Radiant Comics

As I’ve written about many times on this blog the mundane things in life interest me. Sure there are big events in life that can define us but life is mostly made up of small decisions that add up over time and influence our behavior from day to day. In the spirit of that I did a mundane thing this week that changed a small part of my behavior. I turned my art markers horizontal.

First off all, most markers have basically the same design. Inside the plastic barrel of a marker is a sponge and that sponge is saturated with ink. The tip of the marker is also a sponge (though usually a harder sponge) so the tip draws ink from the reservoir that is the inside the barrel sponge. When the interior sponge runs out of ink you either have to refill the sponge or throw out the marker.

Most “Art Markers,” such as Copic markers, Blick markers, Artfinity markers, or ShinHan markers are alcohol based markers with dyes used to color the ink. Dye is not as lightfast as pigments are but they blend well into the alcohol. This helps the color be consistent over time as the dye doesn’t separate from the alcohol and settle.

One of the challenges of working with markers is how to store them. Sometimes, if you buy a set of markers, there will be an instruction to store them in the horizontal position. I believe that was written on a set of ShinHan markers that I used to have. But I have also visited websites that said it didn’t matter if they were stored horizontally or vertically. I think that’s Copic’s position.

Years ago I bought a set of Copics and they came in a case that was clearly meant to be stored in the vertical position. I’m not sure if that’s what they recommended but that was the way it was designed to sit best. I kept it that way until this week.

I also bought a similar case for the rest of my Copic markers. Plus I bought two other stands for my Blick and Artfinity markers. I call them stands because they were obviously designed to stand up vertically. So the left side tray on my drawing table had five marker cases on it holding about three hundred markers all standing vertically. That’s the way things have been for the last decade. Then at the end of 2025 I bought a set of 99 Pantone markers.

Pantone markers art not dye alcohol based markers. They are pigment water based markers. Pigments are way more lightfast than dyes but I think that the pigments are larger particles than dyes and therefore can separate from the water a little bit more than the dyes from the alcohol. Even if this is not the case and there is another reason for it the Pantone markers specifically say to store them vertically. Plus the cases are built to be stored vertically.

After I got these Pantone markers I had to rearrange the whole right side of my drawing table and its side tray. I set up the markers so that they were stored horizontally and were easy to get to. I even got some smaller Pitt Penn pigment markers, put them in a vertical stand, and turned that stand horizontally. It’s off to the side on a shelf but I figured that I may as well store all the pigment based markers horizontally.

The Copic markers, as well as the Pantone ones, have caps on either end of the marker covering up two different tips. There is a chisel tip and a brush tip. I never use the chisel tip and always use the brush tip. The thing that I’ve noticed when storing them vertically is that, since I store them brush tip down, the chisel tip often dries out after it’s been sitting there for years. This hasn’t bothered me much since I never use that side but I did notice it.

I write this all down because, as I said, this week I decided to turn all of the markers on the left side of my desk horizontal. It took a little bit of doing to get it done.

The cases were not meant to be turned on their sides and stacked that way so I had to put a backstop on them. A had a small inch tall rim on the left side of the side tray but now I needed something taller. I used a six in tall piece of cardboard (from the back of a pad of drawing paper) and stapled that to the wood of the rim. I also had to re-glue the wooden piece that I used for the rim. This all kept the marker cases from sliding off the side of the side tray.

This backslide was also important because I also had to put a small piece of molding under the marker case to get it to tip up slightly. When the marker case was flush with the top of the table I couldn’t get the bottom row of markers out easily. When it was tipped up slightly they were easier to grab.

The backslide is functional but a little bland. It’s just a piece of brown cardboard. I might have to think up a prettier solution in the future but for now it’ll do.

For the last two months I’ve mainly been using my pigment based markers. My dye based ones have mostly just sat there. After I turned them all horizontal I decided to use the dye based ones for my latest “Dreams of Things” cover. Everything went fine. I have to turn my head a little differently when choosing a color and I had to be a little more careful as I pulled a marker form it’s case but nothing was really harder about it. I just wasn’t used to it yet after having them stored vertically for a decade.

Sometime or another I’m going to have to test the chisel tips of these markers now that they’re horizontal. If they were dried out before then they might have to be replaced if I want them to work. But since I don’t used them I probably won’t bother going to the expense of replacing them. Replacing them would be a mundane thing so maybe someday when I’m bored and restless. We’ll see.

Steven Ward back in April of 1985 helping me out with a photoshoot for my photography class.

Yesterday, March 29, 2026, I got the news that my childhood friend, Steven Ward, died in a car accident. That’s sad news and it got me thinking about our childhood together and particularly playing stickball. We spent a lot of summer days playing stickball.

