Radiant Comics

For most of my adult life I’ve been a non-fiction reader. Besides comic books that is. In my childhood I read a lot of historical biographies for kids but as I got older, around high school age, I started reading a lot of novels. That lasted through college but sometime in my twenties I switched to reading mostly non-fiction books. I’d read a novel every now and then but I probably read ten non-fiction books for every fiction one. That’s just how my taste ran.

As a comic book collector I have a lot of comic books lying about the place. They can take up a lot of room. As a consequence I decided not to be a book collector. So I would read a book and then pass it on to someone else. I wouldn’t keep it. That way I wasn’t filling up the place with even more stuff.

As a consequence of getting rid of the books I read I took to digital reading as early as I could. Not for my comic books, I still like to read those as physical copies, but for all the prose stuff I would read digitally. I really enjoy reading digitally. Digital books take up a lot less room, I can more easily keep track of my reading, and I can “Collect” books without ever reading them and never feel guilty about it. A physical “To be read” pile of books comes with regrets. I’d to look at the pile and and sigh that I didn’t have enough time to read them all. A digital pile is just some images of book covers on a screen. They’re hardly real at all and so don’t bring up feelings of regret.

Before this summer I hadn’t gotten much reading done at all. Especially novels. For years now I’ve been a member of Amazon Prime and they offer two free digital novels a month for their members. They send you an e-mail with about eight books to choose from and you can download two of them. Despite not reading any of them I’ve been downloading two every month for a couple of years. I figured I might get around to them someday. Someday finally came.

When I work at home on my art I’m usually by myself. I go at my own pace and get done what I can. Part of working is taking breaks. I stand and work so usually I sit down when I want a break. The question is always “What do I do now?” Since I’m by myself I don’t have break room to hang out in and chat with fellow workers so my answers is usually the internet, a quick video game (this is why I like games I can play for ten minutes at a time), or social media. The same stuff as everyone else.

This summer I found my break habit was wearing me down a little. Not physically but mentally. I found I could sit down and putter away with the computer or iPad on the internet, kill ten to twenty minutes, and then not even remember what I was doing. I was mostly reading but what I was reading were short articles and pieces on whatever caught my eye. Nothing I was reading stuck with me. It was all empty reading and it was bringing me down. Plus sometimes it would take five minutes of surfing around to even find something that might be interesting to read. I felt like I was wasting a lot of time on nothing. It wasn’t much of a break.

That’s when I decided to starting reading some of those novels I had been downloading for years. Why not? On my iPad I could read a novel for fifteen minutes as easily as I could read Twitter or Instagram?
So I picked one out from the pile and started reading it. I think I read four novels in about ten days. I was really enjoying myself. They were mostly thrillers with a fantasy or a horror novel thrown in there too. Fun stuff.

One of the things I found myself doing after reading a novel was rating and reviewing it. Amazon has a five star system and I gave out three and four stars for the ones I read plus I wrote a short paragraph about the book. I figure any book I can make it through gets at least three out of five stars but it takes a classic to get five stars from me. If it’s a one or two star book I’m not even going to finish it and therefor I’ll never rate it. That’s my system.

I found I really liked writing a short paragraph about each book. I’m not sure if anyone else will find them helpful but I like them because they remind me what the book was about. I’m sure all of us who are readers have picked up a book and thought to ourselves, “Have I read this one before?” It’s not always easy to remember. Now I can go back and read my own notes about the book to refresh my memory. I find that satisfying.

The one book I gave five stars to was “This Side of Paradise” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. That one is generally considered a classic and I first read it back in my mid-20s but haven’t read it since. I think I may have even liked it more now that I’m in my early 50s so it’s a well deserved classic. It’s funny because I was reading the collected Conan by Robert E. Howard as I also read other things (that Conan book is long!) so that switching between Conan and “Paradise” was quite the roller coaster of reading.

One part of digital reading that I haven’t found a use for yet is the highlighting feature. At any point when reading you can highlight some text and it will save it for you. I’ve highlighted some particular passages that I’ve liked but haven’t found a use for them after that. It’s probably a better feature for a book group or student but hope to someday find something to do with it.

