Radiant Comics

Books that I bound!

I’ve got to take a moment and look at the different types of sketchbooks and notebooks that I’ve made over the last couple of months. I have to get it clear in my own mind and write up some descriptions as I want to sell some of them. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind learning bookbinding and making a few different types of books. I’m not even sure how many I’ve made so I have to do a bit of an inventory.

Upscaled hardcover book. This is the type that started me out. I saw someone else doing it on TikTok. I take an interesting hardcover book, cut the pages out, and use the hardcover case wrap to make a new sketchbook/notebook. I use nice writing or drawing paper plus some of the pages from the original book and rebind them into a new book. I can even put different types of paper in the book. So far I’ve used colored paper, vellum, and marker paper so far.

Upscaled hardcover book with new cover. Sometimes the hardcover books that I’m upscaling are a little uninteresting. In that case I make my own cover and attach it to the existing book. This is a lot more work but it does make it more fun. I think I’d rather stick with already interesting covers though.

Watercolor Sketchbook. This one is made with twenty sheets of 110lb 5×7 inch cold press watercolor paper. Its back and front covers are two sheets of board with one of my art prints attached to both sides. The whole thing feels sturdy in my hand and opens up flat for easy drawing.

Monster Journal. This one is made with 50 sheets of 5×7 inch 32lb lined writing paper. Bound in every five pages is a double sided print of two of my monster drawings. So this one is an art book as well as a journal to inspire your writings. It hard a hardcover that is wrapped in raw canvas and bound with glue and waxed thread.

“I survived… Nature Attacks!” Journal. I made a monster journals out of an upscaled hardcover book. I put my own monsters into an “I survived… Nature Attacks!” book. It has 30 lined sheets of 32lb writing paper plus it has six double sided monster prints bound in. There is also a few sheets of green paper in for accents plus some of the original book’s pages. It’s bound with glue and waxed thread.

NYC Street Photos Watercolor Sketchbook. This one has thirty sheets of 110lb 5×7 inch cold press watercolor paper. Every ten pages I have bound in three double sided prints of my NYC street photos for a total of 18 photos. So you can get inspired by New York City scenes while you draw. It hard a hardcover that is wrapped in raw canvas and bound with glue so that it opens up flat.

NYC Street Photos Notebook. I made one of these from an upscaled hardcover. It’s about 6×9 inches and is filled with 80 sheets of unlined drawing paper plus some color paper, tracing vellum, pages from the original book, and eight double sided photo pages. That’s sixteen NYC street photos. It’s bound with glue and waxed thread.

Blackout Poetry Book. This is a little invention of mine I made as I was learning to upscale hardcover books into sketchbooks. Since I had to remove the pages from the hardcover I was using I ended up with a bunch of loose pages from random books. So I decided to bind them into a Blackout Poetry book.

Blackout poetry is when you take a printed book and blackout most of the words. What’s left are just the words you want to make your poem. It’s a way to turn a book into your own writing.

Each book is 3.5×5 inches with a hardcover. There are about thirty pages in each book. It’s small enough so that you can take this with you and write your own Blackout Poetry in a park.

Golden Ratio Sketchbook. I haven’t actually made one of these yet but it’s in the works. The golden ration is a spiral shape that goes way back in time. Artists have been using it forever. I made a digital file of one sitting on graph paper and I’m going to print it on every page. So every page of the sketchbook with have a golden ration on it to draw over and use as a guide. That’s the plan anyway.

Even after writing this I still don’t have them all straight in my head. I’ve made a bunch of different types and the upscaled ones come in different sizes too. I think I’m going to have to find a place to physically lay them all out and organize them. That way I can see what I’ve got.

In doing this I’ve noticed that I’m a lot better at art than I am at craft. What’s the difference you ask? With art you only have to make something once. With craft you’re looking to make something over and over again. Of course there is overlap but I find I have much more patience for art than for craft.

When I’m making a piece of art I have all the patience in the world for the process. I can stand for hours and days on end through the whole making of a piece. With craft, such as this book binding, I can figure out the ten steps I need to do but then I have less patience the sixth time through.

I ruined quite a few case wraps and sheets and paper while making these books just because I got impatient. I thought I could take a step or two for granted and not pay much attention but then things didn’t go right. I had to start over more than a few times. It’s amazing what I have patience for and what I don’t.

I think the whole reason I came up with so many different types of books to bind and make was that is the most creative part for me. The art is in the ideas and the craft is in the making. I’ve got way more patience for ideas than for following steps. But I still have enjoyed book binding.

