Radiant Comics

Reading “Peepshow” on the train

I’m writing this about one of my favorite cartoonists who died just a week ago. His name was Joe Matt and he did a comic called “Peep Show.” The series ran from the late 1980s (in various places), got a first issue of its own in the early 1990s, and ran 14 issues through the early 2000s.

The first “Peep Show” comics from late 1980s ran in anthology series like “Drawn and Quarterly” magazine. He only had a page or two per issue to work with so this led him to do comics jam packed with small panels and lots of story in only one page. Some pages had thirty panels or more per page. It really was something different.

“Peep Show” is named because the comics were autobiographical and we, the audience, were peeping in on Joe Matt’s life. It was a “Warts and All” presentation of his life as he showed himself as especially neurotic with all sorts of hangups. He was notably cheap, had a porn addiction, wasn’t always nice to his girlfriends, and blamed the world at large for a lot of his personal problems. Maybe not exactly the way he really was but it made for a good comic book character.

I’ve read a lot of tributes to Joe Matt since he died and most of them mention how funny “Peep Show” was and though I agree with that I’d also like to mention that it was also very insightful and full of excellent cartooning and story telling. Whether in the single page format or the later regular comic format there was an inventiveness and clarity to the layouts and drawing. Plus he had some interesting ideas and observations about life in general. It wasn’t a strip that was just about gags.

Back in 2020 I reread all of “Peep Show” for the first time in 20 years. I mentioned it here: http://radiantcomics.com/comic-binging-time/. I enjoyed reading it all over again.

Joe Matt’s work has a special place in my heart. If you were a mainstream comic book fan back in the late 1980s to early 1990s then comics were probably defined for you by the likes of Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen, and the rest of the guys who eventually went on to form Image Comics. But I was an indie comics guy. Comics of that time period were defined, for me, by Joe Matt, Seth, Chester Brown, Peter Bagge, and Daniel Clowes. There were others too from before and after but those were my late 80s to early 90s guys.

Peter Bagge’s “Hate” started in 1990, Daniel Clowes “Eightball” in 1989, Chester Brown’s “Yummy Fur” in 1986, Seth’s “Palookaville” in 1991, and Joe Matt’s “Peepshow” collection came out in 1991 but I was probably reading him in Drawn and Quarterly Magazine before that. To read that one of them died (Joe Matt was 60) was sad and also (of course) makes me contemplate at my own mortality.

One of the things that “Peep Show” was about was making comics. That’s why Joe Matt, the cartoon character, and Joe Matt, the real person, wanted to do. I could relate to that. I was three years younger than Joe Matt and at the time I was reading his comics I was trying to make comics too. Joe Matt was always complaining about having to work for a living and how that was interfering with his ability to make comics. That was something I could really relate to.

One of Joe Matt, the cartoon character’s, defining characteristics is that he was super cheap. That made sense to me though. He was cheap because that allowed him to make comics rather than spend all his time working a regular job. When you’re an artist and life does not allow you the time to be creative that’s hell on earth. That might be one of the reasons there are so many angry and miserable people in the world. Joe Matt just found a different solution to the problem. Cheapness.

It was the morning of the 19th of September 2023 that read that Joe Matt had died. His friend since their college days, Matt Wagner, announced it on social media. That’s another thing I could relate to about Joe Matt. At the time I was reading “Peep Show” I was working in the Marvel Comics Bullpen doing production work. I was there working with a bunch of friends from college. One of us got a job there and he eventually got a bunch of us in. That’s how life works. A lot of it is about connections and who you know. So to read In “Peepshow”that Joe Matt knew Matt Wagner from art school made sense to me.

I had to commute into NYC that Tuesday morning that I read of Joe Matt’s death. I have about an hour on the train when I usually read a novel on my iPad. It’s easier for me to read digitally on the train and I don’t have to carry an extra book with me. But that day I just had to read the originally collected edition of the “Peep Show” strips. I hunted through my shelves for it and stuck it in my bag.

