Anonymous
asked:
Of course recent Marvel Unlimited issues come from purely digital sources. But the old classic issues are scanned from... what? Microfilm probably? How does MU work behind the scenes? Is every issue of everything Timely/Marvel potentially in some microfilm archive somewhere? What was the source of the image before it got to microfilm? Original art? A printed page? How come classic issues in MU don't show CMYK rosettes but continuous color? Who picks the classic issues to add? Inquiring minds...

We have a large archive of the film used to print the original comics, and the proofs of said comics as well. It’s not absolutely 100% complete, but it goes back to the 1940s.

Everything that we reprint in TPB sources from that film (or digital data in the case of more recent comics). The older stuff is recolored using the original books as a guide, so that you no longer have the dot patterns of the old limited color screens. And those new files are all digital–so they get added to our digital archives, and are used thereafter for all things–including Marvel Unlimited.

For those elements that we don’t have original film or stats for, they are painstakingly recreated sourcing from the original books, to create a new black plate that can thereafter be colored in the same manner. Reconstruction technology of this sort has become so much better in just the last few years that this is a relatively simple process at this point.