In the mail today I got a package of large ellipse templates. The auction actually said “Vintage Ellipse Templates” and that is because not many people use them anymore except me. There isn’t much mechanical drawing that is done by hand these days but ellipse templates used to be used by comic book artists all the time. That’s why I first started using them.

First off I better explain what an ellipse template is to those who don’t know. It’s a piece of hard plastic, usually around 8×10 inches, that has a bunch of different size ellipses cut out of it. Ellipses are squashed circles or symmetrical egg shapes. They are organized by degrees. A one inch 45º ellipse is wider than a one inch 30º ellipse.

When drawing a comic book there are all sorts of reasons for having to draw an ellipse. Anything that’s a circle in a straight on shot is an ellipse when turned at an angle. Some artists draw them freehand but some want the perfection of an ellipse template. You can make a drawing exact with them.

Most of the drawing I do these days that require ellipse templates are my “Covers to Comic Books That Don’t Exist” series. I’ve done a lot of them. I don’t really draw exacting perspective in those but I do draw a lot of design elements. It’s these elements that are often ellipses and I still hand draw them.

Back in the early 1990s I used to collect ellipse templates. By that I mean I wanted all the different sizes and degrees of them. A basic set of ellipse templates had 20º, 30º, 45º, and 60º in them. The templates stared out with an ellipse 7/16 of an inch high and went up to one 2 3/4 of an inch high. The main brand was Berol RapiDesign and I think I bought this set in my school days in the mid-1980s.

It wasn’t until I got to Marvel in 1990 that I started going to the NYC art stores regularly and started collecting as many different ellipse templates as I could. They weren’t easy to find individually but the base set was everywhere. I eventually filled out my set so that I had from 10º to 60º in increments of 5º. Except for 50º. For some reason I have two 55º templates and no 50º one. They’re all Pickett brand too.

All of us young would-be cartoonists who were working in the Marvel Bullpen were always looking out for ellipse templates. We wanted more of them because we never had the right size or they weren’t big enough. One day we heard of a big set of them. A large series of ellipse templates by Alvin (formerly Lietz as it says on the envelope). Ellipses from 2 1/8 of an inch to 4 inches. I, and my friends, trudged down to Pearl Pain to check them out.

There were actually three sets of ellipse templates but it turned out that they only had one set at Pearl. The least helpful set it ended up being. The set was a set of five and had 10º, 65º, 70º, 75º, and 80º. The 10º one is really narrow and the rest were the ones closest to a circle. There was just less call for them for whatever reason.

The two sets they didn’t have was the one set of ten with ellipses from 15º to 60º and a set of 15 with 10º through 80º (in other words the first two sets put together). That 10º to 60º was the one I wanted to match the smaller temples I already had.

Pearl Paint didn’t have any of the last two sets but tons of that first one that nobody really wanted. That’s probably why they still had them. I’m pretty sure the sets were old in 1990. The package looks like 1950s industrial design and I’m pretty sure they were going out of style even in 1990s. They were still expensive though. I don’t remember what I paid but it was probably around $60-$70 for the set. I used to pay $6-$7 for an individual small ellipse template.

Just recently I decided to look for them on eBay. They might have been hard to find in the early 1990s but we have eBay now. Sure enough all three sets were listed and for various prices. Fairly expensive prices too. I ended up getting set two (ten with ellipses from 15º to 60º) for $45 shipping and taxes included. It was the cheapest one as it was listed for $40 bucks I made an offer of $30. It was accepted right away. I’m guessing these aren’t in high demand.

A separate story that goes with these ellipse templates is that they’re not bevelled. The plastic lies flat and flush with the paper. When you use an ink pen with an un-bevelled template the ink can leak under the template and smear. To cure that Pickett makes something called a Template Ink Riser. It’s a punch that puts little dents in the plastic of the template. These dot dents raise the template off the paper just a tiny amount. That is the equivalent of a bevel.

These ink risers were harder to find than the templates. I don’t think I ever saw one in an art store but I may not have looked very hard. It’s not a tool you need all the time. You only need it when you buy a new template. I just used to bring my new templates to Marvel and use the “Beveler” (that’s what we called it) there.

The problem was that someone was always walking away with the beveler. I don’t think it was expensive. It was probably under $20. Probably some freelancer needed one for his templates at home and just took it. In those days Marvel was always handing out art supplies to their artists so why not? Usually when someone noticed that it was missing a new one was ordered.

I never took a beveler home until the very last one at Marvel. In the early 2000s Marvel moved out of their 1980s to 1990s building on 28th Street up to 40th Street. By that time the Marvel Bullpen had been digital for at least six years. The days of the endless supply closet and Marvel handing out art supplies were long gone.

