Cleaning up a scanned drawing

I scanned in this line drawing from this old, falling apart, yellowed book. I want just the drawing. [yes, if I scanned it as black and white I could avoid all this, but what fun is that.]

This is the original scanned image.

 

To get rid of ALL the flesh tone colors select;

      Tools | Selection Tools | By color select

Click somewhere in the background, then right click and from the pull down menu select;

     Edit | Fill with BG Color

The result looks like this;

Now, if you want to change just the background do the same as above, but use the

fuzzy select, rather than the select by color.

The result looks like this;

If you go this way you will need to do it over and over for any enclosed areas, like between his legs, the cane and his body, and the enclosed part of 'A's.

On either, you will need to erase some artifacts in the background to get a clean white background. To darken the image and writing, do a select by color in the legs and fill with foreground colour, which should be black.

The end result is this;

Pretty nice.