Bringing color back to the comics

Natick artist uses computer to restore luster to pages of yesteryear

(Joanne Rathe/Globe Staff) Rick Keene adds his restorative touch to a Starman comic from the 1940s.

Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman - those are just some of the superheroes who owe their future to Rick Keene.

The 54-year-old Natick artist restores comic books for DC Archive Editions, hardback collections of series that date back to the Depression. "I don't make these drawings better," Keene said. "I bring them back to life the way the original artist wanted them to look."

His ingenuity at the computer has made it possible to bring back stories once "considered 'lost,' " said John Clark, editor-in-chief for Gemstone Publishing's Disney comic books, which Keene also restores. The comics, originally printed on newspaper letterpresses, "were smudgy and out of register, so any attempts to make them reprintable were cost-prohibitive," Clark wrote in an e-mail.

Keene estimates he has restored 11,000 DC pages and 800 Disney pages. They often come in faded and tattered. Occasionally, he has to recreate dialogue or make an educated guess, say, as to whether the missing wrist in a torn panel had been wearing a watch.

He employs computer technology that not even the sci-fi comic creators of decades ago dreamed possible. When he started his restoration work 18 years ago, he pioneered techniques using computer components that today are considered museum pieces.

His office is on the second floor of his Civil War-era house, a couple blocks north of downtown Natick. A solar-powered prism sends lights dancing, disco-ball like, around his downstairs parlor, where he serves oatmeal cookies on a Felix-the-Cat table he made himself.

Game boards, advertising posters, and other pop culture treasures scavenged from flea markets decorate the house. In the front room are posters of art he did for the website of the band Van Halen; his work had caught the eye of Eddie Van Halen's then-wife, Valerie Bertinelli, after he depicted her as a dominatrix on an Internet mailing list.

But back to the comics and the magic Keene performs on his Mac. His current patient is Starman, a sci-fi superhero created in the early 1940s. In a departure from his earlier work for DC Archives, he is restoring the colors in addition to the line work.

After scanning copies of the original pages, Keene uses Adobe Photoshop and a tablet stylus to touch up the images. Starman's hair is out of register with his head; letters in the dialogue bleed together; swaths of color are faded or missing. "My challenge is to make it look like a vintage comic, without having it look processed," Keene says.

To fill in bald spots, for example, Keene copies and pastes with the stylus. "I take hair from there and put it up there," he said. Call it Hair Club for Super Men.

When he does the Disney work, he has to follow strict color guidelines that specify the percentage of cyan [greenish-blue], magenta, yellow, and black to create the desired color for, say, Donald Duck's beak and Mickey's pants. Keene has more freedom to toy with background colors. "If Donald gets really ticked off, I'll give him a red glow around his head or change the coloring in the room," he said.

If Keene's life were depicted as a comic book, the panels might include:

Little Rick watching his father, a Natick patrolman, operating the town's first radar gun for catching speeders. Even then the Keenes were on the cutting edge of technology.

Inventing Willy Weasely, his own comic-book character, while on lunch break in the mid-'80s. Consider him a mix of Eddie Haskell, Homer Simpson, and George Costanza, but with a foot-long nose and a tail.

Creating animated scenes for "Riders of Rohan," a 1989 computer game based on "Lord of the Rings."

When Rick was a kid, he says, it wasn't cool to read comics. He recalls going to the mall with his seventh-grade friends and reaching for the latest copy of Superboy. "One of my friends nudged me and says, 'You're not going to buy a comic, are you?' "

From an early age, Keene had to be creative to keep himself entertained. After school, he'd stay with his uncle, a jeweler who worked at home, until his mother finished her day working for the town of Natick. As he wasn't allowed to watch TV or have friends over, he drew caped superhero figures, cut them out, and pretended to fly them around the room.

Initially Keene wanted to be an art teacher. He went to the New England School of Art and Framingham State, but couldn't find a full-time teaching job when he graduated in the mid-'70s. He took on a succession of full- and part-time graphic artist jobs, learning how to make detailed drawings of things like valves, trucks, and cockpits.

Meanwhile, he nurtured a dream of drawing comics or cartoons. "I was getting tired of drawing stuff that only shows up at board meetings," he said. But when he sat down to create a strip, he realized he didn't know "how to pace this, what to show and not to show."

He organized a class taught by one his former art school teachers, Bhob Stewart, to learn the basics and the concept of narrative art. Keene created Willy Weasely as his final project; he published a Willy comic book in 2006.

Keene's DC connection began in 1990. The archives editor at the time found himself with 30 pages still needing restoration and a deadline just a few weeks away. On Stewart's recommendation, the editor gave Keene a call. "They were stuck," Keene says. "Usually that's a good way to get into something."

Keene took advantage of the best technology available at the time. He found a company in Burlington that had a drum scanner capable of copying a comic page and an Apollo computer on which he could touch up the artwork. To print out the finished pages, he drove a stack of floppy disks down Route 128 to a printer in Waltham and had the finished pages delivered to New York.

He completed the job on time and to everyone's satisfaction, but his efforts were promptly forgotten after DC reshuffled management of the project. Keene's luck changed a year later, with another call out of the blue from DC Comics. A new editor had taken over the archives series, reviewed the work of previous freelancers, and decided that Keene's was the best.

Perhaps the most creative aspect of the archive project for Keene has been pushing the bounds of technology. At his suggestion, for example, a software company upgraded a drawing program for Atari, naming a new tool for him.

Keene's favorite comic book hero is Batman "because he didn't have any superpowers. He was just a guy with brains." He hated Adam West's '60s television Batman because it made fun of the character, preferring director Tim Burton's darker movie version.

"Batman is mentally disturbed from witnessing his parents being killed," Keene explains. His real personality comes out when he's the Caped Crusader, not as the playboy Bruce Wayne.

"If you take Clark Kent, that's who that guy is" - while when he's Superman, it's more of an act.

Keene spent so much time working to restore Batman comics that his son, Tim, thought he was a real person. When someone dressed as Batman marched in a Natick Fourth of July parade, Keene scooped up 3-year-old Tim and ran out to shake hands.

Just before the parade the following year, Keene asked Tim if he thought Batman would show up.

"I don't know, Dad," Tim said. "You work for him."