Radiant Comics

“Leg Competition”
The finished piece.

Trying something new is hard. That’s my observation for the week. It’s not a new thought. People have stated that many times over the years. But it’s a thought that came home to roost for me last Saturday (April 29, 2025). I tried something new. At least it was semi-new.

The biggest risk in trying something new is that you won’t be any good at it. When you’re younger this is less of a risk because almost everything is new and you’re not going to be good at much. Youth is when you’re learning a lot of stuff. When you’re older, like I am, there can be plenty of stuff that you’re good at. Trying something new means taking a risk that you won’t be good at it. When you’re used to being good at stuff it’s not easy to suddenly be bad at stuff.

The new thing I was trying was making a complex watercolor painting. I’ve been working at getting better at watercolor over the last couple of months but it’s mostly been simple stuff. Small 5×7 inch paintings of faces and such. This time I wanted to take one of my complex 11×17 inch drawings and use watercolor to make it.

I even thought I was making it simple for myself. I wasn’t going to render the whole drawing in watercolor. I was going to make a complex ink drawing and then do some basic coloring with watercolor. I had done things like this way back in the 1990s and I was going to try and do that again.

The first thing I did was to dig through my scans of drawings. I have a lot of them. I only wanted to spend a day or two on this project and didn’t want to spend the time coming up with a new drawing to work on. This was a bit of an experiment after all. I found a drawing named “Leg Competition” from back in 2012 that I liked. I printed the drawing out in blue line on watercolor paper and spent the first day inking it.

Also I looked it up later and it turned out that I had done a finished piece from this drawing back in 2012. I made a Big Ink drawing out of it.

Here is where I made my first mistake, I thought it might happen, but decided to try it anyway. Most of the drawing I inked with a brush and waterproof India ink. That waterproof part is important because I was going to go over the top of the ink with watercolor. But for a small part of the drawing I used French curves and a small black marker.

Some small black markers use waterproof ink and some don’t. I refill all my small black markers with waterproof India ink but this marker was a new one. Though I had already refilled even this new marker with India ink I didn’t know if that first bit of ink would be waterproof or not. It wasn’t.

The second day, Saturday the 29th, I started in the morning by putting in some colors with my watercolor paints. It was going okay until I hit the parts made with that pen. The black line of the pen started bleeding into the paint and greying out the color. That was not fun.

What was even less fun was using the watercolor in general. It turned out that I had no vision for it. With most pieces, when I’m not trying something new, even if I don’t have an exact vision for how it’s going to turn out, I can, “trust the process.” With tried and true methods that I’m good at, even if something doesn’t look good in the moment, I know that it’s going to look good at the end.

I once was told that some famous artist said that art should look finished at every stage in the process. I’ve never found this to be true. Often as I’m working on a piece it looks terrible and unfinished. This is because I’m laying the groundwork for it to be finished. Plus it’s okay that it looks unfinished because I know it will look good in the end. That’s what I’m working towards and I’ve done it before.

All that was not so with this watercolor painting. I was putting down color, some of the black line was bleeding into the paint, none of it looked good, and I was not happy with it. It is tough to work on something that you’re not happy with but I kept going. I didn’t want to give up.

After struggling with the painting for a couple of hours I came to the conclusion that something had to change. I realized that my idea for what the painting should be was too blurry and incomplete for me to follow. Plus I had no tried-and-true process to use. This watercolor method was new to me.

The first thing I did was to stop putting the watercolor down neatly. I started throwing watercolor all over the page, letting the black line bleed in some places, and letting the color bleed into the color. Exactingly putting the color in for two hours got me nowhere so I decided to wreck it all in about fifteen minutes. At first it seemed like I had ruined the whole piece. And I kind of did.

I ruined the piece but it also freed up my thinking. At that point I decided to use acrylic paint markers to finish the piece. Since watercolor is transparent I thought the opaque acrylic would make a nice counterpoint. And it did. I spent the rest of the day using the markers and black ink to finish the piece. It took a while to get it into shape. I worked on it from eight in the morning until six at night.

The struggle was real with this one. With no process to fall back on I had to invent one as I went along. That takes a lot more time and energy. In the end I like the piece but I’m not sure if I love it. I like the big main face best but the little face in the bottom right lets me down a little. It’s not easy doing new things.

It can be tough being a self motivated artist and figuring out what to do next. What art to make, what project to work on, how to spend your making art time in general. I’m a little bit stuck right now. Not really stuck but I don’t have an idea in mind for any kind of big project.