It’s amazing how many panels of comics are in that book. Amazon tells me that there are 96 pages in the book but it takes a lot longer to read than a regular 96 page graphic novel. Over the two hours of my train riding that day I only made it through about three quarters of the book. There is so much in there. So much good stuff.

I remember back when the first issue of the regular “Peep Show” comic book came out that some people complained that it was too much like a regular comic. They liked his jam packed strips so when confronted with a six panels a page Joe Matt strip they were disappointed. I could understand this but I liked the new format too.

If memory serves most of the issues of “Peep Show” come out in the early 1990s. By the mid to late 1990s it was comic out only once in a blue moon until the final issue came out sometime in the early 2000s. It was on my pull list so I got all of them but it became an event for me when an issue came out. I loved it but wished it came out more often.

The fourteen issues of “Peep Show” were collected in three 6×9 inch graphic novels. Those, plus the original magazine size collection of strips, make it four books. Unfortunately they are all out of print. You may be able to get them second hand on Amazon but that’s about it. The morning I read of Joe Matt’s death I actually went on eBay to check is his stuff was available and there was nothing. Not a single comic for sale. I checked again yesterday, a week later, and there is some stuff available but not much.

Joe Matt’s work is highly regarded among those of us in the know but unfortunately he had faded from view over the last couple of decades. He hadn’t had anything new out in a long time and that means that a lot of current comic book fans don’t know who he was. The passage of time will do that to us all. Goodbye Joe Matt.

Here is a bit of advice for you. If you want to be entrepreneurial then get it done when you are in your twenties or thirties. By that I mean artistically. I was around thirty when my friends and I self published our comic book.

If you’re not rich with access to money then friends are the key to being entrepreneurial. That way you can split up the work and risk. It’s really tough to be entrepreneurial when it’s only you. And as people gets older they have less and less time and more and more responsibilities so it gets tough to help each other out as you get into your forties.

I mention this because today I was working on a project that I always meant to be entrepreneurial with but never have been. I started, and nearly finished, this project about twenty years ago. It’s a deck of fortune telling cards. I’ve noticed these types of cards are now called “Oracle Decks” so that’s what I’ll call it.

I in no way shape or form think I can predict the future but I like cards in general and have always found systems of divination interesting. They are systems based on nothing real. Someone had to make all of it up. So I decided to make up my own cards and my own system.

Tarot cards are the most well known type of fortune telling cards but I wanted to mine to be more modern and different from the Tarot. I came up with names for forty eight cards, wrote out what each one means, and made a color drawing for each card. I even made an instruction book to explain the system. It took me a few years to do back in the early 2000s but I got it done. I originally called the cards “The Tourmaline Mystique” but have since changed the name to “The Envoy Oracle Deck.” Tourmaline is a cool word but it’s actually a type of crystal and the name confused people I told it to.

I only ever made one deck of the cards. I printed them out on my inkjet printer, laminated them, and cut each one by hand. I even rounded all the corners of the cards. I thought they came out well and always wanted to take it a step further and have then professionally printed. But I never did.

In the early 2000s there was no Kickstarter to Indiegogo to fund a creative project like that so I never quite knew what to do with the deck. I’m not even sure if there was a place to get it printed back then. I probably finished the deck a couple of years before I turned forty and I didn’t have much entrepreneurial spirit for it. I liked it but I didn’t like the idea of trying to sell it to people. Especially since there was just me to do it.

Over the years I would occasionally look online for places that would print a card deck. Nowadays there are a few of them. Sometimes I’d price them out just to see the cost. Then I’d do nothing. I could get a hundred decks printed up for around five or six hundred dollars but then I’d have to try and sell them. That never seemed like an easy way to make money.

In the last couple of years I’ve noticed a lot of people making their own Tarot decks or oracle decks. At least I get a lot of ads for them in my social media feeds. I don’t know how much of a demand for them there really is but some of the decks are nicely made and can go for between thirty and fifty bucks a deck. Not bad.

