Radiant Comics

I like putting things in order. Arranging things into the places that make the most sense. I was doing that today, and over the last few days, for my comic books. Most people have their comic book collections in boxes, and I have some of those, but most of my comic book collection is on shelves.

Over the years I’ve built shelves everywhere I can. Along the walls of my studio, in my bedroom, and in the laundry room. I have a lot of shelves. It’s still not enough though. I’m planning on building some more in a hallway. It’s just a pass through hallway with nothing in it. I think I can build some shelf the length of it up over the door frames. They’ll be high shelves but pretty easily assessable and they can shelve books about ten inched high.

Meanwhile I’ve been moving other things around. I have two big book cases in my studio that both have four shelves a piece that fit comic books. Of course they’re both full so moving things around them means moving a lot of comic books around.

It started with the new Mister X comics and books that I bought recently. I wanted to put them all in one place. Usually I don’t put collected editions in among my comic books but for this I wanted to. The two Mister X books I already had plus the comic books in my Mister X collection already had their spaces but I needed a new place for both together. Hmmmm…

Often my comic books are shelved or boxed due to the order off their importance. If it’s on an easily accessible shelf then it’s important. If it’s in a box in a closet then it’s not important. I could get rid of those boxes more easily. So I picked out a spot on the shelf that had some less important books. I moved them onto a bedroom shelf after moving some even less important books onto a small new bedroom shelf that is high up. Then the Mister X books went in the important spot. That was easy enough.

The second book case in my studio has a lot of my indie comic books on it plus all of the series I’m currently buying. That’s the section that has to be adjusted the most. If a series I’m buying ends I move it into the section of comics with all the other ended indie series. Series I buy are constantly ending so I’m moving books in and out of that section two or three times a year. Long running series like Savage Dragon or Usage Yojimbo have their own place on other shelves so I never have to shuffle them around. That would be too much.

It was about time to shuffle my shelves and move the ended series when an idea struck me. That indie bookcase of ended series is also divided into two sections. Complete series and incomplete series. It’s been that was for thirty years. I think it made it easier for me to find stuff. I have card stock paper dividers between the comic series with the series name on the paper. If an incomplete series is only an issue or two the naming paper gets really close together and can be hard to thumb through. At least it was when all the papers were close together in that section.

But many years have gone by and lately I’ve been finding that system annoying. Two alphabet lists in one bookcase was no longer making things easier to find. I decided to mix the complete and incomplete series together. I’d say about two and a half shelves were complete series and half a shelf was incomplete. Either way I had to pull about half the comics off the shelf to begin with and all of them had to move eventually. Moving comic books is sweaty work.

The first thing I did was to clear out the bottom shelf of everything but the comics I’m currently collecting. During this I also had to pull out the series that have ended over the last few months. Right now the current comics take up about a third of the bottom shelf but that will grow to about half the shelf in six months or so.

Since there were many more completed series than incomplete ones I started by putting the end of the alphabet complete series on the shelf. After I had a bunch of them in place I mixed it the incomplete series from that end of the alphabet. I did that until I had the bottom shelf filled up. Then I went on to the second of the bottom shelf.

A word here about my paper dividers. Many years ago I used to get these scrap pieces of Bristol paper from when I worked at Marvel Comics. At the time this supply of paper seemed endless and so I used them as dividers. They worked pretty well. After the supply of them ran out I started to use a card stock paper. They’re not bad but they really do get bent over and folded up over the years. Sometimes I’ve used pieces of old backing boards and they work the best as they’re the thickest. I’d like to replace all my dividers but that’s a big job that’s also fairly pointless. Plus I’d have to buy a lot of backing boards. And maybe I should buy a label maker to make fancy labels! You see how I can turn a pointless job into a lot of work? That’s my super power.

This whole process took about three hours but I’m glad I got it done. It was a Sunday afternoon and I didn’t have any energy to work on art anyway. And here is the end of the story. I got the last book in place and stood back satisfied. I stepped back, took a look at my bookcase, and was happy in was in this new order. Then I turned around and saw another three or four short series on my drawing table. At least they were from the beginning of the alphabet and that’s where I ended so that I didn’t have to move too many comics. But it was a sitcom moment.

