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Jan 30 08 12:41 AM
captainmarvel1957 wrote: They would almost have to be printed from photographic plates. Hal would be the guy to ask about this---what's the answer, Hal???
They're all printed from photographic plates, cap. And on the same presses, whether you use coated or uncoated stock (newsprint). Only difference between a regular comic, graphic novel and Essential type 'phonebook' is whether you use a saddle stitch or a perfect bound binder. As a matter of fact, they're all printed heatset offset these days. But it wasn't always so. Years ago, we wanted to demonstrate to Marvel what a good flexographic press could do (the difference being that flexographic uses rubber printing plates and vegetable ink that air dries -- more eco friendly -- while heatset offset uses metal plates and oil based inks which need to be set by heat -- hence the name). As a test, we ran some ZORROs, and some ALFs (I think that was my first work for Marvel -- re-colorkeying Zorro using a flexographic color chart. Talk about recieving a crash course in color theory). Eventually Marvel was interested to see how Jim Lee's X-MEN would look printed flexographically. We'd been doing color work for them since the cover of the first issue of X-MEN, that big fold out thing and it's singular variations, all on an overnight turnaround. So they held up a copy of the most recent issue, I think it was like #2 or #3, showed us Scott Williams really thin linework, and asked if it would stand up to a flexographic press, and how soon could we run a test. That's when we told them that we'd had open presstime and had already gone ahead and printed it flexo, and that's what they were holding, and it just blew them away. Every line was intact, no dropouts, and the color was rich and vibrant. Other factors lead to flexo being replaced by offset, but the point is, yeah, even super detailed stuff can be printed on newsprint, and using a variety of equipment. Heck, we used to print early Alex Ross MARVELS samples in Marvel Age on newsprint (back before anyone knew who he was), and they looked perfectly fine. The original art, of course, looked even better
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