Radiant Comics

I worked on another large 20×28 inch ink drawing this week. That seems to be my habit lately. It’s what gets me by. It can be tough figuring out what I want to do in terms of making art and when I find something I stick with it as long as I can. It’s hard to make art. It’s hard to do most everything which is why people get paid to do work. But imagine if you weren’t getting paid. Would you still do your job? Of course not. And that’s why so many artists stop making art as they get older. Unless they can find a way to make a living doing their art it fades away. Finding motivation to make art is a task. Often the answer to the question “What should I do?” has no answer and so nothing gets done. When I have an answer to that question I try to make the most of it. That’s why I’ve been making these large ink drawings.

“How long is this going to take?” is one of the first questions a person has to ask themselves before undertaking any task. The longer it’s going to take the harder it will be to motivate yourself. Answering that question isn’t always easy with these large ink drawings. The first couple I did took two days each which is what I estimated. That’s not bad but they took less time than they could have because I already had working drawings done for them.

How long does it take to make a working drawing? That’s another tough question. It takes either an hour or two days. That’s quite a spread. I recently made a working drawing for one of these large pieces and it took me nearly an entire day. It took a lot longer than I expected. Normally I work up a few drawings at once. I spend some time looking though one of my sketchbooks, pick out a four or five drawings, print them out in blue line on 6×9 inch paper, work on redrawing them until I have a group of working drawings. But it doesn’t finish there. Some of them need to be blown up to 9×12 or 10×15 inches and have finished drawings made out of them. Sometimes a 6×9 inch working drawing is good enough to blow up and make a finished work out of and sometimes I need a finished drawing. It’s a case by case thing.

The reason the 6×9 inch drawing for the ink drawing took so much time is that I knew it was going to be blown up big. I added a lot more detail into it than I normally would. I should have decided early on to blow it up to 9×12 and work on the detail but I kept thinking to myself that with just a little more time I wouldn’t have to do that. Time caught up with me though.

That brings me to the large ink drawing I just finished. It only took me one day to do and that was my goal with it. I wanted to finish a large ink drawing in one day. That what I had the motivation for. Of course the only way I could accomplish this task is if I already had the working drawing finished. My mind thought back to a small drawing I made that I always wanted to make something bigger out of.

The original drawing was from 2003 and was from a series of drawings that I made of faces. That was back when I was first working with spontaneous drawing and I drew a hundred faces in marker on 5×7 inch paper with no pencil underdrawing. I’ve used some of those faces over the years for different things and here was another opportunity to. They aren’t finished drawings though. That could have been a problem but I remembered attempting to use this face before for something else and having made a finished drawing out of it. I just had to find it. I scan almost every one of my drawings in so I looked through my folder of scans. It took twenty minutes but I found it. I made a finished drawing of the face I wanted back in 2012.

The rest of the drawing was done by my usual method. I blew the drawing up to 20×28, printed it out on pieces of paper, taped the paper together, used graphite paper to trace the drawing onto the big paper, and then went to work making an ink drawing. I use brushes, ink, markers, straight edges, French curves, a ship’s curve, an adjustable curve, circle templates, and eclipse templates to make these large drawings.

This drawing is of what can only be described as a scary clown. I generally have no problem with clowns. I don’t find them scary at all. But this clown face is definitely weird and unsettling. He’s peering out at us from some place unknown. He might be looking in a window or he might be looking into a camera. The face is on a diagonal and is cropped oddly. It’s cropped in such a way that emphasizes his glaring at us. Its a real strange face that has stuck with me over the years. I’m glad I finally found something fun to do with it.

It turns out the small drawing wasn’t quite finished. Scale is important when it comes to making art and enlarging something small to something big can change things. In this case it was the markings on his face. When I finished drawing what was on the small drawing there was too much negative space on the face. I had put in all the same black shapes that were in the small drawing but I needed more. Small areas of white became large glaring areas of white when the drawing was blown up. So I added more stuff.

One line on the bridge of the nose became two lines. The eyes had bent black triangles drawn around them. The eyebrows on the forehead became an entire forehead design. Under the mouth and chin got some new stripes. The cheeks got some new stripes too. Plus a few more circles were added. Overall the face just got more stuff added to it.

I like this one. I thought since it was a single face I could get it done in a day and I did. It was a close thing though. At the end I kept looking at it and one more thing would suggest itself to me. That’s a process where I never know when it’s going to end. But eventually it did and here we are.