Mister X #1 Cover

One of my favorite comic books from the 1980s is “Mister X.” It was originally published by Vortex Comics and, I think, they still own the copyright on the comic. However a variety of creators have worked on the comic over the years lead by Dean Motter who is credited as Mister X’s creator.

The comic first caught my eye sometime in 1984 because of the stylish Dean Motter and Paul Rivoche ads that ran in support of the book. I’m not even sure where I saw the ads but they mostly featured the eye catching covers that they did for the book. The ads certainly got me interested but I didn’t see an issue until 1985 when I bought a copy at my local comic shop. I’m not sure exactly when or how but I soon was able to get the first three issues too. Maybe my LCS had them as back issues or maybe I got them somewhere else but I was lucky enough to track them down. It went on my pull list after issue four.

Those first four issues were written and drawn by the Hernandez Brothers of “Love & Rockets” fame. This may have been my introduction to them. I had heard of “Love & Rockets” before “Mister X” but I don’t think I had any issues of it. I bought a couple of issues of “Mechanics,” which reprinted some of Jaime Hernandez’s “Love & Rockets” work, around this time but it was still a couple of years before I started reading “Love & Rockets” regularly.

I liked the Hernandez Bothers “Mister X” issues best and I was disappointed when they left the book. Issue five was drawn by the book’s regular colorist Klaus Shonfeld and inked by Ty Templeton. It was a pretty solid effort. I liked it too.

Starting with issue six the one named cartoonist Seth took over the pencilling (and sometimes inking) duties and the series lasted until issue number fourteen. In the years since I first saw his work on “Mister X” Seth has since turned into one of my favorite cartoonists. “It’s a Good Life It You Don’t Weaken” and “Cylde Fans” are two of my all time favorite comics, but back in the mid 1980s I slowly lost interest in Seth’s “Mister X” work.

Seth’s work in “Mister X” started out trying to keep a visual continuity with the earlier issues but as time went by the style of each issue changed and simplified. The later issues are much more recognizable as Seth’s mature style, which I now love, but I didn’t like it so much back then on Mister X. I think I stopped buying the book around issue nine. I didn’t even pick up issues 10-14 until the early 2000s (I’m still missing thirteen).

In 1989 Vortex Comics tried again with “Mister X” volume two. Shane Oakley drew it and Jeffrey Morgan wrote it (with D’Israeli taking over on art with issue seven). I bought the first issue and no more. I’m not sure why I didn’t like it. I always bought plenty of black and white comics but there was something about “Mister X” volume two being in black and white that bugged me. The color on volume one was really good so volume two being in black and white must have been a disappointment. I had already given up on it during volume one anyway.

Despite only reading one issue of volume two in my mind it became “The volume of ‘Mister X’ that I didn’t like. That’s when I thought of it at all.

In 2008 Dark Horse Comics came out with a hardcover collection of “Mister X” volume one and I had to get it. I bought it and enjoyed all the issues. Even the ones I didn’t like back in the 1980s. In 2011 Dark Horse Comics came out with a hardcover collection of volume two and I ignored it. Why wouldn’t I? It was the volume I didn’t like after all.

That brings us to a couple of weeks ago. Mid June of 2023. That “Mister X” hardcover has been on my shelf since 2008 but I think I last read it in 2009. That’s when I wrote a review of it on this very blog. (http://radiantcomics.com/comics-i-bought-march-5-2009-2/) The spine of the book showing on my shelf would always catch my eye and I’d think to myself that I want to read it again. But 14 years have past since I last read it so I obviously wasn’t in a hurry.

Then a funny thing happened. I somehow started wondering about volume two of “Mister X.” I have a philosophy now that if my opinion is over a decade old it’s expired. Often I can remember that I didn’t like a comic but I can’t remember the actual comic. Since I only read one issue of volume two thirty four years ago my opinion was clearly expired. Maybe volume two was good or maybe it wasn’t. I had no idea.

So I got on eBay and looked up the price on the hardcover of “Mister X” volume two. It was originally a $50 book but I managed to get a copy shipped to me for a total cost of $26. Not a bad price.