I got some stuff done this week. I made some art. Intellectually I know that and I know it’s a good thing to get stuff done but emotionally I’m not feeling it. I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything. That’s because I haven’t gotten the one thing done that I feel I should. What is that one thing? I don’t know. That’s the problem.

On Monday I decided to do some inking. I picked out one of my “Dreams of Things” covers that I have penciled and was ready to ink and I worked on it until I got it done. It was issue number 76. I’ve inked that many of them. 76 cover is a lot. I’ve done them all myself. It’s an accomplishment but I didn’t feel it after I finished it. I still wanted to work on some unnamed thing that I can’t even picture.

Sometimes I get it in my head that I want to do something big and important. That’s understandable. A lot of people want to do something big and important. But the eternal question is what is big and important? Most of us have no answer to that. Neither do I. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting to have the answer.

On Tuesday I still had no idea what the big thing was so I continued on with my usual fare. I noticed that I had never inked “Dreams of Things” #74 so I put that one on my drawing board. I worked on that one until it was done. I should have had a sense of accomplishment but there was none. It’s not like I didn’t like the work I was doing. It’s that I know it will lead nowhere. At least nowhere in terms of the external world. Fame and fortune do not await me for finishing the 74th “Drifting and Dreaming” piece of art after the world didn’t care about the first 73.

I think that’s what the “Big and important” thing is about. It’s about getting the world to notice and like my art. There is no path to follow to make that happen so I stumble along making what I can and hoping to find the right road to go down. If you want to listen people have endless advice on which road to take but it’s rarely a road that’s well lit, they’ve never travelled it, and don’t even have proof of it’s existence. Making art is a tough gig.

On Wednesday I couldn’t take inking anymore and decided to use ink and watercolor to make some of my sci-fi fantasy landscapes. I pulled out three 5×7 inch sheets of paper. Except it wasn’t actually paper. It was left over matte board that I cut down to size. That meant it was extra thick and could take water without warping.

First I put down some pencil lines where I wanted the buildings to go, then I drew the buildings in ink, next I used some gouache/watercolor to put in some color, and then for the final step I went in with some more black ink. I worked on three of these small paintings at the same time so that I could switch between them when the one I just worked on needed drying time.

Y’know what gave me a sense of accomplishment the most this week? Playing a trivia game. That’s what video games have evolved to be quite good at. Giving a player a sense that they’ve done something. I downloaded the “Friends” 25th anniversary app onto my iPad. It’s fairly useless except it has a trivia game in it.

Each of the ten seasons of the TV show are divided in half and ten multiple choice questions are asked about each half a season. Over the week I played the game until I answered all the questions correctly. I got about 80% of them right on the first try but it took a few tries to get the ones I didn’t know. Eventually I cleared the whole game and felt like I accomplished something. Weird.

As I write this it’s Thursday and what I got done today was another “Dreams of Things” cover. This time it was cover number 75 and I colored it with markers. I had inked it weeks ago and so it was ready for the next stage. It took a while as the color was complex on this one but I liked the way it came out. It’s amazing how I can be happy with the way a piece of art turns out but I still have no feeling of accomplishment after it’s done.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s good when I like the way a piece turns out. I’ve known some artists who were never happy with their work and it made them miserable. I’ve heard some people say that an artist being unhappy with their own work makes their work better but I don’t think this is true. I expect young artists to be unhappy with their work but after making art for a long time you’d better learn to please yourself or you won’t be making much art.

One of my habits to help myself feel like I’ve accomplished something is to put a whole bunch of my work in front of me and look at it. I usually have my latest stuff up on my easel and I can see a bunch of pieces all at once but sometimes I have to go beyond that.
I think I’m going to pull out all of my “Dreams of Things” covers and look at them. I have 75 of them so I can’t even look at them all at once since I don’t have that much space (they’re 11×17 inches each) but I’ll manage something.

Meanwhile I’m also going to still be contemplating my something big and important. It’s mostly thinking that comes to nothing but I still want to think it. Maybe someday I’ll come up with an idea for something that will really catch on but until then I hope I can at least think of some art to make.

I’ve got nothing. That’s my subject for today. Things unfinished. What do I have that’s unfinished? That’s tough to say because for one I finish a lot of things and for two if I don’t finish something I usually tuck it away and don’t look at it. But I know I have unfinished things.

