Posted: 04 November 2024 at 4:31pm | IP Logged | 11
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Barry: thanks for the heads-up on these! I went out this weekend and picked up the Far Sector and Wonder Woman: Earth One volumes. Pros and cons are essentially flip sides of the same coins:
Paper: the matte paper stock (which I prefer over modern glossy comics) looks great with the flatter color approach of the WW:E1, but the more subtle gradations and contrasts in Far Sector are lost because they were colored for glossy stock. The fact that WW:E1 uses a strong black line throughout and Far Sector opts instead for much finer black outlines and fill approach and sometimes converts the linework to another color ends up making the latter overall more difficult to read.
Lettering: The traditional hand-lettering look on WW:E1 is really readable, even at the smaller size, while the more typeset-looking font on Far Sector gets hurt a bit. Not helped by the fact that they chose an odd font, something that's like a Garamond but missing the serifs, which isn't particularly aesthetically pleasing or readable. Additionally, WW:E1 goes pretty much black text in white balloons and captions throughout for maximum clarity, while Far Sector has a ton of narrative captions set in knockout white on a not-fully opaque dark green that's a genuine challenge to read, in places.
Format: Both suffer a little bit with things getting lost in the gutter. I feel like larger trades normally compensate for that but it wasn't really a thought, here.
Composition: Both Paquette and Cambell favor baroque stylings and panel layouts, with the former doing a kind of J.H. Williams art nouveau filagree in lieu of clean borders and the latter dropping border outlines altogether in favor of just leaving a white or tonal space. Not sure if the reduction impacted the line art at all - but given that Campbell colored his own work, the whole line vs. color isn't really a thing. It's all just art. I have the first two issues of Far Sector and the manga-flavored art really pops and the colors are nice and vibrant there - though I do recall the lettering not really being ideal at that size, either.
TL;DR: this format probably works best on older works with traditional flat color and lettering and may, in fact, be superior to some of the other existing trades of the same work if they retained the original coloring.
Edited by Dave Kopperman on 04 November 2024 at 7:26pm
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