Radiant Comics

Classic X-Men 83 Original Art

Once upon a time I worked in the production department at Marvel Comics. All through the 1990s and halfway through the 2000s I was one of the behind the scenes people who helped do some work to make sure that the comics were printed properly. There is not much glory or money to be found in such a job. It’s the kind of job where you’re dealing with other people’s creative output all day but not leaving a trace of your own. You can find my name in a hand full of credits over that period but in general it’s hard to find the name of anyone who does that job. It’s a job that doesn’t leave much of a mark behind. So imagine my surprise when, as I was scrolling through my Tumblr feed, I came upon a mark I left behind long ago.

Among the things in my Tumblr feed I’ve subscribed to a lot of different comic book blogs. Since Tumblr is all about visuals people post pictures of comic book stuff including original artwork. One recent morning the art to the cover of X-Men Classic #83 by Joe Madureira and Dan Panoisan came up in my feed just like any other piece. The cover has a May 1993 cover date on it which means it probably was first on sale in about February 1993. That’s twenty two years ago. On the bottom of the cover you’ll see a note that says “1 at 90% Jared”. That Jared is me and I wrote that note way back in early 1993 (or even late 1992).

My Note on the Classic X-Men 83 Original Art

First off that note isn’t written on the actual paper the art is drawn on. Since we didn’t want to mar the original art with our production notes we would put a piece of removable white tape on the border of the art, write a note, and then remove the tape after the job was done. That’s another reason why few traces of my production work exist. So why is this piece of tape still on there? I have no idea. I guess I didn’t pull it off before I gave the art back to the editor. Or the editor took the page back before I could pull it off. Who knows?

I can tell you why I wrote the note though. The cover was for X-Men Classic #83 and the editor (I don’t remember who and can’t find his or her credit) thought the art obscured too much of the logo. This was before the days when we did things on computers so it was my job as the production guy to make all the pieces of the cover, art, logo, trade dress, and copy fit together correctly to make a finished piece to be sent to the printer. So I wrote that note on the bottom and brought the cover over to Robbie in the stat room for him to make a photostat of it at 90% of the size of the original size.

A photostat is like a cross between a photocopy and a photograph. It’s only in black and white like a photocopy but it’s made with a giant camera on light sensitive paper. Robbie ran the big photostat machine at Marvel so I gave him the original and he gave me back the original and the smaller copy. Photostat paper is pretty tough stuff so working with it is easy. It’s not going to wrinkle, rip, or bleed like a photocopy on normal paper would.

I’m not positive but I’m pretty sure this next part happened. Marvel had an art corrections department called “Romita’s Raiders”. They were basically artists in training, maybe two or three of them at a time, that John Romita Sr. oversaw. Any art corrections that needed to be made went to these guys and they penciled, inked, and generally corrected any page that needed it. Being an artist myself if it was an extremely simple touch up I would do it on my own but anything beyond that I would pass over to one of the Raiders. This touch up looks simple but not extremely simple so I’m guessing I passed it along.

In looking at the reduced size printed piece compared to the original I can see that Caliban’s (the guy in the tux) sleeve had to be completed and Storm’s (the woman in the Mohawk) blasts that are coming out of her hand had to be extended. That’s a simple fix but not an extremely simple one. Though I used an ink brush and pen all the time at home I didn’t use them at my work desk. And one of those tools was going to be needed so I must have given the piece to the Raiders to fix.

Classic X-Men 83 Printed Version

After I got the fixed stat of the art back it was my job to get a stat of the logo and corner box and paste them down on the fixed art for printing. That meant I had to take an X-Acto knife and cut away all the parts of the logo that the characters heads, hands, and blasts are in front of. I had to cut away a good ten to twenty percent of the logo. You could still read it and so that was acceptable. If you could imagine how much of the logo I would have to cut away with the original larger art you can see why the decision was made to reduce the size of the figures. I’m guessing it would obliterate fifty percent of the logo. That is not acceptable.

One last thing I wonder about this cover is where the stat art that got sent to the printer is? That the original art showed up on Tumblr means that it was returned to either Joe Madureira or Dan Panoisan like normal. One of them or a person they sold it to scanned it and posted it and so it ended up on the internet but what about the production stat that the cover was actually printed from? I wonder where that went? The printer sent all the original art back to Marvel and from there it went to whoever was working in Marvel’s art returns department at the time and he returned it to the artists who made the art. But since this “Original art” was a stat, a copy, who got it? Was it given to the Raider who made the corrections? I have no idea. All I know is that it wasn’t given to me nor would I have really expected it to be. But now it makes me wonder.

