Radiant Comics

John Romita Testing Paper

I’m going to take a trip to the past this week because I recently joined a Facebook group for collectors of comic book original art and shared a piece of John Romita art that I got from him want back in 1992. I posted the story of me getting the piece from him but I wanted to write something a little bit longer about it. I want to try and remember and capture the time and place.

Back in 1992 I was working at Marvel Comics on a freelance basis in the Marvel Bullpen. We Bullpenners were the people got the comics ready to print. We were also known as the Production Department. Paste-ups, lettering corrections, art corrections, and various other behind the scene things got done in the Bullpen. We were on the tenth floor of the building located at 387 Park Avenue South.

At some time around the summer of 1992. Marvel decided that the tenth floor needed a remodel. That meant moving everybody on that floor down to the fourth floor (which I assume was vacant) for a couple of months. The fourth floor was considerably smaller and different that the tenth floor.

On the tenth floor the Bullpen was a large open area with about ten to twelve desks and drawing tables in it. Down on the fourth floor they squeezed about ten drawing tables (not the desks they went somewhere else) into a room half the size of the tenth floor Bullpen. I wasn’t even in that room. As a freelancer I didn’t have a choice of desks. I got stuck wherever there was space leftover. There were a couple of spots.

The first spot was in a hallway with a row of cubicles along the side of it. It wasn’t much of a row. I only remember George Roussos nearby. He was Marvel’s house colorist and had been in the comic book business since about 1940. It was cool to be near him.

The second spot was the worst. One of the great things about the Marvel Bullpen of that era was the camaraderie. It wasn’t a great job. It was a fairly crappy one overall but that was made up for by the fact that we could talk all day as we did our job. A dozen or more creative people in a room talking as they worked could be a lot of fun and it was. Except the second freelance spot wasn’t anywhere near that room. Instead it was in a room with the photocopiers. It was the only desk in that room. So when I sat there I had no one to talk to unless someone came in to make copies. It was just me and the dull work.

It just occurred to me that there was a third spot where I worked on the fourth floor. There was a another room where the people who did the production on the covers worked. I think there were only two drawing tables in there but there were also a couple of desks right outside the room. I worked in there some days when I was filling in for one of the cover people. It wasn’t as lively as the Bullpen but it was way better than the copy room.

The only photos I know of from this period on the fourth floor were taken by Eliot Brown. Eliot’s Website He was an ex-Marvel bullpenner at the time and he liked to take photos so he came by one day and took some. I also like to take photos too but this was long before the age of everyone carrying a camera on their phone with them everywhere they went. It was either that year or soon after that I bought an Olympus Stylus pocket camera and started carrying it with me every day. But either way I took no photos of our time on the fourth floor. I wish I did. I wish I took a whole lot more photos of those days.

So back to the story of my John Romita art. This has to be my geekiest moment in comics. It took place during this time period on the fourth floor during the summer of 1992. The drawing is dated 5/1/90 so John must have been cleaning out his office. After all we had just moved floors so I assume a lot of people took that opportunity to get rid of unwanted stuff. Especially since most people’s space got smaller.

I had some reason to go into John’s office and speak to him about something or another. I don’t even remember what. Some random production problem. I noticed the working drawing on his desk as he stood across from me. Then as we were talking, and in the middle of our conversation, he picked up the drawing and and tossed it in the trash.

I immediately blurted out “You don’t want that? Can I have it?” I’m not usually one for blurting out stuff like that but it was such a beautiful drawing and as an artist myself I love to see the guts of a piece of art. How it’s done. John, who is the nicest guy in the world, looked at me for a moment as if I had grown an extra head and said, “Sure” and handed it to me out of his garbage bin. I was, of course, thrilled.

Now for what this piece is. At the time (in 1990) John was working with the paper company Strathmore to make some new paper for Marvel. Inkers like the paper to be smooth and pencillers like some tooth to the paper. John was working on finding the right balance for the Marvel paper that gets handed out for the artists to draw on. Here he was testing out a paper sample. He used various pens, drew a couple of heads, used some white-out on it, and generally put it through its paces. I love working drawings like this that generally never get seen.