The one thing I never did with my deck was to set it up for printing. They were all finished digital files but they were never set up specifically for printing. Except once I set them all up as individual tifs for printing but that was a little cumbersome. What I really needed to do was to set them up as an InDesign document that I could easily make a PDF for print out of.

That was what I was going to do until I decided I wanted to learn something new. I recently saw a video of someone who set up their 32 page comic book all in Adobe Illustrator. Usually InDesign would be used for such a task but he explained why he was using Illustrator. I decided to try to set up my cards for print that way.

There is something in Illustrator called the “Art Board.” That’s basically just a single page. For decades all Illustrator had was one page/art board per document. Each Illustrator file was one picture. Now you can add a lot of art boards. You got thirty two pages in your comic? Then make 32 art boards. I thought I try that out.

As I wrote before this is a task I’d normally handle in InDesign but I wanted to try something new. Ten hours later I wished I had just used Indesign.

The first thing I did was to set up my document at the correct size and then make forty eight art boards. After that I had to open the files for all forty eight cards (which were in Illustrator), scale them to the correct size, and them paste them into the master file with forty eight art boards. This took hours. As I added more and more cards Illustrator had a hard time keeping up. Screen redraw lagged and I couldn’t always trust what I was seeing.

Plus things like “Paste in Place” didn’t work since it had no idea what art board was “In Place.” It would paste stuff anywhere. And “Paste in all Art Boards” pasted multiple things wherever it wanted to. So lining stuff up took longer than it should have. Plus there are no “master pages” like there are in InDesign for the parts of the design that repeat on every card. I had to repeat them manually.

One of the forty eight cards was a real pain. I have no idea why but when I pasted the card into the new file it changed color. Only this one card and I tried everything I knew to get it to stop but it changed color every time. I finally recolored it.

But there was something even stranger than that. Near the end of my day I went to output the document as a PDF on one card showed up. I couldn’t figure out what happened. As I was checking each layer in the document I noticed that all the art boards except one disappeared. All the card art was still there but according to Illustrator forty seven on them were not on pages and therefor could be ignored.

I had to remake all of the art boards and then make sure all the art was in the correct place. I also had to convert all of my type into outlines because Illustrator was choking on all that type and doing weird things with it.

So I did get to learn some new things in Illustrator and now can easily output the cards as PDFs for print but the main thing I learned was that I should have stuck with InDesign. After all multiple page publications for print is what it’s designed for.

Dark and Finished

Since I jump around in my personal art making from medium to medium and project to project sometimes I get certain stuff done and sometimes I don’t. For the last twenty months or so I’ve been working on my Great Gatsby illustrated project so that means I haven’t gotten other stuff done. I’ve also been getting one “Dreams of Things” cover done a week for about that same time which takes away from other stuff I might be getting done. That brings us to my ”Big Ink Drawings.”

My ”Big Ink Drawings” are made on 22×30 inch pieces of paper and, as you might imagine, are made with India ink. The paper is too big to fit on my scanner so I have to move my scanner out of its normal spot and on to a portable table to scan them in pieces. This means I don’t scan them often so that the drawings are usually stacked on my easel until I get a chance to scan them and put them away. If I’m working on my easel on any given day I move the drawings off and place them on my bed. It’s the only place big enough to store them temporarily.

Right now there are there are fourteen “Big Ink Drawings” in the stack. It’s the very end of July as I write this and only one ink drawing is dated from this year, 2023. In addition to that one four are dated from 2022, eight are dated from 2021, and one is undated. I have no idea why that one is undated. It may be from 2023 but I’ll have to check my calendar to see when I drew it. I just checked. It’s also from January of this year. I drew two in a row back then.

Some years I’ve gotten a dozen or two of these “Big Ink Drawings” done. When I don’t get things done in a particular series or type of medium it can make me a little sad or nostalgic for when I did get that stuff done. It’s an irrational feeling since I know that I’m getting other stuff done but feelings aren’t always rational.