A week later I got the book and guess what? I loved it. I read all thirteen issues in it over the weekend. I hardly read any collected editions that fast. I usually like to skip between comics but “Mister X” was all I wanted to read those two days.

I’ve often described “Mister X” as a B-level comic, in general, but with A-Level stylishness. Over the years the various creators really have tried to make “Mister X” special. They use a lot of graphic design in the drawing to make more elaborate visuals than the average comic book. It’s a fun book to look at.

If not better written then volume one volume two is at least more consistently written. It only has one writer and two artists after all. The art is also terrific. Even though it’s black and white (and I’d love to see it colored) it’s really visually interesting. Both artists employ a ton of graphic design techniques to keep your eye moving and give you a lot to look at. This volume is A-Level straight across.

After reading volume two and loving it I went a little “Mister X” crazy. I went back on eBay to see what other “Mister X” volumes I was missing. Dean Motter has been doing “Mister X” stories over the last twenty years or so for Dark Horse Comics. I have all the stuff he did in individual comics but I started looking for the collected editions of them. I found two paperback volumes and got them both for about $8 shipped.

Then I started to wonder how much a CGCed ( a graded and slabbed comic) “Mister X” number one would go for. It turns out that it doesn’t go for much. There are only nineteen of them slabbed which means the book isn’t very popular. I ended up buying one graded at 9.2 (out of 10) for $35 shipped. I don’t usually buy slabbed books but for that price it makes a nice conversation piece.

Considering it costs around $25 to mail a book to CGC, have them grade it, and put it in the plastic case (the slab) the seller was not making any money. I’m sure he was happy to cover his costs at this point.

But I wasn’t done with my “Mister X” madness. I decided to look for how much it would cost to get the original 13 issues of volume two. I checked online at mycomicshop.com and they were about six bucks an issue. They didn’t even have every issue though so that was a no-go. Then I looked around on eBay, saw a set, and after a little negotiating I paid $50 for the full set shipped.

You’d think that was the end of it but it wasn’t. In my looking on eBay I saw an auction for the volume two hardcover that I just bought for $26. The auction was at $1.39 plus $6.99 shipping. Just because I thought that was too cheap a price I bid five bucks on it. The auction had days to go so I assumed I would get sniped and wouldn’t win but guess what? I won it for around $3.60. With taxes and shipping I paid about $12 for a book I just bought the week before for $26. How weird.

Now go read some Mister X!

Organics 5 Page 1

A lot of my art has to do with the search for meaning. What individual things mean isn’t as important to me as trying to find meaning in general. That’s why I like to make weird stuff. Art and images that no one has seen before. Then I wonder how I thought of it and what it means. That’s interesting to me.

I the 1990s I made a series of short comic book stories that I called “Organics.” They were made back when I first started learning Surrealist automatic drawing. If a story was going to be ten pages long I’d get ten blank pieces of paper and rule borders on them. They would look like blank comic book pages, which was what they were, and I’d close my eyes and then scribble with a pencil on those pages.

After I was done scribbling I’d look at each panel on each page to see what I could make out of the scribbles and then draw that thing I saw. It was kind of like finding faces in clouds. It was a weird technique and I ended up drawing a lot of weird stuff.

After I drew all ten pages I’d lay them in front of me and decide what order they went in and what story they told. Usually with comics you think of the story first and then draw it but with “Organics” the images came first and then the story. Plus the story didn’t have to match the images literally. It had to tell its own story.

To me this was all about the search for meaning. I had a story written in words and a bunch of weird drawings but what did they mean together? My mind used to find ways to fit the words and pictures together and that was interesting to me. It wasn’t interesting to most people though. It’s not like I’ve ever had a ton of fans for my work but most of my friends, with a couple of exceptions, had zero interest in my “Organics” comics.

The first few of the comics were the most off-putting to people. I was working in this really opaque drawing style where I was trying to blur the line between the foreground and the background. Sort of along the lines of that classic face and vase optical illusion. If you concentrate on one part of the drawing then you see a face of if you concentrate on another part of the drawing you’ll see a vase. This was sort of the kind of think I was going for in the beginning.