Years later I scanned it in and it was printed in the “John Romita: Marvel Visionaries” hardcover book in the back with a bunch of other sketches and such. In the end anyone can now enjoy it. Good show.

My Bag As It Now Hangs Under My Drawing Table

I wrote this Blog before the social distancing hit that we’re all facing. It seems so quaint now. Me rambling on about a commute that I no longer can do. Oh well, here we go.

One of the things I’ve been working on lately is to make an art bag fo being on the go. Or commuting. Mostly commuting since I’ve been in NYC for two days a week recently. Since my commute isn’t during rush hour (at least on the way in) the train time table doesn’t match up with my time table so I have time to wait at the station and do some drawing. So I need some art supplies with me.

All last year I carried my Just-Stow-It art bag that I bought many years ago. It’s a bag specifically designed for artists and I like it but it’s a pretty big bag. It’d designed to carry 14×17 inch pads of paper so it’s bigger than your average bag. I like that about it but for this art bag I wanted something smaller. Plus my art bag is beginning to fall apart (I bought it in 2009). I had to sew the shoulder straps last year as they were beginning to tear off the bag. Not a good sign. The art bag is also black nylon and I prefer a canvas bag. I like the feel of canvas better.

The other problem I had was that I had to pack the bag with art supplies every day. My art supplies: pens, paper, markers, erasers, and such all have their place that I keep them in my studio so I’d pack them in the bag and then have to unpack them so they were back in place for when I needed them at home. That was kind of annoying. So I wanted to put together a set of art supplies to just keep in the new art bag. Fist I had to figure out what supplies.

A couple of years ago I bought a modular type art supply bag. It’s around 6×9 inches and is supposed to hold pens and paper on its own and then you stick that in another bag. I wanted to use it to hold my 5.5×8.5 inch sketchbook but the bag is a little too small for it. I think that’s why it’s been sitting on the shelf for years. But it will hold some of my cartoon art card stuff. I have a small aluminum art card case and that fits right in a sleeve on the from of the bag. Along with that I fit a sign pen, a mechanical pencil, a lettering marker, a kneaded eraser, and some flat portable reading glasses. It is good to go.

I ended up being a messenger style canvas sling bag that’s 10.2×13.6×4.4 inches. That’s about half the size of my Just-Stow-It art bag and was just about what I wanted. It had a bunch of pockets to put things in and I had to decide what I was going to keep in it. I wanted to be able to grab it and go so it had to have permanent supplies in it. At first I threw everything I could in it but then I narrowed down the stuff. I put a small photo tripod, a small flashlight, a small Swiss Army style knife, a D-Ring, small headphones, mints, a train schedule, and a lease cleaning pen in the bag. Along with the modular art supply bag these are my go stuff.

I wanted to put some more stuff in there too so I wanted another modular bag. They made a bigger one so I ordered one. It was only after I ordered it that I though to check the size of it. Fo some reason I assumed it would fit but when I got it the size was a smidge too big. The canvas bag is 10.2 inches tall and the modular bag is 10.5 inches tall. It does fit in with the corners bent but it’s not ideal. It is big enough to fit a couple of file folders I need to have with me. As long as I bend over the tabs.

Since I’ve been working on my art cards while at the train station I wanted to carry some color markers with me. I have a ton of markers at home but since I don’t want to be packing and unpacking the bag I needed more markers for it. Not a lot. I got some Pitt Artist Brush markers. I wanted to use tham because they’re India ink based markers. They’re different from my usual Copic alcohol based markers. I got a couple of the six marker sets. A blue set and a flesh tone set. They fit well in the pockets of the larger modular bag. I’ll probably need some more stuff to go in there but I’m not sure what just yet,

The one thing that goes in my bag and always messes up my packing is my camera. It’s a Canon Powershot SX60 that I bought back in 2015 and I use it to take street photos when I’m in the city. The problem in that it’s about 5x5x4 inches. So it sits on the bottom of the bag and bulges out. That’s less of a problem when I’m heading into the city to specifically take street photos but as an everyday camera it’s less than ideal. I’m looking to buy a new smaller camera to carry in the bag but the one I want costs about $400 dollars so it’ll take a while to save up for it.

