Radiant Comics

It’s a strange feeling when I don’t finish something after getting a lot of finishing done. First of all it’s tough to get anything done as an artist. You’ve got to get over the initial hump of, “Why do any work if you’re not getting paid for it?” That’s what stops most people who want to be artists. Why make a piece of art that takes up your time and money that no one cares about when you finish it? I can’t even tell you how to answer that question. At best I can tell you it’s an obstacle of self doubt that you have to put aside and ignore. The question never goes away but can be put away in a drawer. At least for a little while.

Four about five months I was getting a lot of big ink drawings done. I finished 28 of those 22×30 inch big ink drawings. Since each one takes about three days to finish that is a lot of work. I was into it though. I had first made about a dozen big ink drawings back in 2014-2015 but then I stopped. Who knows why except that these things just run their course. I thought I would make more but I never did until five months ago. Over three years later. What got me started again? I’m not even sure of that except that I wanted to. I was feeling constrained by the 11×17 inch paper I usually work on.

I worked on the drawings on the weekend. I’d work up a drawing during the week, transfer it to a big piece of paper, and then draw with ink all of Saturday and Sunday. Sometimes I’d have to finish a bit of it on Monday. Sundays worked well with the drawing because I could put a football game on in the background as I worked. Otherwise I might have the TV on with a movie or TV show that didn’t demand too much attention. It’s not like I could watch something closely as I was working.

I finished the last one two weekends ago. It came out nice. I’ve generally been happy with all the big ink drawings I’ve done so far. You can’t make a drawing that big that takes that much time without planning and that planning usually weeds out the bad stuff that I wouldn’t be happy with. So that’s what’s good about this big ink drawings. By the time I get to the finished stage I’m happy with it.

Working on smaller drawings with less planning can lead to frustration. It’s just part of the process. Sometimes it is the process. At the beginning of making a piece of art I need to be jamming out ideas and not thinking about quality. That’s the stuff I do in my ink book/sketchbook. I have to get stuff down on paper and quality doesn’t matter.

After I have a lot of drawings I pick some out and try to make new drawings from them. That’s where the quality control comes in. It’s not easy to make a drawing out of a small idea. Often it doesn’t work out. I have a bunch of drawings that I bring to this stage and then abandon. I think I can do something with it but then I can’t. Frustrating but that’s the way things work. I have to put aside the frustration and keep going.

So the big ink drawings were all vetted through this process. Some were new drawings that I came up with and some were old drawings that I brought back to life. Like I said I have plenty of orphaned drawings so I looked through them to find something I liked. But that was the key. I already liked the guts of the drawing. The basic premise and style so there was almost no chance I’d hate it when I made a big ink drawing from it. That’s key when working big. Keep yourself as happy with it as possible.

So as I was working on the last one I was feeling some burnout. The sense of satisfaction of getting one done wasn’t there. It was felling a little to by the book. I often work on things in bursts. If five months can really be considered a burst that is. I’ll work on a bunch of “Dreams of Things” covers in a row, a bunch of small paintings, photographs, or some comics. Inevitably whatever grove I get into with a particular thing ends. I don’t know why it ends but it does. I get a “That’s enough of that” feeling and can’t go on. That’s what I hit with these big ink drawings.

It’s the feeling that come after the burnout that’s tough. It’s that sense of “What do I do now?” When I was on a roll with those big ink drawings I didn’t have to ask myself that question. I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it. It all made sense. I know that feeling doesn’t last but I ride it out as long as I can. That’s how I get things done. But how do I get things done after a roll? I have to start small.

This week I did some little things. I’ve made some art cards, worked on some ink book drawings, and drew a few 6×9 inch drawings. There is not a lot sense of accomplishment in those small things. They’re all about starting things and not getting things down. Of course starting things is a necessary part of the process but of the things I start only a percentage of them get finished. So they’re less satisfying to do.

Just yesterday I finally got something done. Not quite all the way done but nearly done. I took one of my new 6×9 inch drawings, set it up as one of my “Dreams of Things” comic book covers, and inked it. I ended up with a new 11×17 ink drawing. It’s not finished in the sense that I eventually will color it with markers but I usually don’t do that right away. I’ll put it in a pile with other drawings like it and one day I’ll pull it from that pile and color it. But that day is not today. So I’ll have to be satisfied with almost finishing something for now.

