In another case of nostalgia gone horribly weird, I’ve started perusing the old Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards comics I did a quarter of a century ago and realized that the images are super tiny because back in 2000 everyone still had 15-inch monitors. Observe a random panel from Episode 6.5:
This shot is shown at its full resolution–a whopping 375×281 pixels. It’s like a Diablo II postage stamp.
I decided to super-size all the images to 1920×1440 using the Super Resolution™ feature in Pixelmator Pro for the main comic panels (which are 640×480, so large postage stamps) and it worked surprisingly well, even preserving the text balloons decently. But some have required more fiddling and none of these panels were made with fancy layer technology, so it’s a bit like fixing up an old painting–you need to be careful to not muck it up.
What I have found is in some cases I need to actually redo pretty much the entire panel. For example, here’s the Diablo II panel above in its shiny new 2024 version:
Upscaling the original panel looked grossbuckets. The shot above is from Diablo II Resurrected, which offers much better graphics than the original, though I could have toggled on the original 2000 era graphics for maximum fidelity, but that many giant pixels would look very chunky at 1920×1440. I also changed the font to one more befitting a comic. This means I have to change the font in every panel now. Whoops.
And while it’s a bit silly to go back and do all this work for something very few people will see, I’m enjoying it, and it’s fun to revisit the old comics and make them a little more presentable for our shiny modern age.
