Radiant Comics

Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things. Case in point is that I finally finished some EC Comics sketch covers this week. I got the idea to do them months ago and they’ve been sitting around since then. One day when I was at my local comic shop I was looking around their dollar bins for anything interesting. I ran across these 1970’s reprints of old 1950’s comics. EC Comics is famous for their horror, crime, and mystery comics. The HBO show “Tales From the Crypt” is based on them. I bought three of them for three dollars and decided to make my own sketch covers for them.

The first part of making a hand bound sketch cover out of a random comic is to make the logos. Though it can be time consuming this is the easy part for me. I remake the logos as vector drawings in Adobe Illustrator with the original logo as my guide. I find this to be a fairly mindless endeavor sort of like putting a puzzle together or putting a piece of furniture together from a kit. I got this part done right away. I think I rebuilt all three logos within a week after I got the there comics. Then they sat there.

The problem was that I had no idea what to do. First of all “Sketch Covers” is a bit of a misnomer for me. I don’t really sketch on them. I make finished drawings out of them. That takes more time so I need a good idea of what I’m going to do. I had none. Second of all EC Comics had excellent artists and those artists did excellent covers. It would be hard to come up with something that was anywhere near as interesting. I had nothing so the comics just sat there as time passed.

I hadn’t made many sketch covers in a while so I was thinking up any ideas I could. One idea was to mix them with my Super Hero Cartoon Art Cards. Those are the drawings I do at art card size of a super hero saying something. It’s a head and shoulders shot with a word balloon above it. I enjoy those little faces and pithy sayings. I wanted to make them bigger and put them on a sketch cover. I looked around for a sketch cover to draw on and there were the EC ones.

The EC Comics line didn’t have stories with continuing
characters in them. They didn’t have a Spider-Man or a Superman. The comics were all anthologies of short stories that shared a horror or crime theme. But what EC Comics did have was horror hosts for their tales. A host would introduce the story and then wrap it up at the end. The most famous one is the Crypt Keeper but there were others too. The comic I had feature the host “The Old Witch” so that’s who I went with for my sketch cover.

My Old Witch cover is pretty straight forward. I drew her ugly old face and gave her a world balloon. It came out okay but in the end it was just a B rather than an A. As I was contemplating how to improve with the next one I thumbed through the crime one I had. The EC Crime comics had no hosts so I was wondering what to do with it when a panel caught my eye. It was a drawing by Bernie Krigstein and it was beautiful. It was a panel of a guy smoking a cigarette and looking over his shoulder.

A few years ago I did a series of sketch covers where I took a 1980s comic, picked a panel with a head in it, and redrew that panel for the sketch cover. The problem I had was that the art inside wasn’t always that good and I often had trouble picking a panel to work from. As a result only one in three of them was really any good. But this Krigstein panel in the EC comic was beautiful. So I decided to use that for the sketch cover.

I’ve written before about my digital drawing process with my iPad and iPencil and that’s what I used here. I didn’t even scan the panel in as I normally would do. Instead I took a photo of the panel with the iPad, opened it up in Procreate, created a new layer, and drew on the new layer right over the panel. Then I took that digital drawing put it into my Photoshop sketch cover template and printed it out to be inked. After I inked inked the drawing I colored it with markers. With all the creative work done all that was left was to pull the staples out of the comic and put the new cover on. It all went smoothly for this issue.

For the third cover I did I picked a panel drawn by Wallace Wood (I’m going with Wallace rather than Wally, as he was often credited, because I’m told by people who knew him that he never went by Wally. He went by Woody to his friends). I found it a bit tougher going that the Krigstein one. Or at least it was more time consuming. The Krigstein one was more up my alley. His type of simplicity is my type of simplicity so I understood it well. Woody’s drawing looked simple at first glance but as I was redrawing it I realized how complex his simplicity was. Or maybe it was just that is was such a different simplicity from mine that I had to pay attention a lot.

Woody put a harsh lighting effect on the face that was masterful. He broke the shadows down into black shapes that reflected the forms of the face. All of his simplicity was based upon observed light where my and Krigstein’s simplicity was based more on the shapes of objects. It was interesting to me as I worked on the Woody one how much more attention I had to pay it since it wasn’t my usual way of thinking. It took me about twice as long to make as the Krigstein one. I didn’t think that would be the case when I started it.

One last thing of note was that the Woody one was easier to color than the Krigstein one. Since it had a lot of lighting effects in the drawing there was no need for me to put any into the color. It was a simple matter of putting in flat color and letting the ink drawing do the rest.

