Waffle

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.

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 took some time off the clock during a slump at my day job to fix up some more remastered comics for the Drunk Duck mirror, and in the process I fixed a serious problem with the comic for May 1, 2002, bringing back three panels that had been missing for years. I also fixed a spelling error in the comic for May 2, 2002.

The May 1, 2002 installment, coloured by Drooling Fan Girl, is still one of my favourite installments, largely thanks to her colour choices. I'm glad to have it back on the website.