After the move everything had to find a new place and the beveler popped up. It didn’t have a place and most people there didn’t even know what it was. After months of it kicking around in random spots I decided to take it home. I still have it and now I have a use for it. I’m going to bevel these new templates.

Let’s hear it for some old technology. I can’t help but wonder if I’m the last person bevelling templates.

Krazy Kat is a comic strip made by George Herriman back in the 1910s through the 1940s. It’s a famous comic strip. It may not be as well know today among the general population but to comic strip and comic book fans it’s certainly still well known. It was also the favorite comic strip of a lot of artists, writers, and intellectuals in its day. People who might not have been fans of comic in general were fans of Krazy Kat.

As a comic book fan born in the mid 1960s I grew up having heard of Krazy Kat but I never got to read more than a sampling of the strips. I didn’t get my first Krazy Kat book until 1990 or so. I got “The Komplete Kat Komics: Volume Three 1918. I can’t say that I was overly impressed. I liked it well enough but I don’t think I “Got it.” People I read singing the praises of Krazy Kat got it a lot more than I did.

There is a lot of repetition in Krazy Kat. The strip has three main characters: Krazy Kat, Ignatz the mouse, and Officer Pup. The mouse is forever throwing a brick at the cat and hitting him in the head with it. Officer Pup (the dog) is always arresting Ignatz and trying to keep order.

The people who loved Krazy Kat were forever going on about the circle of the brick gag and what it meant and how they really loved each other and yada, yada, yada… Like I said I didn’t get it. I found the strip boring and repetitive. I liked the art. That was terrific. But the strip itself I would give up on after reading a few.

Yet Krazy Kat was a strip I would alway come back too. It was also one of those strips that was always coming back into print. There are decades worth of them and I think the early stuff is in the Public Domain now. So a few publishers have tried their hand at Krazy Kat volumes.

The next volume of Krazy Kat I bought was “Krazy and Ignatz 1937-1938” from Fantagraphics Books. It’s from 2006 and it reprints the Sunday strips in color. I probably bought it around 2006. Once again I was trying to “Get” Krazy Kat and once again I didn’t. I read it and found it repetitive and uninteresting. This is the same critique I’ve heard from other non-fans of Krazy Kat so I knew I wasn’t alone.

Both books have sat on my shelf all these years and occasionally I’l pull them out and look at them. Then a funny thing happened about five years ago. I suddenly “Got” Krazy Kat. I read those Sunday strips, enjoyed them, and found them very fun. I think it was because I started reading them in a different way. I think it also had to do with my own comic strip, “Four Talking Boxes” that I’ve been making for years and years.

Most comic strips, even if they’re gag-a-day comics have a continuity from day to day. Calvin and Hobbes is one of my favorites and Calvin can have an adventure that lasts a few strips. Each strip does exist on its own but also can be read in the context of the other strips. Every Sunday’s Calvin, which had its own self contained continuity, still related to every other strip. They were about his daydreams and nightmares and anything could happen but Calvin was still the little boy we all knew. There was always a connection.

I have another book called “The Silver Age of Superman.” It’s from 1995 and reprints a whole bunch of Silver Age (1950s to 1960s) Superman comic book covers. Back in those days every Superman comic book cover told a story to entice you to buy the comic. The cover could tell the story that was inside the comic or maybe not quite tell the same story. The cover could juice the story up a bit to make it an exciting cover.

Sure the purchasers probably knew who Superman was and what he was about but the cover itself didn’t need continuity with previous covers. It existed in a world by itself. Even to this day I, and lots of other fans, love to look at and enjoy these covers without ever needing to open the book and read the actual comic. The cover is complete unto itself and they can make a book of just covers and fans can “Get it” both literally and figuratively.

I found myself reading Krazy Kat strips like they existed in a world of only that strip and I found myself enjoying them. Sure Ignatz often had a brick at the ready to throw at Krazy Kat but this was a new strip and a new brick. Ignatz and the brick were being born again in the new context of today’s strip. Yesterday’s brick is now meaningless and doesn’t exist. There is only today’s brick and I don’t have to think about yesterday’s brick anymore than I had to think about last month’s Kryptonite on a Superman cover.

I stopped caring about continuity in reading Krazy Kat strips but it was really the continuity of meaning that I abandoned. The characters were all still the same but the relationship between became more fluid. The brick didn’t mean one thing. Sometimes it was a sight gag, sometimes it expressed an emotion, sometimes it was chaos that Officer Pup had to bring order to, and sometimes it was just punctuation to a strip.