My big project for the last three years or so has been my illustrated version of “The Great Gatsby.” I’ve almost finished it. I still have some work to do on it but for some reason I put it aside and haven’t looked at it in months. That could be because the finishing touches seem pointless to me now. I have no plan for it after I finish it so why should I finish it? That’s kind of a crazy thought but it’s where I am with it right now.

I’ve also been getting a lot of stuff done lately but most of it is the regular stuff that I get done. Somehow that doesn’t count and anything “Big” in my brain but it’s not like I’m sitting around doing nothing. I just finished inking “Dreams of Things” cover number 283. When I finish cover 300 I think I’m going to take some time and put them all into a digital book. But that’s in the future. I’ve been getting one of those a week done so number 300 isn’t far away but it’s not today.

I’ve also been getting a lot of “Tiny Drawings” done. I only started doing those a few weeks ago and I’ve already drawn over two hundred of them. I’m drawing them faster than I can give them away and the plan is to give them all away. But that’s way more drawings than people that I see. I’ll keep making more though. As long as I’m not tired of them I’ll keep drawing them. But that’s not a big project in my mind.

I’m thinking about doing a bunch of paintings this summer. Back in the summer of 2021 (was it really that long ago?) I made a series of five 24×36 inch paintings. That was my last “Summer of Painting” and I think I might try to do the same thing this year. I’m not sure yet and it’s only March 29 as I write this so the summer is still a couple of months off. But maybe that could be my big project.

I’ve got a lot of stuff done over the last few months. I’ve been keeping up with writing and finishing my five times a week “Four Talking Boxes” comic strip. I’ve been doing that for over fifteen years but since I always get it done it’s one of those things that doesn’t count as a “Big Project” in my head. I also finished up all of 2026’s “Drifting and Dreaming” strips. I’m usually finishing those about now but I fished them early this year.

Another thing I finished early was a new comic to replace my “Message Tee” comic. That just kind of happened organically. A few years ago I started making these comics that were a drawing of a superhero’s head and shoulders with a word balloon. They were like my “Art Cards” except they were bigger. The art cards are 2.5×3.5 inches and the “Super Talk” ones are 5×7 inches.

The bigger size gives me more room to put detail into the faces plus the larger balloon size lets me write a little bit more. I did about a dozen of these over the last few years and thought nothing of them but then, back in December 2024 or so, they caught fire with me. I figured out a new way to do them and started making a bunch of them. (http://radiantcomics.com/art-writing-big-superhero-cartoon-art-cards/) I ended up writing and drawing fifty two of them and now they are going to replace my “Message Tee” comic for 2026. So that’s done.

I started out making those “Super Talk” comics with India ink and marker but then halfway through I switched over to India ink and watercolor. (http://radiantcomics.com/art-writing-another-watercolor-try/)

Watercolor was never my strongest medium but I like to give it a try every now and then. I think this has contributed to my sense of being stuck. I recently bought some larger watercolor paper. It’s 11×17 inches compared to the 5×7 inches I was working at. I made two pieces at that size and I think they came out pretty well. But then when I went to make a third piece I got stuck. I started painting it but then stopped. I don’t know why but I grew disinterested in it as I went. So it’s sitting there only part way done.

It was two days ago that I started to work on another watercolor piece. This time I took a different approach. I didn’t feel like making a whole new drawing so I looked through my vast archive of scanned in drawings for something I could use. I have way more working drawings than finished pieces. I was looking for something complex that I could just fill in with watercolor. I found something.

I spent part of yesterday inking the drawing. I made this new version of the 11×17 inch drawing with a brush and India ink. It came out okay but now that I look at it I can’t seem to find the motivation to break out the watercolors and finish it. I don’t know why.

Usually I’m not an “Inspiration” person. I don’t sit around and wait for inspiration to hit. I get to work instead. I’ve made plenty of good art when I’m not feeling inspired. I have enough things going on and in progress that I can pick one up and work on it. It’s a good habit to get into. It beats the bad habit of doing nothing.

I’ll probably pick up my watercolors sometime today and try to start painting over my drawing. I’m not sure what I’ll get done on it or if I’ll lose this feeling of being stuck but I’ll give it a try. I might end up switching over to working on some other thing that I’m not even thinking about right now. Either way I’m not really stuck. I just feel that way at the moment. Luckily there is a mother moment coming up.

