Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities How were reprints produced before scanners?

We all know that DC's Archive Editions are produced by destroying 2 file copies of each issue. How did DC & Marvel produce reprints back in the 60s & 70s? Did World Color Press keep negatives of the original art on file?

I'm also curious about this! Seems like in the 70's Marvel and DC did more reprint comics than actual new comics!

Actually I didn't know that about the archives... I'm interested in any info on this you may have...

I didn't know this either! I thought they were all on some sort of film.

Usually, they were kept on film, and reprints were taken from those films. If the film was lost (and Marvel's film archives were apparently a complete mess until fairly recently - one of the Don Heck Iron Man issues in the earlier Masterworks printings was actually redrawn by Heck late in his career because they'd lost the film completely), then they tended not to bother.

The Archives copy-destruction ggm mentions involved leeching the coloured ink out of pages with a chemical bath, photographing the now-b&w pages, then recolouring. Since it was expensive (not least to buy the copies!), that wasn't an option for cheaper reprints.

Usually, they were kept on film or photographic stats, and reprints were taken from those films. If the film was lost (and Marvel's film archives were apparently a complete mess until fairly recently - one of the Don Heck Iron Man issues in the earlier Masterworks printings was actually redrawn by Heck late in his career because they'd lost the film completely), then they tended not to bother.

[The Archives copy-destruction method ggm mentions - which is a "were", not an "are", they just scan them these days - involved leeching the coloured ink out of pages with a chemical bath, photographing the now-b&w pages, then recolouring. Since it was expensive (not least to buy the copies!), that wasn't an option for cheaper reprints.]

DC, so I've heard, had film negatives back to about 1961. When I look at the ARCHIVES books of JUSTICE LEAGUE, FLASH, GREEN LANTERN, LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, most of them look so sharp and clear, it's as though they were drawn "yesterday". Marvel's reprints-- until very recently-- have ALL looked abysmal compared to the original comics, which look abyslmal compared to the ORIGINAL ART. They had really bad problems with their stat machine, apparently.


I've never heard of Marvel keeping film negatives. Only stats. And they had this bad tendency not to keep original stats. When a lot of 60's Marvels were reprinted by a foreign publisher in europe in the 60's, they made copies of the stats... and sent the ORIGINAL stats to Europe, instead of the copies! So, I've heard, the foreign reprints, done in B&W, had SHARPER line reproduction than domestic reprints. ABSURD!!!


Then there's Grantray-Lawrence, the animation studio that did THE MARVEL SUPER-HEROES SHOW (1966) and SPIDER-MAN (1967). Marvel "loaned" many ORIGINAL stats to them. But G-L went bankrupt in mid-1968, and much of what they had "went home" with employees. I believe this is how the 2nd Scorpion story (ASM #29) was never reprinted until the early 1980s, because there was no original art, and no stats at all. They had to get someone to RE-DRAW the entire book around 1983, in order to create NEW stats, which could be used thereafter.


When FF #53 was reprinted in FF MASTERWORKS Vol.6, the person who owned the ORIGINAL ART loaned it to Marvel to make new stats. That reprtint of that story looks BETTER than the original comic, which just showed me how bad their ORIGINAL STATS were, even in the 60's.

By comparison, FF #52 (the debut of The Black Panther) still looked TERRIBLE, reprtinted from multiple-generatin stats. Sometime later, they put out a special one-shot of FF #52, shot from an ORIGINAL COMIC-BOOK. The line reproduction was excellent... but the comic still looked AWFUL, because somehow it had been processed to look DARK AND DINGY. I ran scans of that reprint thru Photoshop, and was able to improve it in SECONDS. Which just showed me how INCOMPETENT someone in Marvel's production department was, even to this day.