Growing up Steven and I played a lot of sports together. He was a year older than me but we were always around the same size and athleticism. He had an inch on me as I was five foot eleven and he was six feet tall but we were both good athletes. We played even in most sports. We played football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, and any other sport we invented together. I remember patio hockey being an invention of ours.

This wasn’t city stickball that’s played out in the streets with manhole covers and sewer grates marking the playing field. This was suburban stickball. It was called Strikeout in other neighborhoods. If you’ve even seen a box with an X through it painted on a schoolyard wall that was stickball. The box was the strike zone.

The batter stood in front of the box with a broomstick as a bat and the pitcher stood a marked distance away with a tennis ball for him to pitch. If the pitcher could get the ball in the box without the batter hitting it the pitch was a strike. Outside the box was a ball. You know the drill.

If the batter hit the ball there were markings out in the field where the hit would be a double, triple, and home run. Past the basketball court was a double and such. Any ground ball past the pitcher was a single. If the pitcher fielded the ground ball it was an out. Of course any fly ball caught was an out too. You could have multiple people play and have outfielders, and occasionally we did, but most of the time it was just Steven and I.

Over the years we played in multiple places such as the schoolyard across the street and the schoolyard down the block about a mile away. But the summers I mostly remember were when we were in high school playing in his backyard. Somewhere around the summers of 1982 to 1986. He lived next door to me so our yards were connected with a fence in between them. You had to get it over the fence for a double.

When we played in Steven’s back yard we usually had a boom box with us listening to some cassette tapes or the Mets’ game. It was Steven who was the baseball fan and he loved the Mets. I especially remember listening to games as we played during the summer of 1986 because that was the year the Mets eventually won the world series. There were a lot of happy Mets’ games that year.

The album I remember listening to the most was the original Asia album. The reason I remember it the best (besides the fact that we played it a lot of times) is that one song, “Heat of the Moment,” had the line, “Now we find ourselves in 82.” Songs rarely mentioned the year they were made in them and I noted that at the time. Even at the time I knew that I would forever associate 1982 and playing stickball with Steven to that song. We were marked in time by it.

I remember the band and title of one more album from that time but not the actual music. Steven was a huge fan of the band, “Toronto” and the album, “Get it on Credit.” He used to play that cassette tape in the car a lot. He was the only person I’ve ever met who even know who that band was let alone was huge fan. So I associate them with that time period too.

Steven didn’t have a wall with a box on it in his backyard so we made our own. We were always building stuff out of wood and so always had some laying around. It was almost always scrap wood and all these days later I can’t even remember where we got it. It’s not like we were going to the lumber yard to buy it new but there was always scrap wood around. But now that I contemplate it this may have been after Steven and I turned his basement into a finished basement. Twice. But that’s another story. He did order lumber at that time. So there could have been extra two by fours from that.

We used two by fours to build a frame about four feet wide by six feet tall. We then nailed a piece of plywood the same size to it. We painted a box with an X on the front of the plywood and propped it up leaning it on a couple more two by fours. It took the two of us but we could put it up and take it down in a moment.

I wrote before that we were even athletically in most things. But by the time we were in high school we were not even in stickball. My sport was football and I was a good quarterback but his sport was baseball and he was a pitcher on his high school team. I probably lost at least three quarters of the games we played.

The main difference between us was that Steven could throw a curveball. Throwing a football is easier on the arm than throwing a baseball (or a tennis ball in place of a baseball). Throwing a curveball means snapping your arm as you release the ball in a way that puts a lot of strain on your elbow. It hurts. That’s why you always see pitchers icing their elbows. Not having that much interest in baseball I was never willing to learn to endure that pain it took to learn to throw a curveball. Steven was and did.

I was a solid stickball pitcher and I was accurate enough to hit any part of the box anytime I wanted to but without the deception of a curveball I was at a disadvantage. In the guessing game of where the pitcher is going to throw the ball it’s an easier guess if the ball is traveling straight.

Not being able to hit a Major League curveball has kept a lot of otherwise good baseball players from being able to make it in the big leagues. We were playing stickball and Steven’s curveball was far from the major leagues but I still couldn’t hit it consistently.

It’s tough to explain why I had a hard time consistently hitting a curveball but it all has to do with perception. When swinging a bat, even a stickball bat, you are guessing where the ball is going to be. It’s an educated guess based on what the pitcher has done before and is doing now but it’s still a guess. You’re not reacting to where the ball is. There is no time for that. So when the ball doesn’t travel on a straight line, as it should, my brain and body could not anticipate where it would end up. My swing would often be hesitant and I’d miss. Or I’d straight up miss. That made me lose a lot of otherwise close games.

