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.
