Strange Colors!

One of the earliest rules I learned from blogging is: be careful when you're presenting material from a reprint as opposed to the original publication.

Sometimes art has been re-drawn; sometimes words have been altered to eliminate mistakes or conform with more recent continuity. That's why I try to note when a story I present panels from is a reprint, because it just may different than the original.

Trivial but profound example: a Google image search for something else led me to this panel...or rather, 4 different versions of this panel, from 4 different websites:

Now, none of these websites identified where they scanned/clipped the panel from. But the story, originally from Strange Tales #138 (1965) has been reprinted a jillion times, many of those times with a different colorist credited for the reprint (GCD lists "Stan Goldberg (?)" as the original colorist). And aside from the Doctor Strange figure, there is nothing in the panel that's the same color in all four versions, save a few black areas.

Now, I'm not going to tell you that one of these panels is preferable to the other, that one is superior. Indeed, such re-coloring might be necessary due to time and/or unavailability of the original materials.

But think about this: if one relatively inconsequential panel can differ so much from printing to reprinting to re-reprinting to re-re-reprinting...what about everything else in the story?

So remember--when you're reading a reprint, or even a presentation of the original one on of these new-fangled digital platforms, you may not be seeing same thing the contemporary readers saw when they grabbed it off the rack. Even in a particularly important comic from an artistic legend.

Manic Monday--A Cap Of A Different Color

A ways back, I discussed my dislike of Marvel's current style of coloring in many of their books. Specifically, I said:

This style of coloring requires that the color palette in every scene be as washed out as the latest film from a big-name director who can no longer figure out how to make symbolic points except by slapping filters over the lens, and then the film is shown in a cineplex with a cheap-ass manager who thinks that letting the projector bulbs go dim is somehow saving energy, so watching the movie is like trying to experience the world through 4 sets of polarized sunglasses simultaneously.

So, not to beat the dead horse again, but here's damning exhibit A: The cover of Captain America Comics #1 (1941), as it originally appeared...the image was taken from the version at Marvel Digital Comics, unretouched by me in any way:

Then we have the same cover from Marvel's 70th anniversary reprint of the same issue, as recolored by Kai Spannuth:

Same cover, different colors (and type, and UPC box, and...). (Click to embiggen each for closer examination if you wish)

See the masthead, which in the original was the red, white & blue of the American flag? Now it's scarlet, white and gun-metal gray. Clearly an improvement, right? And Cap punching Hitler in the face is much, much better in murky, muted tones than in the old four color glory. Yup, that really jumps off the shelf at you...if you can actually see it.

It's not just the cover...the issue reprints many of the stories from the original CAC #1, and they are all recolored, by various hands/computers, into dour, lifeless palettes.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think I've made it pretty clear which I prefer. Why Marvel is on the perpetual trip of trying to make everything dampened and "realistic" is beyond me.

And somehow, if Simon and Kirby could see this version, I'm pretty sure they'd say, "Damn! You need a flashlight to read this!! I thought this was a funny book!!"