About give-aways and photostats

[Daniel van Eijmeren]

Hi all!

This message contains a conversation which I had with Don in private 
mail, it is about the problems publishers seems to have with 
reprinting Barks' give-away stories. 

I'm sending this to the club, because this subject might be too 
interesting to keep in private mail.

For those who don't know: In the 40's Barks made also stories which 
didn't appear in the regular comics. They appeared in comics called 
"give-aways", these were comics which were given away by companies as 
promotion. Examples of these stories are "Darkest Africa", "Race to 
the South Seas" and "Donald Duck's Atom Bomb".

The last two decades the stories were reprinted *redrawn* (by other 
artists), because there seem to be problems with reprinting the 
original art. As what I am told this is because the original art and 
the photostats of (most of) these stories are lost. 

I asked Don why they didn't work from xeroxes of the original comics.


-------------------- Beginning of forwarded messages ------------------

From:           Daniel van Eijmeren
To:             donrosa at iglou.com (Don Rosa)
Subject:        Give-aways
Date sent:      Thu, 14 Sep 1995 17:48:28

Hi Don,

I have a question to you about the CBL-reprints of Barks' give-away 
stories. I've also asked it on the club, but then no one replied. I'm 
asking this to you, because you might know a lot about the 
reproduction techniques of Another Rainbow / Gladstone.

Why didn't the CBL use the original art of the give-aways? I've heard 
that the photostats of the stories are lost, but why didn't they make 
a reproduction of the original give-away comic?

It might be a problem that these comics contain colours, but I know 
of xeroxers which have the possibility to leave colours out of the 
xerox (so you get only the black lines). Harry has (or had) one at his 
work, and the xeroxes he made with it looked quite good. So this is 
why I think that it's not that impossible to make a good reproduction.

I'm even thinking that Another Rainbow did use reproductions of comics 
(instead of photostats) in the CBL, so that's also why I'm wondering 
why they didn't do that with the give-aways.

At first I thought that they didn't make a reproduction, because it 
was far more easier to use the redrawn versions which were already 
ready to print. So I thought it was lazyness. But the redrawn 
versions have the original balloons pasted in their art, and I 
certainly don't call all that work on pasting being lazy!

Now I'm thinking of the possibility that they only used the balloons 
because these didn't contain colours (so it isn't very difficult to 
make a black-and-white reproduction). Do editors still have problems 
with coloured art, despite the existance of the xeroxer I mentioned?

I hope you can answer these questions.


Greetings,

--- Daniel

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date sent:      Fri, 15 Sep 95 07:53 EDT
To:             Daniel van Eijmeren <daniel at maisie.ow.nl>
From:           donrosa at iglou.com (Don Rosa)
Subject:        Re: Give-aways

        They seem to need to work from photostats and not xeroxes. 
Whatever method you might use on a common copier to get the colors to 
drop out either isn't suitable or not as successful as you believe -- 
all I know is it won't work for the system they use to print comics 
or books. This must be true since I know of a guy who has even 
copywrited a system for dropping colors off a comic page for B&W 
repro and if it was easy to do correctly on a simple copy machine, 
this wouldn't be necessary.
        Anyway, the only acceptable way to get a good B&W copy of old
colored comic art is to cut the comic into individual pages and soak 
eachpage in a solution which bleaches out all but the black ink. This 
obviously RUINS the comic, and no one is willing to do that to a MARCH 
OF COMICS issue that has a current "value" of around $5000.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From:           Daniel van Eijmeren
To:             donrosa at iglou.com (Don Rosa)
Subject:        More give-aways
Date sent:      Sat, 16 Sep 1995 17:52:50

Hi Don!

Your answer about the giveaways was very interesting. I've still 
some questions: Isn't it also possible to soak away colours from 
colour-xeroxes? And what is exactly a photostat? 

BTW. This is going on in private mail, but maybe you allow me to send 
your previous answer to the club? Maybe others would also like to 
know about it.


Greetings,

--- Daniel


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date sent:      Sun, 17 Sep 95 09:16 EDT
To:             Daniel van Eijmeren <daniel at maisie.ow.nl>
From:           donrosa at iglou.com (Don Rosa)
Subject:        Re: More give-aways

        A photostat is really just a photo. It's done on a huge 
expensive machine which has the camera mounted pointing down at a flat 
surface with lotsa guide-marks on it, and the camera can enlarge or 
shrink the photo and keep the whole flat sheet in perfact (?) focus 
and so forth. A Xerox or any copy-machine is really just an invention 
for making really, really cheap photostat-type shots. Actually, on 
modern copiers, I've found that a very carefully done Xerox from a 
extremely good (i.e. big and expensive) Xerox machine is BETTER than a 
photostat. Even photostats are a little blurry if they aren't done 
very carefully. When I personally supervize my copy-store people, they 
can make perfect Xerox copies.
        I don't know about soaking color out of color copies -- it 
sounds like it would not give the quality that is needed.
        I think the Digest has already discussed this, but you can 
post all this there if you wish. Somebody there probably knows much 
more than I do about this subject.

--------------------------- End --------------------------------------


Is there someone who can add his/her two cents to this?

Greetings,

--- Daniel