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May

20

Restoring Rudy Florese’s ORAS MO NA!

Filed Under ORAS MO NA!, Philippine Comics | 14 Comments

Before anything else, just a quick link to Ilyn’s blog in which she has something important to say for all our friends. Thanks!

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It was never in my mind to do a full scale restoration of Rudy Florese’s ORAS MO NA! I just intended to scan the pages, fix the contrast, hue and saturation a bit and then post it. I just wanted to share the story of my father in law’s tragic vigilante online.

And then I saw one of the covers and thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to strip that color off, clean the page and recolor it again?”. And that turned out well. I continued to think, “Wouldn’t it be nice to strip off the color in the first installment (the first 4 pages), clean it, and then recolor it? I think that would be nice.”

And then Ilyn saw how nice it looked and said how nice it would be for all the pages to be so colored. I nearly fell off my seat. That’s more than 120 pages! I didn’t think I had the time to do it. But I too thought how nice it would be. It would do Rudy great honor for one of his favorite works to be restored and represented in a way far better than the original did. Ilyn offered to scan the pages, strip them of color and clean them, so that all I would do would be to color.

If that’s the case, then I think I thought I could pull it off. I’m not always successful, as I’ve already been a week late on one installment. I can’t assure that there won’t be any similar hiccups in the future, but I will try my best to release an installment every Thursday.



The process of cleaning a page is one that I’ve come up with on my own. Take note that there are definitely a lot of ways in which a task can be accomplished in a program like Photoshop. And that’s the great thing about it. The program is flexible enough to allow one to accomplish something without having to follow any particular process strictly.

It starts off with just variations in which levels, curves and sharpness are manipulated. The purpose of this is to strengthen the black lines, and purify the colors to the point that they become more saturated and distinct. This allows you to then pick the color by pixel, and then convert the color to white. This would effectively remove all color from the page.

Due to the printing, and the paper on which the art is printed, one cannot get a 100% faithful reproduction of the original art. There will be damage, fade, distortion, thickening, etc. of the lines which you would need to go in and fix pixel by pixel, either by reconstructing parts of lines that were lost, or erasing dirt, or fixing distortions that were never supposed to be there. I think it’s important that a task like this should be given to an artist, specially one familiar with the style of the artist of the artwork being restored. It will give them an understanding of what goes on in the original artist’s mind and give them an insight on what should be done.

I tried to be subtle in the coloring, with a few highlights here and there. I didn’t want to go all out with the effects and shimmer and light and shade. Given the knowledge that Rudy was unhappy with how his comics were colored, it allowed me to work with a clean slate, ignoring the original colors completely and establishing a palette of my own. Knowing what the story is like, I try to establish a certain kind of tone that reflects the story. Once in a while I’d give a stark red background to a panel when something horrible or shocking is happening. Similarly, I’d give desaturated, dark colors when the mood is somber.

Comments

14 Responses to “Restoring Rudy Florese’s ORAS MO NA!”

  1. Rafael on May 20th, 2007 11:29 am

    Gerry, I’m really enjoying the job you’re doing over the late Mr. Florese’s pages. The digital coloring you’ve added is subtle and does not overwhelm the lush ink work yet it still adds the essential mood and tone in accordance to the story. What a wonderful tribute Gerry – Bravo!

  2. Noel on May 21st, 2007 6:02 am

    I’d be happy with it being B & W but I do like the colouring job you’ve done. It’s got none of that annoying glowing effect that most of today’s comics have.

  3. Nerp on May 21st, 2007 1:29 pm

    you can also try manipulating the channels palette, things will be a bit faster there.

  4. Rod Samonte on May 21st, 2007 2:21 pm

    Gerry,
    For me, it’s probably alright to see the original comics the way it was, so long as I can follow the story to its conclusion, now that we’ve seen what you can do with restoration. A little tweaking in Photoshop should get it looking better than the original without having to remove the color and then recoloring it. However, one advantage of having it fully restored is you’d be set and ready to have it published as a graphic novel later. Rod

  5. Gerry Alanguilan on May 21st, 2007 3:48 pm

    Hello Rod…

    Yes, I’m coloring it at 400dpi so that I can have a high res version in case circumstances call for print publication in the future. :)

  6. Reno on May 21st, 2007 5:48 pm

    Yung El Indio baka puwedeng ganito din. :)

  7. Myke on May 22nd, 2007 4:54 pm

    This is really amazing Ger. Somebody can make a new business out of this. Filipino Comics restoration. Pwede kaya yon?