In order to start a “Big Ink Drawing” I first tape a piece of 22×30 inch watercolor paper onto my drawing board that sits on my easel. I then measure one inch from the edges of the paper and use a black marker to draw on a border. I always draw a border before I start any drawing because it helps me define the drawing parameters and therefor it helps with the composition.

Usually after I tape the paper down and draw the border I start the drawing. Not this time. This time the paper sat on my easel for a month or two. I’m not even sure if I had an idea in mind for the next “Big Ink Drawing” but idea or not the paper just sat there unused. That is until yesterday when I decided to make a monster face on the paper.

Last week I wrote about doing a couple of my “Monsters of Comics” drawings. They are done with markers and white pastel on a piece of paper torn from a comic book. My big ink monsters are similar except they are done only with ink. There is no white used in them.

I hadn’t made any “Monsters on Comics” drawings in a while either and it took me a while to relearn how to do them. If I get rusty with a technique it takes a minute to knock the rust off. I think that’s why I chose to do a big ink monster face. Even though the techniques are different the thinking is similar. I was probably in a monster state of mind.

Early Version

Using black India ink to make these monster face drawings helps make them scary. When drawing monsters you want them to be dark. Charcoal works well for this. I’ve noticed over the years that when a horror movie or TV show has a character who makes scary drawings they are almost always charcoal drawings. The rich blackness of ink or charcoal makes us stare into the abyss. It’s good stuff.

I make these big ink monsters using my “Busted Brush” technique. That’s when I uses a watercolor brush that’s been ruined by India ink. Sable hair watercolor brushes are the best brushes to use for ink drawings but the ink eventually ruins them. Watercolor brushes are made to come to a point but when they’re used with India ink the shellac in the ink eventually wrecks the brush so that it never comes to a point again. The brush breaks up into four or five points.

Most comic book inkers throw the brush out at this point and I used to also. But then I got tired of throwing away those expensive brushes. They cost about $25 a piece and last anywhere from two to six months. Instead of tossing them I threw them into a spare brush rack and left them there. It was years after I started doing that when I invented my “Busted Brush” technique.

When drawing one of these monster faces I don’t need a brush with a point. I’m not looking to make lines. Instead I’m looking to make multiple lines and marks. Usually when I’m using ink I dip the brush in ink and then twirl it along an ink stone to make sure the brush comes to a point. With the “Busted Brush” technique I dip the brush in ink and then mash it on top of the ink stone to make sure it spreads out into many points. I then use this wild and a little unpredictable brush to make marks and draw with.

Like most things it always takes me a little bit longer to make a monster face than I think it will. It also takes patience to make one. It takes until the end for it to come together. A monster face is supposed to be scary but in the beginning it usually looks comical. When it’s mostly still the white of the paper showing with the face only in lines it’s not scary at all. Plus the monster usually has big eyes and big teeth which looks funny.

It takes until the drawing is 90% done to start getting scary. Once the monster starts blending into the black is when our brains start seeing it as a monster. The teeth have to nearly disappear to stop being comical. It’s a weird transition and it takes patience to work towards.

It felt good to get a “Big Ink Drawing” done. Now I’m going to have to go and write the date on the undated one from January.

Some days I want to make some art but I have no idea what art I want to make. That’s one of the reasons I like to make a lot of different kinds of art with different techniques. Sometimes on days that I don’t know what I want to do I can go by feel. By that I mean literal physical feel. What it feels like to use the tools that make the art. I went by feel yesterday and chose to make some drawings in my “Monsters on Comics” series.

I started drawing monsters, and particularly monster faces, about fifteen years ago and it all had to do with an art show I saw back when I was in art school in the 1980s. I had a teacher for my visiting artist painting class named Emilio Cruz. He took us to a show at the Brooklyn Museum about the art of New Ireland. That’s an island in the Pacific where the people made these small sculptures, about a foot tall, of scary monsters. They kept them in their homes to remind them that there were bad things out in the world and everybody should try to stay on the straight and narrow. This idea inspired me to draw my own monsters.