One other thing I had to do with the new canvas bag was to waterproof it. Or at least water resistant it. A couple of weeks ago as I was walking to Penn Station I got caught in a downpour. I was carrying my Just-Stow-It art bag which I thought was waterproof but turned out to be closer to water resistant. The stuff in the inner compartment was dry but I had my inkbook in an outer compartment at that got damp. It wasn’t a disaster. Only the edges of a handful of pages got wet but it still annoyed me. This was a twenty minute walk in a downpour so it was really worse case scenario.

My new canvas bag wasn’t waterproof at all. So I ordered some waterproofing spray that was for boat canvas. That ended up driving up the price of my $35 bag to $50 but I knew what I was in for if I didn’t. I gave the bag two coats of the spray and that seemed to do the trick. I’m still going to avoid the rain though. Plus I have enough spray to give it a couple of coats ever year for a few years. Here’s to art on the go.

It’s time to pull something out from my art files and give it a look. Usually I’ve written these about my paintings but I think today I’m going to dig into my drawings. I have a couple of cabinets I use as flat files and store my old drawings in them. I built boxes of different sizes for them a few years ago. I think I’ll dig into one of my 11×17 inch boxes and see if there is anything that I want to write about in there.

I pulled out an old Epson paper box that I store drawings in. It’s Super A3/Super B size (13×19 inches). This is the biggest paper my printer (and all my printers before this) can handle. It reminds me that before I even had a computer I used to use old stat paper boxes to store drawings in.

A stat machine used to be a common thing in publishing. It was used to make copies of black and white art. It’s sort of like a photocopier except that is was around a long time before photocopiers and didn’t make copies on regular paper. A stat machine was also called a stat camera because that’s what it was. A giant camera that used a chemical based photographic method to take pictures of art and copy that art onto a piece of photographic paper.

When I worked at Marvel in the early 1990s they had two stat cameras and they were making photostats all day long. So they went through a lot of photostat paper. That paper used to come in boxes that were around 11×17 inches and up. Some boxes were 16×20 inches and probably even bigger. When the boxes were empty the stat guys would throw them out or give them to anyone who wanted them. Since comic book paper is 11×17 inches there were lots of people who wanted those boxes to store art in. I was one of them and still have some of those boxes to this day.

Looks like I have about 20 pieces of paper in this box so I’ll pull one of them out and see what it is. It’s a 10×15 inch black and white ink drawing on a 11×17 inch piece of paper. It’s named “Snakes in Soil” and has the date August 19, 2011 on it. It looks familiar but I don’t know if I ever made a finished color print out of it. Sometimes I do that and sometimes I don’t.

It’s a picture of a teacup shaped face that looks like some kind of art robot hooked into a machine like background. I hesitate to use the words “Robot” and “Machine” because the shapes and space the image exists in really isn’t that real world. It’s more artistic than machine like but it’s drawn with a lot of straight lines which makes the piece look mechanical without really being mechanical. It looks like a lot of the lines were drawn with a pen and French curve but then gone over with a brush and ink to thicken them. That’s a common technique I use to keep the my line from getting too mechanical and dead.

I like the shapes in this drawing. I think I did a nice job with them. It looks to me like I was trying to integrate the background and foreground into a shallow space made up of these shapes. I also like the swirls they come off his shoulders. This is something I tend to do every now and then and it looks good in black and white but I usually find it hard to color. The swirl shapes make sense as black and white lines but when color is added the color usually dominates the thin shape and the background color becomes more dominant than the foreground line. That can sometimes be a problem.

An odd thing about this drawing is that I can see about eight small areas that I used white out on. I’m usually a very neat artist and almost never use white out (it’s probably really a white gouache) on my drawing so I wonder why I messed up the drawing in this case?

Since this art has a date on it I decided to look up that date on my calendar. I use the Mac Calendar program to keep track of the stuff I work on. So as I look back to August of 2011 I can see that four days after I finished this drawing I colored it and turned it into a print called “I Was Lost in the Wilds.” This doesn’t even ring a bell but I can now look that up and see how I colored it.

