> bought Neal Adams Batman omnibus
> looking forward to it since it's pretty expensive (normal for omnibus, but still expensive for me)
> it's all recolor or something, because the old 70s books don't look like that at all
> the new colors look shit
> the colors I get from torrenting the scans look literally better than the Omnibus ones
Why is this happening.
At least it has complete Batman Odyssey included. I haven't forced myself to read through it yet.
Examples
from a different edition, but the same colors
junkfoodforthought-krisshaw.blogspot.com
Original
And recolor (and yeah you get this in the expensive omnibus)
Apparently, from the comments on the blog, it has been on the request of Neal Adams himself, and he feels it's a progression of the old art.
Yeah progress my ass. It sucks.
I feel you, it's the main reason I didn't order it
Its stupid to recolor it because the inking in those older comics where all done witht he idea that only flat or minimal coloring would be used. That's why there's so much hatching and spotted blacks and thick lines in the inking of old comics; they where meant to show shading in lieu of full colors.Photoshop colors on top of this looks awful.
It's still interesting how coloring can totally destroy the mood.
Even when it's literally the same comics, the new colors look shit.
Even when it's old colors printed with new printing methods, it doesn't always look "right", but it's not an abomination like Adams' Batman.
>Why is this happening.
I don't own the book you're using as an example, but the difference in colors may not be due to digital recoloring at all (check the book credits—not for the individual stories, but for the entire book—to see if the publisher actually hired somebody to digitally recolor/remaster the art). The book might have been printed from the original art.
Sometimes, the difference in color comes down to the difference in paper quality. Old comics were printed on cheap newsprint, or sometimes on higher quality Mando paper or even Baxter paper. These papers absorb ink much more readily (newsprint being the most absorbent) than the glossier and whiter papers used for printing comics today.
Because the old paper absorbed so much ink during the printing process (and because stuff like newsprint wasn't really white and its natural color tended to show through lighter colors), some colorists would compensate for this by using more saturated hues or exaggerating the color contrast. Now, if the publisher reprints the old comics from the original art BUT on today's whiter, less absorbent paper, the result can be what you see, with garish contrast and some color values that look heavily saturated.
LMAO WE GOTTA GET DAT EXCITING DIGITAL COLORING IN! BROWNANBLOOM AND SHADES OF GRAY!!!!!!
PEOPLE GOTTA BE PEOPLE COLORED!
GRADIENTS!
They are coming out with another version of Year One with the original colors soon
When I researched more, it seems like it's an actual recolor - not for the omnibus, but for some earlier edition - on request for Neal Adams.
It just shows, because there is all these gradients that were impossible to do in 70s comics.
Sandman recolors are actually pretty OK, in my opinion. But still a little "gradient-y".
b&w marvelman, when
>Sandman recolors are actually pretty OK, in my opinion. But still a little "gradient-y".
I just hate how they kill all the subtlety of the coloring with a stifling literalism. That picture's a great example; "he's a person, so his skin is person-colored!" "It's liquid, so it's water-colored!" etc.
Who the hell prefers the new coloring? God forbid something looks unique and arty.
More pics from the Adams Batman (my book has the same colors, even when this has "2007" in the name)
not that it changes much but afaik it's Adams that did all the recoloring, redrawing, relettering and re-doing
The original coloring job on Miracleman was kinda shit desu senpai. The new one may be a bit lifeless and have all the flaws of your standard digital coloring, but barring a handful of scenes where the more toxic coloring helped set the tone, the original coloring was trash.
new coloring doesn't work at all, that's why I'd like it in b&w
Anyone got that one really bad example of recoloring? I can't remember what, exactly, it might have been a captain america? But the page has a guy dropping down into a container ship or something and the original color is gorgeous and conveys action subtly and elegantly, and the recolor is atrocious and makes it impossible to follow the action?
Also, someone wanna post that "insert map here" shit?
>When I researched more, it seems like it's an actual recolor - not for the omnibus, but for some earlier edition - on request for Neal Adams.
Ah, okay.
To see the effect I was talking about in my previous post, see IDW's reprint collections of the 1980s GI Joe comic. IDW stayed faithful to the original color art (they didn't digitally recolor the art), but because of the difference in paper quality, the result can be somewhat off-putting to readers who grew up reading the original comics that were printed on lower-grade paper (it doesn't really bother me, but I know it bugs some readers who want the comics to look exactly like how they did back in the day).
this one's especially interesting becuase not only were the colors redone, the art was slightly redrawn. batman's cowlears are longer and superman's face has been redone in the newer version.
is this sort of thing common among these digital recoloring releases, not just messing with the colors but also the pencil/inking?