Back in the 1990s I used to be a hardcore video gamer. The definition was a little looser back then because there was no such thing as professional video game players but I owned a lot of systems and played a lot of games over the years, I owned an NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Advance SP, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Sega Nomad, Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, Atari Jaguar, Playstation, Playstation Portable, X-Box, X-Box 360, and a NeoGeo Pocket.

When I used to work in the Marvel Bullpen back in the 1990s there were a whole bunch of us who played video games. We talked about them all the time. In those pre-internet days there were tons of magazines about video games and that’s where we got our information from. There were probably at least two new magazines a week and every time we got a new one in the office we’d pass it around and get psyched up for all the new games the magazines previewed. I must have had a half dozen subscriptions (they were much cheaper that way) to video game magazines in the 1990s. It was a fun time.

At the end of the 1990s if you were to ask me what my favorite video game was the answer would be Card Fighter Clash for the NeoeGeo Pocket. There were plenty of other games over the years that I liked but I always counted that one as my favorite because I played it so much. It was a card battle game along the lines of Magic The Gathering but a lot simpler. It also had a feature where it kept track of how long you played it for. I’m not sure of the exact number all these years later but I think I was up around 250 hours. I don’t think that I ever played any game more than that. After a while playing became like meditating. I could do it without using a lot of my conscious mind. It was also a turn based game and not a twitch game so I could go at whatever was my pace at the time. Since it was a hand held game I could easily watch TV and play it.

Sometime in the early 2000s I gave up my hardcore video gamer status. It had a lot to do with video games and a lot to do with me. I like games that have a lot of game to them and video games went down a path where there was less game and more immersion into a world. There were still a lot of good games but I wasn’t as interested in getting lost in a video game world for hours at a time. I’d rather spend my time creatively making art and then take a break with video games. I grew to prefer games that I could pick up and play for ten minutes and then put back down again. But those games were few and far between.

Football video games also let me down. Being a big fan of the NFL video game football was a favorite of mine. But then in the early 2000s John Madden Football paid for the exclusive rights to use the NFL and its players. That meant the end of competing football games. Where there used to be three or four football games to chose from now there was only one. That one game also became increasingly complicated. It got to the point that I was better at football in real life than in the video game. That’s not the way things should be. I realized that, if I wanted to get good at Madden Football, I’d have to practice at it. I had no interest spending more time playing that game so I gave it up entirely.

The last video game system that I bought was the X-Box 360. I think I bought it in 2006 when the Halo Edition came out. Halo was the last video game that I really liked. The last one that absorbed me into its world even as I grew disinterested in such video games.

What ended up saving video games for me was the rise of the iPhone and the invention of “Casual Gaming.” Not that I’ve ever owned a smart phone but I have owned an iPad touch and an iPad. Casual games are right up my alley. Almost all of them are made to be played for a little while when on a commute or waiting for a few minutes somewhere with a little time to kill. The controls on a phone have to be simple so the game designers have to strip things down and put some game in their games. Making an immersive world isn’t the point of casual games. Making colored blocks disappear with the touch of a finger is.

So now if you were to ask me what my favorite game is I have a new answer. Once again there are a lot of good casual games but if I base my answer on which one I’ve played the most over the years then the answer is Subway Surfer.

Subway Surfer is a game that falls into a category that was invented for the casual gamer. It’s call and “Endless Runner.” You control a character who is constantly moving forward as trains are coming at you. You have to move left, right, up, or down in order to avoid being hit by a train. There is no end to the running. You go until you get hit by a train and you score points and collect coins along the way.

Subway Surfer is also not the type of game, like Tetris, that keeps speeding up until it’s no longer humanly possible to play it and you lose. Subway Surfer does increase its speed over the first few minutes but then it tops out and stays there. I much prefer that. I always hated all those 1980s games like Pac-Man that always ended because they just got to fast.

Subway Surfer is not a turn based game like Card Fighter Clash, and I can’t watch TV while I play it, but it still can be a bit meditative. Once I get going dodging those trains my mind can go clear and I no longer think about anything and just react to the game. I move my thumb up, down, left, and right and just keep chugging along. The game rarely ends before I want it to. As it’s an endless runner I can keep running about as long as I like. It may be casual rather than hardcore but I still like it.

I’m writing this on the day we all got the news that, at age 95, Stan Lee has died. As a comic book fan since I was a kid, and I was a Marvel kid, the name Stan Lee has been in my life for a long time and I found myself sadder than I thought I’d be at this news. It prompted me to pull out a couple of things from my collection to post on social media and contemplate them.

