Obsession Du Jour

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan now has a Twitter feed at RoguesClwydRhan. I'm spectacularly late to the party. Here in a few days I'll try to get an RSS feed working for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan as well.

My plan is to announce comic and websites on there, nothing more, nothing less. I will continue to post them here as well.

My other plan is to do something concrete for the comic every day that my day job sucks. So yesterday I made the feed; today I ...tell people about it through my existing channels. Any step, no matter how tiny, will count, but it has to be completed, so "Working on an update" only counts if an update is finished that day.

I'm not going to claim that I'm nearly ready to start full-scale production again. I've got burned on that too often now. However, the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan remaster project has picked up some speed. As of today, the latest remaster is the comic for November 3, 2003 ( http://www.rocr.net/index.php?p=20031103 )

The Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan remaster project started in 2006 as a way to upgrade some of the earlier comics from their poorly-scanned, tiny images. Remastered versions of several stories were posted on my DeviantArt site and on the Drunk Duck mirror site for ROCR, but it wasn't until recently that I've started posting new ones on the main site, working both backwards from the end of the story The Corby Tribe and forward from the start of The Rite of Serfdom.

The project has been beset by accidents and hardware failures including the simultaneous failure of both my main and secondary system, located at the time on two different continents, in late 2009, at a time when an earlier incident had caused me to temporarily lose faith in automated back-up software. That faith has since been somewhat restored, but some of the earlier remasters, including much of the work for The Corby Tribe, have already been lost and will need to be redone.

Currently, the remaster process involves work on scans that were high-res, but low bit depth, which at the time were coloured in on the main layer. The gutters and panel borders are cleaned out, then on a new layer, the line art is improved, with particular attention on areas where the low-bit depth lines run into each other, causing areas of the art to become crowded. Sometimes, new detail is added that will be visible on the larger final images. The art is re-lettered, with British spellings now the norm for all pages, and sometimes new word balloons are drawn using Photoshop. In addition, some pages are redrawn entirely from scratch and some characters, particularly Maghreid, Abúi and P'Séaigg are partly redrawn and recoloured nearly every time they appear. Final results are suitable as source images for even higher-res remasters in the future, and for print in the unlikely event that there is real interest. The work is done in 15-minute blocks during the working week, and in longer blocks of time during the weekends.

The remaster project should be complete by the time my wife is ready to work in the Netherlands, by which time I should be able to work fewer hours in my day job and get back to regular production of new work. That could be as early as next year, or as late as 2015.

I would like to thank my two years younger self for writing such clear instructions on how to install PNGOut on a Mac. My command-line skills, such as they were, have become extremely rusty, but when I needed to install PNGout again, I went from downloading the program to getting the first output written to disk in five minutes. The post also contained my command for batch operations, which I shall quote here again for future reference:
for s in *.png;do pngout "$s" pngout/$s;done
This will work if you have a subfolder named "pngout" already, and will keep your input files separated from your output.

On a completely related note, I have finally got the redrawn ROCR page for February 02, 2003 uploaded to the website.

Top row of page 62 of The Rite of Serfdom, as redrawn by me in March of 2011 and coloured by me and Aggie Janicot.

The remaster project is continuing at a mostly steady pace. Right now, there are some delays as I am redrawing a seven-page sequence of pages and it's taking longer than I anticipated because of the dreaded Real Life Issues. Once we're past that sequence, I will return to adding remastered comics into the archive at a rate of two a day or more again, until I hit the next sequence that needs to be redrawn.

I am unexpectedly psyched by the opportunity to revisit my older work again and draw it the way it should have been drawn in the first place. For some reason, the sequence I am working on now was originally published at a rate of five comics a week, and it shows. The original versions are of noticeably worse quality than the ones surrounding them, and I'll be glad to see them replaced by comics that are noticeably better instead. I am also considering adding the odd page here and there.

Sometimes it does bother me that I am not working on the current story, Feral, but as I said above, the moment I start drawing new pages, delays start to happen, because I simply do not have the time right now to produce good-looking pages at a steady pace. When you add in the added complication of also having to script new material, it becomes even less feasible. Better to keep Feral on the back burner until I can give it my full time and attention.

This is also the reason why I have backed down from doing any special stories to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan this year, as I had considered earlier. Instead, my revised twentieth anniversary plan is to devote more time to fixing everything that is wrong with the ROCR archives. I won't just be remastering most of the artwork and redrawing part of it, but I will also track down all broken links in the archives; in the case of the two big crossovers that the comic has been part of, I will deal with missing comics by crossover partners by redrawing them myself based on their original scripts (if available) and inserting those new versions into the archives. Finally, by the end of 2011 I will modernise the site design itself, taking advantage of new navigation standards that have become common since 2005. Those things alone will keep my busy for a while.

Then, and only then, will I turn to creating new material for the comic. By then, my private life will be considerably more settled than it is now and I will be in a much better place to finish Feral than I am now. And the existing episodes will be that much more awesome.

