Radiant Comics

A pile of three marker ink drawings.

Creatively January is probably the hardest month of the year for me. Part of it is coming out of the Christmas and New Year season where I go from being really busy with family stuff to not busy at all and part of it is me looking forward at the new year and wondering what creative projects I should work on?

I usually end up getting the stuff done I always get done, such as my “Four talking Boxes” comic strip and my “Dreams of Things” covers, but somehow that doesn’t always count in my brain. It always wants to get new stuff done too. I’m not sure what that new stuff is but here is some of the “Mundane” every day stuff.

One of the basic paper sizes I work at is 6×9 inches. I buy pads of 9×12 inch Bristol board and cut those pages in half. I do almost all of my pencil drawings at that size before blowing them up to 11×17 inches to be inked.

Almost all the 6×9 inch drawings start out even smaller. Often they start as 2×3 inch thumbnail drawings in one of my Inkbooks. Those are my sketchbooks that I draw small ink drawings in to get down visual ideas. I work in ink so that I don’t get caught up in trying to make the drawing “Good” and just get down an idea instead.

One of my inkbooks has around nine drawings a page and each book is about 100 pages. So that is 900 drawings per book and I finished book 25 last year. I’ve got a lot of choices when I want to make one of them.

One of my types of drawing I call my “Three marker drawing.” It’s pretty easy to figure out why. I use a fat marker, a medium marker, and a thin marker to draw them. All of them are black markers. I actually hadn’t made one of these type of drawings in months so I just kind of forgot about them. I’ve made plenty of them in the past but not many in the second half of 2025.

In one of the drawers underneath my drawing table I keep three envelopes with 6×9 inch blue line drawings in them. I keep them loaded up with drawings ready to work on. They are labeled “Three Marker Drawings,” “Dreams of Things,” and “Random Drawings.” I’ve been working out of the DOT one for months so I kind of forgot about the other two.

I was looking for something to draw the other day and grabbed one of the Three Marker Drawings sketches. It’s a blown up thumbnail from my Inkbook printed out in blue on a 6×9 inch piece of paper. The edges are also taped over so that I can draw right over the edge of the drawing. That keeps my line consistent and I can peel the tape off at the end to clean up the edges. Hence my “Tape Peeling” videos were born.

I finished five of these drawings over a couple of days and they came out well. I’ve used these drawings as the basis for some of my “Big Ink Drawings” so maybe I’ll get some of those done this year. It’s been a while since I’ve worked on them.

I even set up a bunch more 6×9 inch blue line drawings to be made into Three Marker Drawings. These take more effort than normal 6×9 inch blue line drawings. The normal ones I just pick a thumbnail, open the scan of the page the thumbnail is on, put the thumbnail into the 6×9 inch template I have ready, then print it out in blue line.

I do the same thing for the Three marker drawing ones except then I have to mask all the edges out with removable tape. I put a piece of tape along the edge up to the border of the drawing and then trim the tape so it doesn’t hang over the side. I do this for all four sides. It doesn’t take forever but it takes a few minutes. I set up ten drawings that way.

I also set up about six more “Dreams of Things” drawings to be pencilled. I already had about six of them ready but more is always better. I like choices when I’m want to draw something. The method is exactly the same, minus the tape, except that I have to keep track of where the logo is going to go. I need room for that.

Just because I was already spending my time on the mundane task of setting up all these 6×9 inch blue line drawings I decided to set up eight random ones too. I kind of had it in mind to make some “Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love” or “Great Gatsby” prints so I mostly concentrated on figure thumbnails for these ones but they can and up being anything.

As I was setting up all of these 6×9 inch blue line drawings I came up with something new. In looking at all of my thumbnails I noticed some of them had interesting landscape spaces. I don’t usually do a lot of landscapes but often have landscape spaces in the backgrounds of my “Dreams of Things” covers so I’m sensitive to them.

I do a lot of 2.5×3.5 inch Art Cards and lately I’ve been looking for new things to do with them. I’ve made some abstract Art Cards and now I thought that I could make some of these weird landscapes. They were simple too. I decided that was their strength and so I shouldn’t complicate them.

I ended up drawing them straight in ink on one of the cards and then coloring them with my Pantone ink markers. The drawing itself is simple enough to draw in only a few minutes. Most of the work is done in the thumbnail which leaves time for the coloring. I think they’ve come out pretty cool. I came up with the name “Strangescape Art Cards” for them.

That’s a little look at the mundane world or going through a lot of thumbnail drawings to find the gems and making 6×9 inch blue line drawings of them. Hopefully something exciting comes of them.