It’s been since 2010 that I’ve been making my web comic strip “Four Talking Boxes.” I’ve made five strips a week for all those years and next week (as I write this) I’m about to hit four thousand comic strips in that series.

I’m not saying that’s the most comic strips ever made by a person but it is a lot. Especially since I don’t make any money doing it. I would imagine most people who have made that many comic strips did it because they were getting paid to do it. I don’t know what that says about me but I’m glad to have done them.

I also have done about 700 “Message Tee” comics and nearly 800 “Drifting and Dreaming” comics. Again that’s a lot. Being that they don’t make me any money nor earn me any glory all I get for them is bragging rights. No one is very interested in my bragging but still I’m going to brag to the void. Why not? What else do I have to do? Besides make more comics.

“Four Talking Boxes” has never been an attempt at making a commercial comic strip and it has a few things going against it in that area. First off the art is all talking heads and there are no cute little animals. I’ve had the thought that I should design some cute little animals and reuse all the same dialogue to make a new strip that would be more commercial. It’s a silly idea but I’m a dreamer.

Another non-commercial aspect of the strip is a the art. I don’t draw all of those talking heads new for each strip. Since I’m not getting paid I’d never have the time to make new drawings for each strip. I designed each character and drew them multiple time from multiple angles so that I could use those drawings over and over. I can even change their expressions a bit in Adobe Illustrator.

Basically I made my own clip art to make the strip out of. It’s the only way I’ve been able to get the strips done all these years. You can ask any comic strip artist about the grind of drawing a comic strip and they’ll tell you that it usually takes all day to draw a single comic strip. I don’t have all day. Rich and successful comic strip artist often have assistants to help them out too. I have no assistants. I figured out a way to get a strip done and that’s how I do it.

I would say the main non-commercial aspect of “Four Talking Boxes” is that it is ephemeral. There is no plot. There is no continuing story. There is no character growth. The strip is about the brief conversations between the six characters.

When I designed the strip back in 2009, at first, it only had four characters. And it took me a long time to get to those four characters. I always wanted to make a comic strip but it took me a lot of the late 2000s to figure out how. I had at least a half dozen false starts that always ended the same. They’d all take too much time and I’d never be able to devote that much time to them.

Finally it came to me to design some characters, make a bunch of drawings of them, and set them up as vector drawings in Illustrator so that I could manipulate them to fit the writing a little bit more. I made four characters. I forget which ones came first but each character took me two weeks of full time work to complete. That’s a good chunk of time.

After completing the four characters I set to writing the conversations. Pretty quickly I discovered that four characters weren’t enough. It didn’t give me enough character pairings for varied conversations. So within a week of completing the first four characters I spent another four weeks making two more. Then I was ready to start writing.

The writing is what makes the comic ephemeral. It’s writing based on my days working in the Marvel Bullpen back in the 1990s. Back then the Marvel Bullpen was a big room with anywhere from fifteen to thirty people working in it. Everybody who worked there was a creative person but we were doing a boring job. We were also in a big open room and we were allowed to talk. So that’s what we did. We talked to each other all day.

There was always talking in the Bullpen and there was always crazy conversations going on. We were almost all in our twenties. We were young, witty, and with big imaginations. Conversations could start anywhere and end anywhere. And they were all ephemeral. All that wit and humor disappeared into the air never to be heard again. We had a lot of fun but who can even sat what we talked about? It was everything.

It is that spirit of conversation that I’ve tried to capture in “Four Talking Boxes.” Conversation that could go in any direction. Often as I am writing the strip I try to make it so that the first panel gives no clue what the conversation in the last panel will be. You could read just the first and last panels and wonder how we got from point A to point D. That’s often how our conversations went in the Bullpen.

Much like the writing in the strip we also had themes in the Bullpen. Things like, “What super power would you like to have?” often came up. There were lots of, “Would you rather?” discussions. I found the key to a good, “Would you rather?” discussion is to make both choices as equal and balanced as possible. Everybody would rather have Superman’s powers over Green Arrow’s powers.

Much like the characters I write we probably also had a lot of discussions about space ships, space aliens, super powers, and even catch phrases. A lot of escapism was going on in the Bullpen as we chatted away the day doing dreary work so a lot of imaginations were working away too.

“Four Talking Boxes” isn’t a strip that’s designed to be read many strips at a time. One a day is how it’s supposed to be read. Its ephemeral nature is a strength to me but not in the market place. Oh well, I’m just going to keep on doing what I feel like doing as the world doesn’t watch. Pretty much like everybody else out there.

