Today’s Black Plate Special

Comments ⁶

1. Grant

   My newspaper printed Crankshaft with no black plate today. It was a really good one. I hope I have better luck next time.

2. Jeff

   I saw Non Sequitor without the black plate and I thought it was beautiful like a French Impressionist watercolor. Especially the 1sr panel.

3. Mike Peterson  (admin)

   I used to set up a full-page educational comic feature each week. I would start with the black plate and then lay the color plate over it and blow it way up to make sure I was matching everything up precisely. I don’t think it mattered what order you laid them in, and I can’t remember if I flattened it or not before sending it out. This was about 20 years ago and we certainly weren’t at straight-to-plate yet.

   Our comics page was B&W, and they could pull in each strip with a command, but I don’t think they could fill the whole page with a single command yet. It’s hard to mess things up when it’s only one image, but the less hands-on you are, the easier it is to let screw-ups get on the press and out to the public.

   Another innovative way to screw up: We printed CMYK in those days and a lot of stuff came in RGB. If I forgot to convert something, I’d get a call from the back shop that began, “Hey, Dumbass ….” I got along well with those guys, so they’d be laughing when they said it, but thank god they were paying attention when I wasn’t.

   1. Eric

      Was that back in the day when they had HOT linotype machines with REAL MOLTEN LEAD, or was it photogravure color sep…or maybe on a floppy?

      1. Mike Peterson  (admin)

         I missed the hot lead days, but our backshop guys remembered and shared a lot of stories with me. When the conversion came, the company set up the new equipment at a local hotel and they would put the paper together the old-fashioned way, then go to the hotel and do it again on the computers, for training.

         One interesting thing they told me was that the lead would spatter and they’d get little burn marks on their forearms. This was something I could tell high school kids on tours because a lot of them worked fast food and knew how hot fat from the fryers did the same thing, only you didn’t have to pick it off like you did the lead.

         By the time I was laying out my own features (and that full page comic), the finished material came out as four negatives to be burnt onto plates. I was no longer doing that kind of hands-on work by the time people began going straight-to-plate but I got to see it at the paper that printed the tiny local paper I was editing.

4. Eric

   Back during the ’80s when I was young, I had to do color separations by hand with a knife with some plastic stuff I had to cut with an exacto knife. I forgot what thy called it.

   Fortunately, I never actually HAD to handle a linotype machine. But I did cold type. The transition to computers in the ’90s was contentious.