As I was reading a bit of Twitter the other day a comic book related subject came up that I had contemplated before and it brought it to mind again. It has to do with pencilers, inkers, and original art. They way comics books have traditionally been made, especially Marvel and DC comics, is that one person draws the comic in pencil and then a second person draws over the pencils with ink. They’re generally known and a penciller and an inker.

A second thing that you should know is that the penciller is generally considered more important than the inker. The penciller makes a lot of the storytelling decisions, has to be able to draw well, has to be able to draw quickly, and generally make everything look pleasing. The inker deals with how the drawing is going to look as a finished piece. With ink he sets the lighting and mood and well as making sure that things will print properly. Two different inkers working over the same pencils will yield different results but both should be recognizable as the work of the same penciller.

In the business of commercial art publishers usually buy the rights to art but not the art itself. So if a publisher wanted to hire Norman Rockwell to paint a cover for them they get the reproduction rights to the art but not the physical painting itself. That is returned to the painter. For many years comic books were different. After the artist handed in his work to the publisher they wouldn’t give it back. They said it was theirs and kept it. It the 1960s artists started to fight for the return of their original art and by the late 1970s Marvel and DC started return the art to the artists.

The first problem the publishers has was who to return the art to. Both the penciller and the inker worked on it (we won’t mention the letterers because they got nothing returned to them). The penciller was considered to be more important but none of his actual pencils still existed. They’d all been inked over. Eventually the publishers decided to return half the pages to the penciller and half to the inker. Or two thirds to the penciller and one third to the inker. I’ve heard it both ways but the tweet I read mentioned the two thirds to one third split.

That’s the way it stayed for years but then technology changed things. Besides things being done digitally, in which case there is no physical artwork to give to anyone, digital has also made it possible to easily separate pencils from inks. I do it all the time with my own work. You scan in the pencils, e-mail them to the inker, and then the inker prints them out in non-photo blue line on a new piece of paper. The physical pencils and the physical inks are never even in the same room.

Marvel Comics used to have an art returns department (it was usually one person and an intern) whose job it was to make sure that artists got their original art back. They don’t anymore. They don’t even want the physical art sent in. Scans are all they need. This means the artists are on their own when it comes to original art issues these days.

John Byrne doesn’t tweet. He only posts on his own website www.byrnerobotics.com. But there is a person who goes by the Twitter name of “NotJohnByre” who reposts some of Byrnes stuff so the wider world can more easily keep track of Byrne and his work. It was there that I learned that Byrne had been working on a new X-Men project that he wants to get published. Byrne has pencilled some pages of it and he was thinking that he’d like to have them inked over blue lines rather than the original pages. None of that was unusual. The unusual part was that he said he wanted not only to keep his pencils but also have two thirds of the inks returned to him. So he would end up owning all the pencil pages plus two thirds of the inked pages while the inker would only end up with one third of the inked pages and no pencil pages.

That sounds unfair but Byrne’s argument was pretty straight forward. No matter if inked over the pencils or over blue line it was still his work and he deserved his fair share of it. If the inks were done right over the pencils he would get two thirds of the finished pages so why should things change? His work was as integral to the finished pages as it always was and so he deserved what he always got.

That’s not a bad argument but it overlooks one very important item. Things have changed. First off neither Byrne nor the hypothetical inker own the intellectual property they are creating. Marvel Comics owns the X-Men and all the X-Men Comics that they pay anyone to make. All the artists own is the physical manifestation of what it takes to make the comics. John Byrne owns the physical pencils that he draws but once he scans them in and sends them to Marvel his ownership of the intellectual concept of those pencils is gone.

Once Marvel receives Byrne’s scans of the pencils they can do what they want with them. Byrne’s ownership over the pencils has ended except for the direct physical manifestation of the pencils which he still has in his studio. Marvel can send the, now digital, pencils to an inker, they can send them to six inkers, they can forgo inks entirely and print directly from the pencils (which used to be tough to do but now is much easier), they can never publish them, they own them.

