Roger the Dodger, #3583

[Lew Stringer]

I once had the Inland Revenue round my house, Lew. They said I could claim for Bristol Board [which I did] but I doubt if I got the full amount back. They actually brought up the subject of drawing 'card' as they called it, so they must have dealt with artists before.

I tried claiming for travel expenses between Edinburgh-Dundee to visit D C Thomson [which I done often] but they were having none of it!

I didn't know they made house calls Rab. I went to see them when I was starting out, to check on the do's and don'ts and the ones I spoke to were polite and very helpful.

You should have been able to claim for any business travel expense if you kept the tickets so I don't know why they wouldn't allow you to put the fare to Dundee into your expenses.

[swirlythingy]

Wow... 13 replies before I even bothered to check, and 15 by the time I got around to posting! I guess I'm just not used to high-traffic forums... or even medium-traffic forums.

All the Bob Nixon artwork I have seen was submitted in line only, then coloured in-house.

Same here. Bob's comic strips were all sent in black and white. I think he did one or two pieces for posters or promotion in colour but pretty much everything else was in black and white. Bob drew very quickly and the board he found best for that was a very glossy stock, which wouldn't have taken colour.

I stand corrected. I wrote that post in a hurry, and formed an on-the-spot opinion of Nixon's preferred creative process after five seconds spent looking at the following:

From Beano #3051 (Jan 6 2001), 'cos it was convenient

While I'm no expert in these matters, that looks like inks to me. Of course, I suppose there's no rule which says DC Thomson's in-house colourists aren't allowed to hand-colour their comics. They must have done something before Photoshop!

(Although this raises the interesting question: if Nixon's paper didn't take colour, what did DC Thomson colour on? Did he scan and email it, and then it was printed off at the other end, coloured, and then scanned again?)

beano went to glossy bigger paper with issue 2402 30/7/88 & dandy went glossy with issue 2413 20/2/88.I still prefer the old syle newsprint of 70s & 80s & love the smell of em,i wish they would go back to that style

Aha! So it must have been before 1988, then (and, by extension, before colour), but at the same time after 1986. I don't think we're going to narrow it down any further without someone delving into the attic.

Thanks for your help, everyone.

[Lew Stringer]

(Although this raises the interesting question: if Nixon's paper didn't take colour, what did DC Thomson colour on? Did he scan and email it, and then it was printed off at the other end, coloured, and then scanned again?)

Over ten years ago? I think it's more likely he posted the pages in and the staff would colour a high quality print.

[Jonny Whizz]

To my eye, Bob's pages usually looked more like they'd been painted rather than printed, although I could be wrong. From the example you've shown, look at the sky - it looks as though it's been painted to me.

I think DCT would be more likely to add colour through the printing process rather than doing it by hand. However, there is the possiblity that it might have been coloured by someone else (i.e. not DCT and not Bob). Certainly, Nigel Parkinson uses colourists who do a great job with his artwork - his strips are usually painted rather than coloured using Photoshop.

[Digifiend]

(Although this raises the interesting question: if Nixon's paper didn't take colour, what did DC Thomson colour on? Did he scan and email it, and then it was printed off at the other end, coloured, and then scanned again?)

beano went to glossy bigger paper with issue 2402 30/7/88 & dandy went glossy with issue 2413 20/2/88.I still prefer the old syle newsprint of 70s & 80s & love the smell of em,i wish they would go back to that style

Aha! So it must have been before 1988, then (and, by extension, before colour), but at the same time after 1986. I don't think we're going to narrow it down any further without someone delving into the attic.

Thanks for your help, everyone.

Email wasn't available in the 80s, lol.

[stevezodiac]

Lew mentioned the reduced size comics of the late 40s (I still haven't worked out how to copy a quote into my post) so have scanned two 40s Dandys to illustrate how thin the paper rationing made the Dandy and Beano. The wider one is normal A4 size.

[swirlythingy]

Email wasn't available in the 80s, lol.

Yes, it was. In fact, it was available in the 60s. Not that this is relevant anyway, since Roger was black and white before 1993 (so colouring problems wouldn't arise).

