I've made this first post on my blog and thought I'd repost it here, starting a new thread on this project:

A few months ago, I had posted a colouring experiment where I coloured five pages of a Gene Colan issue of Tomb of Dracula. I've decided it's time to repeat that experiment.

I'm taking an entire issue of that series (issue #44, to be precise) and recolouring it - I've decided it has been too long since I last submitted any of my colouring to Marvel Comics, and thought this might be a good portfolio/submission piece.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting these pages on my blog. These will be the aforementioned Tomb of Dracula Thursdays.

Note that I'm not using the original coloured book for any sort of reference - I am scanning the pages from Volume 2 of Essential Tomb of Dracula (all black & white artwork), and am simply following how I perceive the colouring should be within the text and artwork of the story, rather than in comparison to (original colourist) Tom Palmer's colouring choices.

Here, I've coloured the cover. I've kept the colouring effects fairly simple, just using colour holds for the background effects and white text, and painting in the lineart around the magical energy that Drac is being blasted with to give it an interesting look.

This book was written by Marv Wolfman, with artwork by Gene Colan and Tom Palmer, and lettering by John Costanza.

im looking forward to this !

If you care, the original colorist did a rainbow in the background - I like yours better.

I'll follow this.

Thanks, Steve

I did look at the original colours on the cover after I finished up colouring this. I could totally see why Tom Palmer chose the rainbow pattern, going with Strange's magic effects and all, but I had really wanted to set up depth and a desaturated background, while going with an eerie, otherworldly look. This scene does take place in the book, where Doc Strange is confronting Drac when he's still human (it'll make more sense as it goes along), all through the Images of Ikonn (or some similar effect).

So, the textured background and white colour holds seemed more what I wanted. After I saw the original colours, I was happy with my choices.

Another thing about this project - I'm not wanting it to take 23 weeks to do the entire book, but I'm going to try to restrict myself to posting one page a week. I like the idea of this weekly content thing on my blog, but I do have a tendency to post everything as soon as it is done.

I'm actually (!) wanting to have the whole thing done in the next three or so weeks and be able to send it off to Marvel in a month or so. We'll see how well that works out, however

Looking forward to this as well. I've thought for some time that you should submit some stuff to the bigger publishers. Good luck and keep us posted.

Yes, good luck!

Thanks, folks - I appreciate your response on this

Is the printing good for you to color? Some pages on my Essentials can be a little muddy.

For the most part, the pages are just fine. Where it's a bit too muddy, I'm quite merciless about fixing the lineart myself, something I have to do all the time with pencil scans anyway. So, no big deal

The trickiest part is not getting too much of a twist to the lineart when I'm scanning the pages - the books can be hard to open wide enough to scan all the way to the binding.

Great idea for a project. Have fun with it!

Essentials are cheap enough that you should be able to just cut the pages out and buy another.

That's true.
I got lucky the first time I did that - my copy of ETOD#1 had a broken spine and the cover wouldn't stay glued on. It made scanning it a breeze. I'm thinking of just doing that to volume #2.

Ah, but you can't always find them. I still can't find Essential Iron Man vol. 2. It is out of print and going to ebay is expensive.

Hard to believe an Essential would go up in value!

I think there is only one for sale at ebay in England. And at AmazWAN, http://www.amazon.com/dp/0785114874/?tag=imwan-20

That's really odd - I'm always seeing those first three Essential Iron Man volumes for sale at some of the big book stores here in WANnipeg.

Heh... coincidentally, I just ordered this comic from MileHighComics (actually, the whole Marvel super-hero output for coverdate May '76).

Y'know, I kind of understand people's obsession with having the original colouring for reprint books, but seriously... that colouring was SOOOO BAD! Now that people have learned to properly colour digitally (as opposed to a lot of that 90s crap), I'd rather have them redone properly. That cover looks so much better than the original.

Tom Palmers inks and colours are awesome !! they were an integral part of TOD

Well, the technology was incredibly restricted back in the 70's with regard to non-painted comic book colouring, whether covers or interiors. There was only so much you could do with one hundred or so colours to choose from, so it isn't really comparable to today.

And, just to be clear, I'm not colouring this in any sort of competition to what Tom had done back then. This is just a stand-alone portfolio piece, seeing what I can do with it in my own interpretation. Like I've said, I'm not even consulting the original colours for comparison.