So let’s say Marvel sends Byrne’s pencils to an inker and he inks them. What is Byrne owed from that inker? Nothing. Why? Because things have changed. The days of pencils and inks having to be done on the same page are gone. When they had to be done on the same page there was a need to compromise. The penciller could get some of them in proportion to how important he was seen to be to the book and the inker could get some of them. Not anymore. The penciller can own the exact work he did and so can the inker. That seems very fair to me.

For John Byrne that doesn’t seem to be a good enough argument but for me it is. All the artist owns in the case of commercial art is the physical manifestation of that art that he makes with his own hands. He doesn’t own the conceptual rights that he sold. He has no say over them. So once Byrne hands in the scans and keeps his own pencils he owns nothing that is made form those pencil scans. The inker gets to keep his inks.

I don’t usually dress down my own artwork. I’ve been making art for a long time and I generally know how to make good art. Or I at least know how to make art that satisfies me. It’s usually young artists who are the most dissatisfied with their own work. I’ve seen plenty of young artists who finish a piece and then hate it and have a hard time looking at it. That’s normal and understandable.

It takes a long time and a lot of practice to be able to make good art on a consistent basis so if you’re young and inexperienced you’re not going to hit the mark as often as you’d like to. I’ve also know artists who never like to look at their old work from when they were young because all they can see are the mistakes. I used to be like that until I learned to give my younger self a break. He was trying his best with his limited skills and there is no need to get upset about that now. I try to look for the good things in my old work to learn from them.

Certain artists always have a feeling of insecurity. I’m not sure why but they’re hard on their own work. I’ve known an artist or two who did some spectacular work but then dressed it down because they didn’t like it. For some reason they were never satisfied with they own stuff. They could see the value of other people’s art but not their own. I’ve always been glad I don’t have that trait because I could see how hard it was to shake off.

I bring up this topic because I just finished a piece that I’m not happy with. I didn’t like the way it came out. I’m not one of those artists who has a complete vision in his head of how a piece will come out but I do know a general direction I want to go in. I have a process. For these “Dreams of Things” covers it’s: thumbnail sketch, pencil drawing, maybe a second large pencil drawing, ink drawing, and then color it with markers. I’ve done over sixty of them so I have the process down. I have had some misses with them and this is another one of those.

I can’t even tell you what I think is wrong with this cover. If I could figure it out then maybe I could fix it. It could just be that it didn’t come out like I thought it would. It got away from me. You might even think it’s just fine and like it. I’ve made other pieces that I’ve been unhappy with that other people have liked just fine. This might be all about me rather than about the art.

The art in question is one of my faux comic book covers. “Dreams of Things” number sixty two. Since I haven’t been making any of my big ink drawings lately I switched back to making some of my “Dreams of Things” covers. So far I’ve pencilled four of them, inked two of them, and colored one of them. This is the finished colored one. As I look at it now it bewilders me.

I penciled it just fine, set it up on the computer with the logos and trade dress, printed it out to be inked, and that’s when I think things started to go wrong. It turned out that the pencils were pretty thin. The idea for the hair, face, giant eye, and strange animal profile were there but the body of the figure wasn’t. There is not much form to it. Or at least the form is simpler than I intended it to be.

I wrote that the face was there but maybe it wasn’t. I added more dividing lines in the face then were there in the pencil version. There are about thirteen color shapes in the face but there were only about six in the pencil stage. The same with that animal profile. I addd more shapes into that too.

The background I find okay. It’s a little dull and flat but it has a lot of color and texture. Often I keep the backgrounds simple for these covers because the foreground figure are so wacky and weird. The background has to tether the image to reality a bit to make it more comprehensible. Though I’m not thrilled with the background in this one I don’t hate it either.

It’s the body, the person’s shirt, that bothers me the most. That’s where I spent the most time. That’s an annoying thing about making a piece of art that doesn’t satisfy me. They take more time than a piece that I get right. When things aren’t working out I keep chasing “Getting it right.” I pour more time and work into it thinking that if I can figure it out I can get to where I want to be with it and be happy. But it rarely works out that way. Since my vision of it is compromised there is no way that adding more stuff to it will make it better.

