This week I thought I'd try something a little different with the blog and instead of giving you an update on a figurine, I'd give you some insight into the work involved in the creation of the magazine.
As many comic fans will know, the quality of the printing, and paper that comics have been printed on, has greatly changed over the years. While Marvel does re-print a lot of comics in graphic novel form, there are hundreds of Marvel comics that only exist in their original printing. More often than not the years have not been kind to the original pages with whites turning cream, colours fading and word balloons smudging. To illustrate the magazine we spend hours looking through old comics and lovingly restoring some of the images so that they can be re-printed in the best quality possible.
Below I have an excellent example of the work our designer (Dan) has put into an image from Strange Tales #178, which at the time we couldn't find re-printed. You can see the first image is the actual scan of the comic page, from this Dan knocks the image back to black and then adds a new layer of colour to the image, to match the original as closely as possible.
Obviously not every image requires this amount of work, some Marvel supply to us directly and some are from newer or re-printed comics but each issue we try to make sure that the images we choose best sum-up the character and the article they're in.
There's a lot more to the magazine than just the images but hopefully that gives you a bit of an idea into the workings of the magazine and its design.
And don't worry; I'm not going to bore everyone with a weekly update into how the mag works, apart from anything else Dan's head will end up growing too big to fit into the office if I keep it up.
More figurine news next week.
Have a good weekend.
Rich