The first thing is the magazine program from a 1975 comic convention that was signed by Stan Lee. You might think there is a story that went with the program about me going to the con and meeting Stan Lee but there is not. I’m not even sure who got the autograph in person at the con but I’ve had it since about 1977.

Back in the late 1970s in the suburbs of NYC there were no comic shops. If you were a ten year old kid your choices in comics were limited to what you could find on the newsstand. Back issues were usually nonexistent except on the occasions where word would come down the kid-grapevine that some kid in some other neighborhood was selling comics. We’d jump on our bikes, ride over to another suburban street, ask around if anyone was selling comics, and then knock on that kid’s door. Usually they would be selling the comics for a nickel a piece. Occasionally a friend of a friend would hear I liked comics and take a trip over to my neighborhood to see if I wanted to buy or trade comics.

Those back issue excursions probably only happened about a dozen times over the years, I remember such occasions being fairly rare, but a few of them were memorable. I have a vague memory of getting the Stan Lee autographed program at my house so it must have been an instance where the guy came to me. What I remember most is being confused.

Whoever this fellow was, who I made the trade with, is now lost to my memory. All I remember is that he was older than me. I was probably eleven or twelve and he was fourteen or fifteen. I don’t even remember what I traded away or got in return. What I remember is that after the deal was done and we handing over the books to each other he insisted on throwing in the program. I was baffled. The deal was done, the terms were met, so what was he doing changing the deal? He must have gotten frustrated with my suspicions because he finally said, “Just take it. It has Stan Lee’s autograph on it. Some guy traded it to me and I don’t want it.” So I took it. What else was there to do?

I’m not an autograph person. Despite having many chances I usually don’t get things signed just because it doesn’t cross my mind. But this is the autograph I’ve had in my possession for the longest time. Every time I’ve pulled it out over the years it not only reminds me of Stan Lee but makes me wonder about the two people who owned it for a short time before me who didn’t want it. Who were they? Why didn’t they want it? One who didn’t want it so much that he gave it to me just to get of it. Strange but makes me think.

The second piece that I pulled out was the book “Origins of Marvel Comics” by Stan Lee. It’s a book that I got in about 1976. It’s a reprint collection of early 1960’s Marvel comics that comprise the first issues of Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and others. It was the only way I could get to read those fifteen year old comics. But it was also an interesting history book.

Even as a child I loved history. I used to take out history books written for kids from the library. So a history of comics was of special interest to me. Before each comic that was presented Stan Lee wrote a few pages about the story behind the comic. How each one was created. I loved that stuff and read it and the comics over and over. It also taught me a little something about reading history with a skeptical eye. As much as I loved the text pieces I began to suspect that Stan Lee was telling some tall tales. Once again I had suspicions.

My ah-ha moment came a year or so later when, for another birthday or Christmas present, I was given the book “Son of Origins of Marvel Comics.” It was the same format as the first one, and I loved it just as much, but I found my smoking gun in one of Stan Lee’s text pieces.

From the first volume I was already familiar with the “Marvel Method” of making comics. Stan would write a loose plot or maybe just have a conversation with Jack Kirby, the artist of the Fantastic Four, and then Jack Kirby would go off in draw the whole comic. After the comic was pencilled Stan Lee would get the pages and add dialogue to them. Seemed simple enough but still left a lot of room for a twelve year old to wonder who really came up with what.

Then in the section before the first appearance of the Silver Surfer we were told of his origin. Stan Lee writes that when he got the pencilled pages back from Jack Kirby there was a little figure flying around them and Stan Lee asked Jack Kirby who that was. Jack answered that he thought that a villain as powerful as Galactus (it was his origin story too) should have a herald and that’s who the Silver Surfer was. Stan Lee wrote that he thought that was a great idea and he ran with it.

The problem my twelve year old brain had with Stan Lee’s telling of this story was that it didn’t jibe with the actual issue. The Silver Surfer wasn’t some minor character on the fringes of the story he was the main mover of action. He was the story. How could the writer of the story not know what was in the story? That’s what my young mind tried to figure out. Of course the inevitable answer was that Stan Lee was not the writer of that particular story. Jack Kirby was. In between the tall tales a little truth snuck in.

I still love those Stan Lee text pieces in those two “Origins” books and the few that came after them but I learned to look at history with a more skeptical eye. Over the years Stan Lee’s stories about the origins of Marvel Comics have been shown to be flawed but he always was good at writing an origin story. And I enjoyed reading them.