I ended up adding a lot more shapes to the brown shirt than I first had. The shirt had pretty big shapes in it to start but then I cut those shapes in half. After that didn’t satisfy me I cut them in half again. I ended up with a lot of little shapes in that shirt and you know what that did? Nothing. It didn’t help one bit. I decided I had put enough time in this piece and would try one more thing before I quit it. I blacked in half the shirt.

There is an old saying in cartooning. “When in doubt black it out.” This means that often you need to strip things down. Too much detail can be distracting. It can also make you question if it should be there. If that question comes to mind then black out the detail. The drawing is almost always better off that way. So that’s what I did here. The black area helps pop the animal head out and off the shirt a bit plus it gives the flat shirt a little bit of shape. The little bit of black on the bottom right of the shirt gives the illusion of a chest and arm. It was not a bad idea for a last ditch effort.

I’m not going to tell you I’m happy with this drawing because I’m not. But maybe you’ll like it better because to you it’s just another drawing. To me it’s one that went off course and got away.

I’m moved tonight to write about my trips to the comic book store. Or stores as the case may be. It’s one of those everyday (or every week) things that slip away unnoticed with time. In the mid-1970s before the age of the comic shop I used to go to local stores that had newsstands to buy my comic books. At first it was the 7-11 behind my house. They had a spinner rack and they got new comics in every week. They’d put the new ones on the stand every Thursday afternoon and I’d be there to check them out and buy the ones I wanted.

As the 1970s wore on comics on the newsstand were starting to die. Newsstands didn’t want to bother with the low price and low profit comic books. They’d rather sell higher priced magazines. My local 7-11 started to not care so much about the comics and it showed. They got fewer of them in and put them out in an inconsistent manner. I also think they changed owners. About that time I was lucky to find another store called Stout Steve’s that was a bike ride away and took more care with their comics. That became my regular place for comics on Thursdays for a few years. I can remember putting the bag of comics under my shirt and then tucking my shirt into my pants to be able to ride my bike without having to hold the comics in my hand. Messenger bags were a long way off.

In the summer of 1981 I turned fifteen and a comic shop opened in a town about ten miles away. That was as cool as it gets. Of course being ten miles away meant that I couldn’t get there without a ride. So I visited it every so often but still continued my trips to Stout Steve’s every week. My friend Steve and I did bike ride the ten miles to the comic shop one summer day. That was the only time I made it there under my own power.

My friend Rob (who I met in high school) and I both turned 16 the next year. We both got our driver’s licenses but I don’t think it was until the next year (1983) when we were 17 that Rob got access to the family car on a regular basis. That’s when we started going to the comic shop on a regular basis. Saturday mornings he’d drive over to my house to pick me up and we’d travel the ten miles to Nyack NY and M&M Comics.

That is also when I found out about having a “Pull list.” If you wanted to buy a certain comic you’d tell the store ahead of time and they’d pull it for you and put it aside for when you came in. Comic books are usually published monthly or every two months so I could just put the X-Men on my pull list and it would be at the comic shop waiting for me every month. That way I wouldn’t miss an issue.

As time went on besides M&M Comics we started to add a couple of other stores to our itinerary. We would head over to the local mall and check out the record store and book store. After a couple of more years we added video game stores to that list.

In about 1984 a second comic shop opened in that mall. It was once a used bookstore called The Paperback Exchange that we would check out every now and then but we noticed it started to add comics. Then slowly the books disappeared and the comics took over. I still kept my pull list at M&M Comics but would buy a book or two at the Paperback Exchange.

In 1984 Rob and I both graduated form high school and went off to college. No longer could we make it to the comic shop weekly but we still had our pull lists there. Whenever we were both back home for the weekend we’d meet up and go to the comic shop and our other stores.

My first college was up at what is now SUNY Sullivan in the Catskills. It was a two year school and there were no comic shops anywhere around. My second school was SUNY Purchase in Westchester NY. Nearby was the White Plains Galleria and in that mall was a comic shop named “Hero’s World.” I made a bunch of new friends at Purchase and some of them were comic books fans so we made occasional trips to Hero’s World. It was always fun to get off campus and go get some comics. Not my pull list stuff but whatever caught my fancy.

About a year after I graduated from college I found myself working at Marvel Comics. Suddenly there were comics around me everywhere all of the time. I could pretty much get any Marvel or DC comic that I wanted for free. The funny thing was that by that time I wasn’t really reading any Marvel or DC comics. I was pretty much an indie comics guy.