The Summer I tuned 15, way back in 1981, I discovered that a comic shop opened up in Nyack NY (named M&M Comics for the mother and son duo of Marge and Mike). That’s about a twenty minute drive away from me. The next Spring my friend Rob turned 16 and got his driver’s license and it was sometime around then that we started making trips to the comic shop. I used to go to the local newsstand to get my comics but this started the lifelong habit of weekly comic shop trips.

I loved going to the comic shop because it opened up a whole new word of comic books to me beyond what I could get on the newsstand. Even when I could only get Marvel and DC comics I gravitated towards the offbeat ones. So when the world of indie comics opened up to me I jumped in.

Comic book stores usually have a subscription service. It’s often called a “Pull List” because they’ll pull the books you want out of the stack of books they got in that week and put them aside for you. It helps the store because it’s guaranteed sales for them and it helps the customer not miss out on the comics they want.

In those early days of me going to the comic shop I don’t think I had a pull list. I was probably still going to the newsstand a lot because I wasn’t making it every week to the comic shop. Or maybe my pull list was small and I was supplementing it by picking things up off the shelf. Either way that brings us to the topic of Eclipse Magazine.

Eclipse was an small indie publisher back in the 1980s and I bought a lot of their stuff over the decade. From May 1981 to January of 1983 they published eight issues of a magazine size comic called “Eclipse Magazine.” It had a color cover and black and white interiors. It was an anthology magazine filled with a few genres of stories. Sc-fi, fantasy, super hero, and slice of life were a few of them.

It also had some big name mainstream artists and writers like Jim Starlin, Steve Gerber, Marshall Rogers, and Gene Colan as well as some well known indie creators like Trina Robbins, Kaz, Howard Cruz, and Marc Hempel. It was a comic that was right up my alley then and now.

As a consequence of this magazine coming out so early in my comic shop visiting years I wasn’t able to buy every issue. I think I was missing three out of the eight issues. Despite, over the years, telling myself that I was going to buy those three issues so I could have all eight to read it took me forty two years to finally do that. It wasn’t until the summer of 2025 that I bought the three issues I needed off of eBay.

Just this month (January 2026) I finally sat down and started reading the magazine again. The first thing I decided was how to read it. Since it’s an anthology there are many different stories in it and some of them are in multiple parts across a few issues. Do I read all the chapters of a story first or do I read all the stories in an issue before moving on? I brought up this topic on our Friday night YouTube show and most people said to read it issue by issue. I decided that was the best idea too. So I’ve been reading it one issue a week and have read three issues so far.

The first thing I have to tell you is that the stuff is good. All anthologies are hit or miss but this one has far fewer misses than normal. There is a lot of talent working on this book. They were also trying. The early 1980s were the beginning of alternate or indie comics. In the late 1970s and early 1980s comic shops were being opened all over the country and they had a new distribution system to get them comics.

New publishers were popping up hoping to be an alternative to Marvel and DC. They were giving creators new deals with ownership of the comics they made and the creators also had the freedom to tell stories that weren’t superhero stories. It was a cool time to be a young comic book reader who liked comics outside of the mainstream.

One of the interesting things about rereading these comics is that they really capture that time and place. Most things are “Of their era” but most eras are fairly bland. There is not much difference between a 2014 comic and a 2024 comic in terms of the flavor of the era. But the early 1980s in indie comics were a distinct era. The mid 1980s black and white boom was another distinct era so the early 1980s indie era didn’t even last very long.

These comics capture that early 1980s indie era so well that as I read them I was often aware of the passage of time. That also comes with owning the comics for so long, meaning to reread them for so long, and finally doing a reread after 43-45 years have passed by.

When I opened up the first issue of Eclipse Magazine and saw the date of May 1981 on it I was struck by the fact that I was a fifteen year old when I last read this comic. And it was even the same physical copy of the comic. I have had it in my collection since I was fifteen.

Fifteen year old Jared could not even comprehend that there was going to be a fifty-nine year old Jared. Fifty-nine year old Jared can barely even comprehend that there once was a fifteen year old Jared. Yet here we are linked together by reading the same exact comic book.

I have a lot of comic books in my collection that I’ve had since I was a kid but most of those I’ve read, or at least looked at, many times over the years. Many Jareds have seen or thought about those comics. Eclipse magazine was a comic I read once and then never looked at until now because I always wanted to fill in those missing issues but never did. It’s a bit of a unicorn in my collection.

I still have five more issues to read over the next five weeks that I am really looking forward to reading. And fifteen year old Jared says, “Hi.”

