In The Year 2000 – Part II

Back in 2000, 2001, we had six production artists on the floor in the bullpen.  All the books filtered through our manager after the editors and proofreader marked up their corrections.  The manager sorted the books according to when they would be due to the printer, and when they were due in the comic book stores.  The books shipping the earliest went to the top of the pecking order, and so on down the line, depending on how many books were in the drawer.

When a production artist was ready to work on the next book, he went up to the drawer and grabbed the book on top.  Logging it out, they brought it back to their drawing table, and began working on the book.  Before we could work on the editors and proofreader’s corrections, there were two basic steps to perform.  The first was to ink in the crop marks.  To do this you took a small right angle ruler, and lined it up with the top crop marks on the comic board, on all four corners (this got very tedious if it was a book with more then 22 pages, let me tell you).  The second basic step was to put registration marks on the boards.  We had pre-made registration stickers for easy application to the board, and they went on the top and bottom of the page, outside the crop area.  These two steps were important mainly because we would use these guides to line up any overlays and/ or lettering that we would have to use later on, if necessary for each particular page.

Now that you had all the original art boards set up, it was time to go through the entire book and see all the corrections that were marked up.  We usually put the pages that needed corrections aside, in one pile, and the pages that didn’t into a “finished” pile.  Then, we were ready to do all the corrections, page by page.  Tools we used to do this were markers, pens, correction tape, exacto knife, a T-Square, ruler, plastic balloon templates, plastic curve rulers, whiteout, a wax machine, and a photocopy machine.  Everyone worked a little differently, depending on their preference, but I usually liked to take all the pages that needed corrections and make high quality photocopies of those pages right off the bat.  So if I needed to do 13 pages of corrections, I made 13 black and white copies of those pages.  Making 11 x 17 inch photocopies allowed me to have something to use to paste words and art from, onto the original boards.  In essence, I was making corrections from a copy of the pre-existing page.  This made it easier to match the style and font that the artist and letterer used.  After all, the corrections had to look flawless.

To do this, we all used a method called “ransom note”.  This meant that we used the photocopies we made to grab lettering and art from, and transferred it to the original board making the correction needed.  For instance, if a word was spelled wrong, say “superstious”, we cut out the letters we needed to change on the copy and pasted them over the misspelled word on the original art, creating the correct spelling (in the same type-face), “superstitious”.  Sometimes we had to cut out a new word letter by letter, if we could not find a word somewhere else in the book.  Hence the “ransom note” term used for lettering corrections.  Now, with this way of working, a new problem arose.  Most of the time, the new word or sentence threw off the size of the rest of the text and the old balloon it was in, forcing us to have to alter everything to make the corrections fit.  That meant re-doing not only words, but entire word balloons.

To do this, we put correction tape over the entire area that needed a new balloon & text.  We ransomed the text to what the corrections called for, and then laid it on top of the correction tape.  Then we took our plastic balloon templates tool, and drew in a new balloon on the tape, to the size needed.  Then you redrew the tail of the new balloon, also on the correction tape, to the character it needed to go to (since you covered up the old balloon).  Then, using your exacto blade, we cut out the excess tape around the balloon, throwing it away, therefore creating the entire new balloon, with the fully corrected text.

Each correction called for all the same techniques, all requiring a lot of different tools.  You had to account for the balloon and the text to be as straight as possible with a T-Square and ruler, just to name one.  All the while making sure all the corrections matched the text of the original letterer.  If we did our job correctly, the changes should look like it was originally lettered that way by the letterer.

If you are still following all of this, and haven’t lost your mind yet, then I give you a lot of credit.  It wasn’t as hard as it sounds, granted, but it was a very meticulous, technical process that required a lot of time and skill.  All these corrections now take minutes in a program like Illustrator, but we didn’t work digitally back then.  This was the only way to do corrections such as these, back in the early 2000’s.  As complex as it sounds, trust me, it was a lot of fun to do it this way!

Remember, all this was just for the books that were lettered directly on the boards.  We had to do things completely different for books that were lettered on velum sheets, overlays, and books lettered by Comic Craft!  Just wait until next week when I go into that, and how we used to do art corrections.  That gets even more complex, yet is where all the fun of working this way existed!

TO BE CONTINUED…!