I'd expect Rebellion's repro pipeline to do something there...) but I haven't found a solution that works for me yet.
* My exceptions above - I scanned the House of Daemon art and the Eagle Adventure Special photo-strip at 1200dpi then resized down to 600dpi in an effort to avoid moire. I'm not sure it was entirely successful with the photo-strip, but it gave a reasonable result, and I think it worked pretty well for House of Daemon. Pain in the arse handling the files though - they're
enormous! The other reason I'd scan at that resolution is if I want to blow a detail up to enormous size in a layout - for example, I've just finished laying out an article with a bit about the Eagle photo-strips, and I wanted to have details from the strips blown up to a size where the dots of the printing process were visible, almost to the point where the photo itself was lost and abstracted.
Amstor that could be an article in the next Comic Archive! Think we could squeeze it in :lol:
Quote from: maryanddavid on 28 November, 2017, 10:54:57 PM
Amstor that could be an article in the next Comic Archive! Think we could squeeze it in :lol:
:lol:
My other half was looking over my shoulder while I wrote all that - she took one look at the splurge of text and just sighed and shook her head at me :-)
There're some nice ideas here. I think, as you say, professionally there are probably solutions that can address some of the issues but source material is likely to be the biggest challenge due to the age and the quality of the original material. Daemon and Tower King are both fine examples of how effective your techniques are. Both stand up well in comparison with the originals. As you say, at that sort of resolution file size becomes quite an issue as well which impacts on processing time. In terms of personal computing we seem to have hit something of a plateau in terms of tools for this sort of thing so that is likely to be an issue.
Thanks for that.
Quote from: Tjm86 on 29 November, 2017, 06:16:56 AM
There're some nice ideas here. I think, as you say, professionally there are probably solutions that can address some of the issues but source material is likely to be the biggest challenge due to the age and the quality of the original material. Daemon and Tower King are both fine examples of how effective your techniques are. Both stand up well in comparison with the originals. As you say, at that sort of resolution file size becomes quite an issue as well which impacts on processing time. In terms of personal computing we seem to have hit something of a plateau in terms of tools for this sort of thing so that is likely to be an issue.
Thanks for that.
Hope it wasn't too much of a boring wall of text!
I can kinda imagine how you could set up some kind of automation of the process I use (aside from just creating a Photoshop action for it) and I suspect there's probably a way to even do some of the manual work that way but I think it still needs human oversight on every page, and quite likely at least some hand-correction.
Whatever Rebellion are doing to get the quality they're getting at the rate they're managing is pretty impressive, though. I reckon on being able to manage a couple of B&W pages a day on a good day, but with other commitments and looking after my kids that's not very often. Assuming I managed that five days a week, and maybe fitted the odd page in at the weekend, I'd be able to do something like 40-ish pages a month, and if I could sustain that across a year working pretty much full-time outside of school holidays, I could maybe hit 400+ pages if I was very lucky.
By my back-of-an-envelope calculations, Rebellion have hit around
800-900 pages in 2017 on Treasury of British Comics material alone (Leopard of Lime Street, One-Eyed Jack, Marney the Fox, Faceache, Dracula File, Misty Vol. 2, the Tornado reprints in the Meg) and even assuming they started work immediately on the material back in August/September 2016 when they announced their acquisition of the Fleetway/IPC archives they've still had barely a year - and that's on top of whatever repro work has been necessary for the Mega Collection, other 2000AD reprints like Luke Kirby (a huge task in itself!) etc.
It's a huge investment in time and expertise from them.
I would say that in the mean time we need a history of IPC comics volume. We've got Thrill Power Overload, Barkers Action and Gifford's Book of Comics (which has way too much American crap in it) but we desperately need someone to do a history of British Comics, especially the post war era.
Sounds great. If it's three or so volumes, I'll probably pick these up :)