No one really got what I was going for so over time I made the drawings more illustrative. They were still weird but it was a better defined weird. People liked them better and I think it was a better way to go. People may as well be able to tell what I’m drawing if I’m going to spend time drawing it. Foreground/background confusion was a dead end.

Organics 5 Page 2

This ties into one thing I’ve been doing this past week. Checking out using AI to make art. Talk about a search for meaning. I’ve been using an app called Photoleap. It does a bunch of stuff but the thing that it does that I’m interested in is that it turns a sketch or photo into a finished piece of art based on thirty one different Anime/Japanese Animation styles. It’s push-button art. I load one of my sketches into it and hit a button. That’s it.

With the app I would make various pieces of art from my art and I would also be asking myself, “Who’s art is this?” It exists because of my art and because I pushed a button but it doesn’t look or feel anything like my art. What does it mean? I don’t have an answer for that question but it fits into my liking to search for meaning.

So at some point during my playing around with this app I remembered my “Organics” strips from the 1990s. I wondered what would happen if I ran a page of that comic through Photoleap. I thought that I might have to deconstruct the page of comics into its individual panels and run those through but that wasn’t the case. When I ran a page of “Organics” through Photoleap it kept all my panels but filled them with completely new art.

This new comic book page was based on my page but since my art was so weird and dream-like the Photoleap page was also weird and dream-like. It was so strange to see and I started calling it “Art from the machine.” Because it really wasn’t art form me. I was the starting point but certainly not the ending point.

I decided to run an eleven page story through the machine but I had to prep the pages first. These comic pages were made before the days of digital lettering so I had to strip the lettering off the scan of the original art and then art correct the hole in the art that was left by deleting the lettering. Finally I had to re-letter the comic digitally to be matched up with the new AI art.

Organics 5 Page 3

Page by page I ran my art through Photoleap and even saved it in three different styles:
Romantic, Fantasy, and Isekai. I don’t know what that last style means but it seemed to add greenery to the art. After doing that, it took about forty minutes, I transferred the art to my computer. Most of the time was spent saving the files and keeping things organized. The actual creating of the AI art only took seconds per page. Finally I matched up the art with the lettering as with any comic.

I like the way this new version of “Organics” came out. The art that the AI made was sufficiently weird and interesting. I even made a version with my old art side by side with the new art that came from it. That really makes me say “Who’s art is this?” I still don’t know. It clearly comes from my art but it also comes from whatever art the AI is pulling from, mixing up, and putting back together to match my stuff. But it doesn’t feel to me line it’s mine.

I’m baffled by the who process and don’t know what it all means but I don’t think I can just ignore it. AI art isn’t going to go away just because I want it to. Art from the machine and the search for meaning will continue.

As an artist I am not a huge fan of AI art. But me not being a fan of it is not going to make it go away. That’s for sure. I have little interest in sitting here, writing prompts, and seeing what the machine can come up with. Yet I also think I have to find ways to use AI art to my benefit or I’ll get left behind. So that’s what I did this week.

I wrote recently about the one hundred and twenty faces I was drawing for my Great Gatsby illustrated project. I finally fished them and that took some time. I would estimate that it took me about two hundred hours to draw all those faces. That’s with me being able to leverage cartoon art faces I had already drawn over the years that cut down the drawing time quite a bit.

I was happy to have finished the faces and I took the time to try and work them into the overall book design but I faced a problem. All of my other illustrations were in color but these faces were black and white ink drawings. They looked a little out of place and I wanted to color them. But after coming off two hundred hours of drawing them over a month’s time I didn’t want to put another two hundred hours into coloring them. That’s what it would take. So I set about looking for a way to use AI to automate the process.

The drawings were only going to be printed about three inches high. I didn’t want to color to be complicated but even keeping it simple would take me a couple of hundred hours. So I was looking at AI apps on my iPad, I often check them out, to see if any of them would be of use. I found one called Photoleap. It promised to turn photos or simple drawings into anime characters. Color anime drawings.