Now when I read Krazy Kat I get it. It’s a lot of fun. I read each strip with the idea of who each of the characters is but also with the idea that things can change within each individual strip much the way things can change with each individual Silver Age Superman cover. One month a little girl can be accusing Superman in a courtroom of killing her father (Action Comics 359) and in another month Superman can be planting a Super Flag and declaring himself dictator of Earth (Action Comics 381). Those two covers are completely unrelated continuity-wise but they both play with Superman tropes. This is how I see Krazy Kat now too.

So if you don’t “Get” Krazy Kat as I didn’t for most of my life I say give it another read. Except this time look at it as if each strip is it’s own distinct thing like a comic book cover. It’s part of the whole but also a little separate from it.

This is the second “The Acid Ram” cover I’ve done in the last couple of weeks and I think I’m getting a grip on them now. This may only be the second one I’ve colored but I’ve also drawn four more of them and inked two of those. So I’ve been getting on it.

After finishing two of them I can say the main difference between these and my “Dreams of Things” covers is in the inking and coloring techniques. It starts with there being a lot more black ink on “The Acid Ram” covers. I’ve got a lot more graphic design stuff going on in the inks and therefore the color is simpler. I’ve used fewer color techniques in these first two because I did a lot more things in the ink stage. With “Dreams of Things” I leave a lot of the space open for color. With “The Acid Ram” that open space gets filled up with black shapes.

Take, for example, the main figure in this cover. He’s a guy in some sort of Robe with a high collar and a big hat. But his robe is mostly black with just a few stripes of orange and purple. The collar is only orange and yellow. The vast majority of the robe is filled in with black. There is even some black texture in the color stripes. In “Dreams” I probably would have left those black shapes open for color. It’s more dream like to have lots of color. “The Acid Ram” has a little more reality to its surrealism.

Usually I color from the background to the foreground. I figure out all my background colors first. But in this case I colored the balloon first. I got the idea in my head that it should be orange but not solid orange. It should have some other colors dabbed in there to give it some texture. The black shapes are very much a graphic design element and tend to flatten the balloon out. I thought the scumbling technique of the orange would give it some visual tension.

After that I knew I wanted the background clouds to be a light blue but I wasn’t sure what technique to put the blue down with. After some thought I came up with what you see here. I used the brush to make a thick to thin pointed line and layered four different blues down with that directional stroke. It’s got some direction and motion to it. At the end I layered in some light red and light green to give the color a little more depth.

That greenish brown in the background was actually the hardest part of the piece. I like the way it works now but it took a while to get there. First of all what are those shapes? They’re vaguely reminiscent of buildings but they’re not specifically buildings. They could be hills but not really. They’re mostly a design element so what is their color? I stated by putting in those dark blue stripes that now look a bit grey. I then layered a grey on top of them but it looked too grey. I then put a third color on top of that but I can’t even remember which. It could have been a light brown. I didn’t like that either so then I put a yellow on top to make the yellow/brown/green that it looks now.

Part of the reason I tinted that background towards yellow was that I knew I wanted those Q-Bert like structures on the bottom right to be brown. I went with a redder and more neutral brown to set them apart from the yellow brown of the far background. The striped shadow side of the block was colored first with an orange brown. Then I dropped in a neutral to reddish brown on the other side. This was all simple.

After all that brown I decided that some bright color was needed in those diagonal running stripes. I went with blue. I went with three different blues to have some contrast. Now it looks like a cubist version of streams running down a mountainside. That blue might be my favorite part of this color.

I then put some green in the very bottom right corner. I like that punch of green there. It works as a bit of bright color as a reference to grass. There is no grass technique to it but it’s in the right spot.

Finally we get to the main figure. I had no solid idea for this until I got to it. I ended up going mainly with orange and yellow to match with the balloon. But I wanted the orange to be subordinate to the big orange in the balloons so I added a second orange brown to the cloak to calm it down. I then added some purple to the cloak to further calm down the orange. With some yellow in the collar I think it works fine.

I made his hair green to add another pop of that color to go along with the grass.

Finally we get to the hat. I brought the purple of the robe up into the hat but here I made it the main color. Like the robe there is almost no room for color technique in the hat. It’s almost all black ink. I filled in the spaces with blue based purple and red based purple for a little contrast. I also wanted a spot of different color here too so I went with red. It was really my only choice and the only place that bright red is used on their cover. Otherwise we only have the dull red and pink of his face. I thought about yellow but I didn’t want it to distract from the yellow of the collar and the balloon’s eyes. So a beacon of red it became.

I like the way this one came out. I like that it’s different than my “Dreams of Things” covers. It’s got its own feel. It makes me ask questions that might have some slightly scary answers. That’s good.