While recoloring is completely fucking insane if I remember right there's problems with those Bronze Age Batman comics that make it hard to reprint them digitally. They change the coloring because they had to.
>Why is this happening
Colorists that populate the industry these days are all self-taught through shitty youtube tutorials rather than fundamental learning. When you only get the most superficial type of training from 8 minute videos, of course you're going to give shitty substandard results that lack the insight into what made the original colors so compelling. Not surprisingly it's the same problem with most young artists that don't know shit about perspective, cones of vision, object placement on planes, shadow origins and directions, and line quality to establish point of interest.
It's like asking a 12 year old to direct a compelling WWII movie and then being surprised that he turned it into a Michael Bay schlockfest.
He did the same thing to one of the issues in the collection of Deadman. There's one issue in his run that Adams didn't ink himself so for the collection he went back and inked it and it got modern colors. Not only does it look awful, it feels incredibly jarring since none of the other issues got the treatment
This is as bad as 90s digital coloring
This is also a reink or at least the ink was touched up; look at batman's muscles and cape, batman's mouth, eyes, etc
Yeah the inking is weird here but the colors actually work fairly well I think
Absolute Year One is going to have the original colors and I think printed on a non-glossy paper stock.
Why the fuck does DC not reprinting Bronze Age Batman when it's literally some of the best comics they've ever published?
After YEARS of waiting they finally got their with the Showcase line and they've essentially cancelled it. Seriously what the fuck is there a technical problem or something?
Bronze Age Brave and the Bold is getting an omni
Yea they're re-reprinting the comic that already got covered completely in Showcase but not it's contemporary that's far more influential and important to the character's history that has literally never been reprinted...
(not that I don't love Haney)
They're doing a proper collection for Outsiders soon
>blaming modern colorists
Don't do this.
First of all, modern coloring techniques are different from old techniques.
Secondly, in most RE-coloring cases, the original penciller (and frequently the writer, too) prefers whatever the modern colorist chooses to do. I don't think I've seen a case where the original penciller didn't give his blessing to the new colors -- but surely, in all the examples that Cred Forums likes to mention (Sandman, Killing Joke, Flex Mentallo, Adams old stuff), the pencillers hated the old coloring.
It's easy to get nostalgic about the old, limited coloring of the past. But oddly enough, I think if you asked the average artist, they hated the coloring, even when you didn't get straight up printing errors.
I love this version of Batman for being less of a superhero and more of a swashbuckling type pulp hero
Was the recolor on Year One also by Richmond Lewis?
>if I remember right there's problems with those Bronze Age Batman comics that make it hard to reprint them digitally
Original pencils and inks where something that had an aesthetic value that was worth keeping for archives, color separation sheets were just blobs of CMY and were worthless once the comic saw print. Thus they were tossed pretty quickly, and recreating the look wasn't quite as easy. The shift between old style and new style printing meant that without the original overlay color separated acetate pages, color separated images would have their faults magnified when printed. That's the first problem.
The second problem is that digitally you could scan an old image and separate out black pretty easily and from there tweak any flubs. It's just black lines. With the dot patterns of old style printing, you had a shitload of oddball color flubs that look weird as fuck when scanned. Remember that when printing from color separation, you're using a dot pattern system, and had a TON of overrun. Thus it's impossible to recreate every damned little overrun nuance to perfectly create a page. If the original printed run had a -.003" offset from cyan to magenta, you get a weird and unique color set that would have to be perfectly recreated with painstaking detail.
The problem lies with what I said in where you have young people that don't know shit about what they're doing and just follow guidelines rather than calling an audible and getting better results. If they colored the image with the old style in mind (i.e. overrun and dot patterning) rather than lassoing off shapes and separating them in layers and applying the bullshit gradient and highlight razzledazzle, it would look 98% as good as the original run. But they don't because actually learning and thinking beyond the obvious is hard.
>I don't think I've seen a case where the original penciller didn't give his blessing to the new colors
David Mazzucchelli straight up told his fans not to buy the recolor of Year One
> Anybody who’s already paid for this should send it back to DC and demand a refund.
comicsalliance.com
>Killing Joke
Bolland even reworked his originals, adding Penguin and more unnecessary shit. Higgins' work was way superior to Bolland's greyish palette.
those new omnis will get there eventually I guess
well the man DID go more crazy than Frank Miller.
>First of all, modern coloring techniques are different from old techniques
You don't need to "ACK-SHU-ALLY" me, I brought that up in .
