Radiant Comics

So I got it in my head this morning to write about one of my ink book page drawings immediately after I drew it. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. For those of you not in the know my ink book drawings are the basis for a lot of my other work. I grab my 5.5×8.5 inch spiral bound sketch book and a black marker, usually a Pentel Sign Pen, and start doing some surrealist automatic drawing. That’s the name for a type of drawing where you don’t think about what you are going to draw but instead just start making marks on the paper and see what comes out of the strange crevices of your mind. I also like to define the borders of my drawings first so I make little boxes on the paper and then draw in them. I also work from the top left of the page, then across, then down a row to the middle and across, and finally the bottom row.

If you look at the first picture I drew you can see a line that splits the drawing in half with an oval in the middle of it that forms the man’s chin. I draw this line with a U in the middle of it all the time. I have no idea why but it often comes out of my pen. You can see a similar line in the last drawing except the U is on the top. I often struggle to find something to do with this shape but here I made it into a face with a bit of a positive/negative face and vase thing going on.

The second drawing is of a figure that’s almost one of my usual triangular “Mod Man” figures. But instead of the triangle of the torso being continued down to his feet I lifted his legs off at the hips and moved them out into space. I do this sometimes to get a get a better gesture out of the legs. It doesn’t make sense on an anatomical level but it’s a drawing thing. And there is that line with a U in it shape above his head!

Picture number three is a single eyed half masked man with a body made up of odd little bits. Any resemblance to actual anatomy is strictly coincidental.

With drawing number four we get to one of my more landscape flavored drawings. As I was drawing this I wanted a bit more of a feeling of deep space rather than my usual use of flat modern space. I ended up with something that doesn’t really make sense on a literal level. It ends up looking like a Steve Ditko type of magical dimension. There are a couple of different horizon lines and two figures that are not in scale to each other. I often work with out of scale figures but if I was ever to make this into a larger drawing I’d have to figure out the space.

Drawing number five makes a nice bullseye in the center of the page. I wonder if it’s placement in the center influenced it’s composition? I like this face. I like that the face turns into the hair and some sort of piece of machinery. It’s one of those things that works in a small sketch but as I look at it wonder how I could make it into a finished drawing. That’s always a problem when looking for a sketch to make into something finished. Just what I like about the sketch, the head/hair/machine, won’t necessarily make sense at a larger size and in color. The last things I added to this drawing are the white circles in the background. That’s a motif I use every so often and it works here.

Drawing six started out as a distinctly female figure but morphed into this androgynous drawing when I put the eyes on her chest. I was also playing with some deeper space on this one as I created some strange but simple shapes in the background. Other than that this is another body made of of simple shapes. And big ears.

And then I went out for a bike ride and spent a while dealing with some mundane paying work. It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that I started to draw again and made drawing number seven. And I think that shows. It’s a real oddball of a drawing. I’m not sure exactly what it is. It looks most to me like a body/torso but the head runs off the top of the page and we only see a neck. Then the turtleneck of the shirt has a face on it with a couple of ears too. And then there is an eye on the front of the shirt where the chest is. Or it could be something else. It’s a weird and unsure one.

Drawing number eight is straightforward and a little dull. A long necked figure stand in front while a small full figure stands atop something in the back. This one is a little too well defined for me. Everything is clearly what it is and in the right place. You’d think that was a good thing and often it is but here it’s not working. I don’t know why. But I also think that on a good day I could take this drawing’ blow it up, and redraw it into something interesting. The basics are there but the intangibles aren’t.

The final drawing has a lot of ancient civilization art and architecture in it. That’s what all those little shapes and lines are. With the eyes down the bottom maybe it’s a closeup of an ancient Maya king with his crown on or maybe it’s a wall carving on some pyramid some where. I’m not sure. It could be a dog with sneaky eyes. Anyway you cut it up I like the extreme closeup nature of the drawing. I hadn’t done that yet on this page and one of the things I try to make these ink book drawings about is variety.

So there it is. All while it was fresh in my mind. Now I have to go back and do some more boring work. Oh, well…

Nothing will slow down artistic momentum (or any other kind of momentum) quite like being sick. Yep, last week I caught some sort of cold/flu/sinus thing that kept me away from the drawing board, off the bicycle, and on the couch for almost a week. Two days of it came with a really bad sore throat which was the worst of it and all the other days came with a lot of fatigue. It killed whatever artistic momentum I had before hand though I don’t think I had a lot. I can’t seem to remember what I was thinking about the week before but that’s part of the momentum killing.

