Photo of the Negs. As you can see they don’t look like much.
I picked up a piece of comic book production art last month. I’ve picked similar production art before but not in a little while. Production art is the things that go into getting a comic book printed. Usually they are not original art but copies of original art that are used in the printing process. The ones that I picked up are the production negatives that were used to make the printing plates for the Harvey comic book “Spooky Spooktown.” From June 1976.
There are four black and white negatives in the set. Each one represents one of the three color printing plates (magenta, cyan, and yellow) plus the black plate. After the color separations were made by hand they were photographed on a big graphics art camera and these negatives were made. Then these negatives were used to make the printing plates. This process isn’t used anymore since now things are digital but these negatives are remnants of the old way of doing things.
I bought these production negative off eBay and they cost me around fifty dollars shipped and taxed. I’ve see a lot of comic book production art on eBay in recent years and it has gone up in price. These production negatives tend to be a bit on the cheaper side of production art. I think because not a lot of people know what to do with them. They don’t look particularly good on their own as an art piece but you can scan them in and make a really nice print from them. I also use them to show my students how the printing process works.
I bought a copy of the comic too.
These for negatives are comic book print size which means they’re about seven by ten inches. That’s a big negative and you need a transparency scanner to scan them in. I have three scanners. An 11×17 scanner, an 8.5×11 scanner, and a dedicated slide and film scanner. The 8.5×11 inch scanner can scan in medium format negatives but not these big production negatives. Luckily I work at a school that has a scanner with a transparency adaptor that can scan them in.
After my semester started at the end of this January I brought the production negatives into my class. My plan was to show the class how to scan them in. Then the scanner wouldn’t cooperate. I attempted to scan them in but the scans came out all distorted. I’m not sure why.
Since I was doing this in the middle of class I didn’t have time to troubleshoot so I abandoned my attempt to scan them in and switched over to a set of production negatives that I scanned in last year. The lesson was to line up the scans on different layers in Photoshop (there are registration marks on the negatives that make that easy) and then paste each negative into the color channel it belongs in. The cyan negative goes into the cyan channel. After all four are pasted in you have a complete color cover.
We did the lesson with the older cover and everything went well but I still had to scan in Spooky Spooktown. So the next week I got in a little bit early to see if I could troubleshoot the scanner. Either somebody already did (which I doubt) or whatever went wrong the week before was probably my fault (more likely). Either way the scanner worked perfectly and I made my scans.
When I was home the following week I decided to use the scans to make a print of the cover. Usually scanning in the original production negatives of a cover is the best way to make a reproduction/print so that’s why I like to buy them.
As I said before there are registration marks on the negatives to help line them up. Those registration marks used to come on a roll of clear tape. You’d tape them onto the black negative and when you made the negatives of the color plates the registration marks would show through and become part of the color negatives.
So the registration marks on the three color plates are part of the photograph. The registration marks on the black plate are the ones that were taped on. Fifty year old tape doesn’t want to stick on anymore. All the registration marks on the black plate fell off before I could scan it. Whoops! This made lining it up a little bit harder but not impossible.
In the few other sets of production negatives that I’ve bought and scanned in they lined up just fine. But as I was lining up Spooky Spooktown I was having trouble. I couldn’t get it right. At first I thought it was because of the lack of registration marks but no matter how I rotated things and shifted them around I couldn’t get the registration right. I even looked up a scan of the original comic book to check its registration and it was fine.
The solution to my problem ended up being that I had to shrink the width of the black plate by about half a percent. That’s a really small number. I still don’t know what went wrong. None of the other production negatives I’ve bought have had this problem and I don’t see how the black plate negative could have shrunk. But either it did or something went wrong in the scanning process with that negative but not the three others. I may try scanning them in again just to see.
In the end I got a pretty good print of the cover. By scanning in the negatives it assures a quality I can’t get any other way. I also make the prints larger than comic book size. I put them on eleven by seventeen inch paper which is closer to the size of the original art. I printed out a couple of proof copies of Spooky but I haven’t put it on the good paper just yet.
By the way I tried to find out who drew this cover but the Grand Comic Book Database (.com) doesn’t know. I then asked duck.ai and it says that it’s by Dan DeCarlo. I don’t know if that’s correct or not but it’s the only answer I got.