Radiant Comics

“Asterios Polyp” by David Mazzucchelli came out back in 2009 and I wrote a little review of it (The First) . Then I reread it in 2020 and wrote another piece on it (The Second). Here we are near the end of 2025 and I just reread the book (graphic novel) again and I’m going to write another piece about it. This book grows on me more and more as the years go by.

Asterios Polyp is the name of the main character in the book. The story takes place in the year 2000 after Asterios turns 50. It could be said that this is a mid-life crisis book but I’d say that 50 is not mid life. He’s a little too old for a mid-life crisis. Plus you’re usually still married for one of those and Asterios isn’t married anymore at the beginning of the story. At least I suspected he wasn’t. That isn’t really revealed until later but it is hinted at.

This book really isn’t about the plot but it’s about the questions it asks. That said the plot starts with a lightning strike that burns down the building that holds Asterios’s NYC apartment. His answer to this crisis is to get on a bus and leave for parts unknown heading upstate. From there were get flashbacks to Asterios’s past and looks at how he starts living a new life in the small town he landed in.

Asterios is a smart and successful person. He is an architect who has won awards and is well known. But he is referred to as a paper architect. For whatever reasons none of his buildings have ever been built. He has made his living for most of his life teaching architecture in a college in Ithaca NY. He’s lead a good life.

From his earliest days drawing superhero comics for Marvel and DC Mazzucchelli has been an excellent visual storyteller. His layouts and drawings have always been terrific and they still are here. It looks nothing like his moody superhero drawing but I love it. Sometimes he uses illustrative richness and sometimes he breaks things down to there basics and presents things in a graphic design way. He’s really good.

The main character in Asterios’s life is, of course, his wife. We see her in flashback as he meets her in the 1980s. She is a fellow professor at the school and she is an artist who teaches sculpture. She’s younger than him and a little shy and he’s the star at the school. It’s an opposites attract situation as he is a little rigid and formal while she is looser and more chaotic.

The other characters are the family that Asterios stays with when he gets off the bus. He gets a job as a mechanic’s assistant at a small car repair shop. We get to see his brains as he hits the local library to read car repair books before he starts the job. Who among us would have the confidence to do that?

Asterios meets the wife and child of the man as he rents a room in their house. The wife, like Asterios, has a big personality. She is a believer in Astrology, past life, and other New Age sort of stuff. It’s not like they clash or anything because Asterios seems to want to be less rigid and open himself up a little bit.

Another word on the art. I remember reading back in 2009 that Mazzucchelli drew Asterios’s face with ellipse templates. He wanted to keep his face the same throughout the book. He wanted it to have rigidity. I really didn’t notice that the first time I read it but I sure notice it now. Mazzucchelli also does some stuff like draw Asterios and his wife differently when they argue. Asterios gets drawn in blue line with lots of mechanical drawing to his form. Almost like an architect’s blueprint. Hana gets drawn with sketchy lines and shading emphasizing her artistic-ness.

The book also has a narrator. When Asterios was born he also had a twin brother who was stillborn. The ghost of his twin brother is our narrator. He tells us things about Asterios that we otherwise would not know because Asterios isn’t big on revealing his feelings.

One more important character is a NYC playwright, Willy Ilium. He bursts onto the scene uninvited and offers Hana an opportunity to build sets for his plays. He a weird and intrusive person who is a bit of an NYC artistic type who would be right at home in a Christopher Guest film. He even seems to be a bit of a flamboyant gay stereotype except he’s always making passes at and saying inappropriate things to Hana. He’s an irritation to their marriage.

There are scenes in the book that interrupt the narrative flow (even as it skips between time frames) and give us symbolic insights into the happenings in Asterios’s life. His dead brother plays a part in some of these scenes. There is a ten page chapter that shows scenes of Asterios and Hana’s marriage. It’s just showing us the normal stuff that goes on. It gives us a glimpse into their everyday lives.

Immediately following that chapter comes a wordless twenty page section that is about the breakup. It’s drawn in a darker and moodier art style and appears to be about Asterios attempting to rescue Hana from hell. The three headed dog Cerberus appears at the beginning. There are even a couple of dance sequences that seem to reflect Willy Ilium’s choreography. Asterios is not able to save Hana so I guess that’s the breakup.

That’s just the basic framework of the story. Lots of other things happen too. There are no page numbers on the book but the internet says that it’s 344 pages long. There are lots of things to contemplate and that bring up the nature of life and how we live it.

