Marvel Handbook Recoloring (Graphics Heavy Thread)

[Roger A Ott II]

Part of working on my Marvel Database project is making sure character entries have images.  Well, in the 80's, production quality on comics...well, it sucked, and the coloring tended to bleed through the cheap newsprint of the day very badly.  So, most of the imagery from the Official Handbooks of the Marvel Universe published in the 80's had terrible coloring.  Then a couple years back, Marvel released those old volumes as part of their Essentials line, in glorious black and white.  So, two or three weeks back I started scanning in a few character images, cleaning up the black and white art, and then recoloring them, trying to enhance things a bit here and there, but not take away from the original artwork.  Below are a few of my favorites:

The ever-Incredible Hulk.  I just couldn't do the purple pants...but overall this is probably one of the best I did.


I love Rom!  Man, I wish Marvel could still do comics on him!


Old dead Iron Man villain the Blizzard!  This is an awesome costume!


Grog the God-Crusher from Thor.  He just looked cool, and turned out better than I expected.


My favorite villain of all time, the Hobgoblin!


I've only read a few comics with these guys, but the Knights of Wundagore have some really cool armor!


Old Spider-Man foe, the Scorpion.  Sure, he's taken over the Venom symbiote now, but I still liked the original look.


Robotic information-sponges known as the Recorders, which turned out all shiny like they're supposed to.


These are all in a Photobucket album, where I've posted 22 images so far, including some obscure characters like Swarm, Devil-Slayer, Defensor as well as a few alien races and some more well-known characters.  If you want to view the entire album, go here: http://s218.photobucket.com/albums/cc110/CyRog/Marvel%20Handbook%20Recoloring/

[Roger A Ott II]

The really interesting part of this is that I use two different programs for the majority of the recreation of these images.  First is Paint.Net, which is a wonderful tool and it makes cleaning up the black and white art a breeze.  But the bulk of my work is done with Paint Shop Pro version 4, released way back in the late 90's.  I know there are programs out there with all the bells and whistles you could ever want in a paint program, but I still find myself going back to this old one for the most basic stuff.

[Bill Meiggs]

Roger this is looking really good. Just shows you don't need a high end program like Photoshop to do a good job coloring.

The older comics were colored by hand mostly using something called Dr Martin's which was a concentrated water color. The colorist would get the comic pages on reduced size paper ( about the same as the printed comic instead of the 11 x 17 size it was drawn on ) and would hand color each panel and page. It was alot like a coloring book lol. There was a guy named Bob Sharon who lived in our area and was a colorist for Marvel back then. I own a few of these coloring guides and they them selves look pretty nice. The technology back then just couldn't reproduce this very well.

After time with the advent of computers the coloring went all digital and so did the printing technology.

This all just hows how old I am lol

Bill

[Roger A Ott II]

There was a big ol' hardcover book by Les Daniels about Marvel that came out back in the early 90's.  I remember there being a whole section on how comics were colored at the time and it was just as you described.  The color guides looked phenomenal, and now I see them for sale on eBay once in awhile.

[Ironghost]

Man, now I miss ROM too.

[Tetragrammaton]

The colors look great Roger.

 

[Roger A Ott II]

Man, now I miss ROM too.

I have the entire Rom comic series, and I've been meaning to re-read through them again.  There was some good stuff in there, including great art by Sal Buscema.  I wish Marvel would buy the rights to the character, since it seems Parker Brothers has no intention of ever doing anything with him again.

The colors look great Roger.

Thanks!  It's been fun so far.

[Iron YoJimBo]

ROM!!!!!!   

[IMJ]

You've got a distinctly simple, Silver Age coloring style that's really neat Rog!

[brohara]

Yup, these are great Roger. Was it all single character stuff?
Did you have any scenes/panels or pages to recolor?
Would be curious to see some of that...

[Roger A Ott II]

This was all stuff I did on my own for my database program, long before I started writing for the Handbooks.  I scanned in the black and white art from the Essential Handbook volumes and recolored it from there because the original coloring for the 80s stuff was terrible on the paper used at the time.  Haven't done any full panel work yet, but I've considered scanning in some of my favorite panels from various Essentials and giving them the color treatment.

[krackley]

I really like Swarm.  One of the first memories of reading a comic I have is of The Champions #15 where they fight Swarm.  Man I loved that comic.

[Roger A Ott II]

Yeah, my choosing process was based a lot on characters I remember from comics I read when I was a kid.

ALSO: I got away from using Photobucket, and started using Dropbox a couple months ago as a place to not only link to a gallery, but also as a way to save my stuff easily.

https://www.dropbox.com/gallery/22927034/1/OHOTMU%20Colors?h=64ce1a

There's currently 47 images there, and I believe I have a few more I haven't uploaded yet.

[Billium3]

Oh man! Sweet Hobgoblin, Rog. I only have the original Marvel Handbooks in Essential format, so all the entries are in black and white. While Hobby is my favorite (I'm a little biased, him being quite possibly my favorite villain of all time), your other colorations look fantastic as well. I wish I had coloring talent. 

[Roger A Ott II]

Oh man! Sweet Hobgoblin, Rog. I only have the original Marvel Handbooks in Essential format, so all the entries are in black and white. While Hobby is my favorite (I'm a little biased, him being quite possibly my favorite villain of all time), your other colorations look fantastic as well. I wish I had coloring talent. 

Thanks!  All these came from scanning in the Essentials. I've recently began doing some refurbishing and recoloring of old comic panels for currentHandbooks, and I've learned a few new tricks or two from the guys who head up that department. I'll eventually get around to posting some of them online.