A WORD TO THE WISE...

Copyright DC COMICS

Just where do I begin? By going over old ground I suppose, and drawing your attention back to the recent facsimile edition of HOUSE Of SECRETS #92.  On page 5 of the SWAMP THING tale, part of the word 'the' had been clumsily relettered (presumably because the 'th' was too faint or hadn't reproduced properly, if at all), transforming 'the' into 'me'.  Made absolutely no sense.  Compare above with below.

I recently re-read SUPERMAN's KRYPTONITE NEVERMORE! series (for the umpteenth time), but instead of digging out my original issues, referred to my DC COMICS CLASSICS LIBRARY collected edition of the nine issue saga.  All the stories were scanned from actual published issues, and this would've required parts being digitally (as well as manually) cleaned up, especially on the lettering.  On page 9 of #237, the 'o' (and the tilde above it) must have dropped out, so a badly angled 'a' had been scrawled in.  (The tilde was again missing over the word on page 16, but at least the 'o' remained.)

Back on page 13 of the same story, the 'hi' of 'his' was missing, but at least no random letters had replaced them to transform the word into something else.  Then, on page 12 of #241, the word 'transmissions' must've been smudged, because it'd been retouched to read 'transnussions', suggesting that whoever did it paid no attention to the rest of the speech balloon in order to understand what was being said.  It's almost as if they isolated the word in their mind and then tried to work out what it was (and failed).

Or perhaps there's a simpler explanation. Maybe the person responsible was a foreigner (no, that's not a dirty word, Melvin, behave) who couldn't understand English, and simply took a stab at guessing what the faint or missing letters actually were, hence the less than satisfactory result?  Whatever the reason, DC needs to up its game when it comes to reprinting their material, and ensure that any 'restored' dialogue matches what the writer originally wrote.  There's just no excuse for the kind of carelessness I've described here.

What think the rest of you?

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