Nah, lose 'im.
DC to REBOOT???
- Thread starter Professor Zoom
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Regarding the reboot - According to Bleeding cool, a lot of the artist teams are changing for the second issues to keep up with the deadlines, I guess the same will happen for the third and so on. A lot of those series are going to look like shit when collected for the TPB.
Ugh.
That's pathetic. They're on the second issues and they're already behind on deadlines?
I've heard the change-over is because the second and third issues are being drawn in parallel to the first to ensure that comics can be submitted to apple in plenty of time (for digital release). The reason that the artists could do more is than they had no idea that those titles existed three months ago...
I remain skeptical. Most of today's artists are not known for their ability to dependably meet deadlines.
It's been a while since it's been a condition of their continued employment. They'll learn. 
It's been a while since it's been a condition of their continued employment. They'll learn.
Best decision of this whole thing, IMO. There is no other media where lateness has been tolerated the way it has been in comics. Can you imagine sitting down to watch an episode of your favorite TV series on its regular airdate and seeing just a black screen because the cameraman couldn't get it together that week?
I would say about two thirds of the 52 will be on the chopping block by December, either to do with lateness or just plain suckiness. I think there are already articles popping up about which books will survive the chopping block and which won't. No way all 52 will remain healthy.
I don't think even DC would think ALL of the 52 would survive. They know some won't make it, they just don't know which. If they knew how to make a book that would succeed, then they wouldn't be behind Marvel.
Yeah. We still don't really know what the wave two books are yet or stuff what they have waiting in the wings. I suspect most of this will be revealed next weekend at comic con. I'm sure there will be a summer event as well next year (aside from Multiversity which seems like a self contained beast).
It's been a while since it's been a condition of their continued employment. They'll learn.
Best decision of this whole thing, IMO. There is no other media where lateness has been tolerated the way it has been in comics. Can you imagine sitting down to watch an episode of your favorite TV series on its regular airdate and seeing just a black screen because the cameraman couldn't get it together that week?
My pet theory is that it's the coloring. I know it takes me forever to color anything (usually far longer than pencilling it), but I don't know if that's my personal problem or indicative of a shitload of hours being spent on professional work as well. Not that it's the colorists' fault, per se, but that delays earlier in the production line (by the writer or penciller) get magnified by the time the color dudes get ahold of it, who are still expected to expend a great deal of effort to do a "professional job."
Though if they used flatter colors ala the older books, though, it would take almost no time and three or four guys could probably reliably color 52 monthly books by themselves. It's one of those things where I suspect automation technology has failed to make anyone more productive, because of the possibilities Photoshop and other tools open up for increasing a page's color quality (although in computer coloring, perhaps I should say "color quantity").
It's an interesting thing to compare it to other parts of the process, too, because the average quality of pencils (and inks) hasn't gone up by any means since the 1980s, so a lot of books are colored lovingly but still look rankly amateurish.
Almost all are still pencilled by hand, I think. Inking is increasingly digital, but there are still a great number, probably an great majority, that are traditionally inked. (I've never fully understood inking in the modern age--it's easy enough to scan in a pencil drawing as black and white, and manipulate blacks via computer, but I suppose a lot of inkers are actually finishing artists, too).
Almost no coloring is done by hand. The only people I can think of that "hand-color" are actually painters, like Alex Ross. I don't even really know how old-school coloring worked, although I'd be interested (from an academic perspective) to find out.
For generations television networks have thrown many hours of new programming up against the screen every year fully understanding as part of their business planning that most of the new stuff will quickly fail (despite always hoping to beat the average this year). Dependably popular shows and whole schedules that work for periods of years - in a few cases, nearly decades - are built by presenting new stuff all the time and then ruthlessly and unsentimentally disposing of anything that doesn't work. The folks at DC may (finally?) see the utility of approaching comics publishing in the same way, particularly given that the financial loss involved in spiking a failing book and replacing it with a new one is minimal in comparison to the same thing on television.
And in the past, DC has sorta done it in waves, always following big events, from the pages of... (Insert summer event here).
So, no surprise that, with a relaunch, go big, see what sticks. And, I think upthread we talked about it: they aren't SO much over their normal monthly publishing... Things will settle down soon enough.
The colorist would color a reduced photocopy of the inks with Dr. Martin Dyes (similiar to watercolors), and then code each color they used. This would be used as a guide for the color separators/printers (Do a Google Image Search on "Comic book color guide" to get an idea of what these looked like).
The separator would then physically cut the plate to be used for each color in the CMYK 4-color printing process (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black). Those plate would then be used in the printing of the actual book. That was the process I originally learned at the Joe Kubert School back in '94, and it was already on its way out by then.
The process had its limitations, which is why primary colors were so prominently used in the first few decades of comics. The Hulk was colored grey in his first issue, but they switched his coloring to green because of their difficulties in maintaining a consistent grey tone.
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