For many years I had one particular unfinished painting on canvas sitting around the studio. It sat there for years and years. One day a friend asked what it was and I said it was an unfinished painting. Then I went on to tell him that in pictures and movies I had seen of famous artists they always had unfinished canvases around their studios so I decided to keep an unfinished one around mine. He pointed out that that probably meant my unfinished canvas was actually finished since I had no intention of working on it again. I think he was right about that. I can’t even tell you where that canvas is today. I didn’t get rid of it but I stopped paying attention to it.

I have an unfinished comic book from back in my self publishing days. My friends and I made and published six issues of a comic book back in the late 1990s. But it was a bad time for comics, especially small press comics, and we never made any money with them. So we stopped making them. I went on to start another story with my character who starred in my comic but with no place to publish it I stopped working on the story. I think it was ten pages that were pencilled and lettered but never inked. The pages sit in a flat file in my studio.

A couple of years ago I published a few art books on a print-on-demand publishing site. It was fun but nobody was really interested in my books. I sold a handful of them to friends and that was it. I had started and even finished another art book but when I came to the proofreading stage I couldn’t face it anymore. What was the point of finishing it? It was just going to sink into oblivion like the others I had just finished. So I abandoned it. I never bothered to set it up on the print on demand site. It sits on my hard drive. I’ll have to take a look at it someday.

I have ten unfinished cartoon art cards on my desk that have been there for a month. They’re written and lettered but I couldn’t bring myself to draw characters on them. I know I’ll finish these sometime soon but I made a lot of them over the summer. I even filmed them as I drew them for my YouTube channel. It’s intense filming myself as I draw. It takes a to of concentration. Much more than if I drew them without filming it. So that’s the part I haven’t been able to bring myself to do. I could draw them without recording it but that seems like a letdown if I do. I’ll get to them someday.

I have a drawer filled with unfinished drawings. But at least they serve a purpose. As a matter of habit I make a lot of small (around 5×7 inch) pencil drawings. I pick out a bunch of thumbnail ink drawings from my sketchbook and work them up into pencil drawings. I make about three or four of them at a time. Two or three of them might get turned into finished drawings right away but the leftovers go into my drawing drawer. Later when I’m looking for something to do I open the drawer and thumb through the drawings. I usually find something but some of those drawings have been in that drawer for years. I just quickly glanced in the drawer and saw a drawing dated from September of 2009. Things can sit around.

I have a pile of unfinished 5×7 inch gauche paintings. Since they’re unfinished they don’t have any dates on them but I think they’re about eight to ten years old. That’s about when I started doing marker drawings at that size. I enjoyed painting in gouache and still do at times but back then I was looking for a quicker and more immediate medium. Copic markers became my art tool of choice for that function and my gouache paintings fell by the wayside. I could still go back and make something of them but as of now I haven’t.

I even have a folder named “Never Finished Blogs.” I’ve been writing this blog every week since December of 2005 so I have to be good at finishing them but not everything gets finished. There are only thirteen unfinished essays in that folder so I guess that’s not too bad. That’s less than one unfinished blog per year. But why do I insist on keeping them? Because you never know.

I try my best never to delete anything. I’m one of those people who thinks something that may be useless now could be of use in the future. Especially in the digital world where it’s easy to store things. In the real world being a hoarder is a bad idea but in the virtual one it’s okay.

It started with me back in the early 1990s with my photographs. Only about half of the photos I shot were good enough to keep and display but the other half had some good parts in them. I starting keeping the bad ones in file boxes and eventually developed my photo collage style with them. That transferred over to digital when I abandoned film in the early 2000s. I never delete any digital photos. Even the bad ones. At different times I’ve been able to dig through the bad ones and find good stuff in them.

In one particular case I pulled up a nearly black digital photo, played with the levels, and found an image buried in there. It wasn’t a spectacular image but it was a record of the lobby of Marvel Comics when they were on 40th Street. It was the only photo I had taken of that particular location in the building. It made me a little nostalgic when I found it. In the world of unfinished stuff one can often find nostalgia wandering around.