So there you go. A piece of my production art past came floating back to me on the pixels of the digital age. I have no records or even any idea of what individual comics I worked on in my production days. There were a lot of them. But here is one I can say for sure I had a hand in.

I haven’t written much about comics here on my blog since I got tired of writing reviews of comics and started making comic book haul videos instead. I found that when I was writing reviews I was reading comics books differently than when I wasn’t writing reviews. I was looking for an angle to write about as I was reading. That wasn’t always an annoyance but at times it could be. Some comics were easy to write about since the comics had something to say but not all of them were. It’s tough to find something to say about a comic that isn’t saying much itself.

The comic book haul videos have been much more fun. I get to show off all of the comics I buy in any given week and ramble on for about a minute a piece about each of them. I show the comics off before I’ve even read them but I do talk about what happened last issue in them. No reviews in any real sense but some information. Besides I’ve always thought that any comic that I buy regularly means that I give it a good review. I’m not a completest collector so I wouldn’t by any comic just to have it and not even read or enjoy it.

One of the things I often mention in my videos are that a bunch of comics are on my hypothetical top five list. My favorites. I’m not much for making lists, as I often mention, but the concept of a top five list gets across how much I might like a certain comic. One of the recent commenters on my comic book haul video asked me what my actual top five would be. I looked at the list of all the comics I’ve bought this year and picked my very favorites. It was tough because there are so many good comics these days, we’re in a golden age, and I buy a lot more than five. I think I’m up to about forty comics a month. That is a lot of good comics. I didn’t want to whittle any more off my favorites list so I ended up with a top seven instead of five. So here they are.

Matt Kindt has put out about thirty issues of this comic and it’s going to end soon at issue thirty six. It was originally going to be a six issue story but it was successful enough to keep going. It’s been a lot of fun. Mind MGMT was a spy organization that used people with all sorts of strange super powers. It was disbanded years ago and the first story arc is about our lead character, Meru, finding out about it. Then she finds out someone is trying to put it back together and she and others band together to stop it. All sorts of adventure, intrigue, weird powers, and crazy things happen.

Put any Stray Bullets title that is currently coming out right here. This is one of my favorites that had been missing for years as David Lapham did other things but now it’s back. And it hasn’t missed a beat. If you like crime comics then you should be reading this one. It’s all about low level criminals and the people that get caught in their wake. Part thrill ride and part cautionary tale Stray Bullets is always a lot of fun even as you’re saying to some character, “No! Don’t do that! It’s not going to end well for you!”. And it usually doesn’t end well but it sure is a good story.

I’ll buy just about anything Terry Moore does. I used to buy his “Strangers In Paradise” and bought his more recent “Echo” but now he’s doing “Rachel Rising”. It’s a horror comic of all things that started with a woman climbing up out of a shallow grave. It took twenty-some issues to tell that story as we found out the town was cursed by witches a couple of hundred years ago. I guess the series has been doing well and Moore is still interested in it since he started a second story arc and it’s up to issue thirty two now. Like most of his work “Rachel Rising” is as much about the cast of characters and their interpersonal relationships as anything else. Good stuff.

Rick Remender and Wes Craig bring us a comic that I almost didn’t buy because I though the description of it was stupid. But I liked the cover, flipped it open, liked the inside art, and have been buying it ever since. It’s the story of a kid who goes to a high school for assassins. Yeah, that still sounds dumb to me but the comic is really good. It’s not so much about their school or their training but about the kids and what they get up to and how they get along. There are tons of gangs and cliques and most of them are a bit crazy. But they can’t get into too much overt trouble because the people who run the school are crazy adults and are much more dangerous than the kids. Lot’s of dysfunction and fun.

Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting bring us a period piece spy story. The first story arc, though well done, is pretty standard spy stuff. It’s the late 1960s or so an Velvet is no longer a field agent but still works for whatever British spy agency it is. MI6 or some such. She’s framed as a traitor and everyone is after her. That was the first four issues or so but it really takes off after that as they delve into the history and workings of the agency. We get to see other people who may or may not trust the info they got on Velvet’s betrayal. It’s only up to issue nine as I imagine Epting’s detailed and very well thought out art take quite a bit of time to draw but every new issue is a treat.

Brubaker makes my list again and also again you could put whatever the current work by Brubaker and Sean Phillips is right here. This one only has four issues under its belt as they just finished their series named “Fatale” but it’s as good as all their stuff. “Fatale” was horror but “The Fade Out” is a 1950s Hollywood crime drama. The Hollywood studio system is still in full effect and one of it’s starlets gets murdered. Studio security covers it up and makes it look like a suicide as they’d rather not have the scandal but a friend of hers who was the writer on her last movie finds himself sucked into the mystery of what really happened. Anything these two do shoots to the top of my list and this is no exception.

