I own all of the Marvel editions of the Hatchette G1 collection.

Reproduction quality of the UK material ranges from appalling to quite good.

I have taken a look at some websites which allow you to view digital versions of IDW's Transformers Classics Uk series.

From what I can see, both books use the same files but the digital IDW files are less dark than my printed Hatchette books, therefore allowing more detail to be seen.

This is an example from page 2 of chapter 4 of the Enemy within:

This is the IDW digital version from Transformers Classics Uk volume 1:

idw-jeep


This is a photo of my Hatchette book (volume 1, powerplay):

IMG-0317

In the Hatchette printed copy, the jeep just looks like a black blob with all linework lost.


So after all that, my question is:

Does the physical printed copy of Transformers Classics UK Volume 1 look as good as this, or is it as dark as the Hatchette book?

Thanks!

 

Fisheye, and slightly blurry because of my GoPro. The colours are a bit more washed out than the digital version but nowhere near as dark as the Hachette looks.

 

Thank you very much.

 

Here is a picture from my camera phone. Just to give you a view through a different lense.

 

Thanks again!

 

Something else to keep in mind with the UK Classics trades, there is a large amount of gutter space on all four sides of the pages, resulting in the actual panels being pretty small. Earlier US-comic sized reprints like the Best of UK series were better about this. Obviously with the Hachette collection you're getting them sized more closely to the original UK page dimensions.

 

It's inconsistent and a real-mixed bag, almost issue by issue at times. Sometimes Hachette is better, other times IDW. Equally often - the Titan TPBs beat them both!

Frustratingly, there is no definitive go-to collection of the Marvel material. We've got Titan, IDW (several versions, the post-2011 ones are 'remastered' and contain all sorts of colour changes) and Hachette... all have some pros and cons, but not one of them has the full package.

 

Thanks for saving me money and disappointment - I didn't know this.

 

I had a look at the original comics, and the difference isn't really Hachette vs IDW. It's actual issue vs Collected Comics.

Here's issue 16 itself:



And here's Collected Comics 4 :



Hachette are clearly giving people the proper original experience!

 

Incidentally, when they included the story again later, they used the original again. Here's issue 316 :

 

If you already own all of the hachette Marvel stories then this shouldn't be so much of an issue for you but in Raiders of the Lost Ark the hachette version has the whole story colored while in the IDW collection it retains the original release where the final few pages of each issue have been left uncoloured. I think this is the only instance of that occurring until you get to the Earthforce comics where the first two were coloured in the hachette editions.

Also the idw collection has this massive border on each page. I've only got the digital edition so I don't know how it would look physically though.

 

I actually bought collected comics 4 on ebay a couple of weeks ago and couldn't believe the difference from Hatchette - I thought it was down to bad scanning - now it makes sense, thanks.

 

Wow - that is a big border!

 

Well to be fair the hachette is a bit smaller vertically than your average tradeback so maybe the border is there just to fit the size of the page. I reckon the UK comics were the size of the hachette pages maybe. Could be wrong.