Carl & Jerry's Mold Spots
I'm behind on the third volume of Carl and Jerry: Their Complete Adventures, though there's some sparse chance I may still get it mounted on Lulu before the end of May. The 24 stories in the volume (the years 1959 and 1960) have all been scanned and OCRed. The text has been cleaned up and laid out. The last step, though, is a lulu: Scanning all the illustrations and adding them to the layout.
It's more difficult with Volume 3 than the first two volumes for this reason: With the May 1959 issue, Popular Electronics went to a coated paper and a finer halftone screen for all the artwork. Prior to that issue, PE had used a pulpy paper and relatively course screens that actually remind me more of woodcuts. The early screens are coarse enough so that the artwork does not generate Moire patterns when printed on Lulu's 600 DPI print-on-demand machines.
The Carl and Jerry illos post-April 1959 are smaller and slightly softer compared to the earlier ones. (They remind me of watercolors, even though they are all reproduced in b/w.) Even scanning them at 1200 DPI and enlarging them on the page leaves horrendous Moire interference. There's no choice but to eliminate the halftone screens. This is what I have to begin with, enlarged to show the screen:
Note that it's only a small part of a much larger drawing. Below is what I need to have when I'm done. It's a little fuzzy because it's significantly enlarged; it does look fairly decent when printed at its intended size:
This is a skill I've never needed and had to develop. I've had a copy of Photoshop 5.5 in a box since 1999 and never needed it-anything I needed to do with bitmapped images I did in Paint Shop Pro. Simple in concept: Blur out the image to submerge the halftones into continuous tones, then sharpen it to get your lines and edges back. What I found is that there were complications:
- You have to adjust the b/w levels before you do anything else. This is a surprisingly touchy business with fine screens and, worse, it has to be custom-adjusted for each image. Just getting this knack under my hat took a couple of days of loose moments playing around with the scans.
- A surprising number of my magazines are literally moldy, especially the 1959 year. I bought most of them as a lot on eBay, and the stack had evidently been sitting on somebody's basement floor since Buddy Holly was first-run. There is water damage on some of the pages, most of which are a little wavy.The mold isn't everywhere, but it ended up on a couple of the illos, making it look like Carl has acne. Alas, his sweater looks like it has acne too. Touching all that up would take forever, so although I did my best, Volume 3 will have some mold spots. I won't tell you where they are, since it's my fervent desire that you consider them artistic flourishes.
If it weren't for that, I might be done by now-that, and the fact that I have misplaced the December 1959 issue and am currently tearing up the house looking for it. It's here somewhere, and in the meantime I'm full speed ahead scanning the rest of the illos-as many as five per story. It's turning out to be a much bigger job than I anticipated when I decided to do it last summer, but the people who have bought the books have been delighted.
I guess if it had been easy, well, someone else would have done it long ago.