Sometime a few months ago I posed a question to Paulo and Wilson on our Friday night YouTube Live show. I asked what book do they think could be taught to high school kids much like any classic book is taught? Not a college class because I think I can teach a college class in any number of comics and graphic novels. Anybody in that class would want to be there and, of course, be interested. High school students would be different. A lot of them might not want to even be there so the book has to have a lot in it for them to dip their toes in. I think this is that book. I could convince at least half the class to like it;

“Asterios Polyp” is one of those books that I can pick up, thumb through, and be captivated by as I read just one of the scenes. It’s truly a favorite of mine and gets five out of five stars. An all time classic.

Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love #14

I got the Royal Talens Pantone markers that I wrote about buying on eBay last week. This week I can tell you all about using them. They’re water based pigment markers as opposed to the alcohol dye based markers that I’ve been working with for the last decade. It turns out that makes a big difference. It’s sort of the difference between oil paints and acrylic paints. There is a lot of overlap but there are different techniques to achieve the same results. Plus there are results you can get with one that are harder to accomplish with the other.

The first thing I did was to make some swatches of the new markers. I made up a digital file of ninety-nine boxes with the number of the marker (Pantone colors have numbers rather than names) underneath the box. I printed this out on a sheet of 9×12 inch Bristol board and then filled in each box with the corresponding marker.

It turned out that I made a mistake. I like to make my swatches on the same paper that I’m going to draw on them with. But the 9×12 paper I had was a brand named Caslon and the paper I would be doing the finished 11×17 inch drawing on was Strathmore 300 Bristol board.

I didn’t think this would matter much but it turns out that the ink of the marker brings out the grain of the paper more than the dye based markers that I’m used to. After sampling some of the markers on scraps of the Strathmore paper I noticed the grain was lighter. Plus the paper looked a little bit bluer. So I took a piece of the 11×17 inch Strathmore paper, cut it down to 9×12 inches, and printed the boxes out on it. I made the first swatch sheet on Thursday afternoon and the second one on Friday morning.

On Friday I decided to make a finished color drawing out of one of my “Last Night I Dreamt I had a True Love” drawings. I finished two of them earlier in the month so I had two finished 11×17 inch ink drawings to work with. Usually I color this series digitally so I thought it would be fun to color one of them with the new markers. Spoiler: It wasn’t fun.

I wasn’t fun because learning new things is hard. The new markers were different enough from my alcohol based ones that I had to figure out a new techniques to use them. That took a while. It took all day and about twice as long as if I were to use my usual markers. Plus I don’t think it came out as good. That’s to be expected when learning a new technique but it’s not always easy to deal with.

Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love #15

The new pigment based markers can’t be layered the same way that the dye based ones can. The colors don’t blend together like the dye based ones do. So I had to figure out new ways to make the colors work together. I can still layer them but they won’t look the same. There is more of a hard edge. The colors are much less transparent.

I am especially having trouble with lighter skin tones. Mainly because there are no light skin tones in this ninety-nine marker set. Alcohol dye based markers have dozens of light skin tones that can be layered but all the skin tones in the Pantone set are dark.

Dark skin tones that can’t be blended made me experiment with the way I made marks on the paper. I tried to blend the colors together through a hatching method. I would make lines of a slightly darker color over a lighter one to blend them together. It came out okay for a first try. I liked all of the drawing except for the face. The face wasn’t bad but the technique needed work.

As I was finishing up that first drawing and looking for a finishing technique I suddenly remembered that I had other ink based markers. I had a set of six Prismacolor Premier brush pens. They had some pretty dense and colorful ink in them so I used them to make lines of color on top of the color I already had down.

After I finished the piece with the Prismacolors I remember that I had even more ink based markers. I had a set of 24 Fabel-Castel Pitt brush Pens, a set of 8 Big Brush Pens, and four “Wallet” sets of Pitt Brush pens. I’ve had these sets for years and used them a little bit but since they don’t sell refill ink for them I never got into them in a big way. Refill ink is essential to me if I’m going to use markers as a finished medium. I can’t be running out of ink in the middle of a piece. But using them as a flavor at the end sounded good.

Though I had some swatches of the Pitt pens I didn’t have all the sets on one sheet of paper. So I made a new digital file with boxes and the names of the pens to go with them. I printed that one out and filled out the colors on Sunday morning. Then I got to work on the second “Last Night I Dreamt I had a True Love” drawing.

One of the “Wallet” sets of the Pitt pens was a portrait set. So I had six skin tones of varying lightness to work with this time. I did the color on the rest of the drawing and saved the face for last. The rest of the drawing went pretty well. I used a couple of tried and true techniques and, though a little different, came out as I expected.

