The El Indio Project
After finishing inking Batman, I came back to working on scanning and restoring El Indio. El Indio is a story written and illustrated by Francisco V. Coching that saw print on the pages of Pilipino Komiks from 1953-1954. The Francisco V. Coching Foundation, in cooperation with Komikero Publishing, is compiling the complete story in one volume, for publication next year. Hardly any original art exists for this story, so I'm scanning from the original printed comics pages.
For a long time I had no idea how to go about it because when I started with page one, I realized how difficult it was going to be. The decision to do it completely in black and white was reached in agreement with the Coching Foundation. This meant stripping out the color on some of the pages.
As is typical of many Philippine Comics of this time, some stories had two pages in color, and the rest in black and white. The coloring is mostly limited to shades of red and grey. To achieve a look of consistency for the entire book, it was necessary to make all the pages black and white.
It took a lot of trial and error to get the result I thought were OK. I even consulted with a comics art restorer who did work on Fantagraphic's B. Krigstein Comics and he gave me a lot of really valuable tips.
Oftentimes, I need to go in and clean certain sections of the page pixel by pixel just to make the art over all to look good. I'm pretty happy with how the pages look so far.
