State of the archives

[Tu-plang]

I've been working through my 2000AD books and reprints recently, and I wonder if anyone could shed any light on the repro quality of some of the Rebellion books. Extremely detail-oriented nerdy shit follows.

Black and white work up to the end of the 80s seem to have been kept in a decent archival quality.

But when we get into the 90s, and the painted era of the prog, reprint quality drops off. They don't seem to have access to the original sources (files, negatives, whatever they were back then) and the pages all look to have been scanned from progs or old Hamlyn books. They're blurry and moire-ish and often cropped--the recent Essential Necropolis, for example, has lost some detail and a few centimetres from the (formerly full bleed) edges.

But... when this same material was reprinted in the late 90s and early 00s it looked great. The Ennis Dredd stories reprinted by Titan, and the colour stuff reprinted in the Megazine were as good as or better than the originals. It didn't look ropey until the Rebellion reprint program started just a few years later.

So what happened? Is that whole Fleetway era of the prog just not archived? Where did it all go? Are Rebellion really just scanning this material from the progs?

[Max Headroom]

A pity no one had the relevant information for this question; as I would have quite liked to know as well.

[Funt Solo]

You *might* try posting the question on one of the accessible Farcebook pages - they tend to have a higher population.