Right, but the fact that DC is still using their rustic restoration files from 25 years ago shows how far behind they are. It's like using a movie mastered for VHS, and slapping the VHS files onto a BluRay disc and saying voila. Standards change. Marvel has continually refined and improved their product, while DC has not. Technology has allowed for greater restoration, and DC is once again behind Marvel.


There's nothing really "wrong" in that sense with most of the older DC reprints -- apart from a few redrawn covers that really never, ever should have been used, and color work that doesn't adhere to the original source material, there's not all that much there that "technology" would be likely to improve on.

Marvel got into this endeavor using, in many cases, very poor film as source material and wildly inaccurate color work (for the best of it’s Silver Age reprints), and it took time (and a few attempts) before they came around to doing better. That was more down to opportunity than technology, and Marvel had much more room for improvement. It's great that they took steps toward improvement, and we all reap the benefit, but they had much further to go.

By the time they got into Golden Age reprints in the Masterworks (after that very embarrassing start), the means of restoring and reprinting that stuff were about as good as it was ever going to be, for print.

A Week Ago Tuesday: My blog, where I never, ever write about comics (though I think I did, once or twice).