Something new and surprising found itself on my list and that’s “Drifter” by Ivan Brandon and Nic Klein. I don’t think I’ve read a comic by either of these guys before and I picked this one up just because I read a description of it. I liked the first issue well enough but it was the third that really hooked me. “Drifter” is the story of a man who crash lands on a far away frontier planet. It’s like an old western town filled with strange characters. And things aren’t as they seem. Our lead character disappeared for a year between the crash and his being found. And he has no idea why. Besides that we’re introduced to all sorts of characters and tough to understand alien life. It’s not an easy book to describe but it’s full of ideas. That’s what I like about it. Plus it’s got the most poetic recap page in comics.

So there is my top seven. What are yours?

This weeks video project was my Pop-Up Art Show video. What the heck is that you ask? Well, that’s what I had to figure out. I’ve been wanting to make a video showing off my art for some time now. It seemed like a natural thing to want to do. I’ve been making videos of me making art plus I make a comic book haul video every week so why not a video of some of the art I’ve made over the years? I’ve got a lot of it. Plus I already show off some of my art in still pictures on social media. Still pictures are easy though. I just take a photo of a piece and send it out on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. Video is less easy.

I’ve had some grand ideas about how to make the video that include narration and music. Last summer I learned to edit video on iMovie and made a few short videos with music so I know how to do it. It seemed like a good idea but editing video is a really time consuming task. That would be fine if I was being paid for the work but this is my own stuff. Plus the stuff I made fancy edits on gets no more views than my unedited video. I think it actually gets fewer views since the subject matter, a walk through Bryant Park and a comic book convention, are less interesting to people. So people don’t come to my YouTube channel for my editing skills.

I decided I wanted something simple. But simple isn’t always easy because there is a lot to making simple. At least a lot goes into thinking about what you want to take away in order to make something simple. Plus there is a lot of size variation in the works I was showing. How was I going to simplify that? I thought about shooting it like my “How I Did It” video where I put the small stuff on my desk and the large things on my easel. That worked well for that video since I had to show the two scales that I worked at to make a large drawing. It took a little editing but not much. It was really just sticking the pieces of video together. I almost did it that way but it seemed a bit boring. Plus I’d be off screen for a lot of it.

I make a couple of different types of comic book videos for YouTube. In most of them I point the camera at the comics and talk about them. In some of them I point the camera at me and talk about whatever comic book related subject I happen to be speaking on. I originally stated out with the off camera ones not because I’m camera shy but because I like the focus to be on the comics I’m showing. But in watching videos I noticed that I liked the ones with a person on camera when the video was about what the person thought. That’s why I stepped in front of the camera for the ones that were about my thoughts.

The question I had for myself was which one was my Pop-Up Art Show about? Was it about showing off the art or my thoughts? This was a tough choice but I eventually can around to the idea that it was about my thoughts. I came to that by thinking about what was the best way to show off my art on video. Turns out there is no best way on video. The best way to show off art is with a still picture and video is moving pictures. There was no way I wanted to make a video of still pictures. That’s as boring as it gets. So that lead me to the point that the video has to be about me and the art. I had to be there live and in person. That decision precluded me pointing the camera at my desk and the small pieces of art so I’d have to do it all at the easel.

I was also paralyzed a bit by what to show off. I have a lot of pieces of art going back twenty five years so what should I pick. I had thought about doing a theme or constructing a narrative around some of the pieces but that was when I was still thinking about doing some fancy editing. All the choices kept me from being able to make one. It was only when I decided to go with the simple visual approach of pointing the camera at the easel and me that I was able to make my choices. I kept those choices simple too. I went with what was close at hand. I abandoned any theme and picked a few pieces that I had done lately so they were still sitting around plus I pulled a couple of paintings off the studio wall. Keep it simple.

The camera distance from the easel was important too. Which size works would go on the easel and which ones would I hold up close to the camera? And how much room in the frame should I leave for me? There is no sense pointing the camera at myself if the viewer can’t see me. It took a few minutes to find the correct distance. Then I made sure I turned the power on to the microphone. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again and record a video with no sound. The rest came kind of easy. It was just me talking about the art I made. I don’t find that part hard at all. I was having a little bit of difficulty figuring out exactly how to hold something up for the camera though. At first I found myself peeking over the top of the piece as I held it up where I could see just my eyes on screen and I found that somewhat creepy. A piece of art with my eyes on top of it. I eventually figured it was better to fill the whole screen with whatever I was showing. I think it worked out okay. Give it a look.

