Radiant Comics

I’ve got a blank piece of paper on my easel right now. It’s not quite blank. I drew a border around the outside edge. That’s how I always start one of my big ink drawings. It’s been on my easel for about four days now. That rarely happens. It’s not often I put up a piece of paper and then don’t work on it. There have been plenty of times that I’ve not worked on my easel for weeks and even months as I work on stuff either on the computer or on my drawing table but usually I have a finished drawing or painting on there.

I’ve been contemplating what a blank piece of paper on there means. It’s kind of nutty thinking about a blank piece of paper but that’s the kind of thing I do. I think about weird things like that.

First of all the drawing board that’s on my easel is white. So visually the blank piece of paper isn’t much different than the board itself. I even taped the piece of paper on the board and it sat there for about a day without a border on it. It was just a big blank piece of white paper taped to the white board with white tape. It was the second day that I decided that I may as well get started on the next big ink drawing and drew the border. Then I did nothing on it.

I’m not a procrastinator. Just the opposite. If there is an unpleasant task to do I like to get to it right away and move on. I like to get the thing done and then move on to things I actually want to do. I’m good at being self-motivated. I don’t need deadlines. I’ve known people who couldn’t get started working on a project until the deadline started getting close. They needed the pressure of the deadline to get them going. That’s not me. I’m good at managing time, don’t like deadline pressure, and can get things done on my own. My point is that the paper isn’t still blank because I’m procrastinating.

I’ve been working on other things since the paper has been on my easel. Lately I’ve been working on my “Dreams of Things” series of “Covers of Comic Books That Don’t Exist.” I’ve inked three of them and marker colored that many again. I’ve been woking on a bunch of 6×9 inch pencil drawings that I make for either those covers or my big ink drawings. As a matter of fact I’ve got about a half dozen drawings to choose from for my next big ink drawing. So why aren’t I working on one? That’s the question I have for myself.

Waiting around for inspiration is a bad idea. A lot of people think that’s how art is made. Something inspires and motivates an artist and so they get to work. That does happen but it’s rare. If you want to make art you have to get to work inspiration or no inspiration. That’s not easy to do. That’s why most people never do it.

I like to have a lot of different things to work on. That’s how I keep making art. This year after I got tired of making big ink drawings I worked on some 18×24 inch acrylic paintings. Earlier in the year, as I was commuting, I drew a lot of my cartoon art cards that I use in my “Drifting and Dreaming” comic strip. I aimed to get a year’s worth of strips done (that’s 52 of them) and so had to make 104 cartoon art cards plus another 52 regular art cards. It took me months but I got it done.

I have an 11×17 inch aluminum box that I keep unfinished work in. That includes my faux comic book covers and drawings for prints. Whenever I need something to work on I go over to the box and look through it. I can pick a work that needs to be inked or colored. If nothing catches my eye in the box I often look through my inkbooks to find a sketch that I can pencil and then set up to either be inked right then and there or go in the box for the future.

I also have my inkbook to work in. I fill eight pages a month in it with each page being about seven to nine small ink drawings. Some mornings that’s all I can muster. Any ambition to work on something big is gone so I work on something small. My inkbook drawings are not only physically small (it’s an 5.5×8.5 inch book) but they’re conceptually small too. The drawings are quick idea drawings that may or may not ever turn into something. They’re not finished works themselves so that makes them easy to finish.

That brings us back to that 22×30 inch blank piece of paper on my easel. What am I going to do with it? I think that’s why it’s still sitting there. I don’t have a satisfactory answer to that question. I’ve made nearly fifty of these big ink drawings so what is the next one going to be? I’m a bit bored with making them as I always have. I need to find something new to do with it. Or maybe something old.

I was actually looking through some old drawings and a couple caught my eye. A couple that were different from the rest. They’re the ones were I took a pair of my old paintings of a floating eye and geometric shapes and blew them up into big ink drawings. They used more of a graphic design space than my usual landscape picture space. I had forgotten I had made those ones and they looked new to me. Fresh.

The blank paper is still there looking back at me as I look at it. I’m not sure when I’ll get to it but I think I’ll get to making some sketches of eyes and shapes first. I also want to draw another portrait but I have no idea of who to draw. But that’s for another day. And another piece of blank paper.

