I continue to receive e-mails from folks offering their copy of Fantastic Four #1 for scanning. Thank you all but the folks who need this think they have what they need.
I also am receiving notes from people who thought I'd slighted John Cleese's co-writer on Fawlty Towers, Connie Booth, by not mentioning her by name. No slight was intended. I just kinda think that Mr. Cleese's performance as Mr. Fawlty is what made that series work as well as it did.
I wrote here that I have/had a low opinion of the DC Comics Production Department pre-1980, at least when it came to making art and lettering corrections. Our pal Mark Waid agrees with me in an e-mail…
Yeah, the lettering corrections were almost universally whatever the opposite of seamless is. I've always assumed that part of it was not that they gave them to a monkey but because the correx were being made on a same-size stat rather than a twice-up. There was, however, a monkey no doubt involved.
I think that was part of it but I also think they just weren't that good at it. I also think no one on the premises had a sense of design when it came to typeset lettering and it was often poor when they tried to integrate typography and hand lettering on a cover or ad. The best DC covers, when you took the copy into account, were those for which Ira Schnapp did everything except the date, the issue number and the price.
In a related note, Paul Dushkind wrote to ask me…
Why is it that the reproduction in comic-book reprint editions is blurry? The older the stories are, the worse the reproduction is. But even fairly recent stories from the sixties and seventies have fine lines missing. Everyone knows that DC is supposed to have the film from every story they ever published, so the sharpness should be perfect!
If they had good film of every story they ever published, the sharpness would be perfect. I don't know where that myth got started but it's kind of obvious, when they have to reconstruct old stories and have someone trace or do heavy Photoshopping of scans from printed comics, that they don't. I doubt that they ever did. And Marvel's files were and still are even worse.
Sol Brodsky, who was the Production Manager at times at Marvel, once explained the problem there to me. Sol said he often urged Management there to shoot better copies of current work for the files and to make more back-up copies of it. But that involved spending money now for a need that might arise in the future and a lot of companies (not just Marvel, not just comic book publishers) don't like doing that kind of thing. It makes this month's budgets look bad. It's easier to not spend that money now and let someone else deal with problem years later.
Paul, you've inspired me to do a long post about this topic. I will…in a couple of days. Thanks.