This is what the printed cover would have looked like.

I bought a little piece of forgotten comic book history on eBay this week but first let’s start on some of my art. I have this series of drawings that I do called “Covers to comics that don’t exist.” I like comic book covers a lot and draw my own. “Dreams of Things” and “Psychedelic Dreamer” are two of my made up comic book series that I’ve drawn covers for lately. I never draw the insides of these comics, that would take way too long, but I do draw the covers. I love the esthetics of comic book covers. Especially twentieth century comics.

As I’ve wrote about recently one of the category of things I’ve purchased on eBay has been old comic book production art. Specifically the negatives of comic book covers that were used to make the printing plates. Most people would have no idea what to do with these but since I’m an old comic book production guy I can scan them in and can make nice prints from those scans. I did just that with an old Harvey comic. Bunny #21.

I bought those negatives to Bunny #21 back in November of 2023 (it’s March 22, 2025 as I write this) so, last month, I decided to see if there were any other comic book cover production negative to be found on eBay. There was only one. It was a cover to a Bugs Bunny comic and it didn’t seem to me like a particularly good cover. I didn’t buy it but I was thinking about it because it was the only one on eBay.

Then, last week, I took another look on eBay to check out that cover. It still didn’t thrill me but when I searched for more cover negatives a whole bunch of them showed up. It was one comic book store and they posted about twenty sets of comic book cover production negatives. They were all from Harvey Comics in the 1970s.

My favorite Harvey comic from when I was a kid was “Hot Stuff: The Little Devil.” I checked to see if there were any of those and there were. I decided I was going to get a Hot Stuff set of negatives to make a print out of.

This seller only had pictures of the negatives. There was no picture of the actual comic to see what the cover really looked like. So I decided to use the Grand Comic Book Database to look up what the covers looked like. I checked the issue number on the auction listing and looked up that issue on the GCBDB. I downloaded the picture of each cover so I could easily compare them and make a decision.

Uncropped scan.

I wanted a Hot Stuff cover but me being me I decided to do my due diligence and look up all the other covers too. Who knows? Maybe there would be one I liked better than any of the Hot Stuff covers.

As I was looking up each issue I ran into an anomaly. There were a couple of “Little Lotta” comics on the list but when I put issue 121 into the search engine it didn’t come up with an image. So I went to the Little Lotta series on the GCBDB and it only had 120 issues listed and indexed. That was weird. I went and checked the wikipedia page for the series and that’s where I read that it had 120 issues but issue 121 was advertised.

The next thing that I did was to check the picture of the negatives closely. The seller could have made a mistake and put the wrong issue number on the auction. I turned the negative into a positive and zoomed in. I could clearly see the issue number was 121. There you go.

It was a “Buy It Now” on eBay so that’s exactly what I did. I bought it then. With tax and shipping the set of negatives were around $50. That’s not a small amount of money to me but it’s about what these things run. That’s also on the lower side of prices for old comic book production art.

Often I see auctions for just a stat or film positive of the black plate of old comic book pages and people want hundreds of dollars for them. I can see why the negatives are cheaper though. A stat or film positive of a black plate looks like the original art. You can stick it in a frame and hang it on your wall and it’ll look good. It’s a nice “Objet d’art.”

These film negatives that I bought don’t look good on their own. You have to know what to do with them. You have to scan them in on a transparency scanner and paste them together digitally in the proper way. The cyan plate has to go in the cyan channel, magenta in magenta, yellow in yellow, and the black plate has to go in the black channel. This is easy for me but your average comic book fan doesn’t know anything about that.

By the way, despite having three scanners that I regularly use, I don’t have an 8.5×11 inch transparency scanner to scan these in. But the school I teach at does. So I’m going to scan these in there when I have the chance. I was actually looking up how much a 8.5×11 transparency scanner would cost and full retail on one is around $1200. A used one on eBay is around $700. I don’t think I’ll be getting one anytime soon.

I still want to get the cover negatives to one of the “Hot Stuff” covers. There were also some nice “Spooky” (he’s a ghost) covers. I even liked one of the “Little Dot” covers. At $50 a piece I’m not going to get any of them any time soon but they’ll probably hang around on eBay for a while. As I wrote before I don’t think there are a lot of people out there who know what to do with them.