They say that Covid Brain is a real thing. That’s when this pandemic we are in the middle of makes it hard for your brain to plan for the future. It’s trying to cope with the here and now and the future be damned. It’s a survival mechanism. I’ve certainly been feeling some of that for at least the last month or so as I haven’t been able to get any big art projects started. I’ve been getting stuff done but it’s been my small ink drawings and tentacle monsters. I just keep making more of those. I don’t have a plan for them yet though.

I like to make books. Most of my professional work has been something to do with publishing so I know how to make them. It’s been a few years now but back in 2015-2016 (I think) I made a few print on demand books. Turned out there wasn’t any demand for them so I haven’t made any since. I even abandoned one that was about 90% done. It’s tough to get up any enthusiasm for a project that’s meant for others to read when not many people want to read it. But still I want to make some more books if my Covid brain will let me. I think books are cool in general.

I haven’t been writing many ideas down in my bullet point journal in the last month but one idea did come to me this week. One Hundred Words About 50 Drawings. I think I’ve almost done fifty 6×9 inch ink drawings this past month. If not I have at least another thirty of them I drew in times past. My idea is that I could write one hundred word stories about them and put them all into a book. Or maybe more words. We’ll see if I can even muster the enthusiasm to start it.

Another thing on my agenda is to find a place to lay all the 6×9 inch drawings down and look at them. I don’t have a wall to table big enough to put them all on so I might end up using the floor. Sometimes doing that helps me to motivate myself. I put whole lot of my work side by side just to see what I’ve done. Thirty drawings in a pile that I can only view one by one doesn’t always help. Sometimes I need an expanse of them to get some sort of perspective to motivate myself. Maybe tomorrow.

Another idea for a book I had, that came to a screeching halt a few weeks ago, was a book of my photos that I took back in 1996 of various coworkers in the Marvel Bullpen. I figured it would be a nice keepsake for people. I did a little bit of design on the book and even took the time to color correct and clean up all the scans of the negatives of the photos. That took days, But then I stopped. I would have to proof all the photos by printing them out on my inkjet printer. About 35 photos. I just didn’t want to spend the money on the paper and ink. It’ll be a while until I start making money again so it’ll be a while until I get back to this project.

Speaking of photographs I haven’t made anything out of any of my street photos in months. I’m writing this in mid-July and usually by this time I’d have taken three trips to NYC and Bryant Park to take street photos but Covid-19 has kept me away. It has also kept me from making use of my past photos.

What I normally do is pick a dated digital folder that’s filled with my street photos and look through it. I’ll pick out a few photos I might want to work on. Then I crop them, retouch them, color correct them, and post them on Instagram. Or maybe I get a bigger idea for one of the photos and make one of my photocaps out of it. That’s a digitally manipulated photo collage and caption. I haven’t made one of those in months.

I’m not sure why but I haven’t posted any of my past street photos to Instagram at all in at least the last month. I used to post plenty of them. Probably at least once a week but I’d often go on tears and prep and post different ones for days in a row. I’ve barely looked at any of my street photos in weeks and certainly haven’t taken any new ones.

I’ve gotten some of my “Dreams of Things” covers done. I’m approaching having a hundred of them finished and I want to make something out of them. Maybe some sort of book. But I have no idea what kind of book. I guess it would basically be an art book but without some kind of idea or theme, besides the obvious, it’s tough to think of what to do with an art book. How to present the artwork in an interesting way is what I’m wrestling with.

One of the things I’d like to do is to take some nice photos of my art. A few years ago I got a bunch of colored paper, set it up as a background, and took photos of lots of my art. They were art as objects photos. Usually when I photograph my art I looking to get it looking as close to it looks in real life as possible. But with these photos I was trying to make them look more like still lives.

For some of my smaller paintings I’d use a small easel, prop them on it, and then take a photo with a blurred our background. For my “Dreams of Things” covers I’d put down a whole bunch of colored paper on a big drawing board and then drop a cover on top of the paper. I’d artfully arrange the cover and colored paper.

It’ll take a whole day to shoot photos of the art I’ve done so that makes it a big project. At least these days it does. Let’s see if I can get it done.

I’ve been reading quite a few comic books lately. That’s because as I’ve been sheltering in place I’ve found myself a little bit over worked and under stress. During the first couple of months of this Coved-19 crisis I got a lot of stuff done. From making videos to making art I was busy all day and night. A little too busy. I couldn’t keep up that pace and burnt out a little. So I slowed things down and gave myself less to do. That meant I had to find things to do that weren’t work. So I decided to relax and read some of my many comics.