This Morning I made one of my ASMR drawing videos. What is ASMR you ask? Basically it’s a tingling feeling some people get in their head that’s triggered by sound, sight, or some such. You can read about it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response.

Though I’ve had the sensation all my life I only discovered its name last year (the name is new anyway) at the same time I discovered that there were people who called themselves “ASMT Artists” and posted videos on YouTube that were designed to stimulate ASMR. Lot’s of sounds, skits, soft voices, and strange noises. Some of them work for me and some of them don’t but overall I enjoy the videos. They can be relaxing all on their own without the ASMR.

It was through watching some of these videos that I discovered that a trigger for some people was the sound of a pencil or marker on paper. Since I draw a lot I don’t even notice the sound very much so it never even occurred to me that it could be a trigger. But since I had wanted to make some videos of me drawing it encouraged me to figure out how to. Due to the ASMR angle I ended up deciding to make short videos of me drawing spontaneously with a marker or a pencil.

It’s not easy making a video of making art in general. At least it’s not easy making an interesting video. Making art isn’t a performance so it usually goes very slowly. It often takes me hours and hours to make a finished drawing. Even one that’s simple. Nobody is going to want to watch that. I find condensed time drawings pretty unwatchable too. Those are the ones where they speed up the film so that two hours passes in two minutes. I’m just not a fan of that technique. So I went with ten or fifteen minute drawings with no under drawing or erasing. I put marker to paper and just go.

I found markers pretty easy to use in that situation but pencils have always been a bit tricky. The marker makes a dark and bold line that the camera picks up well but the pencil is light and harder to make a definitive mark with. The whole key to the type of drawing that I’m doing in these videos is to make a line and don’t look back. But with a pencil looking back is the norm. A light line is the norm. It’s tough to make a dark never-gonna-erase-it line with a pencil. I found a Wolff’s Carbon pencil worked pretty well for that but I had to bear down fairly hard and that would make the pencil squeak rather unpleasantly. I switched over to a 6B graphite pencil for some of the drawings but had to bear down even harder. That make drawing a little fatiguing.

With this particular drawing, “Seconds in Seconds” I used a Pitt big brush pen. That’s not a marker I normally use for these videos. As I wrote before sound is a big part of the ASMR effect so that I prefer to use markers that make a good noise with the paper. I find that Sharpie markers are good for that. They get some good friction with the paper and therefore make a noise as I sweep it across but never squeak or anything like that. I don’t always like a Sharpie tip though as they can put down a little more ink than I want them to and give me too much ink spread. Still I’ve done a lot of ASMR drawings with them. For a finer tip marker I’ve gone to both a Copic and ShinHan marker. I prefer the ShinHan because the barrel fits my hand better but both tips are pretty much the same.

I normally draw in black marker but this morning decided on blue. No reason. Just a whim. Brush markers are quieter than regular markers so I knew I would have to draw a little differently to make some noise. Long sweeping lines and short parallel lines are good for noise in general. I like drawing faces. This one was almost one of my regular “Looking right at you” faces but after I put down the first line I decided to change it to a profile shot. I have no idea why except that I’ve drawn a few face lately and wasn’t in the mood to do that again. I made that first line with every intention of making a straight on shot but then veered off into a weird sideways chin shape that I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with but knew I couldn’t make a straight on shot out of. That’s part of making these spontaneous drawings. I have to challenge myself with some things so I don’t make the same drawing over and over. That’s what would happen if I mindlessly followed my tendencies.

I kept the background to a minimum on this one. That’s also unusual. Often with these I fill up the background to the point that it’s tough to tell the positive space from the negative space. It’s all about flattening the space so that it’s in your face. But here I put most everything into the foreground face. It’s got lots of patterns and lines while the background is literal. The background has a sun, some water, and just a few design elements. Often I pack the background full of little faces and figures but here we have none. Sometimes picking an unusual tool, such as the brush pen for me, makes you not follow your usual tendencies. That can be a good thing if you’re looking to break out of a box.

I finished up the drawing with some hatching on the face and nose. I’m not sure if that gives him a bit of a shadow or a sunburn but I like the way it came out. Once again probably because it’s not something I usually do. The lines aren’t even particularly well executed but in this context they work just fine. Overall I like the blue and I like the profile. I also like the forest on top of his head. It’s weird. I like weird.

Have a look:

I finished making a print this week. I’ve finished a few in the last couple of weeks and they are the first ones I’ve done in a while. I stopped making them mainly because I was a bit tired of coloring them on the computer. For the past couple of years I’ve been mainly working with paint or marker and I really do prefer those real life mediums. But when making a print coloring on the computer is a real advantage. Mainly because it’s easier to control how the final print will look. If I paint something, scan it, and then print it out it’s a struggle to duplicate what I’ve painted. Colors change when switching between mediums. With computer coloring I’m using only colors that I know are going to print well because I’ve used them before. Takes the guessing out of matching color.