Meanwhile I’ll have to scan in “Little Lotta” #121 and make myself a print of it. It’s a real life “Cover to a Comic Book that Doesn’t Exist.”

I added a new type of drawing to my workflow this week. The “Tiny Drawing.” I’ve drawn small before. In my “Gatsby” sketchbook I made tiny figure drawings to get down ideas for things. Then there are my Inkbooks. They are filled with small thumbnail drawings that are only two or three inches a side. I have drawn a lot of Art Cards that are baseball card size. I even occasionally draw small things on various pieces of scrap paper. But these new Tiny Drawings are one inch by one and a half inches. That’s pretty small.

It all started when I bought some new paper. I usually work on 11×17 inch paper. That’s a standard paper size and the correct proportions for making comic book art. I also usually work on Bristol Board (paper) that comes in 14×17 inch pads. So I cut off three inches from the width and then cut up that 3×17 inch strip into four 2.5×3.5 inch pieces of art card paper. I’ve got a nice paper cutter to handle the job.

This new pad of paper that I bought was a pad of 140lb watercolor paper. That’s a thick piece of paper that can stand up to being soaked with water. Good stuff. It came in a 12×18 inch pad so I decided that I should cut it down to my normal 11×17 inches. I’m a creature of habit and that makes things easier for me. So I got out my paper cutter and trimmed an inch off the width and then the height of the paper.

That left me with two long pieces of paper an inch wide. It was nice paper too! As I stood there looking at those two pieces of paper I wondered what I could do with them. I didn’t want to throw them out but I also had no use for them. So I let them sit on my drawing table for the afternoon.

Sometime as they were sitting there and I was going about my business doing whatever (it was a Sunday afternoon) it struck me what I could do with them. Or at least it struck me how to cut them up. They were already an inch wide so if I cut them to an inch and a half long I could have the proportions I usually work at. On the 11×17 inch paper I usually work at 10×15 inches. That’s a 2:3 proportion just like the 1:1.5 paper is.

I think it was after I cut the paper to size that the idea of what to draw came to me. A small face with a word balloon and a word in the balloon.

Just a few weeks ago I had ordered some new art supplies. That’s where this new pad of paper came from. Along with the paper I ordered a few new small black markers. I love small black markers and I love to try out new ones. One of them that I bought was a Dick Blick house brand marker with archival pigment ink. Its size was 1.0mm. That’s actually big for a small black marker. Most of them have a tip that’s under one millimeter. But I like the larger small tips.

I got at it and first drew all four borders on the small piece of paper and then the empty word balloon. At first when I was drawing these I’d come up with a word to put in the balloon and then draw the face. Somewhere after the first thirty or so of them I switched and now I draw the face first and then put the word in. And the word was whatever came into my head in the moment.

At first I was using the same 1.0mm pen for the drawing and the lettering. But I found that pen was a little too big for the lettering. I switched over to a 0.8mm little black marker and that worked better. It was also why I switched up the order I put the word in. At first I would draw the borders, switch pens to letter, switch pens to draw the face, and then switch the pen again to title and sign the back. That was a lot of pen switching. Now I draw the borders, draw the face, switch pens, letter the word and the back. A much more efficient work flow.

I also decided that I was going to give these drawings away. They’re tiny and ephemeral. I’ll give them away to my students or anyone else I saw who wanted one (I’ve learned no to give art away to people who don’t really want it). Maybe they’d keep track of them of maybe they’d disappear over the years. Who knows?

I like the way the drawings came out. They’re stripped down to the very basic thing that a comic is. A character, a word balloon, and a word. Nothing more. I also think that there is an appealing cuteness to them. I made almost all of the faces with big smiles on them and the words are generally pleasant and that plus the small size makes them appealing. I like the basicness of them.

I’ve already given some of them away and everybody seems to like them. One question I got asked about them is how long it takes to draw one of them. I find that a hard question to answer because sometimes they can go really fast and at other times slower. And even if they go really fast it’s usually for a short time. I can draw ten of them in about twenty minutes but I sure can’t do that every twenty minutes.

The last couple of nights I drew some of them while watching TV. I drew ten of them over about the span of a forty minute TV show. Maybe that’s a more realistic time for how long it takes to draw one of these. Four minutes a piece is still quick but, once again, I probably could do that through every TV show.

So far I’ve made a hundred of these tiny drawings. That’s over six days. Not a bad pace but probably not one I’ll keep up. I can’t even give away that many over a week’s time. But I’m enjoying drawing them so I’ll make more.