Though I had more colors for the face and a few of them were on the light side the face still come out darker than I expected. Not the end of the world but I’d like a little more choice. I used a similar line method on the face and I think it worked better this time.

All things considered I’m excited about these new ink based pigment markers. They are more archival and lightfast than the dye based ones so that’s cool. I’m going to do my first “Dreams of Things” covers in them on Monday. I’ll see how that goes.

Some of the Pantone markers.

I’m a big fan of magic markers. I used them back in my college days in the 1980s and then I picked them up again around the year 2010 to try and find a finished style that I could make with them. That’s how I ended up with my “Dreams of Things” covers that I’ve been drawing for the last decade or so.

The main thing that I like about markers is that they are instant color. Put the color on the paper and it’s there. No messing with drying time. They are also convenient. I can have a whole bunch of colors at my fingertips that take up a relatively small space. I just have to take the cap off of one and it’s ready to go.

Over the last fifteen years I’ve bought a lot of markers. My main three are Copic, Artfinity, and Blick markers. I’ve also sampled and bought lots of other brands. Last spring I even spent about $125 on a bunch of paint markers. I haven’t used those ones a lot just yet but have them ready to go.

The main thing I like about markers that I can buy today (as opposed to the markers I bought in the 1980s) is that the Blick, Artfinity, and Copic markers all have refill inks that I can buy. That way I don’t have to buy an entirely new marker when it runs dry. I can buy the refill ink instead and fill up my marker. That way I don’t get caught short in the middle of a drawing by a marker running dry. I can just fill it up again.

The downside to the markers that I mentioned is that they are all dye based markers. That means that they are not lightfast. Dyes are a fugitive medium and the color will fade away with time. None of my ten year old marker drawings have started to fade but that doesn’t mean that they won’t someday. I’ve made my peace with that but it’s still a little disappointing.

Enter a new marker onto the scene last year: the Talons Pantone markers. Pantone is a well known company that makes specialty inks for printing and they have branded themselves over the last few decades as a company that is a leader in color. There are plenty of people in the paper, painting, and t-shirt printing world who know their colors by the Pantone color number.

The thing that got me interested in the markers is that they are pigment based. Pigment is a lot more lightfast than dye. Plus you could buy the water based ink (not alcohol) on its own or use the inks to refill the markers.

I ended up buying three makers and ink refills to check out. I only bought three because they are not cheap. Each marker is $8.50 with the refill ink coming in at $13. That’s $21.50 plus tax for the two. I paid about $70 for those three markers and ink refills. That’s steep.

I ended up liking the markers. They are well made and I like the way the ink looks. Water based pigment markers work differently than alcohol based dye markers and I need different techniques for them but they are not that far apart. Back in August I almost bought a few more Pantone markers and inks but I decided against it in the moment. I juts wasn’t in the mood to spend about $150 for six new markers and their ink refills.

Cut to last week and I’m looking at Copic markers on eBay. No real reason for it. I was just window shopping and there weren’t even any deals that interested me. I’ve never even bought any Copic markers on eBay. Usually I buy them from Dick Blick or Jerry’s Artorama.

As I was looking I spotted a set of Pantone markers. A set of nine colors for around $35 plus shipping. They seemed really cheap. I checked the regular online price and it came in at $75 for the same set. I have never even seen this brand of markers (it’s an English brand) discounted at all. Blick and Jerry usually sell their art supplies below the retail price but not these markers. They sell them at full retail price.

I looked around as I was trying to decide if I should spend $40 on a set of these markers when I saw an even bigger set. It was a set of eleven of these nine marker sets. Each one was a different color that added up to a set of ninety-nine colors. The price on the set was $330 (plus free shipping). The price would be nearly $850 at full retail. Now I had a decision to make.

I didn’t exactly have an extra $330 laying around but I thought it may be too good an opportunity to pass up. They was also a “Make an offer” button on the listing so I figured I’d do that. I made an offer of $250. I figured that if I could get them for that price then I’d have no choice. The seller came back with a counter off of $285 dollars and I grabbed it. What’s an extra $15 in this case?

After buying the markers I had a little bit of buyer’s remorse. That’s because, to me, a marker is nothing without its refill. Buying refills for these ninety-nine markers at $13 a piece is around $1300. Had I really just committed myself to spending another $1300 on these markers? That seemed excessive. I spent the next morning trying to figure out how I was ever going to be able to buy those refill inks.