The first thing I managed to get done after getting better was a video from the NYC Comic Con from back in June. I went there on the Sunday of the con and spent some time shooting video with the intention of editing something together like the Bryant park one that I made a little while ago. This one seemed to be a little harder to make since I didn’t want to just repeat myself but didn’t really have a firm grasp on what I wanted to do.

Luckily I had already made a song for the video in Garage Band the week before. I seem to be getting pretty good at Garage Band. I find that it’s something I can do for about fifteen minutes before bedtime to relax myself a bit. Most work that close to bedtime will just keep me up but I seem to be okay with moving around music loops. I even made a second song before I started making the video because I was enjoying myself.

Before I got sick I had looked at the video but hadn’t gotten any ideas. Though I’ve been doing the video work on my desktop with iMovie that’s not where I first look at the video to get ideas. I put all the minute or so long video files onto an SD card and plug that card into my laptop. Then I watch individual files in Quicktime looking for interesting visual bits to give me an idea of how to structure the thing. For my first video I had the SD card in my laptop for no more than a week. I think it was more like half a week before I got started on the final video. This time the SD card sat in my laptop for over a week with no end it sight when that cold/flu/sinus things hit me on that Sunday.

It was the following Sunday when I was finally feeling better that I decided I had to get back to doing some creative work. I did a little drawing but couldn’t get anything started. It was Sunday evening before my mind drifted back to the Comic Con video. I still had no solid visual idea for it but I decided I should get to work on it anyway and actively work out the idea by editing rather than passively work on it by just watching. It turned out this was a good choice.

The song was, once again, the key to the whole thing. The song I made for the Bryant Park video was a melodic dance thing so I purposely made this some something different. It’s more of an ambient dance thing. My music vocabulary is limited but that’s what they seemed to be to me. Whatever they are the two musical pieces had different structures from one and other. I used the structures to make the videos around.

iMovie is consumer level video editing and though it’s good over all it’s not always easy to work in the way I want to. I think my way is a bit peculiar though. The first thing I do is put in the song I made. Though once it’s in iMovie it’s one track so I also have to have the song open in Garage Band in order to see the loops. I match the edit to the timing of the loops. Despite having to go back to Garage Band to see the exact loop timing it’s a fairly easy process. A loop is two seconds long and I can make a video clip exactly two seconds long. The problem comes after the first minute.

The first minute of the movie in iMovie is measured in seconds. Minutes and seconds. That’s makes sense. But as soon as you pass one minute the time becomes a decimal rather than seconds. Suddenly it’s 1.1 minutes. What’s .1 of a minute and where are my seconds? Seriously, 1.7 minutes?!? That does me no good. I could find no preference to change this so the timing of my video is only precise in its first minute. That’s a bit annoying. I got it finished though.

I was able to gain some momentum and get back to drawing later on in the week. I was happy about that. I started with some easy stuff. Worked in my ink book drawing, made some of the brush and ink drawings that I had been doing before I got sick, and even made a ten minute video drawing at art card size. But it wasn’t until I stared to get images stuck in my head that I knew I was all better.

It was on that following Tuesday that I started to get a picture in my mind. It wasn’t so much a specific picture as it was a type of picture. It was one of my complex drawings. I even tried to start off little slowly by doing some inking over a complex drawing that I had already made but then I ended up on a detour fixing a part of that drawing that I wasn’t happy with. After that I got on with it. I was able to satisfy the vision in my head with a new complex drawing. Lots of little figures and do-dads and decorative things. It was good to be able to satisfy a vision in my head and feel like I had a little momentum. It was good to even have a vision in my head. Those aren’t always easy to come by and sometimes I think they’ll never come back but once again they did. That’s a good thing.

Sometimes I let comics sit around for a long time. Not my monthly comics that I go to the comic shop every week to buy but my hard and softcover collections. For a while there from about 2008 to 2011 I was buying more comics in book form than in comic form. But I prefer the variety of reading many different comics so often the collected editions would languish until I was in the mood to read six to ten issues in a row of something. Some are still languishing. Like some of my comic strip collections. And then time passes.

