Someone please correct me because I will say in advance that I have no idea what I’m talking about, but many years ago, I had a conversation with someone who claimed that since they never had any plans to reprint old comics years later in order to make a reprint old comics from company archives were put through a process that destroyed the original but reproduced an inked copy without color which then have to recolored. I don’t really know, but the context was the person was explaining why reprint covers often had to be redrawn on the left margin. Since they were working from company archive copies which had been bound into books the left margin of the cover was unrecoverable. The fact that the left edge of covers often had to be redrawn is obvious in some cases. For instance, there’s a flash cover in an archive edition which is mildly famous for replacing flashes foot with what looks like a flipper.