I looked on eBay for the refills but there weren’t many to be found. Certainly not at the discounted rates of the markers. I figured my best way to get the refill inks would be a little bit at a time. If I got ten of them at a time I might be able to get ten a month. Maybe the blues one month and the reds the next. That’s about $150 a month on marker ink. Even that seemed absurd. But dropping $1300 dollars on them in a single day seemed even more absurd.

Then it struck me that the best thing to do would be to get the colors I use and like the most first. The rest can wait. I almost never buy big sets of markers because in any set I’m not going to use about a third of the colors. At least I won’t use them very often. I figure that by the time I buy the refills for the first fifty markers I can put off the rest until whenever I’ve got the money.

So I lost my buyer’s remorse and now am excited to get my markers. That haven’t arrived yet but when they do I’m make a set of swatches of them. I always find it satisfying to have a set of swatches. I also look forward to figuring out new ink marker techniques. I’ll let you know how it works out.

Ink Vines.

One thing I haven’t written about in a while is the illustrated version of “The Great Gatsby” that I’ve been working on. I think I’m on year four of working on it but I really haven’t done much with it this year. I’ve done a ton of illustrations for it ( maybe a few dozen) and I’m happy with them but what I’m not happy with is my book design. That’s where I’ve been stuck.

I’ve set the book up as a 9×12 inch art book and I’ve even done a lot of design work on it. The problem is that the design work is terrible. It’s bland and uninspired. I never really had an idea for the book design but I went about making it anyway. There is only a tiny bit of flair to the text and I used a lot of textures on the bottom and outside of the pages.

I used all those textures because I had made a lot of ink textures last year for various purposes. I made a 150 different ink textures so it made sense that I could use them in this in the Gatsby book and even have a different one on each page. But it just made the pages look busy and there seemed to bo no point to them. I could not think of anything else though. So there it sat for months and months.

This week one of my students asked me how the project was going. I told him it was at a standstill and he asked to look at it. I sent him a digital copy of it. He agreed with my assessment of it. He told me to move all my endpapers (120 portraits) to the back instead of half in front and half in back and to delete all those textures and start over. Sometimes it takes someone else telling me things out loud to get me going again.

A decorative Gatsby drinking glass.

So this weekend I got going on the design again. I drew little thumbnails of page designs and came up with a couple of things that I liked. I came up with the broad idea of having little spot illustrations on each page that reflects something going on in each chapter. I also came up with this organic plant like idea. Sort of a decorative vine on some pages.

On Saturday I decided that I wanted to try to draw some plant inspired ink vines. I wanted to make them big so that I could use the whose sweep of my arm to draw them but I didn’t really want to use up my 11×17 inch Bristol board. The I remembered some extra paper that I had.

Back in the 1990s when I was working in the Marvel Comics’ offices they used to give out drawing paper to the artists. But they also had paper that was cheaper that we would use for paste-up projects. It was still pretty good paper but it said “For paste-up only” on it and it was never given out to the artist to draw and ink on.

In around 1995-1996 Marvel switched to desktop publishing and we started doing everything on computers instead of on paper. That was for the behind the scenes production work. The comics were still drawn on paper. But Marvel didn’t have any use for the paste-up paper any more so they gave it away to anyone in the office who wanted it.

Rows of grass.

I don’t think I took more than a few sheets of it at the time. But my friend and fellow Marvel Bullpenner, Jerry, did. Cut to just before COVID in the spring of 2020 and Jerry is moving apartments. That’s when he gives me a bunch of comics books he no longer wants and a big pack of this paper. About a hundred sheets. It’s just been sitting around for the last five years waiting for me to find something to do with it.

I walked out to the garage where I had the paper on a shelf and grabbed a sheet of it. Then I got a brush and some ink and started figuring out what I wanted to do. Big sweeping ink lines made with a few different brushes. I spent a good part of Saturday doing this and ended up filling up six pages with ink designs. There are about six designs on each page that run the length of the seventeen inch paper. I might make more. I’ll have to see.

Also on Saturday I got the idea to draw some glasses. I had already drawn some glasses for earlier illustrations but this time I thought that I could make some simple graphic drawings to use on the pages that had parties on them. On Sunday I started drawing them and after a few quick sketches I decided they would best be done as vector graphics. So I opened up Adobe Illustrator and got to work.

By Sunday afternoon I had ten glasses done. I figured out a style for them that was simple and in black and white. When doing these sort of things I usually tend to make them realistic and then pull back and simplify them. Some people are really good at realistic but my own version of it tends to end with me being bored with the drawing. That doesn’t bode well for other people liking it. I like the striped down graphic design glasses that I ended up with.

