[Kyoma] AKIRA Colored - Epic Comics (Upscaled)

2x upscale of all 38 issues of AKIRA by Epic Comics

These are considered to be the first digitally colored "comics", by colorist Steve Oliff.

In the late 80s, editor Archie Goodwin came to Katsuhiro Otomo and asked him to localize Akira in English. It would be published by Marvel Comics' imprint Epic Comics. Otomo said yes, but then came the frustrating task of localizing it.

Jo Duffy wrote the localization, Michael Higgins did the lettering, and Katsuhiro Otomo himself redid the art so that it would make sense in English.

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Upscaled with 4xRealWebPhotov3atd model based on the recently released **Adaptive-Token-Dictionary** Network.

The model does a great job of removing compression artifacts, keeping the line art from getting wobbly, and preserving most of the screentone patterns. Out of all the models I’ve tried, this is probably the only one where the output doesn’t look like a smeary mess. The only downside is a slight color shift.

Comparisons: https://slow.pics/c/ERsXxXO7

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Resulting images were downscaled to 2200px then saved as q97(4:4:4) jpegs, encoded with JPEGLI

Link to the model used:
4xRealWebPhotov3atd: https://openmodeldb.info/models/4x-RealWebPhoto-v3-atd

Reading Direction:➡️Left to Right

**DDL**

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