One of the things I have to say about computer coloring is that it’s not faster than painting by hand. I’d say it’s faster to learn on the computer since it’s easier to fix your mistakes but if you already know how to paint or use markers then it’s not faster to use them virtually. I always think it should be faster but it never is. It might even be slower for me because I can try more stuff. With real paint if I try something I have to think it through first and then after I start I have to change my mind immediately if it’s not working or stick with it to the end and make it work. With virtual tools I can go down many paths and if a path doesn’t work I can reset everything with the push of a button. Often that means I walk down paths on a whim and that takes time.

With this print, “Nine Nine Nine”, I had the drawing finished already. According to the date on the inked piece I made it back on May 14, 2014. It and a lot of other black and white ink pieces have been sitting around a while uncolored. The first thing I have to do is to decide if I want to color it in Photoshop or Illustrator. One is bitmapped coloring and the other is vector. I like vector for its easy use of shape and its resolution independence but I like bitmap for its easy use of textures. I could have gone either way with this one but chose bitmap and Photoshop.

I decided I wanted to try something new with the piece so I broke out my 12” Wacom Cintiq. I just checked and I bought the Cintiq (a computer screen you can draw on with a special pen) over six years ago. I call it new because I’ve barely ever used it. I have a regular 12”x12” Wacom tablet (it’s not a screen but a pressure sensitive tablet I use with a special pen) that I use all the time and usually that works fine for me. But I really want to try new things with the Cintiq. I never could quite set it up to my satisfaction so I took a couple of hours and really figure out what I wanted to have it set up. It took a while but I finally got it. And then it just slowed me down. Turns out I still have a hard time drawing on the thing. I put it away and went back to my other tablet.

There is some prep work on a file to get it ready for coloring. It’s short and not very interesting so I’ll ship to the first part of doing the actually coloring and that is deciding on the basic colors. I have a palette of colors that I know will print well to choose from and that helps when starting out. I began with the main background colors first and then move to the main foreground ones. That means I went with the blues and greens behind her first, There are four blues with the lightest one being in the middle of the print. It suggest the sky more than the blues at the top do. When I’m not using illustrative color I’ll often use colors that suggest things rather than literally show them. Thus part of the print becomes a substitute for the sky without actually being a sky. There are only two greens and the ones at the bottom suggest a fence and therefor the ground but there is nothing literal about the green behind her neck. That green does seem to turn and move sort of like a screw. Repeated diagonals can do that.

The next color I picked was the pink of her shirt. It was then prudent to make her skin tone pinkish. Often I don’t let reality get in the way of making some outrageous blue, purple, or whatever skin to but for this one a pinkish peach seemed to work fine. I went with the neutral brown forearm sleeves next and then it took me a surprisingly long time to pick just the right two reds for the rest of her dress. It looks effortless now but those two colors took a lot of trial and error. I dropped the neutral grey in behind her and her hair became yellow and orange and her eyes blue almost by default. Often that last color or two are easy because not much else will work.

Then comes the part that takes the longest. The textures, the shading, and the patterns. I decided on just a little shading. Some modeled shading in her face and some cut color in her dress and hair. This is where I have to fight off why I call “The DaVinci Effect”. That’s what I call the urge that every artist has to be like DaVinci. I want every bit of shading to be realistic and perfect. Clearly that’s not called for here and is completely impossible for me to do but still the urge is there. So at first I did a horrible job of it chasing an impossible goal and then scaled back and figure out what I wanted to do. I kept the shading subtle, minimal, and let the color do the talking.

I’ve been making textures in Photoshop lately for the express purpose of using them in prints. So I had a few laying around to choose from and they went pretty fast. But the dots and stripes in her dress took more time. At first I tried using Photoshop’s pattern tool but I didn’t like anything I did with it. So I changed over to making patterns in Illustrator and cutting and pasting them into a Photoshop layer. This worked well. I’m much better at making vector patterns than bitmapped ones.

The yellow brush stokes on the edges of her form were inspired by my trying to use the Cintiq. I couldn’t make the lines I wanted with the Cintiq but it reminded me of an old way I used to make lines but stroking paths with the pencil tool. I did that and I was good to go.

The shading on the lips was the very last thing I did.They’re still pretty flat looking but that have just a hint of roundness. That hint took a while to get right. Most things do. But in the end a hint was all I needed.