Right now it’s January 31st and so far here in the suburbs of NYC it’s been a snowy winter. After any snow storm the first thing I have to do is clear the driveway. My driveway is a hill and it’s uphill to get out of it. Without clearing the driveway cars can’t make it up the hill. If I want to go out I have to get the snow out of there.

I have a John Deere riding mover. It’s an LT155 that I’ve had since the year 2000. It’s a bit old and battered but it still runs and gets the job done. Except for this last storm.

A couple of weekends ago we had two snow storms. On Saturday the 17th I cleared a few inches of snow off the driveway with the John Deere. Then on Sunday another inch or two fell. I hopped on the tractor, started it up, but as I went to plow the engine cut out. I started it multiple times but it wasn’t going anywhere.

Tractors in general, and mine specifically, have a safety switch on them. If there is no weight on the seat and the brake is taken off then the engine cuts out. A dead man switch. That’s what I suspected went wrong. The switch on the seat.

Luckily I had a backup. A few years ago a friend of my mother’s gave me a Toro Electric Shovel. It’s like a mini snow blower. It’s corded so you have to plug it in but I have a long outdoor extension cord for such tools. The Toro is only twelve inches wide and can only handle snow up to around six inches deep but it got the job done. It’s a bit heavy and takes some effort but it’s much better than shoveling. I was happy to have it.

The next thing I did was to order a new seat switch for the tractor. It came in on a day my brother in law was over. He’s a guy who is really good at fixing stuff. We put the seat switch in (an easy task) and then started up the tractor. As soon as the brake was off it stopped running. So much for an easy fix. My brother in law took a look at the tractor and discovered a second safety switch. This one was on the brake. Two dead man switches?!? That sounds like overkill to me.

I went inside and looked on the internet to order a new brake safety switch. This all took place on a Tuesday. That’s when I ordered. The problem was that there was a big storm hitting us the coming Sunday. A once in a decade size snow storm. The switch was coming by post office (there was no option for getting it faster) and the projected date of it arriving was from Friday to Monday. The store posted it on Wednesday but then it sat in a Florida post office for three days. I don’t think it even got out of Florida until Saturday. Needles to say it didn’t arrive in time.

On Friday my brother in law was nice enough to bring me over a big snowblower he had lying around. At first he had to get it started but he did. He showed me how to start it, it was gas powered and had a pull cord, and it started up for me on Friday easily.

On Sunday afternoon at around 12:30 PM I decided to clear the driveway. It was still snowing but there was already six inches on the ground. I went to start up the snow blower but it was about 10ºF out and the thing would not start. Pulling the cord was super hard. It felt like the engine was swimming in molasses. I was getting so tired trying to start the snow blower that I decided to switch to the Toro.

It’a a good thing I went out when I did because by the time I got the Toro out there was probably eight inches of snow. With that small twelve inch Toro it took me two and a half hours to clear the driveway. By the time I was done the part I had started with was covered again.

According to the internet a Toro Electric Shovel weighs 16 pounds. You have to push it through the snow and then drag it back to where you started to push it through the snow again. It’s a lot less work than lifting the snow as you shovel but it is still a bit of work. It’s very tiring on the arms and shoulders but easy on the back.

After I cleared the driveway that first time I was back an hour later to clear it again. I cleared four more inches this time. That took me an hour. After that I took a two hour break and then went back to clear another three inches. As I got to the top of the driveway it was covered in snow yet again so I turned around and cleared the driveway again of one to two inches of snow. That took me an hour and a half total.

After that I was done for the night. It was about 8:30PM as I finished. The next morning I went out for an hour and a half and cleared the last two inches. It took so long because of the snowplow clearing the road and pushing the road snow into the top of the driveway. The show was at least a foot deep and four feet wide up there. I had to skim the 16lb Toro on top of the pile and go across two or three times to move the snow. That still beat shoveling.

This was the most amount of snow we have gotten in about ten years. After the second time I cleared the driveway I went out into the middle of my yard and stuck a yardstick in the snow. It measured 14 inches. After the third time I cleared the driveway I did the same thing. The snow still measured 14 inches despite me clearing three more inches off the driveway. I would say we got about 16 to maybe 18 inches of snow but it’s not easy to measure as my measuring shows.

On Monday I was really tired. I mostly sat in a chair all day and rested up. On Wednesday the part for the John Deere arrived in the mail. On Thursday I put the part on and the tractor ran fine. I went out and cleared the very back of the driveway that I didn’t bother clearing with the Toro. It’s all good now but I sure wish that part arrived on Friday. It would have saved mea lot of pain and effort.

