Not A Poem (Pop Chat Won) – When Scanned Printing is Better Onscreen Than Reprints are on Paper

Years ago Marvel licensed a company named Graphic Imaging Technology (GIT) to produce Marvel's first "digital" comics. They were scans of actual, original printed Marvel comics available on CD-ROM and then DVD. Unfortunately, they were "secured" PDFs so you can't read them in your favorite comics reading application without seeing a huge MARVEL watermark.

Image from GIT edition of FF#1: note the blue jumpsuits. Subsequent reprints color the
jumpsuits purple which make them look even more like Kirby's Challengers Of The Unknown.

But you can read them in Adobe Reader, sans watermark. Also, unfortunately, they stuck a little rectangle with ™ info at bottom - negligible on interior pages but quite annoying on covers. Most unfortunately, these are no longer available. This is not surprising, since digital comics have taken off. But, I've looked at/read a lot of reprint collections over the years. The very first one I gave as a gift in maybe 1991 - it was hardcover of earliest Hulk stories and it was very disappointing when we all got a look inside: it looked like someone had recolored it with CorelDraw or some such tool. Even more than the recoloring (which has become less egregious over the years but still is often wildly different than original color decisions), what's most damaging about many of the color reprints I've seen (Masterworks, Omnibus, etc) is that as part of the recoloring/reprinting process a lot of line work is lost, altered, or thickened to point of being ruined. So what these PDFs provide is an actual archive of what the comics really looked like, and in many cases are the best preserved editions of the original art. They also include ads, letters pages, etc. This would all be lost if Marvel just started doing digital comics - their current editions via their subscription service, at least the ones I've seen, look to be sourced from the heavily reworked versions. Perhaps the line work in the BW "Essentials" editions is better representative of original work, but I have not compared those as extensively and my guess would be that at least going forward, if not already, they would be sourced from same files that are recolored for the pricier color editions. Some of the early issues from GIT are scanned from pretty rough copies, but I still find them priceless in that they preserve the real deal better than what you can buy, in print or digitally, from Marvel now. As you can see from a web search though, copies of these can now command a hefty sum.