So at work the other day I came back to my cubical to find a large poster tube in it. I saw Dave Sim’s address on it, and inside I found a bunch of mylar negative used in the production of this cover:

Mylar I said, as I rubbed my chin.  Part of my job is the usage of mylar “phototools” in what is called photolithography. So all I could picture is taking these mylar negatives and using them to create metal plates with the image “engraved” chemically onto them. But nah, I couldn’t do that. As if I have time at work to do something shady like that. Ha!

But that is what it looks like these are used for:

There are four negative images per mylar sheet: two front cover and two back cover. The mylar sheets are approximately 2 feet by 3 feet and have holes on one side – at first I thought that would be to used to register the mylar to each other, but now I think it is just to keep them in a book of some sort. If these were used to create the (metal?) plates for printing, you would only use one set of the mylar images at a time – one for red, one for blue, one for yellow and one for black.

The images on the mylar sheets are actually taped on to them. The images are also the actual size of the image on the comic.  Here is a close up of the “magenta” one:

 Also included with the four different mylar negatives was a “color layer separator”:

They overlay perfectly onto the large mylar sheets.  You can also see the holes in the large mylar sheets where the two sheets above overlay . Now I just need to clean up the mylar negatives, scan them in, and see if I can reproduce the cover digitally for Dave. It was either this, or he was going to just let the negatives sit in a stack in the corner of the Off White House.