Just a few weeks ago I put the new series “The Boys: Dear Becky” on my pull list after buying and enjoying the first issue. Then it struck me that I never finished reading the series that came before it. It’s just called “The Boys” and it ran for 70 issues. Years ago a bought a “Humble Bundle” of a whole bunch of digital comics that included “The Boys” in it. I didn’t have any of the physical comics so the digital ones would have to do.

Here is an odd thing about my comic book reading habit. I don’t like to read all of one thing in a row. I like to mix it up. So I knew I didn’t want to read straight through all 70 issues of “The Boys” with nothing else in there. So I pulled out the five issues of Howard Chaykin’s “Hey Kids! Comics!” that I recently bought off of eBay and decided to alternate some to those with “The Boys.”

Here is something I discovered while reading “Hey Kids! Comics!.” I had actually read them before as digital comics back when they came out last year. I thought they were okay. When I read them this time around as physical comics they blew me away. I loved them. They’re the same exact thing but reading them digitally I got less enjoyment from them. I’d rate reading them digitally as about a 7.0 and reading them physically as about an 8.5. Maybe even a 9.0. That’s how much more I enjoyed them as an actual physical comic book.

I was probably reading one issue of Chaykin’s book for every three issues of “The Boys” I was reading. That meant I had to mix a few things more in there after I was done. The next thing I chose is the collected edition of Joe Matt’s “Peepshow.” This came out back in the early 1990s in a graphic novel format and collected all of the one or two page autobiographical comic strips he made for various comic book publications in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I consider it a classic.

For a lot of comic book fans the late 1980s to early 1990s are defined by Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, and Rob Liefeld and their work at Marvel Comics. Their Spider-Man, X-Men, and X-Force defined comics for most comic fans of the time. But for me those years were all about Joe Matt’s “Peepshow,” Chester Brown’s “Yummy Fur,” Peter Bagge’s “Hate,” and Daniel Clowes “Eightball.” Probably a few other things too that I can’t think of right now.

I don’t think I’ve read “Peepshow” in about twenty years. I don’t know why but it’s probably because I read it quite a few times in the 1990s. Plus I passed it around to all my friends. Reading the autobiographical strips thirty years after they were made meant they have a lot more nostalgia to them now then when they first came out. Time has transformed them. We’ve all moved on, including Joe Matt himself, but the Joe Matt character who stars in these strips is still the same as he ever was. Forever a twenty something not very successful comic book artist in the late 1980s with all sorts of weird “Warts and all” quirks and behaviors.

The pages of “Peepshow” are jam packed with panels. When he made these he usually only had one or two pages in some comic book anthology to tell his story. So he made them sort of like Sunday comic strips. They’re wonderfully done but also dense. So I ended up reading either two or four pages of “Peepshow” in-between issues of “The Boys.” It took a while to finish the 80 page graphic novel.

After finishing “The Boys,” which I enjoyed, I decided to read volume two of “Rex Mundi.” I had read volume one last Spring but then didn’t dive right into volume two. I decided to give it time. Volume two is quite different then volume one. Not only is there a different artist but volume one was dark, mysterious, and full of politics in the background. Volume two was brighter, more action oriented, and the background politics broke out into an shooting war. I hadn’t read “Rex Mundi” in over a decade and it was as good as I remembered.

Since I finished the “Peep Show” graphic novel I moved onto the fourteen issue series that followed it also called “Peepshow” (or “Joe Matt’s Peepshow” I forget its official name). Since it’s a regular comic rather than a collection of strips it doesn’t have the density on the page like the graphic novel, and I remember people at the time were disappointed in that, but it’s just as good.

Oddly when I went to get my issues off the shelf numbers 11-13 were missing. According to my database I never got issue 14 but the three before it should be there. I don’t know where they went. The same thing happened to issue number three of “Rex Mundi” volume two. It wasn’t there and I have no idea where it went. At least I found a collected edition of “Peepshow” issues 11-14 on my shelf. So I’m good to go with those. I read the one “Rex Mundi” issue digitally.