I tested out a few drawings and it seemed to be okay. There were even about twenty different anime styles to choose from. It would take my strange black and white cartoon drawing and render it in color as an anime drawing. It was clearly using preexisting eyes, noses, hair, and other facial features and putting them together in a form that resembled my drawing.

The problem with the whole process is that these anime drawings were clearly not my work. Nothing of my cartoon drawing remained in them except the basic shape. It was also a little disheartening that the anime drawings were actually pretty good. I would guess that your average person would probably like the anime drawings better than my black and white cartoons. I found that depressing. But I had to get over that and press on.

My next step was to bring the AI anime drawing into a Photoshop file with my cartoon drawing. I did that and they matched up well. I set the black line drawing on “Multiply” so that the color drawing would show through beneath it. Then the problem was that the anime drawing was too dominant and over all it didn’t look like my work anymore. So I set about to change that.

The first thing I did was to turn the opacity down on the anime drawing to 80%. This make it less prominent. But it was still too prominent. I selected the anime drawing’s background colors and blurred them. That turned down its strength nicely but overall the anime drawing was still too strong. So I ended up going into the black channel of the anime drawing and turning it all the way down thus eliminating its black line. There was still a dark grey line there but it seemed weak enough.

I ended up liking the way the drawing looked so I automated the process. I made a Photoshop action (a macro) where I could open the files of the anime drawing and my cartoon drawing, hit a single button, and it would join the two together just as I described. That saved me a lot of time. But I still wasn’t done.

I had three problems with the combined drawings. The eyes, noses, and mouths. Being that the app was turning my drawings into anime ones the eyes were all too big, the noses too pointy, and the mouths too small and pouty.

The nose was the easiest one. Since the app made all the noses pointy upturned noses I had to eliminate all the nostrils. The app uses a dark shape for the nostrils so I had to select that dark shape and then use Photoshop’s content aware fill to eliminate them. That type of fill looks at the pixels around where I have selected and tries to guess what they should be in the space I have selected. It works pretty well when my selection is just a brown spot.

The eyes were done about the same way. I had to select them and then shrink them down to the size they were in my drawings. That usually left a cut out white spot in the place where they used to be so I had to select that spot and use content aware fill on them too. That was also fairly easy. Content aware fill saves a lot of time.

The app also added long eyelashes on every character. That worked fine for the women but I didn’t always like the look on the men. I ended up solving that problem just by blurring the eyes. I’d select both eyes and then use the Gaussian Blur filter on them. That made them fuzzier and the lashes less prominent. That was also fairly quick.

The last thing was the mouths and all their pouty lips. Sometimes I would just put a solid pink/red color over the lips and be done with it but other times I used the scale and warp functions to fit the pouty lips into where I drew the lips. They I used content aware fill to fix the areas that were cut out and white was left behind. This took a minute but still went quickly.

I had to tweak other individual things here and there but in general it was these three things that I had to do for all the drawings. I eliminated enough of the anime look of the color so that they now look like my drawings again. But I still had one problem. Overall the color schemes were terrible. Most of the flesh tone of the faces was fine but the hair, clothes, and background colors were not great. I would never had colored them like that. They really looked awful in general as group.

I fooled around with them a bit and ended up solving the problem by eliminating the color. I turned the color into sepia tone. I figured that would fit in with the 1920’s Great Gatsby theme anyway. All these sepia toned cartoons of the partygoers sets a mood. I think I might use them as end papers.

In the end I think I got all the coloring done in under twenty hours. It amazed me how much of the process I automated with actions (macros) and content aware fill. Plus it would have taken me ten times as long without the AI anime drawings. I obscured them enough so that without me writing this no one would be able to tell that’s how I did it but I still have my reservations about AI Art. After all this same App can take any photo of a person and turn it into an anime drawing in seconds. That’s scary for people who took the time to learn how to draw like that.

This week I finished one of my “Covers to comic books that don’t exist.” That’s a series of ink and marker drawings that I’ve been working on for a long time. I like comic book covers in general so I draw my own even though they have no comic books to go with them. The piece is “Dreams of Things” number 191.

