Sean Howe's thick, meticulous, thrilling history of Marvel Comics isn't due out until October. But while we're waiting, Howe is posting a steady stream of amazing artifacts on his Facebook page – which is shaping up to be a virtual coffee table companion to the history. In the same spirit, here's Doctor Doom as he appeared in house ads for Marvel's mid-Seventies fan magazine, "FOOM!"
To get accurate images for this blog, I scan everything at a high resolution – roughly to the point at which my flatbed scanner ceases to capture additional photographic detail. At full screen resolution, they’re huge. Printed at 300dpi, most would probably be 8 or 9 inches wide. (I haven’t tried printing many; I like the illuminated stained glass quality of the screen image.)
Original size:
While the images zing around the blogosphere (thank you!), one thing I’d hoped would happen – but apparently hasn’t – is that people would grab these large files and do things with them. (For instance.) As far as I know, 4CP is the only stock library on the web of big images of printing and paper detail from the classic period of comic book production. There are authentic styles, textures, patterns, and palettes here, waiting for appropriation and mutation.
My computer graphic design/photo-manipulation skills stop at (or before) the “in-house comp” level. However, I was recently chuckling about the continuing existence of all those pre-set filters in Photoshop that seemingly haven’t changed in a dozen or more years. And then it hit me that I’d never experimented with the manipulation of 4CP images.
I was curious to fiddle around, because the most common manipulation of old comic art is concerned with “restoring” it for book republication – pulling the black illustration out, eliminating the paper, and adding back non-dotty color. It’s about getting rid of all that surplus, accidental visual information that’s tangled up with the art on the original printed comic book page.
Obviously, my blog reveals my aesthetic obsession with that surplus visual information. So I was curious about how it would behave when manipulated. Instead of using Photoshop to purify the image – aiming to simulate the inker’s original boards – I figured I’d “remove the dots” by blending illustration, color, and paper into an inextricable whole. There's a crapload of "data" in these files, and they behave in unpredictable ways.
At original size on the printed page, comic book details taunt the eye with microscopic implication – beauty too far away to really see, but the mind reels and extrapolates nontheless. Blown up, that beauty is limited to the documentary truth of a particular printing process. It is often fantastic, but its relationship to what you see, feel, and imagine when viewing it as one square inch of comic book is debatable.
So, in fiddling around with Photoshop, I was imagining the different ways enlarged comic book details might look, had comic art been created, and comic books printed, in different ways. At original size, my manipulations are nearly indistinguishable from the originals – which is to say, enlarged comic book details might look like this on other planets. Anyhow, all you people who like this blog and actually know how to do graphic design on a computer - grab some files, make some stuff, and tell us where to see it!