It was way back in 2007 that I wrote an appreciation of Gasoline Alley. There were two volumes of “Walt and Skeezix” out then but now there are five. Plus as volume of Sunday strips. All published by Drawn and Quarterly Book. Add to that a second series by Dark Horse of the Sunday strips except this time officially licensed as “Gasoline Alley”. It seems as if the strips from the 1920s are in the public domain but the name “Gasoline Alley” isn’t. At least that’s the way I remember it.

Though it’s not the officially licensed version D&Q’s has been working with the cartoonist Frank King’s family to put a whole bunch of family photos and family history into the “Walt and Skeezix” books. The fifth book even comes with a DVD of old family movies. I haven’t got to that volume though. It’s taken me long enough to get to volume four. As a matter of fact volume four came out in 2010 and apologizes in the introduction for it being three years since volume. That means it’s probably been four or five years since I read volume three. Where does the time go?

By volume four we’ve settled into the family aspects of Gasoline Alley. Volume one was the beginning all about men and their cars in the early 1920s. Then they introduced Skeezix who was a baby abandoned on on bachelor Walt Wallet’s doorstep. Since then the strip has professed in real time with Walt adopting Skeezix, learning to be a father, and Skeezix growing up. Volume three had the romance between Walt and Mrs. Phillis Blossom (Auntie Blossom to Skeezix) finally end in marriage so in volume four things settle down into a family strip. And then it turns into a courtroom drama.

It is amazing to me how many things Frank King does well in “Gasoline Alley”. It’s not a gag-a-day comic strip as most are nowadays but he’ll give you a gag strip often enough. Most of the time it’s slice-of-life humor though. You get the everyday interaction of the Alley gang and their cars, the Walt learning to be a father stuff, and the will Walt work up the nerve to really romance Mrs. Blossom angle. Then it turns into a road trip story when Walt and Skeezix take a drive across the country in what was then the early days of the automobile. In volume three we even get a look at their stay at a lakeside hotel for summer vacation. It is a real look at 1920s life that according to the intro articles was what was going on in Frank King’s own life.

In volume four, which I’m reading now, the strips are from 1926 and this is where it turns into a courtroom drama. Y’see since Skeezix was adopted six years ago his father has found out about him and is trying to get custody of him. For weeks we get lawyers plotting and planning and then facing off in the courtroom. There were huge chunks of word balloons with lawyers giving speeches in them. The strip become more dense and more of a page turner at the same time. I was hanging on every word and amazed at how well done it was. I can only imagine what is was like for people reading it in their daily newspaper back in 1926 waiting to see how things would turn out. It really is good stuff. Oh, and after that Walt has to get a job and it turns into a bit of a working man’s strip.

The Sunday strips don’t follow the plot of the daily ones. They’re also much larger and in full color. The newspaper people figured that Sunday only readers would be put off only getting a small piece of an ongoing story so they made Sunday strips their own thing. I began to notice that the Saturday strips were often stand alone too. I mentioned that I have two Sunday strip collections.

The first one is from D&Q and is called “Sundays with Walt and Skeezix 1921-1934”. It’s a giant of a book at about 16×21 inches but isn’t a complete collection of the Sunday strips. It’s listed at eighty six pages so in must have about 150 or so strips in it. I’ve looked through it but this one has also been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years because I didn’t want to get too far ahead of the daily strip. Or it just sat there like so many things do because there isn’t enough time in the day.

The other volume that I recently bought and read is from Dark Horse Comics is called “Gasoline Alley The Complete Sundays Volume One 1920-1922”. I see that volume two is comic out soon so I guess they plan to reprint them all in chronological order. At 12×16 inches it’s much smaller than the D&Q one but it’s still pretty big. In the “Restoration Notes” section they say that they are working with the King family too so as to get the best reproductions available to print from.

The Sunday strips are a lot of fun. They are less continuity based and more self contained. Fun gags and slice-of-life stuff happens plus it gets whimsical. There are dream sequences where anything can happen. Cartoonists in those days had a lot of room to work with in a Sunday strip and often liked to stretch their imaginations and show off their artistic talents and that’s what Frank King does with these. It’s fun to read.