(I still haven't worked out how to copy a quote into my post)

Um, hit that button in the bottom right saying "Quote"?

If you want to quote multiple people (as here), you press "Quote" once for each one (in a new window or tab each time), then copy and paste everything into one reply form (it doesn't matter which one, because AFAICT phpBB doesn't record what specific post you were replying to) and close the rest (the 'Cancel' button seems to be unnecessary).

Another thing... you do know this forum can host images, right? (As long as you don't exceed 300KB, which shouldn't occur with any decent-sized JPEG.) Use the "Upload attachment" form beneath the reply form. After you've clicked "Add the file", a new "Place inline" button will appear allowing you to position the image within the text. For example, my image looked like this:

Code: Select all

[attachment=0]roger.jpg[/attachment]

Where "roger.jpg" was the filename I had given my scanned image before I uploaded it.

HTH

[Lew Stringer]

Email wasn't available in the 80s, lol.

Yes, it was. In fact, it was available in the 60s. Not that this is relevant anyway, since Roger was black and white before 1993 (so colouring problems wouldn't arise).

No, it's not relevant because artists were not emailing their work to publishers in the 1980s, and I can assure you they wouldn't have been sending it that way in the Sixties either. The shift to scanning/emailing artwork (as opposed to posting the pages to the editor) was a very gradual process that developed in the 1990s, depending on the technology of the artist and the editors. We didn't all wake up one morning with personal computers and Photoshop. In fact some artists still post their original art to their editors. (Personally, I didn't have a computer until 1999.)

It's Broadband that made e-mailing art a better solution than posting it. Before then, emailing a 300dpi page would take ages.

[swirlythingy]

No, it's not relevant because artists were not emailing their work to publishers in the 1980s, and I can assure you they wouldn't have been sending it that way in the Sixties either.

I didn't suggest they were. Imagine sending two or three A3 print-quality images over dial-up! (Yes, I have used dial-up. It's not a place I want to go back to.)

Nor did I suggest there was a sudden switch to Photoshop. The relatively recent image posted above is proof of that.

Regarding what you said about colouring methods... how did they acquire a 'high quality print' from the original artwork? Not a photocopier, surely?

[Lew Stringer]

Regarding what you said about colouring methods... how did they acquire a 'high quality print' from the original artwork? Not a photocopier, surely?

They'd usually colour the original art but a high quality photocopy would do. I think they'd use a better method than that though. I dunno.

[imil1]

It was quite complicated. First in process are b/w films of original art.This was done with special cameras. After that this high quality films (2400 dpi) are printed on requested paper only in blue ("blue print"). After coloring process (in-house colourists), this blue prints are scanned and this films were matched with b/w ones from starting point. Some studios in EU and Canada are still doing things this way..

[Classic Comics]

In the days of letterpress and letterflex printing, colour was marked up on photocopies (usually using coloured pencils) and applied at process stage. The Fun Sizes used this process all through their run. It was a very limited colour palette. It was very rare for artists to deliver coloured artwork at this time. When we switched to gravure printing (which was, I think, on the 50th birthdays of Dandy and Beano in 1987 and 1988) the production process obviously changed. For colour artwork, pages were either supplied in colour by the artist, or a matt photo quality print of the artwork was taken and that was coloured by our in-house colourists. Switching to photoshop meant that when the camera photographed the line work a tiff or bmp was sent to be coloured instead of a photographic print.

Other printers will probably have had their own ways of working - but that's how it's been done at DCTs during my time here.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

What about the lavish colour that featured in the Summer Specials, or the BEEZER/TOPPER annuals, that boasted advanced, full-colour in the 60s and even as far back as the 50s, Classic Comics...was this done in-house at D C T by specialized colourists, working directly onto original b/w line artwork by established cartoonists?

[felneymike]

The old process colour method could produce some strange errors, though - like when colours didn't line up. Such as the big red lips of the, ahem, island community in seemingly most episodes Spadger's Isle in the 40's. Mind you the contemporary Adventure had a coloured strip called "Keeper of the Dread Sword" that seemed a lot better.

[NP]

Bromide. That's the word. That and a 303 brush and some coloured inks or watercolour depending on preference. That was up till about 1990.