I’ve always been athletically competitive and it was never any fun to lose all those games but I loved playing anyway. It was a challenge. We always had multiple cans of tennis balls around the yard so we wouldn’t have to chase balls down if they got hit. The pitcher would just pick up another one and keep pitching. It’s the way we spent a lot of our high school summer days. Hanging out and playing stickball. The hanging out was half the fun.

Of all of the sounds of the game that comes back to me as I write this the sound of the stick hitting the tennis ball is number two. The strongest sound is of the tennis ball hitting the plywood. It was a distinctive sound that I heard over and over as we played. As both pitcher and batter. A thunk that’s forever in my memory.

Our last summer playing stickball was probably sometime after high school in one of our college summers off. Maybe it was the years of playing or maybe it was because Steven wasn’t pitching for his high school team anymore but I finally got better at hitting the curve ball. Just when I started to get a few more wins we got too old for the game. We gradually stopped playing. One day we played our last game and didn’t even know it. Since he was a year ahead of me in school he had to go out and get a real job first. Grownups don’t play much stickball.

Goodbye Steven.

Every week I make a video and post it on YouTube showing off the comic books that I bought that week. Also on that video I show off a piece of art that I’ve made. Usually it’s one of my “Dreams of Things” covers that I’m showing off. I put them on my easel that’s behind me when I make the video and when I’m done showing off the comics I turn around, pick the cover off of the easel, and then show it to the camera. As a consequence the last cover I showed off is still on my easel and I thought I’d look at it and write about it now.

The cover is “Dreams of Things” #313 and I completed it on January 5, 2026. That’s about a month and a half ago as I write this. First of all this image looks vaguely familiar to me. I pulled it out of one of my Inkbooks (my books of thumbnail drawings) and I may have used it for something before. Or maybe when looking through one of my Inkbooks for something to draw it caught my eye but I didn’t end up using it for something. Either way this is a weird feeling for me because I usually know it when I’m reworking a picture that I’ve used before. I do that sometimes but I’m usually sure about it. This time I’m not.

This is a drawing that I colored with my new set of Pantone ink markers. I’ve really been enjoying using them. At first I struggled with them because they are different to use compared to the Copic/Artfinity/Blick alcohol based markers that I’ve been using for a decade. I had to come up with some new approaches and techniques in order to get the most out of them. I also had to buy some more Pitt Pen ink based markers to go along with them. The two brands of markers work well together.

Though I don’t have fresh memories of making this one I do remember doing the background first. It’s full of elongated swirls and reminds me a bit of wind and a bit of waves. I like the blues and the pigmented marker ink gives a sharper edge to it than the alcohol dye based ink in my other markers. I like the look of the background a lot. I think it brings the whole piece together.

The most noticeable thing about this picture is that it appears to be sideways. We have the logo and trade dress up top showing us what side is right side up but the face/head is sideways. That makes this piece a little disorienting. Sort of like a dream where you don’t know which way is up or down.

I believe that the second color I laid down was the orange on the right side. When the drawing is turned on its side then the curvy ink lines could either be clouds or water but the orange color doesn’t help us decide. I’m pretty sure that’s why I picked it. This drawing is especially disorienting and I went with it.

The face and what appears to be shoulders on the main character are a cacophony of color. We’ve got green, yellow, orange, purple, red, blue, and brown. That’s a lot of different colors in a small space.

The brown is our neutral and most of the reds and blues are toned down. Either the yellow or the orange circle of the mouth are our brightest brights. Every other color is balanced in a way so that none of them really stand out. The purple might be demanding the most attention but only by a little bit.

I like the quizzical nature of the face itself. Each eye is made up of just two circles without even any color in them. The side eye it’s giving with the three lines underneath each eye (maybe the surprise lines and maybe eyelashes) speaks to me. I understand his need to know what that wind blowing out of his ear is. I’m not sure what it is and neither is he.

As I film my comic book haul and show these off on camera I record on my iPad. This gives me the opportunity to look at the cover on the screen and see it in a different way. When showing this one off I ended up flipping it around to see it with all four sides as the top. It was fun to rotate it around and watch it change.

One of the changes as I moved the drawing into the horizontal position is that the tilted grey triangles really became shark fins to me. I drew them colored them to be shark fins but with the cover right side up I don’t notice them very much. But with the drawing turned on its side they came alive. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything like that so it was cool.

This drawing has some nice textures in it too. I like to draw textures when I use markers but I’m using them even more with these water based Pantone pigment markers. The alcohol markers I use blend together well but these water based ones don’t. So I end up using more textures. The textures in the purple pull the piece together well. The clouds have three distinct lines of colors of orange which makes its own texture and the pattern in the sky counts as a texture too. It works well together for me.