It’s print number 73. The line I put on it is “I was lost in the wilds outside the walls until I heard you call my name.” I’m looking at a printout of it now in my 11×17 inch book of prints. It looks nice. I did a good job with the color. I can see right away that I dealt with the swirl shoulder by adding a line of color to it. This allows the shape of the swirl to remain the focal point rather than getting lost in the background.

I also find it interesting how the black and white drawing is all about integrating the foreground and background but the color version is all about keeping them separate and distinct. The foreground is all blues and the background all reds plus there are even color outlines on parts of the foreground to separated it from the background. It really is a completely different piece when the color is added.

There is also a ton of texture in the final print. The entire background has a light cross hatching texture all over it while the foreground has an even lighter cross hatching texture. That texture serves to unify the piece even as the color makes the two pieces distinct.

I also like that the type is asymmetrical.

So that was interesting for me. I picked a drawing and saw where it led. I’m tempted to look through the whole box of drawings but I thing I’ll save that for another time. Half the fun of writing this blog was that I had no idea what I would pull out of the box. So I’ll save that fun fo another time. I hope you found this interesting too.

I’m feeling ambitious tonight. I want to write another one of my “Friends” watch-a-longs and the next one I have to watch is “The One After the Super Bowl.” It’s season 2 episode 12 (and 13) and is 48 minutes long and so is twice the length of the episodes I’ve done before. This might take a while. It first aired on January, 28, 1996. That’s year that the Cowboys defeated the Steelers. I watched both the game and the episode of “Friends” afterwards. It was probably the first episode a lot of people saw but I watched the show from the beginning so it was just another episode for me. Since I’m a NY Giants fan I’m sure I liked the episode better than the game (The Cowboys won the Super Bowl).

We open with a fake commercial for “Monkey Shine Beer” where the monkey on screen reminds Ross of Marcel (the monkey he had in season one). Plot twist! It is Marcel. I hate that stupid money and most of the plots and jokes involving him so this might not be the episode for me. Lots of monkey jokes in the opening scene. And here comes the theme song. I just might sing along.

Quick set-up. At the coffee shop Joey gets his first fan mail so Joey might have a stalker. Ross is off to San Diego for a conference and to visit his monkey at the zoo. That’s the first plot and it’ll go through both episodes. Then singer and actor Chris Isaak shows up for the Phoebe plot. If I remember correctly this episode has lots of famous guest stars. She’s going to sing to children at the library. That’s plot number two.

Now we’re at the boys’ apartment and Joey’s starker shows up and she’s played by Brooke Shields. I remember her being very good in this roll. The joke is that she’s crazy but she’s so hot that they can’t seem to just brush her off. I just noticed there is glass over the foosball table in their apartment. I don’t remember seeing that there before or after. Joey and Chandler panic and it’s pretty funny. Then they get a look at Brooke’s hotness and all the panic is gone.

Next comes our first scene of Ross looking for his monkey at the zoo and Fred Willard is the guest star. He’s always funny. He tells Ross his monkey died. Its a short scene and then we’re off the library for Chandler to tell the girls about Joey’s stalker and to see Phoebe sing. Some solid if unspectacular stuff. Phoebe’s inappropriate for children songs are the highlight.

Joey is out to diner with his stalker and she thinks he is his character. Brooke Shields really shines in this episode. That scene ends quickly and we’re back to the zoo with Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson, as he tells Ross his monkey is really alive. It’s a quick scene and we’re back at the restaurant with Joey and Brooke. They’re both excellent playing off each other.

Phoebe’s got another song that is full of solid advice for kids but is still inappropriate. Chris Issak is not to fond of her performance but still wants to kiss her. All these scenes are short so we’re back to the zoo with Dan Castellaneta being creepy and Ross being baffled. This is another funny scene.

Back to NYC. We get an establishing shot of the Midtown Library where Phoebe is singing. I take pictures in front of that library during my street photo trips in the summer. It makes me feel a little nostalgic for the summertime. Meanwhile Ross is telling everybody what he found out about his monkey. What is everyone else still doing at the library? Did Ross teleport across the country? I still hate the monkey plots. At least we get another song from Phoebe about how animals get turned into food.