I’ve also been reading my new comics to go along with these old ones. I’ve been getting four of five comics a week so I’ve been mixing those ones in too. I still have some issues of “Peep Show” to go but I just finished “Rex Mundi.” So now I have to find the next old series I want to read. I’m going to have to look around and see what I haven’t read in a while. That’s a lot of stuff.

I hit the wall this week. I had been working on my big ink drawings and acrylic on canvas paintings so much that I burnt out on them. I’ve enjoyed doing them but they take a lot of work and so I want to move onto other things. But what other things? That’s always the big question. I have no answer at the moment but I did manage to get one of my “Dreams of Things” comic book covers colored.

I haven’t made a comic book in a while but I continue to make comic book covers in my “Covers to Comic Books That Don’t Exist” series. That’s what this one is. “Dreams of Things” #84. Yes, I really have made 84 covers in this series so far. I’ve made covers for other non-existent series too but I often numbered them randomly. This is the first series that I started with number one and kept numbering them consecutively. And that number has kept getting bigger.

I draw these with India ink and Copic markers. I ink them first and then they often sit around for a while before I get around to coloring them. This one has been sitting for a couple of months. I let a bunch of them build up in a pile and work on the stage (pencil, ink, or coloring) that I feel like at the time. This time it was color.

As a side note Copic has been having trouble getting their refill inks to market. This winter I tried to buy a couple of new marker ink refills but everywhere they were out of them. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Then in April I read that Copic redesigned their ink bottle and were letting supplies run low before they introduced the new one. Then the virus hit and messed up the supply chain. As a result I still can’t get refills for my yellow and orange markers.

I have two types of “Dreams of Things” covers. One has the logo horizontally and at the top of the cover like a traditional comic book and the other has the logo running vertically on the right side of the cover. I mention this because I was just making some mockups of new covers to be pencilled and most of them were the vertical type. I don’t know why but that seemed to be the trend. This one is the normal top horizontal logo type.

This one took me longer than usual to get done. I was so burnt out from working on my big pictures that I took a day off and just sat in a chair. When I got back to work the next day I was still feeling burnt out so I took things slowly. I worked on it little by little and took frequent breaks. It was the only way I could get anything done and it took me all day.

There was a lot of contemplation time with this one. I don’t do any color sketches with these covers so I have to get the color right the first time. I have a paper full of color swatches in front of me so I don’t have to guess what any of my marker colors look like on the page. It helps with contemplating color to have it in front of you.

The first colors I put down were the oranges and blues in the background. I really wanted to make that cat-like creature orange but thought it would be a bad idea. The idea was stuck in my head so I decided to use the orange first in the background to get the idea out of my head. After that I put down the blue but it ended up being too light so I darkened it a little bit later on. There isn’t much background in this piece so there weren’t a lot of decisions to be made.

Then I worked on the masked face on the right. The purple came to me right away but it took a while to make the decision to go with magenta for the other parts of the mask. I think I even left it blank for a bit and filled in the dark red on the bottom. I even went with the yellow hair before the magenta. I got there eventually though.

The orange was still stuck in my head for the cat and so I decided to go with an orange brown. I put about three marks down and it was all wrong. I shifted over to a darker brown with less orange in it. I used my scumbling technique to mix the various brown colors together. I like this technique because it adds a bit of texture to the drawing. One thing markers don’t have is any surface so I like to give them some texture. Overall I like the brown. After much contemplation I think it was the best choice.

As soon as I put the brown down I knew the cat’s collar had to be green. The only question I had was how to lay the color down. I ended up going with a directional approach to add a pattern and texture to the coat and collar. I drew some dark organic stripes in dark green before adding more green color in there. The color gives it a fur-like quality.

I am not sure what that red fist coming out of the cat’s head is. That’s the weirdest thing in this image. Is it a hat? Is it a visualization of his thoughts? Is it part of the background design? These are the questions I ask myself as even I don’t have all the answers. But I like images that make me think.

I finished up by coloring the city in the bottom right and the coat of the guy on the right. Since the main colors had been figured out already these colors almost chose themselves. I kept them mostly dark and neutral except for that burst of yellow on his collar. That stands out.

In the end I find this picture a little inscrutable. I try to figure out who these two are and what they want but they don’t seem to be interested in giving me answers. They have their own agenda that doesn’t include me. They stare ahead not wanting me to know what they’re up to. But that’s okay. I’ll give them a good hard look anyway.