A Distant Soil Digital Restoration Project: Bummerific News UPDATE
on July 16th, 2012Hey, folks.
I am on the hunt for original art from A Distant Soil. Please click the link to see the article about this restoration, and view the progress.
Our printer went bankrupt a few years back, but we were told the company would stay in business. It did. But it separated, and its old printing division went independent.
Unfortunately, even though it’s customary to hold negatives and digital files in archives for reprint, in the confusion of the reorganization, many of our files appear to have been discarded. The company contacted me on July 4 to tell me they had found the archives.
I got the negatives back today, but none of the graphic novels have been preserved. I have a handful of individual issues.
While we will be able to use some of the negatives to restore art from Volumes II-III, nothing remains from volume I.
I held off selling most of the art for many years, and still have a good deal of it here. I’ve been able to restore 18 of the 25 pages from issue 1 of the comic, for example.
But there are major gaps in later issues, and almost nothing from issue 5.
I will post a complete list of what I need in the coming days.
If you have ANYTHING from Volume IV of the graphic novels, this is the LOWEST priority. Most of the art was digitally preserved already, in good condition. We also have a random selection of earlier pages in good condition. NO MATTER WHAT YOU HAVE, CONTACT ME! Some of your earlier scans are poor quality and need to be redone.
If you purchased A Distant Soil original art, I would be very grateful if you would get in touch with me. I would be especially grateful if you would either scan the art to my specs, or loan me the originals for scanning. I will reimburse you all your expenses, as well as send you a little something nice extra. (At first I thought I only needed pages sold prior to 2008, but some of my early scans are quite poor. So, no matter what you have bought, please let me know.)
I need 1200 dpi greyscale, or 600 dpi greyscale. I prefer the former.
If you have color originals, I prefer 600 dpi CMYK. RGB will do.
Please do not email me with any large files until I have determined I actually need the pages you have. The most critical pages required at this time are from issues 1-15.
I am so grateful for your kindness in helping restore this book. I am deeply sorry this happened, and I am doing everything I can to bring you a new edition in good condition.
Please CLICK HERE to write me.
Thank you.
c
UPDATE: A clarification. Some pages have been scanned by me already and are OK. The pages I am most concerned about are pages with tone sheets on them, as in pages with hand applied mechanical grey areas made of plastic sheets. The original scans on many of these pages are quite poor. It is easy to clean up and restore a page without tone sheets, because line work often scans very cleanly. The pages that concern me most use tones. Here is an example.
This page shows the clean, clear grey areas we want to see in the final edition. It has been fully restored from a scan of the original art.
This is a page that has not been restored:
As you can see, the tones are muddy, and linework has been lost. In some cases, tones on character’s faces are so dark and muddy, their expressions can’t be seen. The more original art I have access to, or the more art that can be properly scanned and sent to me, the more beautiful we can make the new editions of the series. I sincerely appreciate your help!
aw man. Sorry to hear that. I still have my pages over here, I’ll wait for the list to see if you need them.
Yeah, major buzzkill today. When the list of the negatives came in, it said they had Volume I. It turned out to be Images of A Distant Soil #1, not the graphic novel.
Which means the printer discarded nearly $20,000 worth of production work on my graphic novels, some of which I paid to have made elsewhere and sent to this printer.
Oh, and it’s a damn good thing I went on a mad cleaning tear last week, because those negatives are huge and so is the box they came in. They’re on great big sheets, and I will have to cut them down to size to scan them.
I’m not sure how many we are going to be able to use, but you can pretty much bet if you have anything from issues 1-15, I need it. Drop me a line. I have NO negatives from issue 1-15.