  8. Gerry Alanguilan on May 22nd, 2007 7:41 pm

    Hello Myke! Yes, hopefully this is something that can make for a good living for a lot of people. Unfortunately, it can be very expensive and I doubt any local company would restore local komiks much less pay anyone to do it. The client would have to come from abroad, specially the US where comic book art restoration is booming because of the demand for compilations, masterworks editions, archival editions, absolute editions, etc. of old comics material.

    I’m not sure if someone is already outsourcing such a job here, but I do know that my assistant is one of the very first who is doing this professionally as I’m paying her to help me restore EL INDIO. It’s very tedious work and she manages to do only 2 to 3 pages a day.

    If there is a Komikon on October, I think I can definitely say El Indio will be out by then.

  9. The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log » Gerry Alanguilan restores and recolours on May 22nd, 2007 8:18 pm

    [...] Many of you will know Gerry as the artist and writer of the excellent Elmer or maybe even from his past mainstream work on titles such as Superman: Birthright or the 2001 FF annual. He is also a formidable blogger, writing a very passionate blog which whilst dealing with many topics has a particular reverance for the history of Filipino comics artists and the art that came before him. His Komikero site also hosts the wonderful resource which is ” The Philippine Comics Art Museum”. As if the above weren’t enough he is currently restoring Rudy Florese’s “Oras Mo Na!” strip and regularly posting pages for as all to savour. Rudy Florese was Gerry’s father-in-law who died in 2003 and Gerry is sparing no effort to make the strip (which deals with a vigilante who fights child sexual abuse committed by foreigners) look as good as it probably ever has. His latest blog posting takes us through the process of stripping a published colour strip back to black and white and boosting the contrast to give the piece more of the force that was undoubtedly present in the original art. Gerry then recolours the strip using the modern palette available in Photoshop. [...]

  10. Tonio Hubilla on May 23rd, 2007 2:37 am

    This looks just flat-out amazing. What would you say the chances of this work, or any work like this being translated and released in the States? Is this an option any Filipino cartoonists working in restoration are exploring with publishers or anything? I think American comic fans would benefit a lot from getting their hands on these excellent pieces of Filipino history, and this something I continually mention on my Blog, getting a fair amount of positive feedback from other Filipino American comic bloggers who would love to share this stuff. Anyway, keep up the mind blowingly excellent work!

  11. Gerry Alanguilan on May 23rd, 2007 8:34 am

    Hello Tonio!

    Yeah! I think that would be a great idea. As far as I know it had been done only once before. I heard that Alfredo Alcala’s UKALA was translated and released abroad, but I am not aware of other efforts. I do hear about a plan to release some of Carlo J. Caparas’s compiled works in the US.

    I initially thought of this as simply sharing the work of my father in law, a work that I thought was pretty good, but was wasting away in obscurity. But this gives me an idea of doing a bit more with it. I do think it’s a viable option, and definitely a potential for a new kind of employment for Filipinos locally.

    I think the best test case would be Coching’s EL INDIO, which we are also currently restoring. The Coching family has expressed an interest in having it translated into Spanish. But I think it would be a good idea to have it in English as well.

    Once we get done with this, and release a batch of the original tagalog edition, I’ll see about approaching publishers for it abroad.

  12. John Freeman on May 24th, 2007 6:48 pm

    The restoration work on this strip is just stunning – has it ever appeared in English?

    There are some very good Indian companies that do a lot of restoration work, on projects such as the UK’s Look and Learn for example. I don’t know how much they charge.

  13. auggie on May 31st, 2007 10:57 am

    Gerry,

    I know that this will see print eventually. I’m glad that I’ll be having two restoration jobs from you. It’s just a question of when . I really hope you could get enough funding & capitalization to get cutting- edge, equipments, hire more production crew to generate more restoration classics from the Golden Age.

  14. Gerry Alanguilan on May 31st, 2007 12:04 pm

    Yaan mo Auggie… magpapayaman ako. Pag nangyari yun, makakaasa ka na marami pa akong magagawa na ganito. Excited ako sa possibilities. :D