Saturday, November 06, 2021

MASTER PIECE

Saturday Leftover Day. 

Stefan Wood, a good internet friend who runs the Comic Strip Appreciation Group where he rescues complete runs of strips and shares them in low resosultion online (and offers them in complere higher resolution 'books' for a small fee), tought me a new trick for enhancing scans. I tried it out on some of ny old Krigstein collection. 

I have a complete folder of all of the stories Bernie Krigstein did before and after is well remembered run at EC. Some of those stories are rush jobs (as are some at EC) and some are gems, but most fall soemwhere inbetween - with interesting details and experiments in every one. Most of those stories were scanned by myself from my own collection. I also have an almost complete set of scans of his stories for other companies - most predating even the Timely Atlas stuff. Twentyu percent of those are my own scans, others come from online sources such as The Digital Comics Museum. 

I never shared any of those stories here, because I always intended to create a one or two disc set and offer it to the readers of this blog. What held me back all these years is the varied condition of the scans. Working with older (or sometimes British black and white) copies they go from prinstine to barely legible.

So I tried this technique on one of the worse scans. It is better than it used to be, but I am still not srue I can salvage it. The poor coloring that accompanied many of the Tinely/Atlas output in the later fifties doesn't help either. If nit was for a book, large parts of my collection would have to be rescanned or certainly recolored. Of course I have sold all of my Timely/Atlas books by now, so that would not be easy either.

Anyway, I don't mind sharing it here. If a complete run of these stories would come out, it could completely change the image of Krigstein as an artist, who will always be 'the man who drew Master Race' but was so much more.





 

No comments: