Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Re-coloring Classics

What are your thoughts on re-coloring classics?

This is something I’d like to see more of. For me, I feel the technology has come a long way and can bring some life back into classic books. New/young readers are not as interested in older comics it seems and I think the “old” look has something to do with it. I’m not saying pencils and ink should change but the way color is done now is very different and able to do so much more. I also think it’s something the comic companies can make money on. I would personally buy a graphic novel or maybe even a digital version of classic books if they are re-colored. They can even sell both original and re-color versions!

If I had to pick one, I'd go with the original. But since I don;t have to go with one, I've no problem with recolored books. As long as they don't recolor Brainy to have joined before he should have

If it were possible to have only the original art, you could re-dialogue the stories too. I doubt the Legion would be so mean to the applicants this time round. Not rejects. Applicants

Well I'm only thinking of color and nothing else. Keep the story as-is!

Re-Dialog is almost a whole other issue! To me that's really changing things. Way back colors could only be a solid color with little to no shading. I know there were color artists but really it wasn't much of an art. No offense meant by that. To me, colorists today have really come into their own as artists and can make or break a book.

There's just such a huge range of options available to colorists today. I think colorists on Legion have really added a great deal to recent runs.

I totally agree with you. But can you imagine some of the below images with newer ways of coloring? I would buy it!

One downside, that I meant to put in my last post, is that it would affect present/future royalty payments to the original colorists, assuming such a thing is in place for them at DC if recoloured reprints get released.

DC would presumably focus on the biggest selling stories to re release. It would be pretty poor that one of the people involved with helping those stories to be so successful in the first place would get nothing at all. While digital colouring has taken things on in huge leaps and bounds, it's been an ongoing process.

Even before the digital age there were good colorists who worked very hard to make their work the best it could be within the limitations the industry presented them with.

Yes they may but that's still a book they could make money on rather than doing nothing but collecting dust. It's not like they make money on back issues. They need to come out with new stuff. But the classics just don't make today's expectations. Re-coloring could do it.

As you suggested they could even change the story as well.

It would take one guy. A guy in his 70s, with health issues, to come out with his oxygen tank and say "Brainy's purple costume? That was me. They wanted to make it puce, but I convinced them."

"That was back in the '60s just as some of us tried to negotiate a better deal. I didn't get much work from them after that..."

I would look at my snazzy newly coloured book, that this guy got nothing on, and I would feel a mixture of shame & sadness.

Which doesn't detract from your idea at all. Just a thought about it's execution. Although knowing DC, execution possibly wasn't the best choice of word there.

Interesting question.

I'm reminded of two things. The first is the Spider-Man reprints in Marvel Tales back in the '80s, in which certain topical references were updated. For example, Aunt May mentioned watching "The Dukes of Hazzard" on TV instead of whatever the original reference was.

The second is the Star Trek re-releases of a few years ago in which modern special effects were added.

Although I hated the Dukes of Hazzard reference at the time, all of this amounts to very superficial changes to the original material. If using modern color techniques makes a reprint more appealing to younger audiences (and doesn't remove credit or compensation from the original colorists), I think that's great. But the story and ideas are what's most important and will stay with the reader long after they've forgotten the glossy, splashy colors.

They could do that but I don't think that matters too much. Maybe it's a re-run lol. I just keep feeling young readers are missing out on good stories because they don't like old artwork. I've talked to a few about it and they are not even thinking of trying anything old because it looks "old" to them. Yes some of it is the pencils with the bell bottoms and stuff but that's not something that can be easily changed. The colors can be change with far less work.