Unofficial "Adventures of Professor Ludwig" collection

In the beginning of March we had someone thinking that the old Ludwig Von Drake comics from Dell was in public domain. And for very limited time (about half a day) a book collecting the comics was available as a print-on-demand book on Amazon. The publisher apparently use to search up old American comics where the copyright has not been renewed, and then make a compilation of scans from the old comics and put them up for sale as a print-on-demand service through Amazon. When done professionally this could be an interesting project, but in the case of the Ludwig book I'm afraid I couldn't have recommended anyone supporting this even if it turned out to be a legal project. I'll do some arguments for that down below.

The whole thing started with an announcement on Facebook on the 5th of March for a release the next day.

 
The next day we got a teaser telling the book was live, but no actual link for where to purchase the book was posted.

But it was easy enough to search up on Amazon.

Later that day when the news spread to the online Disney fan community, it didn't take long to confirm that the copyright actually was renewed for the comics! Ludwig's last name was just written as VonDrake rather than Von Drake in the copyright catalog. This can be confirmed by doing a simple search in the public copyright catalog.

And when the people behind the project was made aware, we got another Facebook update, and the book was soon after made unavailable on Amazon.

Facebook post canceling the publication

Made unavailable on Amazon

I guess that could be the end of the story. But when I saw all the Facebook comments that day, I knew this book was going to be taken down quick. And even if the preview pages on Amazon didn't look very promising, I went ahead and bought the book while available. I thought it could be an interesting post on this blog. And after getting the book I wanted to make others aware of some facts so you can do a critical assessment of your own when seeing projects like this.
 

Unofficial reprint book (left), the 4 original comics the book collects (right)

I did some comparisons to the original comics, and here are also some of my thoughts on reprint projects in general.

Source material

The most important part for a project like this is to obtain good source material. If proofs can't be found it's perfectly ok to use scans from the old comics. But you should make some effort to find good clean copies to scan from and do it in a high resolution. The Luwig book fails completely in this part. They obviously didn't do any of the scanning themselves, or probably even tried to buy their own copies or contact other collectors (the original comics are not hard to find). The source is from a scanning done 15 years ago and made available online by the pirate scanning community. I got a copy of the original files, and they are in 200 DPI with lossy JPEG compression. And that is not good enough for 1:1 printing in my opinion.

Source file used in the book

The same image as printed in the book

Cleanup and restoration

Even if you scan mint condition comics some cleanup and adjustments needs to be done for printing. This can be mandatory things like color correction and straightening the scans. But any tears, or marks should be edited out too. Some reprint projects I've seen even correct offset color printing errors, but that might be a little bit overboard. But again this project fails. There's no editing done and they haven't even rotated the scans to be straight…

 

Image not rotated for the book

Well, actually some editing is done. The copyright text and ads are removed from the comics, like in this case where they cut into the actual comic panels!

 

Copyright text cut out (and part of the comic panels as well!)

Size

Personally I like reprints to be in the same size or larger than the original comics. The print in the book actually is slightly larger than the original, but it doesn't really benefit from that here with the low resolution scans.

 

Slightly larger print in the reprint book (left) compared to the original comic (right)

Layout and design

Anyone trying to sell something would want the product to look appealing, especially the cover design. But this is not really something I care too much about myself, I'm more interested in the content in books I buy. I think most of my other reprint-books have the scanned pages printed in full paper size. This book has white borders around, but I didn't really mind that (if the scans had been cleaned up and rotated).

Example of white borders outside the scanned pages

Completeness

In a reprint project I'd like things to be as complete as possible. In the case of the four Ludwig comics from Dell, they all exist in two different printings where one has comic pages replaced by more ads. The preferred version to include in a reprint book would of course be the ones with all the comic pages present. But that's not the case in this book. It actually reprints all four versions with extra ads, and there's a total of seven stories missing in the book. (one two-pager, the rest one-page/half-page comic stories)

In the example below the bottom half page had an advertisement in the ad-version of the comic (removed in the book), while the other version has an extra half page with comics.

 

Advertisements cut out in the book (left), original comic without ads (right)

The picture under is the back cover of issue one and two. Both exists in two versions, one with comics on the back page and one with ads (the comic page shown is missing in the book)

 

Back cover of Ludwig von Drake #1 (left) and #2 (right)

And this entire story is missing in the book too:

Printing

This is a critical part that I've seen professional publishers fail at a lot of times. Even if you use InDesign or MS Word or whatever program and everything looks perfect, you need to prepare a file for the printing company – often a pdf file. This is not as easy as it sounds and you need to be careful with compression, fonts that are used, color space, layers in the right order, linked media, page size etc. The Ludwig book is not a very complicated creation, and it looks like this part went well.

According to Kindle Direct Publishng (earlier CreateSpace) there's not a lot of different paper types to choose from when self-publishing on Amazon. There are more trim sizes to choose, but you are limited to the standards there and can't have the book cut exactly the size you want. It doesn't look like any of the standards are the exact same size as the golden age Dell comics. So you need to do some cutting, adding borders or scaling if you want to self-publish with scans of old comics.

As already said, this Ludwig book added white borders, and the paper is matte. I have seen reprint books with scanned comics using both matte and glossy paper, and I think I prefer matte. But both works fine, and there's nothing to complain about with the actual printing quality in the Ludwig book.

Pricing

I'm willing to spend some money on a quality reprint project, but in this case there's no way this book is worth $26.99 (even if full color print-on-demand books have high printing cost regardless of content). I checked out some online comic shops, and it looks like you can get all four of the original 60's comics in VG to GD/VG condition for about the same price. Being a bit patient on eBay, probably less.

Example of May 2020 prices for the original comics (click to enlarge)

And for fun I checked the royalty calculator to find out how much Amazon and the publisher earned on me buying this book.
 

***

I've seen some really great reprints from scanned comics, and also great productions of public domain movies and books. But there are also those that try to make money on public domain material with little effort or care for the product they are selling. So you need to have a critical mind before using your money on projects like this.