The worst thing about looking at all my old work is noting all the stuff I would like to change.
ALL of the early pages were drawn at a strange proportion, too: magazine size. So whenever I do collections of them, everything gets wonky.
One printer decided to make sure the pages lined up perfectly and shrunk them to fit. The figures looked pretty odd, to say the least. We caught it before it went to press, but I had never dealt with that sort of problem before and had no idea what was up.
I think that printer Colleen mentioned must be working at my local newspaper. For some reason, on Fridays, they move the comic strip page from the regular paper to the “Weekend Magazine” supplement. Since the magazine section has different proportions, they shrink the strips vertically to fit. It looks absolutely ridiculous (not that most newspaper strips are much to look at these days anyway).
Heh heh… imagine an ADS comic strip. That would raise a few eyebrows.
Yeah, the computer graphics people usually have a template they just pop the art into. Why bother to fix it? No one will notice. Heh.
I remember sitting down looking at the bluelines (do printers even make those anymore?) of the second half of the first A Distant Soil volume thinking “Whoa, my drawing was really strange back then!”
I finally figured out what had happened, and we had a row with the printer over it. They had to eat the job and redo the whole book.
They had also tried to print from low res scans of the art. Because of the tone sheets and the size of the originals, I print from 1200 dpi scans. They had tried to use 300 dpi scans and every single tone sheet went moire. It was a mess.
When Judge Dredd and other 2000AD strips were first published in the US, they were squashed horizontally to fit the standard US comic format. Very odd looking they were too — as if Brian Bolland had suddenly developed a penchant for drawing tall, skinny folks.
6 Comments
raycornwall
Just imagine- if ADS had been a webcomic in the first place, you could have turned the first three tiers of the page into a superwide panel.
Or not.
Damn, your art is so much fun to look at.
Colleen
Thanks, Ray!
The worst thing about looking at all my old work is noting all the stuff I would like to change.
ALL of the early pages were drawn at a strange proportion, too: magazine size. So whenever I do collections of them, everything gets wonky.
One printer decided to make sure the pages lined up perfectly and shrunk them to fit. The figures looked pretty odd, to say the least. We caught it before it went to press, but I had never dealt with that sort of problem before and had no idea what was up.
JKCarrier
I think that printer Colleen mentioned must be working at my local newspaper. For some reason, on Fridays, they move the comic strip page from the regular paper to the “Weekend Magazine” supplement. Since the magazine section has different proportions, they shrink the strips vertically to fit. It looks absolutely ridiculous (not that most newspaper strips are much to look at these days anyway).
Heh heh… imagine an ADS comic strip. That would raise a few eyebrows.
Colleen
Yeah, the computer graphics people usually have a template they just pop the art into. Why bother to fix it? No one will notice. Heh.
I remember sitting down looking at the bluelines (do printers even make those anymore?) of the second half of the first A Distant Soil volume thinking “Whoa, my drawing was really strange back then!”
I finally figured out what had happened, and we had a row with the printer over it. They had to eat the job and redo the whole book.
They had also tried to print from low res scans of the art. Because of the tone sheets and the size of the originals, I print from 1200 dpi scans. They had tried to use 300 dpi scans and every single tone sheet went moire. It was a mess.
Allan
When Judge Dredd and other 2000AD strips were first published in the US, they were squashed horizontally to fit the standard US comic format. Very odd looking they were too — as if Brian Bolland had suddenly developed a penchant for drawing tall, skinny folks.
Colleen
Wow, Allan, I had no idea!