If memory serves then the first monsters faces I drew were about 11×14 inches and were done with some kind of charcoal. There are a lot of different kinds of charcoal sticks and it took me a few tries to find the darkest and densest charcoal that was good for this task. It took a lot of rubbing to get the darkness I wanted. I didn’t end up making many of these.

A while (a year or two?) after I made those monster faces I started using my busted brush technique. This as using an old brush that no longer came to a point but split up into many points with ink on paper. I found this technique to be conducive to drawing monster faces. India ink is really dark and the texture made by the busted brush can be built up to make cool monster faces out of. I mostly worked on 6×9 inch paper to draw these monster faces but I occasionally made larger ones.

This leads us to my “On Comics” series and specifically my “Monsters on Comics” series. In case this is the first piece you’ve ever read of mine I’ll let you know that I am a comic book collector. That means I have a lot of comic books. I even have a lot of worthless comic books. I mean worthless because they are in such bad shape that they can’t even be read. They’re falling apart.

I decided that I wanted to do something with those comic books. I wanted to tear out the pages that were still in decent shape and draw on them. But draw what and with what? I ended up settling on drawing monster faces but it took quite a while to settle on which tools I should draw on the comic with.

First of all the paper from an old comic book is delicate. Most of the comics I was drawing on were from the 1970s and drawing on forty something year old yellowed newsprint isn’t easy. I couldn’t use a wet medium like ink because that would wrinkle the paper. It had to be a dry medium plus also be a soft medium. I wanted to not only use black but also use white. That way I could work back and forth from black to white. Plus the paper was too delicate for erasing so the white would serve as a cover up too.

I started out trying to use charcoal but all of the charcoal I had or found was too hard for the paper. There is not much tooth to the old newsprint so I had to rub really hard with the charcoal to make lines and shapes so it tore the paper too much. I did find my answer for the white in some sticks on conté crayon that I has lying around since the 1990s. It worked really well.

I eventually abandoned all my different charcoals and tried out some black markers. They worked. I especially liked using an almost dried out marker. It blended well with the conté crayon. The marker wouldn’t keep as perpetually almost dried out and when it did finally totally dried out I kept it around to blend with. I still use it in that capacity.

I made a bunch of drawings this way but then ran into a problem. I ran out of white conté crayon. Just buy some more you say. Which is what I did. The problem was that none of the conté crayon that I bought was soft enough. I bought the softest stuff I could find and it was the same grade of softness as the old stuff I had but it still too hard. It wouldn’t draw on the old newsprint. So I had to go in search of a new white to use.

It took some trial and error but eventually I found some white pastel sticks that worked really well. Pastel sticks are bigger than conté crayon so I couldn’t make as fine a line but it could cover big areas faster. Plus I had a little bit of that conté crayon left that I saved for small areas. I also added in a white charcoal pencil that only worked on really small areas but I found some use for it. I was back in business.

This all brings us to yesterday. That’s when I decided to make some art because of its feel. The feel I wanted was of the pastel rubbing on the paper. It’s hard to describe. It’s also similar to using charcoal. With a pencil you draw it along the paper and it leaves a light mark. With pastel or charcoal you have to use more pressure and it’s a much blunter tip so you have to rub it across the paper.

As you rub pastel across the paper a half inch chunky line is left behind. This has a nice feel. The black marker is put down with a delicate touch which contrasts with the pastel application. Then it’s back and forth. Chunky, delicate, chunky, delicate, and so on. Throw in some rubbing in there with the dried out marker. It all makes for a nice physical process that is a cool change of pace from a pencil, brush, or marker. I dig it.

Back in my younger days I had a teacher say to me, “Every artist has a scale.” What that means is that artists have a size that they work best at. Big, small, or somewhere in-between, all of us have a scale that we are most comfortable with and prefer to work at. Over the years I’ve found this to be true, my scale is mostly large, but that’s not absolute. With some things my scale has changed over the years.

