And yet, it’s those vibrant colors many a comic based film tries to emulate. I had reprints of Fantastic Four and Batman when I was a kid, and I appreciate that they didn’t futz with the colors now. Probably because they hadn’t thought of it, or didn’t want to spend money on doing so. Recoloring comics is almost as bad as colorizing black and white movies. At least those films have disclaimers about how they were altered from the original.
I like the idea of a disclaimer, and I think its strange that its not normal in the comic industry to include one. I bought a Marvel “True Believers” reprint of SW #1 a while back and was disappointed to find that it was the 2015 recoloured version. Of course it only cost $1, but it was still annoying, and when the whole gimmick is that they reprint classic comics its strange that they didn’t make it clear it was recoloured. I’ve had similar problems with digital issues from Walter Simonson’s run on Thor. Random issues had the new colours, while the rest were the original 80’s colours. I even thought the new colours were surprisingly well done, but I intended to buy the originals and got something else instead.
Recoloured versions really should be labelled as some kind of “redux” or “special” edition at the very least. Or even, in some cases, as a kind of “director’s cut” as was the case with Batman: The Killing Joke were the original artist decided to recolour it himself. To me recolouring is the same as the SW SE, I don’t mind it existing, but they should be clearly labelled (which unfortunately they rarely are) and the originals should always be made available (which they luckily are most of the time).
And wow, good catch! Was the coloring on 4-LOM always like that? Makes him look like a cyclops rather than an insect headed droid.
Assuming that the “restored” colours in the TPB’s are accurate, then it looked similar, but not quite so obvious. The “eyes” didn’t stand out quite so much. The funny thing about this page is that all of the bounty hunters have odd colours, including Bossk who’s green instead of orange. In the rest of the comic everyone has more or less the correct colours.
I’m also wondering if people in 1997 complained about the ANH SE comic being a bit drab colour-wise, because the ESB one is somewhat more vibrant despite still going for more “movie-accurate” colours.