Can you DIG IT?!

I’m going to take a little break from spurting off at the mouth and actually show you some hard graphic examples of some of the work that I do everyday on DC Comics monthly periodicals.  Since we are well into the column, I wanted to fast forward and show you some of the things that we are called upon to tackle on a daily basis, doing corrections on various comic books.  The best way to explain to people the basis of being a comic book production artists, is by showing people examples.  It is a visual medium, to say the least, and I hope after this column, you will see exactly what I am talking about when looking behind the curtains into comic book making.

My first example is of Titans #18.  The editor came to me and needed an art correction in the final panel.  In that panel, Cyborg was not drawn with the correct costume.  This happens a lot actually, characters drawn with the wrong outfit.  The editor gave me reference of the Cyborg costume that he wanted me to redraw, and I used that as a guide to fix the one that was drawn incorrectly.  Since this page had not yet been colored, I was able to do this correction on the black and white file.  I used my Wacom Cintque to zoom in and erase the lines I needed to erase and redraw in the lines I needed to update the costume.  I didn’t have to change all that much, but as you can see, I did my best to match the line width and style of the artist so as to make it seem flawlessly integrated, making it seem that the original artist had done the correction himself.  If I did my job correctly, you shouldn’t have been able to tell the costume was changed unless I told you I changed it.

The original TITANS #18 pg.17 as drawn by Angel Unzueta & Wayne Faucher:

The new, revised file that was sent to the colorist, with my corrected Cyborg costume:

The next example is from Fables #86.  This correction was a little bit different.  In this example, the black and white art had already been colored.  So in this instance, we are faced with a different challenge all together.  Not only do we have to redraw anything in the file that needs correcting, but we also have to recolor what we change.  The correction here was to make the main character on the page look less like Liam Neeson.  The artist just rendered the characters a little to closely to someone who is recognizable.  I just had to go in and change the character enough to make the resemblance look less prominent.  I went into the black channel in Photoshop and added lines to his face, deleted other lines to his face, got rid of some hair, and added a few shadows until I felt it was better, I now had to recolor what was changed.  I went back into the CMYK file, and started to match the color that colorist had laid down already.  I did this by making selections and using the eye-drop tool.  If a gradient was needed, I matched the gradient as best I could, but otherwise I just go right in with the paint brush (matching the opacity) and recolor what is needed.  It all depends on the freelance colorist that did that work.  Some colorists like to use a lot of gradients, others use flat colors, while others still use a more painterly style.  Also note, that I changed the color of his hair, as per the editor’s instructions, to a redish color.  I did this by selecting the color I wanted to change, going into Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation, and then >Color balance.  That way, I can keep the values the colorist already established, yet change the tones of the color.

The original file of FABLES #86 pg.3 as drawn by Jim Fern & Craig Hamilton and colored by Lee Loughridge:

The corrected color file:

The next example I will show is from DMZ #47.  This is similar to the above example, in the fact that it is also done after the page has been colored.  More and more, our job in the bullpen has been to correct files at this stage rather then before.  Back in the day, the corrections were done more in the black and white stage before it was sent out to a colorist.  But since the use of the File Transer Protocol (FTP site), where we send our files instantly back and forth to freelancers, the digital process has sped things along tremendously.  This has been a gift and a curse in many aspects, that I will explain in a future column.  Since books are usually running late or right up to the deadline (or even if it’s not), when we get artwork from an artist, it is immediately rushed through to be colored and lettered.  Then down, the road, the editor decides that they want to fix the artwork.  If it has not been colored yet, we fix the black and white art file, and re-send it to the colorist as a revised file.  If it has been colored already, we wait until the colorist is completely done with his or her color corrections, and then make all the art and now new color corrections on top of that.

The art and color corrections I was asked to do on this page were a lot of fun!  First, I had to take the laser scope that was in panel one, and place it in panel three.  I did that by simply selecting that red cross, and copying it and pasting it onto a new layer, and placed it where it should now go.  Then I had to recolor panel three to match the tones of panel one.  I did all that in the adjust ment palette.  Then in panel two the character of ‘Z’ did not have a face drawn in.  As small as it was, I had to draw in two eyes, a nose, and a mouth to that character. Finally, in the last panel I had to add speed lines to Matty Roth, as if he was picking up his head.  This has been made so much easier to draw now that I have a Wacom Cintque, mainly because I can be way more accurate in my lines when I’m actually drawing it on the file as I would draw it on paper, instead of guessing where my line was going to go, when I was just using a regular Wacom tablet.

The original DMZ #47 pg. as drawn by Riccardo Burchielli with colors by Jeromy Cox:

The revised file with corrections:

The final correction I want to show is one of lettering.  Not only do we do black and white art corrections, and color corrections, we also do a lot of lettering corrections.  This mostly contains such corrections as final spelling mistakes, rearranging balloons, and pointers, and also coloring sound effects using flat colors and gradients in Illustrator.  The example below is from Titans #17 where I needed to add a whole bunch of text explaining that people need to go and pick up Blackest Night to continue the story of Tempest.  I did this by dropping the color file into Illustrator, and writing the copy that was needed on it’s own layer.  Then I choose what font I wanted, and created ‘outlines’, so I could manipulate that font.  I made certain words bigger for emphasis and played with the size of the text until I got what looked readable and kinda cool.

Original file of TITANS #17 pg.22 by Angel Unzueta and Wayne Faucher, colored by HiFi, original lettering by DC Comics’ Travis Lanham:

Corrected file:

OK, I think that’s enough examples for today.  I hope you now get fully understand some of the things that we do in Pre-Press at DC Comics, from these and some of the other examples I’ve shown you in this column.  One very important thing to note about doing art corrections, I should mention.  We always, and I mean always save the original copy of the page.  That is very important, because not only do you need it just-in-case, but the editor has to always approve the correction.  If the editor doesn’t like what I’ve done, or he doesn’t like the correction itself anymore, you have to go back to the original file.  So always save the original file, and your corrections as a separate file, so you can always go back to or refer to the original.

That’s it for this week.  Got lot’s more planned coming up, so stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

Keep making those comic books awesome,

CjB