Another quick turnaround and everyone is at Joey’s apartment when Brook Shields shows up. It’s another funny scene. Jennifer Aniston is trying her best not to break up in the background but sometimes she can’t help but grin. Lots of glasses of water being thrown in Joey’s face. Funny gag. They finally get rid of Brooke in an amusing way.

In another quick scene Phoebe gets fired for singing the wrong stuff to children and then we get the continuation of the monkey plot. Marcel is in town filming a movie. Of course they have to go see him. But first Phoebe’s kid fans show up at the coffee shop to her her sing and get more of “The truth.” End of that plot line. Now onto the movie set to see Marcel. I could do without this unfunny part as they sing “Wimoweh” to Marcel to get his attention. I think this is where they split the episode in two for syndication.

The monkey plot continues as they all hang out on the movie set. Lots of movie jokes and Joey is looking for a role from the director. And who makes an appearance? It’s Julia Roberts. She was at the height of her movie star fame at this time so they’re really pulling out the big guest stars for this second half of the episode. This is the new second plot for the second half. Julia Roberts also does an excellent job.

Julia Roberts sees Chandler and it turns out she went to grade school with him. They catch up and plan to go on a date. Now Jean Claude Van Damme shows up and Monica has a crush on him but is shy about it. So Rachel goes up to him and of course then Van Damme has a crush on Rachel. It’s all very junior high. We have our three plots. Monica and Rachel fighting over Jean-Claude, the monkey, and Julia and Chandler.

Back to the coffee shop where Rachel tells everyone about her date and Monica is jealous. More monkey jokes. Chandler tells everyone about his date with Julia. He likes her a lot. Now we get to see another Chandler and Julia date. Lots of kissing on the couch. Cut to a Ross and his monkey on a date. Almost. It gets cancelled. It’s so dumb. Man these scenes go by quickly.

Now we get a big scene back at the apartment with the three women. Monica and Rachel are going at it with Phoebe as the referee. Then it gets physical and funny. Phoebe has to break it up with some ear pulling.

Another date scene with Joey, a girl from the movie, Ross stag, Chandler, and Julia. Julia is coming on strong. This whole plot is about how Chandler can’t believe his good luck and we’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop. Julia and Chandler go to the bathroom to fool around but then Julia gets her revenge for a fourth grade prank and leaves Chandler in the bathroom wearing nothing but her underpants. Much like Brooke Shields, Julia Roberts was excellent in her guest starring role.

Oh look, it’s Van Damme out on a date with Monica. Except Monica now finds herself invited to a threesome she doesn’t want. That’s the payoff joke and Van Damme makes it work. Back at the apartment and more physical fighting between Monica and Rachel. It escalates to handbag marinara. One of my favorite Friends’ bits. Phoebe has to be the voice of reason.

Back to Chandler in the bathroom stall. Joey comes in and we get some good comedy. Now Ross comes in. This is one of the funniest scenes in the show. Chandler’s walk-by holding the stall door to cover himself is classic.

Coffee shop. Joey got a replacement part in the movie. Now we get more monkey jokes as Marcel shows up. Even a monkey comedy montage that isn’t funny. A classic scene followed by a clunker. A funny Van Damme kissing scene follows that. And a tear jerking monkey goodbye. At least it was supposed to be emotional. I found it cringeworthy.

The final scene is a Joey hamming it up in his movie death scene. And we’re out.

I just checked with http://http://uncutfriendsepisodes.tripod.com to see what was cut out of the episode and there was a bit. Mostly a line here and there but stuff I want to see so I’m glad I watched the old extended DVD copies I have rather then any HD streaming ones. I also checked with the ratings I gave to the episode back in 2013 and I gave it three out of five stars. I stand by that. There was a lot of funny stuff in this double sized episode. Plus some good guest stars. Sure I didn’t like a lot of the monkey jokes but other stuff made up for it. Anyway it just took me a good hour and a half to watch the show and write this so I’m off to bed.