Twenty years ago when I started doing my “Covers to comic books that don’t exist” series I had to do everything. I had to come up with concepts for the comics series, the covers themselves, plus logos and trade dresses for the covers. I originally had a few different trade dresses for a few different fake comic book companies. I eventually chose “Radiant Comics” as my favorite and settled into making covers with just that trade dress.

I also used to switch between the different comic book titles depending on what I felt like drawing. I think I had about ten different series made up and if I wanted to draw some sci-fi I’d switch to a sci-fi series. I also had a horror series, a fanciful series, a super hero series, and a kid’s series. I developed a lot of stuff in those early days.

After I drew and inked these covers I’d color them digitally. After all that’s how comic book covers are colored these days. But I wouldn’t always color all of them. I was already making digital prints that I colored digitally so I’d get bored with that type of coloring when it came to the comic book covers.

It was around fifteen years ago when I decided to buy some Copic markers. I hadn’t worked with markers since my college days in the mid to late 1980s but I was intrigued by these new Japanese markers. Back in the 1980s I used markers to make color sketches and marker comps. With this new attempt at using markers I wanted to try and come up with a finished marker technique. I didn’t want them for working drawings. I wanted them for finished art.

Eventually I came up with a finished technique using the markers but it was elaborate. It took a lot of time and work. I liked the way my stuff looked in the end but it took a long time to get there. But then I mixed it with my comic book covers.

After years of doing different comic book covers I wanted to simplify things. I came up with “Dreams of Things” because the weird dreamlike images are the ones I was most interested in. At first the idea was to strip things down and keep the covers simple rather than complicated. In keeping things simple I also decided to color them with markers rather than digitally.

Of course the problem with stripping an image down to its simplest form is that it takes a lot of time. As anyone who works with simple forms can tell you it’s not always so simple. It takes a lot of effort to make something look effortless. So as time went by making these covers I actually made them more complex. And that actually meant that they took less time.

Now, over ten years later, I have finished about 340 “Dreams of Things” covers. That’s a lot. Somewhere around issue 300 I was thinking about stopping making them and starting a new series but due to habit and momentum I didn’t. It wasn’t until this week that I decided to revive a second series to do alongside “Dreams of Things.”

“The Acid Ram” was a series of covers that I developed before “Dreams of Things.” It’s along the same lines in that it uses dream like images but it’s a little more aggressive. “Dreams of Things” has a pleasant atmosphere that makes you want to step into its dream world. “The Acid Ram” is a little be weirder and maybe puts you on edge. It’s not as weird and aggressive as my series “Fascist Planet” but it’s still make you question if you want to go there.

The first Acid Ram cover that I just made is #10. Back when I started doing these covers I didn’t do them in numerical order and just picked whatever number suited me that day. Since then I’ve tried to fill in the missing numbers on my various series. So that’s why I picked the number ten. It was one that needed filling in.

Since, back in the day, I didn’t color many of these Acid Ram covers I decided to come up with a style that was different from my “Dreams of Things” series. I looked at the ones I did years ago and noticed that there was a lot more to the inking than in my “Dreams of Things” stuff. I left the “Dreams of Things” art open for color but “The Acid Ram” art had a lot more black in it. I decided to lean into that.

In looking at the finished cover of #10 I wonder if it’s too dark. There is a lot of black in it and a lot of grey, brown, and secondary colors. It’s definitely not a “Dreams of Things” cover. Did I go too far in trying to distinguish it from “Dreams of Things”? I don’t know. I still haven’t decided yet. I’ll have to take my time with it.

Of course the first thing I notice is that giant eye looking at me. How could I not? Not only is it a giant eye but the white of the eye is the whitest white in the image. That makes it stand out. The sharp yellow lines of the mouth also jump out at me. That guy scares me a little bit.

I didn’t use many primary colors in this one. I think that distinguishes it from “Dreams of Things.” The blue of the eye, the yellow of the mouth, and the half red face are the only primary colors. There is some dull red in the energy field behind the main face but that comes across as more of a brown. I forgot the yellow triangles behind the logo but I barely noticed them. They’re a bit hidden.

As I was looking at this cover and writing it fell off my easel so I picked it up and held it. It actually looks a lot different close up than it does far away. Far away it blends together more. Things are less distinct from one and other. That’s usually not the case with “Dreams of Things” when I use brighter colors.

Overall “The Acid Ram” #10 was a bit of an experiment for me. I was turning something old into something new. I’m not sure if I was as successful as I want to be but it was a start. I’m going to do some more of them so I’ll let you know how it goes.