J.V. — that's how he or she asked me to identify him or her because you could get in a lot of trouble asking a question like this — asked me this question…
You occasionally make mention of people including yourself making corrections on comic book art before it's printed. How does this work? Who decides what to correct and how is it done? And how do you know it was done?
Well, these days, it's almost all done on computers and it's almost impossible to detect in the published work. But when I was writing about it, I was probably writing about the days when it was done by hand. Let's say a comic book was all penciled, lettered and inked and just about ready to be published…and let's say someone decided a piece of dialogue needed to be changed.
There were all sorts of reasons why that might be necessary. Maybe the letterer had made some fatal error. Maybe someone had noticed a flaw in the story. When I wrote a comic and the original art went past me on its way to publication, I often would look at a panel and think, "That would work better without that line of dialogue" or "I can think of a better joke than that!"
The "someone" could have been anyone in the office but the order to correct it probably came from someone with the word "editor" in their job title.
If the original letterer was around, they might have had him or her do the fix but the original letterer was almost never around so someone else would do it to expedite matters and keep the assembly line moving. Either way, the change could be made a number of ways but the two most likely were (1) to paint out the copy to be replaced with white paint. Then you let it dry and letter the new copy over the white paint.
Or (2) you letter the new copy on another piece of paper and paste it over the copy that needed to be fixed. It worked the same way with fixing a drawing, though sometimes the redrawing could be done without expunging what was there before.
Here's a photo from the Marvel offices, circa 1970. The story in question was one that artist Barry Smith drew for one of their "ghost" comics then, either Tower of Shadows or Chamber of Darkness. Someone else had inked it and in the opinion of the editor, the inker had omitted too many of the backgrounds and the work needed them. At the time, there were five artists who worked on the office staff: John Romita (Senior), Herb Trimpe, Marie Severin, Tony Mortellaro and Production Manager John Verpoorten. The pages were handed to whichever one wasn't busy at the moment, which in this case was Trimpe.
Yes, that's Herb Trimpe in the photo adding more background details to the artwork. This kind of thing went on all the time in comics — sometimes when it was necessary, sometimes when it wasn't. Stan Lee had the tendency to change something (anything!) on a cover just before it went to press. They did the same kind of thing over at DC Comics…sometimes because they could make the work better and sometimes when they couldn't or didn't.
