Who Cleaned the Watchmen?

One of the biggest projects I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on at DC Comics, has to have been Absolute Watchmen.  When the Absolute editions were announced, Watchmen became one of the biggest undertakings that Pre-Press got to handle in it’s history.  Each issue of Watchmen was to be collected in an over-sized volume, and it fell upon our department to do it.

Now, you must be thinking, ‘what’s the big deal, it’s been reprinted a million times, why would this be such an undertaking?’  True, it has been printed probably more then any other graphic novel in the history of comics, but this was no straight up reprint, where you could just blow up the files to the Absolute, over-sized format, and send it off to the printers.  No, it was way more complex then that!  For this edition, we wanted to go above and beyond and make it the best reprinting of any comic collection we’ve ever done.  Much like the re-release of the Star Wars Original Trilogy, or a DVD of a classic movie, we wanted this volume to be completely REMASTERED!  That meant it had to be rescanned, reformatted, and completely recolored!  This would prove to be a huge undertaking, as well as a painstakingly tedious process, that last about six to eight months of work, eight hour days, and even having to work on weekends.

But still you say, ‘alright, Corey, why did this turn out to be such an amazingly difficult project to do?’  As I said above, everything was being redone for the re-release of this project.  One of our senior artists began working on the book, preparing it for what we would eventually have to do on it, to be able to recolor it.  Unlike any other reprint where we can just grab the old pages, make some minor corrections, re-quark it, and blam, we’re done, there was much more to this to say the least.

Since it was such an old project, the digital files that we had been using for all the umteenth reprints we did all had to be recolored and “remastered”.  All those old files, although still amazing looking, would not have looked so if they were just blown up to the Absolute Volume size we needed them at.  So what we did was go to the original film that we had for the pages.  Since we no longer have the original art to older comics such as this, what we have are the pages in the film library.  Back in the day, all our books were shot using film on acetate.  Our film library has extensive books all on film, and when we need to reprint them, it is shot from that film, and made digital for us to use.  But this poses a lot of problems.  Since the film is well, film, and it is old, when you make a digital file from film, it can be dirty, have scratches, and have sections missing, depending on how well the film was originally made.  This was the case with the Watchmen ‘film’ we wound up having to use.  There was no way around this since the film was the old way to be able to reproduce the book at the quality we wanted to.  Since it was being recolored, we needed high resolution files, as much as 1200 dpi.  There was no corners that we were going to cut for this book.  We needed 1200 dpi digital files to work from for this project, nothing less.  So we shot from the film, and all the problems we get from doing that were present, even though we now had high resolution, 1200 dpi files to work from.  Not only that, but shooting from this film for a book like Watchmen created a problem which would control my life and the life of other Pre-Press staff at the time months of our lives.

Because the way the film was created long ago for this book, all the files picked up on all the varying tones of the artwork.  The film must had been shot from half-toned artwork, therefore it created a moire pattern. A moire pattern is a term we use when two grids are overlaid at an angle, or when they have slightly different mesh sizes.  In other words, the tones on the film, when digitized, created a dot pattern, zip-a-tone-like look to them.  Much the way comics were printed back in the day, and the reason this happened with these files, was because comics used to be colored using a dot system.  Tiny little dots, millions of them, were placed next to each other, producing a color or tone, when looked at from a distance.  If you take an old comic book, say from the 70’s or 80’s, look at it through a magnify glass, and you’ll see hundreds of colored dots to give the illusion of a whole color.  A moire pattern looks like this:

VIA WIKIPEDIA

As you can see, the image creates a design-like look, that is actually quiet painful on the eyes.  Watchmen, when shot from our film, looked like this digitally.  This was not good.  We now had high res files, but all with unusable moire patterns in them.  These are just two pages of what we were dealing with now:

pg.16

pg.18

As you can see above, the files we had to use were filled with moire patterns.  The “dots” went up to and in almost all cases, fell on top of the contour lines of Dave Gibbon’s artwork.  It all became a bitmap disaster.  It fell upon us to get rid of these moire patterns.  All the “dot” had to GO!  We had to go in the each page, into each panel, and using a Wacom Tablet, get rid of all the “dots” so as to only keep the contour lines of the art, so it can be recolored.  We had to make sure, NO MATTER WHAT, that we keep the integrity of the original artwork and lines.  We need to weed out those dots and make sure that we keep the line work untouched.  If we zoom in, we can see how the dots (and also line moires) really caused a serious problem that had to be fixed.  These files all needed serious art reconstruction to remove these moires before we can send them off to be recolored!

