Pulp Comics Resurrection

As a comic lover, I find it painful to see how old pulp classics are becoming increasingly scarce.

Due to tear and wear over the years plus the dubious paper quality, the remaining ones are almost crumbling away just by looking at it for a while…

The leftovers are considered a delicacy by all kinds of dreadful insects…

And global warming doesn’t help either!

I decided to focus on the bottom right panel, hopefully I could save something...

One day while digging through numerous magazines in various states of decay I found a copy of Strange Worlds comics from 1951, wow!

However, as expected it was in a dreadful state…

Despite that, I couldn’t resist buying it in the hope of being able to salvage at least something out of it…

Obviously, I could scan some of the pages, but even so, would it be possible to undo the damage caused by abuse?

The first attempt went straight off the rails...

I knew there are several fanatical groups of people who are scanning these remnants from a bygone golden age as much as they can and don’t misunderstand me, they do a great job!

But still.., despite their best intentions the results at times aren’t exactly great, to say the least.

Using filters can be very, very tricky and backfire massively as you can see...

How to change this deplorable state of affairs?

In ancient times some people took up the Dark Arts in order to conjure up ghosts from the Beyond, but nowadays this method is as good as forgotten.

Also, some of those ingredients are nowadays a bit awkward, to say the least, try asking for a spoonful of virgin's blood at your local pharmacy and see what happens…

Tweaking too involves a lot of risk...

With that in mind, I took a different approach in focussing on the essence of a particular comic.

Instead of trying to resurrect a complete comic from the 1940s-50s with the usual average results regarding quality, why not go for just one (& only one!) fragment of the comic book in question and make that somehow ‘perfect’?

Easier said than done, but I decided to give it a good shot!

Messing around with certain pixels is also not recommended!

Countless hours were spent digging through the Net’s dark corners, scrolling through eroded digital documents and faded jpegs, trying to make sense of obscure information while distinguishing between fact and lurid imaginative tales of wonder…

The number of ways to screw things up is unbelievably high...

The Dark Web itself was another experience, asking for illegal drugs, weapons, counterfeit money/documents, rigged elections, murder & mayhem, all ‘dead’ easy.

My requests however got a different response, from immediately getting banned/blocked for life to responses like “Hey dude, we know we’re evil, but there are limits!”

Interesting effect but NOT what I was looking for!

Despite all this, I managed to gather more and more information bit by bit (or perhaps byte by byte?) I started making progress until finally, I had enough to give the resulting ‘recipe’ a try.

Fine-tuning took a long time and as you can see the process of extracting & transforming a poor resolution jpeg from a mutilated pulp comic to a cool piece of retro pulp art wasn’t easy, lots of mishaps on the way!