Aman619

Honestly, beats me too! But I do think it’s restored by virtue of no salesmanship for the book. That would not be possible if it was a HG unrestored copy in that apparent condition. We’d be getting a torrent of Metro pumping. As would any auction house.

so what's the over under on the Action 1 being a restored copy??

way too washed out colors. this scan is a bit juiced but the blues are much deeper than your scanner settings are capturing.

wow! this really took off! bravo!

The Rusty Staples.

Maybe this will jumpstart some love for Superman Annual ! I bought the lone 9.0 decades ago only to suffer the sad fate of being surpassed by more and better copies. It’s been a dead book for years for me. Such a cool comic that blew me away when I was a kid. And the cover is a classic of early 60s DC goodness and clean Swan line work of the entire Superman family. Was it the first box design cover? I guess Secret Origins may have come out earlier.

Both!

very few of the scans however are high res, most look blurrier than they'd be with a magnifying glass in hand. So judgements on the blurriness are pixels trying to show an image with too few pixels to work with. The splotchiness shows up okay though. The Spring issue above is one of the cleaned, sharpest in both sets of screen grabs.

Looking the new second set from with dot copies, the red is more fully inked. Printing solid where the no dot copes look muddled red, like a weaker transfer of ink. if we have decided that the dot was printed for awhile and the presses stopped to file away the dot, then they ran off the rest of the run…. then the rough edges might be attributed to the plates sitting around for a “while” allowing the inks to dry a bit on the “mountaintops” then the presses start up again and new ink overlays on them, not clean metal with fresh ink, causing the edges to have extra outside the letter shapes AND cause the poor transfer making the exc text mottled red. But the red all over the covers would have the same roughness so we’d have to look over their entire covers so basically, who knows as Lions den says b

Sorry to disappoint, but no. I thought you were gonna ask an easy one, like why there is yellow around the black letters! Lions Den worked on presses and has more direct experience as to how ink behaves when transferred from the plates to the “blankets” to the paper.

Probably a consignment

Keep in mind that printing plates are like 3D topographical maps of an ocean with islands. Acid eats away the metal everywhere the artwork is blank/white on the artwork. Leaving scooped out areas and high points. The high points are like the islands — “mountains” attached to the ocean floor. Ink is applied to the plates and only sticks to the mountains. This ink is transferred to the paper. I only mention this to suggest that you can’t “add the dot” to an existing plate and expect it to remain in place after a few impressions are made. So “adding a dot to the plate” isn’t a quick fix a printer would use.

earlier I posted this in the wrong thread... posting it here with the Superman 1 discussion... while we are at it and having fun, here's another similar situation. Same comic but some copies have the star, others dont. Unless that star was some kids collection marker stamp, there must have been 2 printings. Did this publisher license out the comic to someone else and they used a star to track them? thoughts?

What you state makes me think that perhaps they started printing with no dot. And when noticed, early on in the run, decided to add the dot. But, it was added in the wrong place! So they said f it. Finish the run. That would explain that more for copies exist. but, if the no dot version was the proof that DC approved, I doubt they’d stop the presses on their own accord. They’d have to check with DC first. So I find it harder to believe that with the no dot covers piling up (presses are fast and the covers are 8-up on a sheet) by the time they got DC on the line, the run could be almost finished. At that point with 75% finished, I think DC says “it’s fine, just finish the run”. or, if they DID STOP THE PRESS and theyd probably get a quick answer such as “might as well fix it since you stopped the print run…”. of course, covers were printed 8-up, or maybe 4-up. With a combination of different comic covers on each sheet. This complicates the idea of stopping the presses, or maybe not. It just delayed it a few hours or a day. Since all the other covers print runs also needed to get back on press. im rambling on mostly guessing based on how the printing works, trying to take the evidence before us (the comics) and work backward without any real certainty. Or knowledge of how they did it in 1940 versus how they’ve done it in my lifetime.

while we are at it and having fun, here's another similar situation. Same comic but some copies have the star, others dont. Unless that star was some kids collection marker stamp, there must have been 2 printings. Did this publisher license out the comic to someone else and they used a star to track them? thoughts?