So there you have it. I’m back on the “Gasoline Alley” bandwagon. They’re brilliant comic strips and I’m glad to be finally back to reading them again. And it blows my mind to think that they’re so old. I doubt anybody who had anything to do with making these strips is still with us and neither is their intended audience. But here I am all these years later reading them.

Some weeks I got nothing going on. Nothing in an artistic sense that is. This was one of those weeks. I can’t always predict them but usually they have to do with being distracted by something in life. That was this week. I had none of my usual projects going so I tried some different things.

Fist off I tried getting some writing done. I’ve been writing a couple of things regularly and haven’t had a lot of trouble getting them done. The first thing is this blog. I seem to be okay with writing this once a week. It only takes a couple of hours a week and even though I’m late with writing it this week it’ll post at the same time as always. I’m used to finding time for it. Habit is a powerful thing.

The second thing I’ve found time to write is my “Four Talking Boxes” comic strip. I write five of those a week and each one takes about half an hour to do. I used to do them after dinner or just before bedtime but it got harder and harder to find that time. So I started writing them as I got ready in the morning. I think of ideas in the shower or as I get out of it and just before I get dressed I turn on my desktop computer and open up my laptop on which I do my writing. It takes a few minutes for my desktop to turn on and get all my programs opened up (it’s getting old) and while I’m doing that I’m writing a strip. I often think up the next line as I’m putting my socks on. Socks seem good for that.

It’s the third writing thing that I haven’t been able to get done. I was working on a comic book last year at a pretty good clip. I had twenty five pages drawn and was at the point where I was scripting it. I got ten pages of that done and then just stopped. I mean nothing. For months. I couldn’t find the time and desire to do it. Unless you actually sit down and do something it doesn’t get done. It’s the same story with the little red sketchbook project that I started ages ago. I got a good chunk of it written and then nothing. I’ve got a couple of other book-like things in the works too. I think it’s that I like the visual arts more than the written word.

So this week I tried to use my drawing to jump start some writing. But it wasn’t my usual drawing. I tried something new. Instead of my usual spontaneous ink drawing with pen I decided to go with a brush. I used a brush all the time and have used it before with spontaneous ink drawings but this time I decided to draw small with it. I used some of my baseball card size pieces of paper and tried to make some figure drawings on them. Drawing the human body three inches tall makes the brush big and clunky and that was what I was looking for.

I made a bunch of these drawings and then added some writing ideas to them. Little sentences and things that went with the images. I wanted to get some words down to see if that would open my mind. I got tired of the mess of small drawings after a little while and decided to use a sketchbook. I looked over at my pile of small unused sketchbooks that I have lying around and there was one that fit the bill. It was a wire rimmed 3.5×5 inch book. The paper was a little thin for ink but it got the job done.

All those little ink drawings lead me to try another writing idea. One I did briefly many years ago. I grabbed one of my 5.5×8.5 inch sketchbooks and started to make some ink drawing comics. That’s when I draw a panel with some pictures in it and then draw word balloons and drop some words in them. I’ve never been able to make anything finished using this method but it’s a pleasant distraction for a little while. It’s a weird little technique that usually ends up splitting my focus between drawing and writing in a way that doesn’t end up yielding anything but a confusing babble. But it’s always a bit of fun before it isn’t. I spent about an hour one day doing this before I finally decided to start writing the comic I wanted to write. So I pulled out the finished ten pages of “Organics” that I had written.

Last time I had tried to continue my writing of this comic I printed out the pages I had done so that I could refer to them on paper rather than on screen. I read through them. It was interesting because even though I had written them I hadn’t seen them in so long that I forgot all but the most basic story that I had written. I thought I did a pretty good job with them except inexplicably I hadn’t written the second half of page eight. That was strange.

I did manage to write the next seven pages though. I thought that was pretty good. I picked up on things easily once I sat down (or stood up) and actually wrote the thing. It turns out that was the key to getting in written. Finding a path to wanting to get it done and then doing it.

I’m still not sure what I want from all those little ink drawings though. I liked a lot of them but I’m not sure if I can make anything finished out of them yet. They did give me a lot of images to post in Instagram though. I often post my drawings and such on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Having a lot of small drawings seemed to fuel me to do so. After all I was making a lot of them so at least a few people could see them then.