In the Year 2000…

Part 1

In the year 2000, DC Comics’ Pre-Press Department was quite different.  In fact, it wasn’t even called Pre-Press.  It was just called Production.  It was all one unit that was split up into the artists/designers, and trafficking/coordinators.  The bullpen handled the workflow of the periodicals, trades, and covers.  The coordinators handled all the approvals, routing, and shipping.  If this is all sounding like gibberish to you, I will do my best to explain.  We’ll deal with how work comes into to DC first.  That’s a good place to start.  That in and of itself will also take up most of, if not more then part’s one and two of this subject, so bear with me.

Back in late 1990’s and into the early 2000’s, all of our artists sent in their original artwork through the mail.  Yes, as dangerous as that was, all art from pencillers and inkers came via UPS or Fed-Ex.  Mostly all the artwork was inked back in the day, so the inker would Fed-Ex his original pages to our Editorial Administration Department.  But he would only do this if the artwork were going to be lettered by Comic-Craft or by freelancers that worked on what we called overlays (blank sheets of acetate).  You see, some books were lettered directly onto the boards at this time.  This usually happened right after the pencil stage.  The penciller left room for the balloons and text (hopefully) and then sent the penciled pages to the letterer before the inker.  If the letter inked on the board, he did his work (the text, balloons and captions).   Then the letterer finally sent it off to the inker, who would then work his magic on the remaining pencils not covered by the text and balloons.  Then, finally, when the inker was done, he would send it off to Ed Admin.  If the artwork was going to be inked without the letter lettering directly on the boards, then the penciller just sent his work directly to the inker and then the inker directly to the Ed Admin.  Following me so far?  It gets even more complicated soon.

As soon as Ed Admin got the book (either lettered on the board or not), they would fill out about 100 sheets of paperwork, and then give it to the editor of that particular book.  The Editor would then approve the artwork, by going through each page and marking up, directly on the boards with a blue pencil, all the corrections he wanted or needed the bullpen to do.  You hear that right.  The editor would mark up, in non-repo blue (that means the blue pencil would not show up on photocopies, or a scan) right on top of the art.  On top of this gorgeous artwork, the editor would ugly it up with markings in blue pencil.  Unbelievable, right?  Well, anyway…  Some editors didn’t like to do that, so they used post it notes.  But the worry with that was, the post-it note would fall off in transit (bringing the pages down to the bullpen to fix).  So not everyone liked to risk having that happen and the correction not being done.

A little side note here… the books that were lettered directly on the board and inked, those books went through the editor and then they had to be looked at by our proofreader.  We had at that time one proofreader who read every book! That would be something in the range of over 200 books a month! That’s a lot of reading, believe you, me!  And she has to have knowledge of all of the titles, not to mention she has to correct spelling, grammar and punctuation!

After she marked up the book (also in blue line, no less), the book would finally reach the bullpen.  It would go into a draw according to ship date, and awaited being worked on by a Production Artist on the floor.

To Be Continued…