And ACK-SHU-ALLY, the original pencilers aren't going to be buying 10,000 copies of the books for themselves. These omnibus prints are made for the fans that want the old floppies collected, and it should be made as such and catered to as such. You can't expect a George Lucas approach to go over well with people shelling out $120+ hoping to get a nostalgia trip.
Eclipse did a better job on the colouring in their trades. But it wasn't made with colour in mind and originally published in black and white
Wait wait wait.
So Batman Year One has two recolors?
The one from the 10th anniversary edition designed by Chip Kidd and another one for the Deluxe version that came out around the time of the animated movie?
As I wrote in OP, Odyssey is included in its entirety (?) in the omnibus.
I am kind of looking forward to reading it.
The old issues I will torrent and think to myself that I already paid for them so it's not stealing.
Yes. I actually bought Complete Frank Miller Batman thinking it will have different coloring but it's the same (stoner Gordon).
>But oddly enough, I think if you asked the average artist, they hated the coloring, even when you didn't get straight up printing errors.
But here's the thing; even if they hated it, they where probably working with it in mind. The whole language of comic book lineart was created due to what they where working with. Thick linework, hatching, al of that, was all done with the intention of it being printed on low quality paper with limited coloring. If they where drawing for modern comic coloring with modern pages, they would have draw differently.
Year One actually has two recolors, with the 2005 Deluxe Edition being handled by Mazzucheli and Lewis. The Mazzucheli fucking hated the 2012 edition and saw it as an insult.
The 2012 deluxe is supposedly from slightly lower quality scans but it's not something most people will notice. I think Mazzucchelli's problem was that he redid the original coloring and it never seen the light of day (until the upcoming Absolute but this was announced fairly recently).
Particularly shitty because the Showcases go out of print so fast this might be the only chance to buy the first volume of the bronze era stuff (Vol. 6 I think).
That's not the question. The question is why recolor at all? Every omnibus/collection I've bought has been essentially a 1:1 reprint, which is what I want.
The biggest change I can think of offhand is in one of the early Sonic Archives that had a contest. The reprint just added an asterisk to make sure the mostly child audience knew the contest was closed.
>Picture of Gordon with another woman
>"Dude, I'm high as fuck, I don't even know what's going on right now"
>The question is why recolor at all?
Because . If you lose the original color source, you're going to have some issues and can't just 1:1 scan and print whatever you have on-hand. Right off the bat it would be really easy to get artifacts and other flaws from the original-to-digital transfer, even at a high DPI. The imperfections in the original print are natural occurrences, and it's hard to translate that to the realm of smooth and perfect digital outputs. Think uncanny valley when you assess how it would look to have grain and marks from the original pages printed onto the finer gloss of modern pages, or even a page with more tooth to it. It would look bizarre.
So in that sense, some of the aspects of reprinting in the modern age enter into a catch-22 situation. Thus you need a good colorist that understands the old ways, strives to recreate the subtle imperfections the best they can with the digital tools at hand, and eschews the bullshit trappings of todays hyper polished revisionist shitfest coloring.
Thanks for this informative post
I'm sure they will. They've been printing Golden and Silver Age omnibi's for Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman(and Supergirl), which are really cool.
Sandman Mystery Theatre probably has some of the worst digital recoloring I've ever seen. Everyone looks totally pale faced and lifeless
I really don't understand why recoloring older books is so difficult
Yeah I've held off from that omnibus for that reason. I'm mad the digital issues are recolored too. I haven't heard many complaints about Marvel's post-Simonson Thor fuck ups
DC seems to have learned about that. I've got Suicide Squad trades and one trade is on glossy but the rest are on real paper. It feels like they tried it and realized that it wasn't worth the effort
That was a colored version of his story from Batman Black & White
That's why I prefer the Deluxe New Frontier over the Absolute. The Deluxe is printed on a toothier, older style paper stock whereas the Absolute is on glossy paper. The old paper really helps sell the time period the book takes place in.
Someone really should put together a list of what collections should be avoided because of bad recolors.
What the fucking fuck is this horseshit? You got gyped.
Recolor is better in this case.
Holy shit they made it atrocious
...
Unfortunately, Walt Simonson's Thor run would end up on that list.
Also, I'm glad I know to expect this in the Neal Adams Batman omni, since I just got it a few days ago.
Gordon is sooo high
Rather than just a list it would probably be best to include examples, at least of the more controversial ones.
Kind of like with Bolland and The Killing Joke some times the artist is just plain wrong and their request should be ignored.