Back when I started drawing my covers I had a bunch of different series that I would draw. I had “Deep Space,” “The Acid Ram,”High Tension Adventures,”Hypno-Love Girls,”Retro Futurist,” and a bunch of others. I did a handful of them all and switched between then to work on which ever I felt like at the time.

All of these covers were a lot of work to do so originally “Dreams of Things” was supposed to be less work. The concept was to come up with a single dream like image and build a cover around it. You can see that in the early covers in this series. The problem with that approach was that simple is not always easier than complex. It’s often harder to distill a single image down into its most basic form and still keep it interesting than it is to add complexity to it. So I found myself spending a lot of time on these simple images.

As I was already spending a lot of time on my “Dreams of Things” covers that lead to them getting more complex over the years. I kept adding one more thing to them. Number 191 has a really complicated geometric pattern in the background that’s full of patterns and colors. That type of drawing isn’t found in the early ones.

This past winter and spring I also bought a whole bunch of new markers. Not that I didn’t have about a hundred colors to choose from before then but I added another forty colors to the mix. That changed the color palette I was working with and the latest ones have gotten even more saturated with color in combinations that are new. They do look different.

The pencilling stage of these covers has changed over the years. In the beginning I used to pencil the pages at the same size that I did the finished ink and marker. Eleven by seventeen inches. First I’d pick one of my thumbnail drawings from my inkbook, then I’d do a rough drawing at six by nine inches, finally I’d blow up that rough drawing to eleven by seventeen inches and make a finished drawing.

At some point in time I decided to work smaller with the pencil drawing and only blew it up to nine by twelve inches. Then at some time after that I decided instead of a rough drawing at six by nine inches I’d make the finished drawing that size. It’s a little bit odd that as the drawings got more complex I made them smaller.

The drawings still get blown up to their final eleven by seventeen inch size so sometimes that leaves me a little bit of drawing work to do in the final inking stage. Usually that’s in the smaller faces. When a face goes for a half an inch high to an inch and a half high it has to be redrawn. That’s okay though. I expect it and can take care of it in the inking stage. The six by nine inch drawings have served me well in recent years. Maybe because the size helps simplify the complexity.

The first of my “Dreams of Things” covers that I finished was on January 22, 2016. As it’s June 11, 2023 as I write this that means that I’ve been working on this series for over seven years. That’s quite a long time. It’s also a little strange that all my other cover series fell by the wayside as at a certain point I only worked on my “Dreams of Things” series. It wasn’t a conscious decision but just sort of happened. I don’t think I drew more than ten covers of any other series.

I’ve been getting one a week of these “Dreams of Things” covers done for most of this year. That means that I’m just a couple of months or so away from getting issue two hundred finished. That’s a big number. I want to do something special for that one but I’m not quite sure what. I might have the beginning of an idea though.

I show off my in progress shots of these covers on my Patreon and I also show a finished cover on my weekly YouTube comic book haul video. On one of the YouTube shows I mentioned I was coming up on issue two hundred and on a whim I said I should use two hundred different color markers on that cover. That got me thinking.

One of the things I really like to draw is faces. Usually one face per drawing but I’ve also made these drawings that are nothing but faces. Twenty, thirty, or forty face all bunched together to make up a drawing. I think I even made one on a comic book sketch cover before. I think I can take that idea and use it for issue two hundred.

I already have pencil drawings through issue one ninety seven done so it’s almost time to draw issue two hundred. I’m also thinking about making it a wrap around cover but as I’m writing this I’m coming up with another idea. I can make it three connecting covers that somehow incorporate the numbers 2-0-0 into the mass of faces drawn on them. See, I’ve already figured out how to triple my work! (Why do I do that to myself?)

I recently put all of my “Dreams of Things” covers into eleven by seventeen inch portfolio books. Before then they were all in a pile and were hard to thumb through. As I put them in books and watched the years pass by as I looked at the dates on them I also noticed themes. I go though periods of big faces, landscapes, figure interactions, and whatever else. I never noticed these themes as I did them. It’s interesting to see new things in them. After I finish issue 200 I’m going to take some time to contemplate them. I’ll let you know what I see.