Bunny 21 Cover Scans Put Together
Last year (January of 2024) I wrote about buying some comic book production art off eBay. I bought the production negatives from a comic book cover published in the mid 1970s. The cover of Bunny #21 from Harvey comics. (http://radiantcomics.com/art-writing-bunny-21-production-negatives/). I am revisiting the subject with a new theme in mind. The new theme is “The right tool for the right job really makes a difference.”
These production negatives are what they used to make the four printing plates with which they would print the covers. There is a blue (cyan) plate, a red (magenta) plate, a yellow plate, and a black plate. There is a negative that corresponds with each one of these plates.
These negatives are also called “Transparencies.” That’s because they are see through. There is no white on them. Any place in the color scheme where the white of the paper is supposed to show through is transparent instead. Since the printing of comic books was done by printing little dots of color (especially for the lighter colors) the space between the dots is also transparent. Any white on any printed page is the white color of the paper rather than a white ink.
This transparency part is important because in order to scan it well you need a part on your scanner called a “Transparency Adaptor.” My scanner doesn’t have this part. I have two other scanners that can scan photographic negatives and slides, technically they are transparencies too, but the production negatives are 8.5×11 inches and that’s too big for my slide/film scanners.
The Yellow Plate. Yes, It’s in black and white.
Last year when I originally scanned these production negatives I did my best using my flatbed scanner. Its scanned it pretty well but not great. I’d give the scans a solid B to B minus. I’d say they captured about 80% of what was there. It was enough for me to make a good but not great print out of the cover. It took a lot of adjusting. I can also tell by my original blog that I had trouble making my own positive transparency of the art. That all changed this week.
The quality of my scans changed because I finally brought the production negatives into the school where I teach and they have a transparency adaptor on their scanner. Y’see, one of the things that I show the students how to do is to scan. There are a couple of scanners that they can use and one of them is an 11×17 inch scanner with the transparency adaptor. So I figured that it was about time I scanned in those negatives the right way.
What a difference in quality the right tool made. Most of the background color in the top of the comic is about a 50% magenta. They used what’s called a “Screen” to turn a 100% magenta ink into a series of dots that looks like a 50% magenta. They used a literal screen which was 50% screen to block out the color and 50% holes in the screen. So in any square inch on that part of the cover half the inch is covered with dots and the other half is the white paper between the dots. If it was a 100% magenta the whole square inch would be covered in ink. No paper would show through.
I mention all that because with a flatbed scanner all those dots are hard to scan. At least they’re hard to scan evenly. And the whole point of the dots is that they’re even. So in my original scans the dots weren’t as solid and even as they should have been. They were okay but I could see they weren’t anywhere near perfect.
Since the production negatives are in black and white after I scan them I have to turn them into color. I did this in Photoshop and lined up all four negatives. They lined up perfectly and looked really good. If my flatbed scans were 80% these ones were as close to 100% as I was going to get. The screens were all even and so the color looked even.
The color looked bright and vibrant too. After comparing the printouts I made from the flatbed scans to the new ones the old printout looked washed out. The color wasn’t nearly as bright as it was supposed to be. Side by side I might even move the score of the flatbed scanner files down to 70%.
The main area that I could really tell was improved was the distinction between the skin tone of the main character, Bunny, and the pink background. In my original scans the two colors were more similar than they should have been. That always bothered me. Now it doesn’t.
A place where the new scans really made a difference is on the transparencies that I printed. Back in the day the printer would give you a “Proof” to look at which was each individual plate (Cyan. Magenta, Yellow, and Black) printed on transparent paper that would be sandwiched together but you could separate them (they were hinged with tape) to look at what each printing plate looked like.
I can see by my old blog that I struggled to print the individual plates on transparencies and thought I didn’t have the correct settings for my printer. Turned out the scans just weren’t good enough. With these new scans I had no trouble printing my own transparencies.
These new scans with the transparency adaptor also took very little cleanup or adjusting. I can remember working on the old flatbed scans for a couple of hours trying to get them to bee good enough to print. With these new scans it was more minutes than hours. I had to adjust the color slightly but since the color of the dots were so even it was easy. I also had to fix a few small areas where the dots were messed up but that didn’t take long. It was so much less work this time around.
So that’s today’s lesson. The correct tool means a lot less work and a better result.