Colleen Doran: Remastering 'A Distant Soil'

A Distant Soil (Remastered)
by Colleen Doran
(The remastered edition of A Distant Soil Vol 2 ships in December 2013. Order your copy now!)

COLLEEN DORAN:

(from the A Distant Soil blog, 6 November 2013)

Allan Harvey is doing an unmatched job on our restoration. AMAZING work. I have not seen any black and white tone work getting the kind of care and attention we are getting on these volumes! 

Check out this quality! On the right, the source material. On the left, the restoration:

There are other restorations and reprints of black and white comics which use tones, but we have either acquired every single page of original art OR gone into the art, removed the toned areas with very careful digital selections, and then replaced them to match the original tones and tone quality perfectly. No effort has been spared. I have not seen black and white restoration this good anywhere else. All praise to Allan!

Another example: Allan goes in between every single one of these speed lines and carefully removes the tone. This is meticulous work!

The original scan is on the left, and the clean scan is on the right. After cleaning out all the flawed tone, Allan replaces it with a clean digital tone, which you can see in the final, published work. The tone may not look flawed to the naked eye in this shot, but when reduced for print, without this restoration it would create a moire pattern.

Dave Sim is also doing extensive restoration on Cerebus, but he is working from scans without doing the cleanup and replacement of tones we’re doing on A DISTANT SOIL. He has an extensive blog post about the mutual challenges we face HERE. Our solution for A DISTANT SOIL is far more expensive and time consuming, but it yields better results. I sincerely doubt this could be accomplished with the 6000 pages of Cerebus, but we wish Mr Sim the best of luck.