5 out of 5

Ah, they figured it out.

You know the routine: nothing about the book itself, just the reprint quality.

The covers of these two pre-City at War issues look great, but that’s ’cause they look like the A.C. Farley Originals.  But to the reprints’ credit: the ‘Color Classics’ and IDW logos are well-colored and placed out-of-the-way to not obscure the art.  And finally, on the inside cover they start to actually credit the right people – Jim Lawson is included – and also mention what books these issue are reprinting.  Most importantly, gone is Scorpion Studios on coloring, in is Adam Guzowski.  Now, maybe Adam is part of Scorpion Studios (or IS Scorpion Studios) and he just upped his game, who knows, but regardless, I can’t believe I was the only one criticizing the bland blends (and lazy color mistakes) made in the previous volume.  Guzowski still uses obvious computer blends for backgrounds and whatnot, but his contribution is notable in both issues: issue #1 is all nighttime stuff, some with scenes of Nobody – whose suit is black (or a dark color) – and the pages manage to convey all of this effectively, a challenge for any book that’s in color (black on black scenes, basically).  And the second issue, Jim Lawson goes pretty much nil on backgrounds for the entire issue, leaving it up to Adam to fill the page.  He smartly leaves some whitespace, but otherwise knows how to choose a proper color for the BGs that juxtaposes his leads, who are colored cleanly as well.

A huge improvement on all fronts.

I considered docking a star because I’m still not sold on the need for the colorizations… but I suppose it’s clear by now that it’s just the Kev and Peter issues, and they’re charging regular cover price and I didn’t feel put out reading these issues thanks to the above details, so…  No need to be star stingy.