First of all scale has a lot to do with tools, space, and money. If you want to work large then you’d better have large tools. Drawing a wall size drawing with a regular size pencil is a tough task. Maybe some larger pencils will be in order. Large tools are often harder to come by too. Especially for young artists who probably don’t even know such tools exist.

Tool are related to money but space is even more so related. If you don’t have the money for a big studio space then you’re probably not going to work very large. It’s mostly successful (ie monied) artists who make huge wall sized paintings. If you’re of modest means, making a modest living, and not selling much art, then you probably don’t have the space to make wall size paintings. That’s why when I say my scale is large I don’t mean wall size paintings. My means are modest.

For a lot of my drawing on paper, ink or pencil, I like to work on 11×17 inch paper. That’s the size that most comic books are drawn at so it became my default size a long time ago. When I make my big ink drawing that are on much larger paper: 22×30 inches. That would be a big drawing to me. My acrylic on canvas paintings of the last few years have been on 24×36 inch canvases. Though I’ve painted on bigger canvases I don’t have the room for them these days.

In my Ink books (my sketchbooks) I draw small. The book itself is 5.5×8.5 inches and I get even smaller by drawing from six to twelve thumbnail drawings per page. When coming up with ideas I like to keep things small so only the basics get drawn. I try to strip off all the extraneous stuff that is better added after I nail down the basics.

I used to make all of my pencil drawings the same size as my finished ink drawings on 11×17 inch paper. I had to do it like that before the digital age as the only way it could be done was to ink right over the pencils. But in the mid 1990s when I got my first computer I could scan in my pencils and then print them out on another piece of paper to ink on. No longer did the pencils and inks have to be on the same piece of paper.

Since the work of pencilling and inking could now be done on two separate pieces of paper they also didn’t have to be the same size but for many years I still kept pencilling on 11×17 inch paper. Probably because I didn’t think about it that much.

At some point in the 2000s I started drawing on smaller pieces of paper. Sometimes a few different sizes. I’d start on 9×12 inch paper, make a drawing, then blow that drawing up to print on an 11×17 inch piece of paper and finish it. Sometimes I’d start the drawing on a 6×9 inch piece of paper and blow that up to 9×12 or 11×17 inches. Sometimes I found myself working at all three sizes to make a finished drawing. That started to be too much.

Nowadays I have mostly done all of the drawings for my 11×17 inch ink pieces at 6×9 inches. I’ve gotten used to that scale. Occasionally I blow one of those up to 9×12 inches when I need to figure out more detail but I almost never draw in pencil at 11×17 inches. I save that size for the inks.

The idea of scale came into my mind today as I was drawing some of my Great Gatsby illustrations. All of last year I did those drawings at 11×17 inches but this year I’ve been doing some smaller 6×9 inch spot illustrations. I’ve been trying to keep them simple. For the most part I’ve been successful at keeping them simple but occasionally one demands to be drawn bigger. Or sometimes small is not the right scale.

I was just working on a spot illustration that had a lot of sweeping lines in it. I was doing it on 6×9 inch paper and from the moment I made the first line I knew something was off. I’m not an artist who usually has to “Warm up” before drawing but as I was making this one I felt that I should have. My hand was not making the brush strokes like I wanted them too. Halfway through the drawing I thought that things were going wrong because 6×9 inches was too small. The scale was off.

I finished the drawing and even used some Pro White to try and fix the lines but I quickly decided to go big with it. I printed out another version of the drawing on 11×17 inch paper and got to work. The extra size made things a lot easier. I was able to get the lines I wanted and I finished the drawing fairly quickly. I think it took me less time to ink the big one than the small one. I was even able to add some details that weren’t in the small one.

This also isn’t the only one of the smaller spot illustrations that I’ve gone bigger with. I’ve done it with a few of them. Usually it’s after I finish the 6×9 inch drawing, contemplate it for a few minutes, and then say, “Screw it. I’m going bigger.” Some drawings demand to be done at a larger size. Maybe each individual drawing has a scale too.