The Chairman of the Office of Rites is having a very bad start to his working day. Click to enlarge.

Partly coloured version of the new art for Page 62 of The Rite of Serfdom. The characters are coloured based on the established character continuity. At this point, I am not entirely sure what to do with the colouring for the backgrounds, but they are greytoned anyway. By adding large flat areas of colour that overlap the line art, I can fill up gaps in the line art and keep things manually. It also helps keeping the background more or less consistent and prevents over-colouring.

If I were to colour a page from a completely new comic, the background colours would be more integrated with the character colours, but in these redrawn pages, character continuity has to be maintained, so their skin tones and costumes are coloured first.
Original version

The Chairman of the Office of Rites is having a very bad start to his working day. Click to enlarge.

Original version

The Chairman of the Office of Rites is having a very bad start to his working day. Click to enlarge.

Original version

It's been almost three months since the last new episode was posted. I apologize for that, and would like to assure everyone that not only have I not abandoned Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, but I've actually been very busy for the past month or so; just not on any new material. Instead I've been reviewing and revising the archives, putting up new, higher-quality files for the old comics, fixing link-rot and re-inserting episodes that were lost from the various server moves the comic's been involved in over the past ten years.

This process has actually been under way for a long time. I started revising episodes from The Faerie and the Earth-Pig onwards back in early 2006, re-scanning material that I created when I did not have the quality of equipment I have now, recoloring them with help from DFG and re-texting them. When I started re-running the comic on Drunk Duck in August of 2007, the pace picked up and I remastered the all of the comics until midway through The Corby Tribe, when I had a series of setbacks and had to give up. Late in 2010, I picked up the project again, and I've been working on it nearly every day since, and in the process, I have redrawn about half a dozen old episodes on top of giving a hundred more a facelift.

The only problem is that until recently, all the results so far have been on Drunk Duck. The only times a remastered image made it to this website were when I discovered a missing strip or when during the work on the old file, I hated the existing images so much that I redrew them. I am working very hard to change that: for the past week, I have uploaded remastered images to the site every day. I am working backwards from the end of The Corby Tribe (which is done but some early work may have been destroyed in those setbacks that I mentioned above and need to be redrawn) and forward from the beginning of The Rite of Serfdom, which I put up as soon as images are done. At the time of writing this, the string of consecutive new versions starts with the comic from August 29, 2002 and ends with the one from November 15, 2002 but the string will be longer before the day is over.

Even the pages that haven't been redrawn are still improved: they are larger, they have had new lettering added and colour faults fixed. In some cases, the colouring has been revised and shading and effects added. None of that will stand out (unlike some of the redrawn art) but it gives the images just a little more oomph. And all of it is now in my working files in Photoshop format at high resolution, so that any further work on them can be done quickly without having to retrace my steps again.

The whole process will take up another year until I'm caught up with the beginning of Feral. I do not intend to leave Feral where it's at for another year - though it might happen. In fact, I plan to spend as much time on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan as possible, because this is the 20th anniversary of the comic; I started creating it in May 1991 and put out the first small press collection of it a year later. I intend to celebrate that with a lot of new material. But more about that later. For now, this is what I'm focused on, because the site and the archives need it badly.

I'm fed up with the fact that the current Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website archives do not reflect the work done on the remaster project. After five years, only a handful of improved pages had been posted - until today! Starting with the storyline that is currently being remastered, The Rite of Serfdom, remastered pages will be uploaded to the archives as soon as possible once they're done. There are ten remade pages up right now: you can tell them apart from the original versions at a glance because they're a lot bigger. The old versions are 560 pixels wide, the new ones 648. At first, they appear shockingly large, but proportionally, they are only as large as the old versions would have looked on a 1024 x 768 monitor such as was common back in 2002. In a few years, they will look small again.

There are other differences, though. Many small areas of flat colour that I forgot to fill in back in 2002 have finally been filled; the panel borders are more natural-looking, even though a lot of them needed to be fixed with computer-based straight lines. A few areas here and there have been recoloured or have had light gradients or smart blurs applied to them; nothing that you would notice if you weren't looking for it, but the changes make the images 'pop' a little more.

Photoshop's scaling algorithm also includes some sharpening, which the software I used in 2002, Paint Shop Pro, did not apply. This is the one change that I'm not so sure about. The final images undeniably look sharper, but they also show some artifacts from the sharpening effect, especially in high-contrast areas. I may decide to turn that feature off if at all possible, but that will depend on the response I get from readers.

I have just shut down my Comicspace account and deleted all the links to it on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan pages that I could find. Please let me know if you find any that have been left behind.

Next step: shutting down the web presence on Modern Tales. I guess it would be nice to notify readers there that this step is imminent, so I will update there one more time.

The step after that is figuring out if I'm owed anything at all by the Open Ad Network or whatever it is called. Then cancel those ad spaces sitewide too.