Over at his own
Designer Tina Alessi and I looked to the world of high-end archival books to create a classy and unified appearance for the line. The first version I received looked great but, with its dark blue borders, I felt it was too staid, a bit reminiscent of law books. However, much of the rest of what became the look of the covers
With RoboCop versus the Terminator, Walter Simonson himself oversaw the scanning of his artwork and we received the files (with the exception of photocopied pencils, which came to the office in a stack for us to choose from), so all of the quality control and checking against the originals was done on Walter’s end. For Samurai, Stan FedExed the originals to Dark Horse, where designer and production artist Cary Grazzini (who has worked on Usagi longer than anyone except Stan) and I went through them page by page. Cary outdid himself with the scanning, taking incredible care to reveal every tiny bit of whiteout and faint pencil work. I compared proofs of every page to the art pages and noted places where a detail of the originals could be brought out more, and somehow Cary managed to bring them all to life. It’s the work of someone every bit as masterful in his field as Stan is in his.
Well worth a full read to get a peek at the origins of Dark Horse’s Gallery Editions.