Restoring Black & White Comics: Cerebus & High Society

Cerebus Vol 2: High Society
30th Anniversary Signed & Numbered Edition
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

DAVE SIM:

I probably should have been clearer about the situation with the restoration of CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY (see High Society Update, 18 June 2013). I think George Gatsis has done a phenomenal job with the materials at hand and the circumstances dictated by computer printing in 2013. I say that, having looked at most of both books under my 8X magnification jeweller's loupe. When you greyscale dot tone, you get dots on top of dots -- that's unavoidable now that computer scanning is the only way to reproduce artwork available to us...

[back in the old days, if the HIGH SOCIETY negatives had been destroyed, the best way to restore the book would have been to shoot the earliest printed pages from a printed copy of the book with the standard upright camera. It would have required an expert cameraperson such as they used to have at Preney Print & Litho who would know what to do with the fixed flood lights, how long to expose the image and at what setting, etc. and a willingness to change all of those variables on a page by page basis depending on how dark or light the page was. That would have produced an alternative set of negatives which could then be "burned" into metal plates just as the original negatives had been. It wouldn't have been perfect: but it would have been the best possible second-generation reproduction available.]

...I really had to marvel at what George accomplished, presumably in Photoshop, basically adjusting the darkness and contrast settings to "bring up" the artwork and "take down" the greyscale dots,  cleaning up each area of the artwork as close to the artwork as it was possible to get so there would only be a faint "ghosting" of microscopically small dots next to the pen and brush lines.

So, for all those people who contacted me about helping with that end of the process, I apologize for not explaining that we are definitely past that stage and -- given the severe limitations of computer reproduction -- George has done far better than I could reasonably expect.

No, the problem is that when the PRINTED copy of HIGH SOCIETY came in, all those faint "ghosting" of microscopically small dots weren't a) as faint or b) as microscopically small as they had been on the proofs.  In many places they were actually quite dark and quite large (relatively speaking) which meant the page looked "blurry".

The problem is, whatever the printer is using for proofs are computer-era proofs -- more accurately "proofs". Back in the day (gum gum gum) we used to get what were called bluelines which were 100% accurate copies of what the printed artwork was going to look like. Just printed in blue on a slick cream stock (for some reason). The only variable at THAT point was the pressman and the ink flow onto the printed page.

[At one time, Preney lost track of the plot and we had an issue come in that was way too dark.  Yes, we wanted nice dark solid blacks, but the line work was filling in in places. I finally I had to tell Kim after, I think, three issues:  come back THIS way. Don't do solid black, do really, really dark grey such that you would think I would reject it because it wasn't solid black enough. I'll take responsibility.  Which he agreed to do (not happily, but he agreed to do).  The book came in and it was perfect.  Ger and I were both relieved.  THERE!  Like that -- print it like that.  And we never had the problem again.]

I'm writing this June 28 and this is now the end of the second week that the printer has had all of our corrections and citations of where the "proofs" differ from the printed copy. I have no idea when I will hear from them, but I don't imagine they will be very happy, either, when I do. I don't imagine they're very happy right now with their printing plant overflowing with 3,000 copies of both books -- basically a half million sheets of unbound CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY. I don't imagine they're very happy looking at the difference between their proofs and their printed pages.

But, then, I'm not very happy that this is now close to a year of having my two best-selling books unavailable.

You just have to be patient and hope that somewhere up ahead there is good news about this situation. Or less bad news.

Stay tuned! And thanks to everyone who ordered a copy at their local comic shop. Very much appreciated.

GEORGE PETER GATSIS:
Before the restoration began, I had observed that the detail of the artwork between:

1. original art and the printed page, and
2. the film negatives and the printed page

had a great deal of detail in the artwork go missing due to:

1. the faint lines disappearing, or
2. details filling in on themselves in the dark areas
3. scratches and holes from adhesives such as printers' tape that held the negatives to the signature sheet
4. degrade of the original artwork that required a major clean up
5. missing elements on various pages, such as Cerebus 30% screen, titles and white lettering against black backgrounds.

I have made 2 free PDFs that showcase examples of all the work that has gone into the restoration, which can be downloaded at Cerebus Download.com.

The only possible solution to get all the detail possible was to scan in greyscale and:

1. adjust (dodge) the dark areas to bring more definition in the dark areas, and
2. adjust (burn) the light areas to bring more definition in the light areas.

This required that each page and each panel and each image of Cerebus be inspected for:

1. cleaning up the faint aged "film" out of the 30% screen
2. making sure that Cerebus 30% screen is as close to BLACK and WHITE as possible, thereby removing any possibility of an additional screen caused by the printer (no grey valued dots no printers screen) which also removes the possibility of having a moire pattern occur.

The DIGITAL proofs the printer supplied us, were just that... Digital. They did not show the printers dots, until it actually went to press. Once the unbound printed books arrived, I was able to quickly pick out of 1000 plus pages, 110 pages that need to be fixed.

The fixes were mostly regarding the 30% screen on Cerebus. But there were also other concerns as well. Some pages seem "blurry." This was caused by a hint of shadow that was cast during the scanning of the film negatives. The shadow was too faint/un-noticeable in the digital proofs... But in the printed samples, it became VERY noticeable.

Another concern was a technical problem with the printing... There were "ink blots" or smudges on the pages in white blots against black artwork AND black blots against mostly white pages.

All in all... Flagged, adjusted and corrected and sent new files to the printer.