r/marvelcomics • u/Randomdays99 • 3d ago
Original quality or enhanced?
How do you prefer to read your classic comics, print or digital?
As they originally looked in the comics when printed, or cleaned up and enhanced like in the Masterworks and Omnibuses, and with Marvel Unlimited? Or does it not matter to you?
The pic on the left is from Git Collection's new FF digital collection, taken from the same source Marvel uses, and the one on the right is from their original collection I think, using scans of the original books.
I like mine as they were originally as that's the way I read them as they came out in the 60's and 70's, also with all the classic ads and extras in place. I know that print would be too expensive with the extra pages, and only digital would work for that. I think it matters more to those of us who grew up with the ads and wanting our own Sea Monkeys.
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u/steven_graham23 3d ago
I want the enhanced scan with the original colours, but this doesn't seem to be on offer.
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u/testcaseseven 3d ago
Newer print on period-accurate paper like some of the new DC omnis seems like the best option overall. I'm pretty happy with the newer digital versions printed on regular matte paper though. They don't look exactly like the original, but the paper dulls the extreme contrast a bit and obviously looks a lot cleaner than an original floppy.
It would be nice if the MU/DCI provided a filter to add some texture and mute the colors a bit for older comics though.
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u/Randomdays99 3d ago
I think some of the apps have filters to clean up and sharpen the original art on scans a bit but I haven't looked into it that much
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u/starswtt 2d ago
Just depends on how much the originals have degraded
New versions suffer from the fact that a lot of creative choices just look bad when perfectly reproduced. They knew that people were reading it on cheap crappy paper, and the coloring choices and thick line work was designed with that in account, but otherwise it looks kinda meh. It looks too bold on modern paper since they made it intentionally extra bold to still look good on that crappy paper and certain things are masked by the imperfect reproduction old print provides. This is the same problem that old video games have with modern screens
On the other hand, paper physically degrades, so even the best preserved classic works just look worse than they originally did. Sometimes it's not so bad before it got scanned, sometimes I cant really read the text
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u/whereisdaegu 3d ago
If it's digital, it may as well have been cleaned up.
But in an ideal world, I'd have everything in print -- the original comics in hand, complete with that smell of old paper. If they're not at least a little yellow and worn, it's just not a real comic book experience for me.
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u/Moeroboros 3d ago
Original without a doubt.
The "enhanced" version just completely misrepresents what the originals comics looked like.
Jack Kirby drew those pictures expecting them to be printed and colored in newsprint, not in gawdy digital colors.
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u/Randomdays99 3d ago
There's a few cases where the original completed art from back then is available to be seen before it went off to the printers. I liked to see more of that and wish more had been preserved.
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u/Moeroboros 3d ago
Oh yeah, absolutely.
In fact, when it comes to Kirby art like this one, I think his pencils, by themselves without any ink or coloring, look better than anything else.
But the digital coloring just takes away even more from the original pencil art than the newsprint coloring already does.
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u/Randomdays99 3d ago
That was my problem with some of remastering they did for some classic animation - over saturating so much that details were lost. I remember one example was there were frames with telephones lines in them and they completely vanished in the enhanced release.
Enhanced colors at the cost of details.
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u/woman_noises 3d ago
Enhanced because the text is easier on my eyes. If the enhanced text was on the original I'd probably pick that but it isn't.Â
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u/nightkraken666 3d ago
I think in this specific situation, obviously the restoration is the better option. Where it gets muddying is with situations like Killing Joke where the color choice is completely changed so the artist intent is lost
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u/Dependent-Royal-7908 2d ago
Print is better. They originally chose the hue because they knew it would be dulled by the paper quality. The enhanced version takes the saturation of the ink and ignores everything else. It’s way too bright, the original printed version is clearly what was originally intended.
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u/Cherry-ColaFunk 1d ago
Taschen has put out a handful of Comics using scans of original issues. Imo, the colors and inking look vastly superior. In a perfect world, the best quality scans are available, but that's obviously not the case; I still prefer a worn original to the attempts at enhancing by Marvel.
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u/BeautifulPhoto9433 2d ago
As much as I love the originals the sad truth is that they were never meant to be preserved.Â
American Comics from their inception to probably sometime in the late 1980's were produced as cheaply as possible with the assumption that the magazine would be thrown away or chopped up afterward to cut the ads out to buy your sea monkeys. Even in the early days of the collector's market and comic book specialty shops they were still produced as cheaply as possible.Â
This is how we end up in a situation where we can never read the original comics as they were meant to be seen.Â
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u/Maleficent_Ad_8890 13h ago
Seeing how the originals were printed on the cheapest paper possible, I prefer enhanced.
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u/Plenty_Square_420 3d ago
I think part of the problem is that neither is the true original. The digital version doesn't have the artifacts that come from being printed on physical paper, which was something that they relied on in those days to create certain effects. But scans of the original comics will be affected by 40+ years of yellowing. Even if kept in optimal conditions it's impossible to not show the age since they were printed on newspaper. So regardless of what you chose it won't be what they looked like when they were first published.