I’ve still got a long way to go with the design and a lot more ideas to work out. It’s kind of untenable that I want a spot illustration on each page. I’m going to figure out which ones will work best on which pages. That and I need a few more ideas on top of glasses and vines. I might use some confetti on some pages.

One of the things that talking to my student about this project brought back to me was that this is my project. I can do what I want with it. I don’t have to follow the rules. There weren’t any particular rules I was following that were hampering me but I couldn’t get anything done because of some vague rules in my head. It’s good to get out of your own head sometimes and see the world.

On Friday October 3, 2025 I was at the civic center in Poughkeepsie NY. What was I doing there? I was part of the Hudson Valley Region Portfolio Day 2025. It was put on by a group called The Art Effect and at it were a whole bunch of art schools who were there to look at high school students art portfolios and tell them about the schools. It was open from 3:30 PM until 8PM and I was busy the whole time.

The entire evening I was looking at some talented student portfolios and talking to them about their art. I always try to be even handed with my critiques and give praise and constructive criticism because I don’t think harsh critiques do any good.

I’ve heard a lot of bad critiques in my day and they are worse than useless. The first thing you want to do when giving a critique is to try and figure out what the artist is trying to do. What message are they trying to get across. Then you go from there and try to help them in what they are trying to do.

They bad critiques that I’ve seen completely ignores whatever the student is trying to do. The person giving the critique tells the student what they are doing wrong and how they should do it without taking what the student is trying to do in mind at all. They turn the student’s piece into their piece. I always shake my head when I hear someone giving advice like that.

The evening went fine. All the students were eager to talk about their art with someone and I can talk art all day. Some of them had a parent with them and the parents were also eager to hear about their children’s art.

These days high school students are a lot more talented than I was back in high school. We didn’t have a lot of access to art stuff in the early 1980s. I had good art teachers all through school and a good high school art teacher but it was only one out of seven classes in a day.

My high school teacher was very good at teaching me to think about art and be creative but it’s not like we had figure drawing classes. It was a regular high school art class that had to keep all of the students who weren’t even interested in art busy. It wasn’t until college that I had a real drawing class.

I think I had two art books in high school. An Andrew Loomis book about drawing heads and hands and the John Buscema book, “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.” Plus I had the “Official Marvel Tryout Book” which showed us all how comic books were made. The first two books were really too advanced for me at the time but I studied them the best I could.

Today’s students have much better access to art materials. There are also endless art tutorial videos online. A student can come across an animated series that becomes a favorite and then go online and see a video on how to draw their favorite characters. Animation has a lot more influence on drawing then when I was in high school. We didn’t even have a VCR to tape anything let alone a digital file to freeze frame. As a result of this I saw some good art out of these high schoolers.

There were some students who wanted to draw comics. One of them asked how he was supposed to figure out what to draw in the panels. How to layout a page. I recommend Wallace Wood’s famous “22 Panels that Always Work” as a place to start and then the two books “Understanding Comics” by Scott McLoud and “Graphic Storytelling” by Will Eisner.

The art stuff was mostly easy for me but then came a question about writing. “How do I write a comic?” I don’t think I’ve ever answered that question before. It came from a student who had created a lot of characters but didn’t know what to do with them. She wanted to know how to create a story for them. I fumfered around with a few ideas before giving the simplest answer I could think of. It came down to the method of writing. I’m big on methodology.

I told her to first decide on how many pages the story is going to be. I decided on eight pages. Take a sheet of paper and write on eight lines page one, page two, page three, etc… Then you write a single sentence about what happens one each page. They go to a diner. They talk in the park. They go for a run. Whatever you got. After the first two or three pages/sentences I often will skip to the last page and write how the story ends. I like to know the ending at the beginning.

After you have one sentence about what happens on each page you get eight sheets of paper. I decided that we were going to have six panels on a page so on the first piece of paper you write “Page One: Panel One” and then on the next line “Page One: Panel Two” and keep going until all six panels are on the page. Then write what happens in the panels.

Do this for eight pages and you have your story. You can even add any notes about the dialogue in the margins. After that is done you can get started on the art by figuring out your layouts. Make small thumbnail drawings of all the pages. This is how I used to write my comics back when I was doing traditional comic books. Since I mostly do comic strip work these days I write with a different method and haven’t thought about my old way of doing things in a while. That’s why it took me a moment to think of it when I was asked the question about writing.

That was my evening that Friday and I think it went well. I hope the students got something out of it. Maybe they’ll even get some writing done out of it.