A altered art card I made.

I bought some Magic the Gathering cards this week. I bought them partly out of nostalgia and partly out of a desire to make some art out of them.

The nostalgia part has to do with the fact that I used to play the game back in the early 1990s and then again in the early 2000s. So it’s fun to look at the cards and read what they do. The instructions for the particular way to use a MTG card is always written on the front to it. I can read a card and imagine how I could use it in a game.

The other part of the nostalgia for these cards is that they are MTG Spider-Man cards and I used to read Spider-Man. I still read tons of comics every week, and occasionally Spider-Man, but I haven’t been a regular Spider-Man reader since the early 1980s.

It’s only been in recent years that Hasbro (they own MTG) has added cards to the game made from properties that they don’t own. They made some Lord of the Rings cards and some Final Fantasy cards. I didn’t buy any of those but the nostalgia wasn’t as strong with them as with Spider-Man.

At first I just bought a few individual Spider-Man cards off of eBay. I bought four of them and each was about $2.50 a piece. Each was a different version of Spidey. After getting those four I decided I wanted to see if I could get a bunch of cards at once. That’s usually called a “Lot” of cards so that’s what I searched for on eBay.

I’ve purchased lots of penny cards on eBay before. Usually one can get about a thousand MTG penny cards for around $30 shipped and taxed. But this time I was looking for Spider-Man cards specifically so that cuts down on the amount of lots that are out there. Since most of the lots are made up of the cheapest cards there aren’t many rare cards in a lot of a thousand cards.

I looked through a whole bunch of Spider-man MTG lots and most of them were not what I wanted. I wanted cheap and plentiful so most of the cards were out of my price range. They weren’t super expensive just more than I wanted to spend on a whim. The Spider-Man set is a new one so that made sense.

A altered art card I made.

I eventually found a lot that appealed to me. It was around a six hundred card set and had both Spider-Man and Final Fantasy cards in it. Plus some others. The set was around $34 shipped and taxed.

There weren’t a lot of specific cards shown in the listing or photos so I’d be taking a chance. It seemed to be a lot from just a guy getting rid of cards for whatever reason. He didn’t seem like a dealer to me. I checked the town he was selling from and it was a small town in NY State. I decided to give it a go and bough them.

When I got the cards I thought they were pretty cool. There were around twenty rare cards from the Spider-Man set so I’m guessing that they were definitely not from a dealer. Those rare cards were only worth about $2 a piece but add them all together and I thought I got a good deal. Plus there were some rare cards from the other sets in the lot. I was happy with it.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do with these MTG cards over the last few years (since COVID I think) is to figure out how to draw on them. They’ve got a thick coated surface so they’re not easy to draw on. Certainly pencil doesn’t work on such a surface so it’s tough to do any kind of preliminary drawings on them.

Over the years I’ve tested all sorts of markers on them and so far I find the ones that work the best are either the Sharpie extra fine markers or acrylic paint pens in general. No specific brand of paint pen. They all seem to cover the card pretty well. I’ve made various drawings on MTG cards over the years but I’ve never been thrilled by any of them.

I’ve also tried priming the surface of the card with various paints over the years but I haven’t really liked how any of them came out. Just this week I found something that I’ve liked best so far and that’s to use a wide white acrylic paint pen. I have a 15mm tip one and that only takes three strokes to cover the art area.

So far I like the coverage the paint pen gives me and I can draw on it with a variety of black markers. The problem comes with adding color. I can’t use any of the alcohol or water based color marker I have because they smear the black line. That doesn’t happen on regular paper but over that white paint pen it sure does.

I’m going to have to use color paint pens if I want some color but they are opaque. So they’ll cover up the black marker line and I’ll have to redo it after I add the color. That’s an extra step and it makes me have to be slow when using the paint pens to fill in color.

I also have no idea what I actually want to draw on these MTG cards. I’ve been thinking about somehow using stencils to make the drawing easier for me. I have no idea how to do that yet so I’ll have to see if it’s ever more than a notion.

I’m also thinking about mixing my Tiny Drawings with these MTG cards. I could draw just a face and a word ballon with a few words in it. I’m not sure if I’d even use color in this case but I think I will be able to pull this one off.

I could also paste things onto the card. I’ve done that before (also during COVID I think) when I pasted comic book panels onto some cards. That was fun but ultimately a little pointless. After doing a lot of them I never went back to it. I think it was more of a craft than an art.

I don’t know why I insist on trying to draw on Magic the Gathering cards. Regular pieces of paper are so much easier to draw on. I guess I need a new challenge every now and again. We’ll see how this one works out.