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Has anyone ever noticed a distinct difference in print quality or colour for the same issue of a comic?
I'm not talking about the difference caused by the paper aging (at least, I don't think I am) but I noticed I had two copies of TV21 & Joe 90, with a Thunderbird 2 cover - on one the craft is a deep green, on the other a vivid mid green!
I know some colours cause printers headaches - orange used to be notorious for the range of hue and intensity over a print run - but has anyone else noticed a marked difference between copies?
I once accidently bought a Beano from the '80's I already had.
The bit with the date on, the ink had not gone in the right place on one and so I was left with a date bar part white and part blue, with blue on the outside of the margin of the date bar. Pretty minor, but I thought I'd mention it anyway seeing as you asked.
David wrote:I once accidently bought a Beano from the '80's I already had.
The bit with the date on, the ink had not gone in the right place on one and so I was left with a date bar part white and part blue, with blue on the outside of the margin of the date bar. Pretty minor, but I thought I'd mention it anyway seeing as you asked.
That's called being "off register" and it used to happen a lot, in minor ways, years ago when print runs were larger. I particularly remember Tiger suffering this "blurring" on its colour pages sometimes.
Regarding the difference in colour shades between copies of the same issue, this used to happen quite frequently too. Less likely now that printing has improved, but it still happens.
We found this with print runs in my time as an editor. The dummy issue of UT and the actual first issue have an identical front cover, the artwork bits being printed from exactly the same bits of film. But the colours are vastly different.
Something to do with ink fairies, I dunno.
The colour variation in different editions of Asterix books was the first time I noticed how print can vary. I've got Asterix books from the early 70s printed on soft matt cheap paper (they were given away with Total petrol, if anyone remembers that?) and the colours and totally different, much denser and redder, than the same strip printed on fine glossy paper.
Printing, eh. Good job we won't have to worry about it for much longer. Soon we'll just have pills that taste like printed pages.
Talking about mis-registration and Asterix books; has anyone been buying the souped-up re-issues of the classic series? They're supposed to be re-coloured (which they seem to be) and re-inked, but more than half my copies (I've bought about eight) seem to be rife with mis-registration. And the line-work is very patchy in some areas and even faded on some pages. And who thought that having a font of upper-case lettering with a lower-case letter "i" was a good idea I don't know, I just find it a flippin' distraction.
O.K. rant over. I really do need to get out more....
Lew Stringer wrote:Regarding the difference in colour shades between copies of the same issue, this used to happen quite frequently too. Less likely now that printing has improved, but it still happens.
Well I work in print management now, in pre-press, and have been surprised by the varying results we get - notably with the standard CMYK colours, but also with photo images. A few runs of brochures had to go back because the outside shots which were supposedly of sunny summer days looked so dark and grey, you'd think there was going to be a storm or something!
Gary Northfield wrote:And who thought that having a font of upper-case lettering with a lower-case letter "i" was a good idea I don't know, I just find it a flippin' distraction.
Could be wrong, but I think that follows Uderzo's own writing in the French editions.
Following on with a related printing query, did IPC use a particularly cheep paper or is it due to aging that the reverse page shows through in varying degrees on comics from the early 70?s?
If you search through Al?s scanned pages from Thunder you?ll get some idea of what I mean but the scanning process has ?Whitened? out the worst excess?s of this phenomenon.
grumpy old man wrote:Following on with a related printing query, did IPC use a particularly cheep paper or is it due to aging that the reverse page shows through in varying degrees on comics from the early 70?s?
If you search through Al?s scanned pages from Thunder you?ll get some idea of what I mean but the scanning process has ?Whitened? out the worst excess?s of this phenomenon.
Mostly seems to occur on the reverse of colour pages so perhaps a combination of cheap paper and heavy inks.