I haven’t had it in me this summer to take street photos in NYC. I went down for a day in June but then July got busy and I never made it back. I think the same thing happened last year. Then August rolled around. NYC has something they call “Summer Streets” the first three Saturdays of August where they close down Park Avenue to traffic and open it up for bikers, walkers, joggers, and skaters. I throw a backyard BBQ every year on the first Saturday in August so that’s out but I’ve made it down the second Saturday in August for the last few years to take photos of all the action. For whatever reasons I wasn’t up for doing that this year and then that second Saturday became a rainy day so I opted out for sure. That left just one more City Streets Saturday.

I made it down to NYC that third Saturday. I somehow motivated myself to get on the train and head in. I still wasn’t feeling it but I went anyway. Usually I get off the train at Penn Station at around 10:30 AM and catch a train back home at about 3 PM. All the time in between I’m taking street photos. As I got off the train I walked east over to Park Avenue taking some photos as I went but I was mostly moving quickly until I hit the Summer Streets.

I still wasn’t feeling it. I don’t even think I walked as far as I usually do. I hung out around 34th Street for a while and then walked down to about 27th Street. Usually I go another ten blocks or so downtown to where there is a gathering point but I get better photos where it’s more open so I skipped that this year. I eventually turned north and made my way up to 42nd Street and Grand Central Terminal. All this took me until about 12:30 and I was taking photos the whole time.

My next step, as usual, was to go over to the steps of the Midtown Library and Bryant Park. There were the usual tourists at the steps and I wandered among them taking photos but it was pretty robotic. There wasn’t much going on and I wan’t in the mood. On the other side of the library in Bryant Park there wasn’t not much going on either. The lawn was closed due to recent heavy rains and lots of foot traffic but there were some people around sitting at the tables under the trees. I took some photos but fewer than usual.

As I was walking near the Sixth Avenue entrance to the park I noticed there was a street fair going on uptown. They had Sixth Avenue closed off at 42nd Street and further uptown as far as the eye could see. I walked over that way. There were venders on either side of the street selling food, clothes, souvenirs, and trinkets of every conceivable kind. And a lot of people too. I wandered the center of the street taking photos all around me. I was finally starting to feel it.

“Feeling it” is not even about taking good photos. I wouldn’t know if I took any good photos until I looked at them later plus I’ve never noticed any correlation between my mood and the quality of the photos I take. I can take good photos when I’m feeling bad and bad photos when I’m feeling good. I was just happy to be feeling good as I was taking some photos. Feeling good really helps with motivation if nothing else. What can get me out taking photos is remembering feeling good when I was out taking photos before.

I finished taking photos at about 2:30 PM and started heading back downtown to catch my train home. I took photos along my walk to Penn Station and was pretty tired by the time I got on my train. Taking street photos takes a lot out of me. A lot of energy is burned. Though I make sure I eat and drink as I go I was extra hungry when I finally got home.

Usually my street photos sit in a folder on my hard drive for ages after I shoot them. When I want to post one on Instagram, make a digitally manipulated one, or make a finished photo in general I look through them and find one I like. But recently I’ve been making big ink drawings so I got the idea in my head to make a big photo collage. I haven’t made one of these in years so I was excited to get one underway.

I make my photo collages digitally but then I print out all the pieces, add adhesive to the back of them, cut them out, and them attach them to a big 22×30 inch piece of paper. I started making this one the next day after taking the photos which is about as fast as I’ve ever started one. It was fun working that big again. I kept a couple of the photos large and had to print them out on 13×19 inch paper but the rest of the bits fit onto 8.5×11 inch paper. It takes two or three days to make the digital file and another two to print, cut out, and assemble the physical photo. It’s not a quick process. I even alternated drawing a large ink drawing with working on the digital file. I found that moving in and out of the process helped me visualize what I wanted for the photo better.

I ended up making the photo about the “Summer Streets” portion of my day. I may not have been feeling it but I got good photos. Lots of action and crowds of people involving themselves in all kinds of physical activities make for good street photo subjects. Plus there are views from the middle of the street that I don’t get to take photos of very often.

I’ve been thinking lately about comic books in general and Marvel Comics specifically. I used to work at Marvel from about the beginning of 1990 until the summer of 2005. I was one of the people in the office who worked behind the scenes to get the comics made. I was in the Bullpen doing production work. First it was by hand and then by computer.