As you can see we had our work cut out for us here.  There is about 350 pages in Watchmen, and each page took about three to five hours of work to fix and get rid of the moires, if not longer depending on how extensive they were incorporated in the artwork.  This was one example of an extreme page that needed about seven hours of work done to get rid of all the dots:

Look in the computer, and the computer keyboard.  Look at the lines in the toy dress.  Look at the dots in the newspaper text.  Look at all the dots in the windows outside.  ALL THESE HAD TO BE REMOVED!  But we HAD to make sure the original lines were ALL kept.  We could not impede any original line work meant to be there that was drawn by Gibbons.  We had to be EXTRA careful that we got rid of the dots in between the lines, and ONLY the dots.  As you can see, we had our work cut out for us.

So how did we do this?  Very simple.  We used our Wacom Tablet to zoom in on each panel and manually go in and erase the dots.  Larger chunks of dotted areas, we use the selection tool to select as may of it as we could and deleted it.  But then we were left with dots attached to original line work, and that would make it a little harder to make sure we were deleting dots/lines and not art.  Below is a step by step process of how we cleaned up those moire patterns, and why you could see how each page took hours upon hours to complete.  Overall, it took three Pre-Press artists 6 months to complete this project!

Here I was zoomed in, and with my pencil tool at a small diameter, used white to start to get rid of the dots in the face/mask of Rorschach.

The face is now clear of dots, keeping all the original artwork in tack!  Next I moved on to the scarf and coat.  Remember, this is only for ONE panel on the page, and zoomed in at no less then 150%.  This whole panel, as you see above have the entire panel covered in moire.  The face alone took me about 30 minutes!

Here you can see I pulled out a bit so you can see how much more needs to be removed.  Remember, it was not just dots that made the moire patterns in this book, but also the moire LINES that had to be removed, as you can see in the coat!  Look at the button.  We had to zoom in a LOT to get in there and keep all the detail of the button, all the while keeping the amazing line work of Dave Gibbons there!  You can see I just continued “erasing” dots and lines on the neck of the coat.  That’s the only way we could really get in there and not mess it up, and be sloppy.

Here you can see that I used the lasso tool to remove a larger section of the moire so it wouldn’t be such a large area to use the pencil tool on.  Sometimes I just used a thicker brush, but the lasso tool came in handy to get rid of larger areas.  But as you can see, it made it a little harder to distinguish what is now the dots, and what is actual Gibbon’s line.

So imagine getting rid of all these dots and lines of moire patterns!  Imagine doing that, and NOTHING else for eight hours a day for six months!  That was my and three artist’s lives here in the bullpen.  We worked our butts off.  We split it up chapter by chapter as we had to send out the finished approved pages to the colorist as soon as we could to be recolored.  It was one of the most time consuming, tedious, and carpel-tunnel syndrome inducing project I’ve ever had to work on here at DC.  Yet it was also the most rewarding, proud moment of mine and the other two artists career as a Production Artist.  We were all rewarded with a bonus check for the work we did on this art reconstruction, and best of all, we actually got CREDIT for it in all the reprints of Watchmen from here on out.  Since the final product came out so well, and I must say, looks AMAZING, the files we reconstructed are now used in any and all reprints of the Watchmen Graphic Novel, whether it be the Absolute version or the TPB.

I am proud to have worked on this book, and it is now a treasure of a book that I displace with confidence on my desk!  I love telling people about the process that went into fixing this book and all the hard work that went into it.  It was so tedious at one point, we started seeing dots everywhere we looked and almost had nervous breakdowns at time.  We all felt like that working on this project at one point or another, but if you pick the book up and really check it out, look at it closely, you can see how much it was worth it.

I hope you agree, and I hope you enjoyed this trip back into one of the biggest projects of my career, and I better go now, because I’m getting flashbacks, and I’m starting to see dots again.

Corey Breen

Senior Pre-Press Artist, DC Comics

PS- I couldn’t find one off the bat, but I will look at home for a completed version of the pages above, that we used for the finished book, with all the dots/line moires we removed.  Remember, we also worked at home on weekends to get this book done, it was that BIG of a project!