I recently got an Apple Pencil to go along with the iPad that I got last December. I’ve had a Wacom Tablet and Wacom Cintiq for years so I’m no stranger to digital pens but there is definitely a learning curve drawing on an iPad. I started out wanting to dive right into the deep end but I’ve had to slow down my ambitions with it. I’ve changed over to just drawing with a “Pencil” rather than going into full blown painting mode.

I’ve been using an app called “Procreate” and it’s a good drawing app but it’s been taking me time to learn the basics. It’s easy enough to pick a pencil, pen, paintbrush, or marker and change the size and opacity of the tool but beyond that the app doesn’t act like a desktop application. All my long used keyboard shortcuts don’t exist because there is no keyboard. So far I’ve been having to look up a lot of basic stuff on the internet. Like how to cut and paste. Since it’s an iPad there are finger gestures to bring up those menus. I would have never figured that out on my own. Like lots of other things that have to do with this app things are hidden and not found in an intuitive way. It’s a good thing the internet exists.

I also had to look up tips on how to set up my own color palettes. Those are the little swatches of color that you tap the pen tip on to change what color you are using. In the Adobe desktop apps I set up my color palettes decades ago and have been importing them to all the new and different Adobe apps ever since. Setting up all new color palettes was looking like a real pain in the neck until I looked up some tips. I ended up taking a screen shot of my color palate and then sampling the colors in Procreate. It went smoothly.

After initially being a bit overwhelmed by Procreate I gave myself the task of drawing the equivalent of one of my 6×9 inch pencil drawings in it. I figured that I only used one pencil to draw them in real life so I’d only need one digital pencil too. That turned out to be true. I imported in a thumbnail drawing, dropped the opacity of it to 50%, and created a layer above it to draw on. In the real world I’d print the thumbnail drawing out in light blue and draw over it with a pencil. The process was about the same so I had no problem with it.

Turns out the biggest problem I had with it was where to draw. Normally I draw standing up at my drawing table but I use my iPad sitting down in a chair. I’m also usually taking a break when I sit down so it was weird to be working that way. Sometimes when I sit down to take a break I end up working on a photo on my iPad so the lines have been blurred before. I ended up doing a little of both but I mostly tried to stand and work.

After getting comfortable with pencil drawing on the iPad I decided to revive my practice of drawing masks on my street photos. I like taking street photos but I don’t like posting them online because the people in them have no idea their photo is being taken. Since I don’t have many followers on Instagram (where I post them) it really doesn’t matter but it still makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m more comfortable with large group photos but when one person becomes my unknowing model I feel I owe them a little privacy. So years ago I developed a technique where I digitally put masks on them. Since I love drawing masks it was a natural and I like the end results. They always look like photos that are mine.

The main problem with the technique was that it took so much time. For some reason I was never able to master drawing the mask digitally with a Wacom tablet and pen. So I would print out a low opacity version of the photo on drawing paper, draw the mask on the paper, scan the drawing back into the computer, color the mask, and then digitally put the mask over the person’s face. It always came out well but it took about twice the time it could have. Maybe three times the time. Either way I’d do one or two of them but then the time suck would get me down.

One of the best things about drawing the masks on the iPad with the Apple pencil is the immediacy of it. First I look through a bunch of my street photos. This takes a while. It isn’t always easy to find just the right one but after I find the right one I can get to work right away. I bring the photo into Procreate, dim the opacity to 50%, create a new layer on top of the photo, and draw the mask on that layer. It all moves a lot faster than printing out and scanning in. Especially since it’s not a big and complicated drawing.

After I draw the mask I color it. I create another layer between the photo and line drawing layer. That’s usually how comics and cartoons are colored and the makers of Procreate even put a helpful trick in to facilitate this process. I can set up the line layer as a “Reference” layer. This means that the app sees the two layers as connected and I can automatically use the lines as boundaries for my color even though the color isn’t on the line layer. So I can fill in the color with one touch rather than have to color it in. That speeds things up.

I’ve done a few masked photos so far on the iPad. I’ve liked how they’ve come out too. I haven’t tried to print any of them yet as that’s the final test for this technique but I think they’ll print fine. In the days of my iPad 2 it would sometime downsample a photo that I put on it but nowadays when I work on a photo on the iPad it keeps the photo’s native resolution. So a high resolution photo stays a hires photo. That’s a good step up. I think this whole digital drawing thing is going to work out.