thundercatsfans and marvel UK

Cartoons ThunderCats (1985)
1

I’ve spent a couple of hours upscaling and cleaning up Marvel UK issue 1 cbr and I see that it has watermarked pages saying thundercatsfans.com.

(I’m assuming that since WB and DC own the rights, and this comic is ober 20 odd years old, it’s not a major issue to talk about the scan).

Was this a site that is now defunct?

Out of interest I’m using smilla enlarger which is a fractal based JPEG enlarger. What’s clever about this is that if you set it right it can make the enlarged version clearer, sharper and also cleaner, getting rid of grain and moire.

Also they were elongated badly. The final images are correctly proportioned ans 2000 pix wide rather than the 1333 of the originals

http://www.tardistales.net/uktcatcompare.jpg

I’m asking because I was going to let them have the corrected version back.

2

If you mean thundercatsfans.org, that’s Purrsia’s site. It’s still active.

3

The comic snippet of Panthro and a Warrior Maiden looks much better on the right. Great work, Crimson.

4

Hi there.

A friend let me know about this thread :slight_smile:

Here’s the thing. To be honest, I didn’t know there was a standard size for cbr scans. I’ve learned something.

Here’s the deal. I know my scans aren’t the best. Part of the reason is the equipment - have an ancient scanner that takes forever to scan in and doesn’t do anything fancy like neatly save to a pdf or anything when done. So that meant single scans of every page which then had to be sized, fixed, fed and tucked into bed individually, then compiled into some format such as pdf, a format which all the originals still on the site for download are currently in. I think I remember putting in the effort at first (or at least trying, though I also admit to Photoshop fail) but yeah, some 100-ish issues out of 129 later (not to mention all the other books, mags, and memorabilia I’ve scanned for the site and posted up), it got old. The scanning and formatting I did do amounted to a full time job with lots of overtime. Seriously, if anyone knew how much time I devoted daily to the vain pursuits of fandom, I’d have to be committed. And let’s face it, this is proof positive a lot of fans can do a better job than I ever could cleaning them up (it does look great, and better, I agree regarding what you’ve done).

So yeah I did all this scanning, and it seemed like people didn’t know where to find them to download. Proof positive again in this thread, apparently my site is cursed and even with a watermark people don’t find it :frowning: As Cheezey kindly pointed out, it’s still very much there, active and toiled on.

Anywho, some time ago I decided to put those comics in a torrent so that more fans could/would see them. This is why I scanned them after all - wasn’t for me, I have the issues! I wanted to share this older print stuff with fans. So then I found out some people prefer this cbr format thing and tried my hand at that for the first few dozen that I put up in a torrent. You must have gotten one of the first torrents, because I gave up on that too when everyone got impatient waiting for me to convert, and wanted all I had in one big fat torrent. So I uploaded them all in pdf format for download via torrent, deleted all the single cbr formatted ones, and called it good.

And that is the story of the uk comics. By all means, if you want to donate the tidied up versions, I’d be happy to post them up for fans to download and give you credit for fixing them. You can contact me via this forum, email or via my site if you wanna donate.

Thanks!

5

Hey, Purrsia. I’ve been reading up on most of the “ThunderCats” comics on your site. Will you buy out the UK “ThunderCats Magazine” and post all of it on your site, especially the comic-book stories within?

6

Lol. I think I must have added .com!

By the way, the scans are great. I do a lot of photoshoppery and processing of images so that I can clean up and upscale a lot of stuff. A lot of this processing wasn’t available until recently. I’ll get in touch with you later on about cleaned up stuff.

Are there any favourite issues I can retouch for the site that people would want done? Also I can do them as cbr and PDF files.

7

@Daremonger - Those mags are way cool but since they’re new and buying them supports the new show, no I won’t be posting them on the site as it could undermine sales (not to mention get me in legal trouble haha). I know right now they’re only available in the UK, but a lot of US fans have been buying them too, not to mention those in the UK could just download instead of buy if I posted them. True it’ll probably end up in a torrent sooner or later, but even applying that logic, putting something like that on my site opens me up to trouble with WB and I don’t want to go there! Typically I only scan in full things that are long off the market and out of print. So far that route doesn’t seem to make the powers that be angry.

@Crimson - thanks again. Looking forward to seeing the cleaned up files. As for specific issues, if I get feedback it’s usually pretty general so I suppose just fix the issues that strike your fancy :slight_smile:

Btw, plan to add a few more issues in the next site update, so those who have been downloading and reading, be on the lookout for that!