Radiant Comics

One thing that most young artists have in common is that they think they are not good enough. That makes sense. They’re young and starting out and not as talented as they’ll be if they keep making art. As a consequence a lot of young artists have a hard time looking back on their own work. Even if the work is only six months old all they can see is the mistakes. Plus a year is a long time when you’re only twenty.

I was the same way back in the day. It would pain me to look back at my work that I had done. The work became a failure in my eyes and that failure was not fun. Eventually I got old enough and had done enough work I was happy with so that I could look back at my young self’s work with more objective eyes. I could see the good stuff along with the bad.

I bring this up because yesterday I was scanning in some old work of mine. Work I had pretty much forgotten that I still had. The very first comic book pages I drew after graduation from art school.

I graduated art school back in December of 1988. Back in those days comic books were not viewed with any kind of regard in general but specifically in art school. They weren’t real art and were just junk below the interest of real art. So, though I did get a good art education, there was no instruction on making comics. Anything I learned about making comics was by making them outside of the curriculum. I also had friends who were trying to make comics so it was good that were in it together. We made comic strips for our school paper.

After graduating art school I had no real idea what to do. So I decided to try and self publish a comic. It was the tail end of the black and white boom of the mid 1980s. In hindsight it was really over by then but I didn’t even know to call it a boom at the time. I threw myself into learning to make comics.

In this bundle of my comic book art was a twelve page story called “I Won’t Take The Cheese Home!” about a kid who doesn’t want to ride the school bus, an unnamed six page story about a guy living through the end of the world, and three 21 page issues plus 14 pages of the fourth issue of my planned to be ongoing comic called “Snow.”

My friend Rob was helping me with self publishing my comic by talking with some of the comic book distributers at the time. The problem was that the boom was over and we didn’t get a lot of orders. Though I do remember that we got more orders than when my friends and I published our comic years later in 1997. The late 1990s was brutal for comics. That put an end to my 1989 self publishing idea plus I really didn’t know how to deliver a comic to press. I would have had to figure that out with not much to guide me.

All in all I considered the whole venture to be a big failure and then in November of 1989 I worked in the Marvel Bullpen for the first time. I was only there as a freelancer for a few days and picked up more freelance production work from them in early 1990 and for the next fifteen years. The first couple of years there was like a grad school of making comic books from soup to nuts.

All throughout the 1990s I kept on making my own art including comic books. I developed a few things, made a bunch of short stories, and even self published a comic with my friends in 1997-1988. All that time I ignored “Snow” and never looked at it again. I even made an, almost, tomb for it.

Back in 1990 I was young and broke but creative. The stack of “Snow” comic pages was 80 pages high plus the other two short stories. I needed something to store them in. Portfolio cases were too expensive so I made a case out of canvas. I wrapped the pages in canvas secured with velcro. I could get them in and out but it was a bit of a chore. And there those pages sat for somewhere around 35 years.

For the first decade it was too painful to look at them. Then I just lost interest in them. My friends and I published six issues of our comic in 1997 but we made no money so we couldn’t continue it. That was a fresher failure but since I had friends to share it with it was easier. “Snow” just never entered my mind much.

This summer, the summer of 2026, I’ve been learning book binding. One of the things I wanted to learn to bind was comics. I have a lot of copies of our self published comic from 1997. We published four issues of “Kansas Thunder,” and anthology of our work, and two issues of “Delia Charm” in which I continued my story. So I decided to learn how to bind all six into a hard cover. That made me look back at them with new eyes and say, “Hey, we did a pretty good job” rather than view the comics as failures. They look good as a hardcover.

Over the years I occasionally looked at the canvas covered pages of “Snow” and said to myself that I really should scan in those pages. Why not? I scan in everything else I do. It wasn’t until yesterday that I actually did scan them in.

I turns out that I didn’t even remember how many pages that I did. It was a lot more than I remembered. I knew I got the first issue finished and I thought there was a second but I never would have guessed there was a complete third issue plus 14 pages of a fourth. That’s a lot of work. Plus there were the two short stories. I didn’t even remember those at all until I saw them and my memory was jogged. It was all pencilled, inked, written, and lettered by twenty two year old me.

It took a few hours to scan in all those old pages and I enjoyed looking at them. I’m so far away from them now that I don’t see them as a failure and can see the good and the bad in them rather than just the bad. They weren’t great pages and were the pages of a beginner but I could see the potential there.

In some world I continued with the story and made it into something. It’s not painful anymore that in this world I didn’t. But I still wish I could read those issues I never made.