comic

I finally finished going through Episode 1 of Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards, reworking the comic to make it more palatable in the age of high-resolution monitors. I tried not to George Lucas it up by drastically changing the artwork and making this a Special Edition™, focusing more on preserving the original art, just making it smoother and more refined.

You can view the updated episode in the gallery below or on the AC vs. QB page linked above.

Issues with the HD version of Episode 1:

• Continuity: The QBs are Blood Eagle (red), but in several panels the tower is shown as also being red, meaning under QB control, despite it being claimed by Angry Carrot. Whoops!
• The line thickness on AC and minions varies a bit from panel to panel. I went back and redid a few, but the rest I declare just part of the charm.
• The word balloons and text are sometimes a bit too big/spacious. This was a result of changing the font from Verdana to Back Issue BB, which have very different properties. In a few cases, I manually chopped down the size of the balloon and had to paint over the old balloon underneath to keep it from rudely poking through.
• I dropped the outline on the balloons as it was too much work to easily replicate.
• I adjusted the brightness of the shots to try to make them as even as possible, but a few are still too dark or too bright. Again, part of the charm!

On the plus side, the improvements:

• Panels are now 1920×1440 instead of a tiny 640×480.
• Redrawn Angry Carrot and minions have much more refined line work than the originals, with far fewer jaggies.
• I forgot to give Angry Carrot arms in a few panels where he clearly should have had arms. This has been corrected.
• The Back Issue BB font gives the episode more of a comic book look (this is a matter of taste, but I’m including it here).
• I redid the first panel to make it match all other episodes, tweaking the fonts where necessary.

How I redid the episode:

• I started by using Pixelmator Pro’s Super Resolution feature to preserve detail while increasing the images from 640×480 to 1920×1440.
• Every panel featuring Angry Carrot and/or minions was brought into Procreate, where I retraced and recoloured over the original art. These were then exported as Photoshop (PSD) files to preserve layers.
• I loaded all the upscaled art into Affinity Photo, then redid the text and word balloons, and made other minor tweaks to colours and other bits.
• I saved these as Affinity Photo files to preserve the layers.
• All panels were then batch exported as PNG, WEBP and JPG files. Although the WEBP files were smallest, they subtly toned down the colours of Angry Carrot in a way I didn’t like, so I went with the JPG versions.

Yes, this is a weird choice for updating the comic, a brief “Where are they now?” update I slapped together while I pondered where to take the comic (nowhere, ultimately!)

I got the idea to redo the strip because the original panels (as mentioned previously) are absurdly tiny on a typical widescreen monitor, at a mere 375 x 281 pixels.

It was a fun little experiment to modernize the comic, as I had to redo some of it from scratch and probably redid some of the panels significantly faster than originally when I handcrafted them from the chunky pixels and stone tools of 2002.

Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards page to see the new and original versions of the episode.

The higher resolution gallery:

Notes on what I changed:

Globally:

- All panels increased to 1920x1440 resolution
- Main font changed from Verdana to Back Issues BB for a more comic book look
- Revised characters were drawn in Procreate on an iPad Pro
- Revised artwork, text and dialog balloons were added in Affinity Photo

Individually:

1. Completely redone.
2. Used screenshot taken from Diablo II: Resurrected.
3. Resized the dialog balloon to make it smaller. Painted over the old balloon, then copied and pasted parts of the background to better blend everything in. I was helped here by how crude and low resolution a blown-up image from Jedi Knight (1997) looks in 2024.
4. Found new still life for background, made the pepper look less still, more peppery, since that seemed a likely reason for him being fired. A “still” version of the pepper also exists in a hidden layer in the original Procreate sketch.
5. New background, new lighting effect added in Affinity Photo. Celery characters were traced over from the originals. Evil version has a tweaked goatee.
6. Changed GIANT Chinese Egg Attack!! to the less culturally insensitive GIANT Evil Egg Attack!! Redid the eggs to look angry/evil. Open mouths reveal yolk-filled innards.
7. Completely redone with new colour image of Freud (same pose) and new background.
8. Completely redone.
9. Completely redone.
10. Completely redone. Figures were traced from originals and refined a bit.
11. Completely redone.

I am planing to at least take another look at the high-resolution version of Episode 1 I also did recently, to see if I want to tweak that one (and maybe others) as well.