Rachel Richey is a comics historian and the owner and publisher of Comic Syrup Press, which specializes in reprinting Golden Age Canadian comic books, many of them unseen for decades. Using a panel from CSP’s latest collection, Johnny Canuck, Richey describes her process of scanning and restoring old comics for the cleanest possible reproduction.

1. The original comic pages are scanned at a higher resolution than traditional print requirements in order to maintain as much of the integrity of the artist’s work as possible over the course of the cleaning process. The ink is a little faded and the texture of the paper gives the page what I call “static.” Originally these pages would have been grey, but over time the low-quality newsprint browned with age and sun damage.