Radiant Comics

With a quick search of my calendar I can see that back in June of 2023 (It’s January 2026 as I write this) I wrote a piece about my Three Marker Technique drawings. I’m not even going to go back and read it as I want to write something fresh about it.

I’m not even going to go in depth on the technique, since I probably did back in 2023, but I’m going to give the basics and then go on.

The basics are that I look in one of my Inkbooks for a thumbnail drawing, blown that drawing up to 6×9 inches, print it out in blue line on a 6×9 inch piece of Bristol board, and then tape the outside white edges of the paper to mask them out. That way I can draw over the edges if I had to (and I do). Then I draw over the blue line thumbnails with three different size markers. Small, medium, and large. Finally I pull the tape off and the edges are clean again. That’s the basic process. I even video myself pulling the tape off the edges and post them as “Tape Peeling” videos.

According to a search on my calendar I haven’t made any of these type of drawings in about a year. I don’t know why except that I’ve been working on other things.

When I first started working on these type of drawings they were without a final purpose. They were just me working on some images in ink. I had no idea what they could become besides a small 6×9 inch ink drawing. Over time, after I had built up a stock of them, they become fodder for some of my Big Ink Drawings.

My Big Ink drawings are a series of 22×30 inch drawings done in ink. According to my calendar I haven’t made one of them since 2024 and I only got one done that year. So it’s been a while since I worked on them. I made a whole bunch of them, around fifty, over the years and I used to look through my Three Marker drawings to find some images to blow up into the Big Ink drawings. Usually I’d redraw the 6×9 inch Three Marker drawings at 11×17 inches before blowing them up to 22×30 inches. That gave me more to work with.

The Three Marker drawings are also more spontaneous than my normal finished ink drawings. Since I’m drawing over a rough blue line thumbnail drawing with no pencil underdrawing there is no fixing mistakes. I just keep going with it. The point of them is not to be perfect but to work out some ideas for images. That’s what I usually redraw them larger if I am going to go on and work with them more. That’s when I can work out the details.

I mention all this because, as I’ve mention in previous blogs, I have a hard time getting stuff done in January. In hindsight I always seem to get stuff done but in these January moments it’s tough. I’m not sure what kind of projects and art I want to work on for the next year. So I stumbled onto doing some more There Marker drawings.

Years ago I attached two drawers to the underside of my drawing table. That’s where I keep a lot of the small stuff that I have in progress. I have three 6×9 inch envelopes in one of the drawers that hold already set up blue line drawings for my “Dreams of Things” series, my “Three Marker” drawings, and finally one for miscellaneous stuff. Last week I realized I hadn’t touched the “Three Marker” one in ages.

I had about five blue line drawings in the envelope and I thought that wasn’t enough to start with. I went over to my shelf, pulled out one of my Ink Books that is full of thumbnail drawings and started looking for ones I could use.

Setting them up consisted of putting the scan of the drawing (I have everything scanned already) into a 6×9 digital template, printing it out in blue line, and then taping the edges of the paper. It takes a few minutes to properly tape the edges so I think it took me an hour and a half to get twelve of them prepped.

Over the next week I got ten new Three Marker drawings done. Each one takes anywhere from half an hour to two hours depending on how things are going. I was going at such a good clip that after a week I set up ten more so that I could have more to choose from. That was not bad.

The Three marker drawings are really not finished pieces. They’re fun to line up and look at a lot of in a row but they’re not the same as something that’s been worked to its completion. There is not a lot of thought put into them at that point. But that is their point. Enough thought has gone into them that they make a very good step one (or maybe it’s step two). I can now look through them and figure out which ones are good enough to be made into something. It’s what that something is that I don’t know.

Possibly I can turn some of these drawings into digital prints. I haven’t made any of those in a while either but we’ll see. Last summer I got five 24×36 inch painting done. That was the first time in a while I painted. I don’t think I’ll be doing more paintings that size this year. But you never know. I might do some more Big Ink drawings. I know I have the paper for them somewhere around the studio and I always have plenty of ink. That might be the most likely destination for some of these ink images I’m working on.

But that’s what I’ve been getting done with my January of not getting much done. There may not be any big finished work in the mix right now but I’m getting some of the small stuff done.

“From small things, Mama, big things one day come.”

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.”