The image manipulation has been a difficult process with the Jiudo reprint, but I’ve finally made some headway. The difficulty was in preserving the excellent original line drawings without carrying along a big white box of empty space around them. I’ve learned this is called “transparency” in the image editing field. The other benefit was that making the rest of the image transparent also allowed me to remove any text or images that bled through the page in the original book. That was quite an issue with the original because of the thinness of the pages, which were otherwise high quality.

I don’t know who the artist was, but I hope he had a career as a tattooist or cartoonist because he really had talent. Here’s a test pic so I can make sure it’s working out the way I think it is (the gray background washes it out a little, it will look pretty sharp against white paper):

Not too bad. The pace should pick up a bit now.

Update: I am a Firefox user, but I tried this in IE6, and it looks like IE6 does not support PNG transparencies, although IE7 does. So if you see a white box around the pic and you are using IE6 or earlier as your browser, that’s the reason.