Failure and success go hand in hand. Maybe not in life but for sure in art. That’s my lesson for today. What brought me to that conclusion? Working on a drawing of course. Or an inking as the case may be. One of the things I occasionally like to do is cover recreations. That’s when I pick a comic book cover from sometime in the past an draw my own version of it. Sometimes I try to recreate the cover as exactly as I can and sometimes I do a interpretation of it. Both ways are fun so it all depends on what I feel like doing at the time.

The first step I take is to recreate a comic book cover’s logo and trade dress digitally. That way I can print those out on my drawing paper and have them look good and be ready to go. The logos on all the original covers were done as mechanical copies (photostats) like this and not hand drawn for each comic so it’s authentic. Except the original Iron Man comic had the logo pasted on rather than printed on the drawing paper.

The second step is to redraw the cover. This is the part I’ve never had down to a specific technique. I’ve used at least three different methods none of which I’m fond of. The first method is to draw over a scan of the cover on my computer. I’ve never taken to drawing on the computer so this is the method I like the least. Sometimes I can do it quickly so I stick with it but other times it’s too slow. The second method is to print out the cover in blue line, redraw it on a piece of paper, and then scan it in. I like this way but it takes a lot of work and concentration. I have to draw it in a fine dark line and that’s not my usual habit. The third method is a new one. I redraw the cover digitally but on my iPad. I still haven’t taken to digitally drawing 100% but I like this way better than on the computer. I have an Apple Pencil and that helps.

I can’t remember which way I redrew this cover but I think it was on paper. I was happy with it too. I think I got it right. That was until I got to the inks. I print out the pencils on a separate piece of paper to ink and that’s what I did here. I’m usually a brush person when it comes to inking but this time I chose a pen. I wanted the lines to look hard and mechanical. At least that was my plan. Nothing I did worked. It all looked confused and terrible. I picked away at that cover for a few hours and hated it. I’m not usually an insecure artist that hates his on work so when I do I know it’s justified. I couldn’t look at the piece any more so I put it away.

A few months later I pulled it out to see if I could salvage it. I worked at it for about an hour and it didn’t help. It was still a confused mess. I put it away again. Another couple of months passed and I once again pulled it out one more time. This time I decided to take a radical approach with it and try my busted brush technique on it. The sloppiness of this approach was the exact opposite of my hard line start to the piece. And it worked about as well. I messed it up even more and then put it away again.
The Iron Man #100 cover that I was working on was originally drawn by Jim Starlin. It’s one of the first Iron Man comics that I ever bought and it remains a favorite cover. It’s a simple design of Iron Man standing and snapping a steel I-beam while in front of the number 100 that is rendered in stone. Simple and easy to mess up as I had done before.

A recent Monday morning rolled around and I was looking for something creative to do. I had some energy in me but maybe not enough to really dig down deep and get things going. I decided I wanted to do some inking. Inking is creative but there is also a lot of craft to it. A lot of applying technique to make a drawing look good. It’s a different type of creativity than drawing with a pencil. There is a lot of acting when drawing with a pencil and a lot of reacting when drawing in ink over a pencil drawing. Reacting I could do that morning.
I decided to take the same hardline approach with this second attempt at the cover. I started it over on a new sheet of paper and inked with a Hunt 107 pen that has no line weight. But I wasn’t going to keep it that way. That was just my starting point. I was also mixing some brush work in with the pen work. This gave me thick lines when I needed them but the thin hard line as a default. For some reason it was easier to figure out what I was doing that way.

I didn’t mess it up this time. I went slowly and worked things out. Instead of Starlin’s finely rendered muscles I went with some of my “Painted Lady” body design tattoos. They weren’t easy to work out because a lot of them blended with shadows. This was the part I whiffed on earlier but this time I was in the zone. Some days are like that. I took the time to figure out what Starlin had meant by his shadows and incorporated my designs into them. Somehow I couldn’t do that the first time around.

It took me a good part of the day but I finished it. It kind of amazed me that I did. It also amazed me that I finished it by going back to my first approach. I really thought that I would need a radical new approach. That’s why I tried my busted brush technique and I thought I would go back to that or something like it. But in the end it was my original idea that worked. I just had to not fail at it.