I go to the comic shop every week to buy my comics but I never get any new Marvel comics. My tastes have leaned towards indie books since I was about 20 years old in 1986 but I still checked in with Marvel and DC every now and then. I still check in with a DC book here and there but no Marvel’s at all. I was even a Marvel kid so that’s where my nostalgia is but even that doesn’t help. They’re not a good brand to me anymore.

I can remember in the early 1990s at the height of the comic book boom talking to an editor (I can’t remember who) about the boom. At that time sticking a specialty gimmick cover (foil, hologram paper, metallic paper, a fifth ink, embossing, die cuts, etc.) on any random comic insured that it would sell a ton more than without that cover. Everyone knew this was a bad idea in the long run. It wasn’t even debated. We were essentially “Tricking” people into thinking a comic was special and sooner or later they’d get wise to the trick and probably feel betrayed.

I naively asked “Why do we do it? Why don’t we stop?” Then the editor asked me “How can we stop?” Those comics with those covers put an extra couple of grand into people’s pockets every month. Even if it’s bad in the long run people aren’t going to give up that extra money now. How could they? Who is going to turn down money for giving customers what they want?

I had no answer for him. I didn’t know how to make it stop. It took me a lot of years to know the answer is good leadership at the top. Someone at the top should have noticed that this was a bad idea (as we all did) and even though it made money put and end to it. The person should have had the vision to take a more stable path to profit. That’s good leadership. Short term gimmicks are not better than focusing on making excellent comics. But good leaders are rare and not usually in leadership positions.

The leaders and decision makers at Marvel made their success by exploiting Marvel’s intellectual property to make money. That’s how you move up the ladder in a big entertainment company. Not by making great entertainment but by making great deals. It certainly isn’t a bad thing to make great deals but the idea that the great deal comes from a great comic gets lost. Without the great comics you can’t make any great deals. But eventually, almost inevitably, the cart is put before the horse. The deals become what drives the business. After all it’s the deal people that are in charge. Deals come before everything and making excellent comics take a back seat. That’s a tough environment in which to make excellent comics.

Make more comics to make more money is also basic wisdom at Marvel. But that’s a tough road and can water down a brand. Imagine that Marvel made fifty comics a month. How many of them would be excellent, good, satisfactory, and bad? Maybe ten excellent, fifteen good, fifteen satisfactory, and ten bad. That’s not a bad average. You have a four in five chance of being satisfied and a fifty percent chance of thinking “That was good.” That’s a good brand.

The problem is that the people in charge (who may not know a good comic from a bad one) think that if fifty comics are good then a hundred will be better (Marvel was publishing a hundred comics a month in the early 1990s). But the reality is that a hundred will be worse. The excellent-good-satisfactory-bad ratio doesn’t scale up. You won’t automatically go from ten excellent comics to twenty. If you could do that you’d already have twenty excellent comics out of fifty. You’d be lucky to add one or two excellent comics to the bunch.

If you’re publishing fifty comics a month you already think you have your fifty best creative teams. Add fifty more comics and unless you get lucky the talent will be lesser. The ratio for the new fifty will probably be more like 2 excellent, 8 good, ten satisfactory, and thirty bad. You just went from ten out of fifty bad comics to forty out of a hundred bad comics. Twenty percent bad to forty percent bad. That makes for a bad brand.

I don’t even blame the makers of the comics for this (from editors to letterers). I blame the leadership and decision makers at the company. That’s because making excellent comics isn’t in their wheelhouse. It wasn’t the key to their success so why should they know how to do it? They should be held accountable but first making excellent comics has to be prioritized. Deals still have to be made but they will be made easier with excellent comics.

How does this all affect the creating of comics? Well the creators aren’t dumb. They are all freelancers so they have to keep the staff people happy or they don’t get work from them. So they learn what work will keep the deal people happy. Spider-Man is a best seller? So let’s give them more Spider-Man. And lot’s of other Spider-People. Need deals for backpacks for young girls? Here is Spider-Gwen, Spider-Woman, Spider-Girl, and Silk. Do those ideas make for excellent comics? Who knows? That’s not really the priority.

So that’s why I don’t buy Marvel comics anymore and haven’t even checked in with nostalgia buys in the last five years. I think the creators are all trying their best to make good comics and there are probably even some good ones from Marvel (the odds say there has to be) but it’s a hard environment to make excellent comics in and after being burned by so many unsatisfactory comics form Marvel I don’t trust their brand anymore.