One last bit of texture I’ve been adding in to these Pantone marker drawings is, after I finish with the color, to go back in and add some small tick marks with a black marker or dip pen. I find if I add this in while I’m inking the markers can sometimes smear the little marks. Not always and it’s mostly the light yellows that do it but I like to avoid smearing if possible. So I put them in at the end. It works as a finishing touch too. What needs to be done? Just this little bit more here.

This might be one of my favorites of these. I hope you like it too.

Photo of the Negs. As you can see they don’t look like much.

I picked up a piece of comic book production art last month. I’ve picked similar production art before but not in a little while. Production art is the things that go into getting a comic book printed. Usually they are not original art but copies of original art that are used in the printing process. The ones that I picked up are the production negatives that were used to make the printing plates for the Harvey comic book “Spooky Spooktown.” From June 1976.

There are four black and white negatives in the set. Each one represents one of the three color printing plates (magenta, cyan, and yellow) plus the black plate. After the color separations were made by hand they were photographed on a big graphics art camera and these negatives were made. Then these negatives were used to make the printing plates. This process isn’t used anymore since now things are digital but these negatives are remnants of the old way of doing things.

I bought these production negative off eBay and they cost me around fifty dollars shipped and taxed. I’ve see a lot of comic book production art on eBay in recent years and it has gone up in price. These production negatives tend to be a bit on the cheaper side of production art. I think because not a lot of people know what to do with them. They don’t look particularly good on their own as an art piece but you can scan them in and make a really nice print from them. I also use them to show my students how the printing process works.

I bought a copy of the comic too.

These for negatives are comic book print size which means they’re about seven by ten inches. That’s a big negative and you need a transparency scanner to scan them in. I have three scanners. An 11×17 scanner, an 8.5×11 scanner, and a dedicated slide and film scanner. The 8.5×11 inch scanner can scan in medium format negatives but not these big production negatives. Luckily I work at a school that has a scanner with a transparency adaptor that can scan them in.

After my semester started at the end of this January I brought the production negatives into my class. My plan was to show the class how to scan them in. Then the scanner wouldn’t cooperate. I attempted to scan them in but the scans came out all distorted. I’m not sure why.

Since I was doing this in the middle of class I didn’t have time to troubleshoot so I abandoned my attempt to scan them in and switched over to a set of production negatives that I scanned in last year. The lesson was to line up the scans on different layers in Photoshop (there are registration marks on the negatives that make that easy) and then paste each negative into the color channel it belongs in. The cyan negative goes into the cyan channel. After all four are pasted in you have a complete color cover.

We did the lesson with the older cover and everything went well but I still had to scan in Spooky Spooktown. So the next week I got in a little bit early to see if I could troubleshoot the scanner. Either somebody already did (which I doubt) or whatever went wrong the week before was probably my fault (more likely). Either way the scanner worked perfectly and I made my scans.

When I was home the following week I decided to use the scans to make a print of the cover. Usually scanning in the original production negatives of a cover is the best way to make a reproduction/print so that’s why I like to buy them.

As I said before there are registration marks on the negatives to help line them up. Those registration marks used to come on a roll of clear tape. You’d tape them onto the black negative and when you made the negatives of the color plates the registration marks would show through and become part of the color negatives.

So the registration marks on the three color plates are part of the photograph. The registration marks on the black plate are the ones that were taped on. Fifty year old tape doesn’t want to stick on anymore. All the registration marks on the black plate fell off before I could scan it. Whoops! This made lining it up a little bit harder but not impossible.

In the few other sets of production negatives that I’ve bought and scanned in they lined up just fine. But as I was lining up Spooky Spooktown I was having trouble. I couldn’t get it right. At first I thought it was because of the lack of registration marks but no matter how I rotated things and shifted them around I couldn’t get the registration right. I even looked up a scan of the original comic book to check its registration and it was fine.

The solution to my problem ended up being that I had to shrink the width of the black plate by about half a percent. That’s a really small number. I still don’t know what went wrong. None of the other production negatives I’ve bought have had this problem and I don’t see how the black plate negative could have shrunk. But either it did or something went wrong in the scanning process with that negative but not the three others. I may try scanning them in again just to see.

In the end I got a pretty good print of the cover. By scanning in the negatives it assures a quality I can’t get any other way. I also make the prints larger than comic book size. I put them on eleven by seventeen inch paper which is closer to the size of the original art. I printed out a couple of proof copies of Spooky but I haven’t put it on the good paper just yet.

By the way I tried to find out who drew this cover but the Grand Comic Book Database (.com) doesn’t know. I then asked duck.ai and it says that it’s by Dan DeCarlo. I don’t know if that’s correct or not but it’s the only answer I got.