My tastes had always run to the weirder less mainstream comics even when I was a kid buying comics off the newsstand. I especially like all the strange offbeat comics that Marvel published in the late 1970s. After M&M Comics opened in 1981 I was introduced to indie and small press comics. Stuff that couldn’t be found on the newsstands and only was distributed to comic shops. So even though I was surrounded by comics at Marvel I still would go to the comic shop.

Rob had moved back into town after he graduated college and so we resumed our trips to the comic shop. It wasn’t every week as I was often away on Saturdays, staying in the city with friends for the work week, or had a long commute that left no time after the work day but we usually made it every two to three weeks at the longest.

The the first half of the 1990s was a boom time for comic books. A couple of new comic book stores opened up in the county and though we weren’t regulars at them we’d check them them out every now and again. It was also a boom time for video games so there were two or three video game stores in the Nanuet Mall alone. That could really kill a Saturday morning. It was a different world in 1993.

In December of 1998 M&M Comics closed it’s doors for good. I had a pull list there for fifteen years. The Paperback Exchange was now called The Comics Warehouse and I moved my pull list over to there. Things went on that way for a while until some time in the early 2000s (I can’t even remember when) Rob moved out of town and over the border into New Jersey. That’s when we started to meet up at the comic shop rather than drive over together. Most of the bookstores, music stores, and video game stores on our mall run were closed by then so it wasn’t even a bother to cut them out. We had the internet for that.

In 2005 I stopped commuting into NYC. That meant I could get to the comic shop on a week night. New comic book day is on Wednesday but Rob and I usually don’t go until Thursday. That’s not set in stone or anything but it’s the general plan.

I’m not sure of the date but sometime around 2008 Comics Warehouse moved from it’s location near the Nanuet Mall into downtown Pearl River. So now, baring a text changing the plans, Rob and I meet at the comic shop in Pearl River at about 5 PM on Thursday nights. We hang out until it closes at about 6PM talking comics, movies, books, life, and whatever else comes up. John is the name of the guy who works that night and he always joins in. So do Roy and Dave if we go on a day when they’re working. Plus we chat with whatever regulars show up at the shop. It’s a grand old time. I was just there this evening.

“People like cats.” That was my thought years ago when I first decided to draw some cat pictures. I’m guessing it was the early 2000s. I had never drawn many cats before, only one I can think of off the top of my head, nor many animals of any stripe but for some vague notion of popularity I decided to draw a few cats. I consider myself a dog person rather than a cat person but I somehow settled on cats to draw.

Of course the first thing I did was I went to the internet to look for some photos of cats. As most people know there are a lot of cat photos online. But finding one I could make a drawing from was hard. I’m very picky when it comes to any kind of photo reference. I prefer to shoot my own photo reference so I can get exactly what I want but that’s not always possible. So I end up looking through a thousand cat phots to find a few that were good for me.

It turns out that the facial structure of a cat suits my stripped down graphic drawing style. The eyes, the mouth, the nose, the ears, and the whiskers all can be broken down into simple and attractive shapes. Drawing a cat’s face that says “Cat’s face” is not too hard. At the right angle with the right shapes it all comes together. Dogs are much harder. They have much more variety in head shapes and sizes. Plus those long noses don’t translate as well into a simple drawing. A cat was the right drawing choice for me.

I can remember one of the problems I was having with the cat’s face was the center of its head. The forehead. It tended to be blank and flatten out the face. Any attempt at shading or delineation of fur just muddied the waters. So I ended up putting a symbol on the cat’s forehead. That’s how I got “Arrow Cat”, “Ankh Cat”, and “Infinity Cat.” Since I’m a fan of symbols I think that part worked out fine.

I made the 8×10 inch acrylic on canvas painting of Ankh Cat back when I first started drawing cats. I made him a purple cat. The purple is pretty strong but the red behind him is equally as strong. That gives this painting the feeling of a traffic sign. It seems the cat is trying to warn us about something but I’m not sure what. Emphasizing the rectangular shape of the canvas with the green outline and the blue rectangles makes this even more of a road sign. The dark blue brush strokes bring it back to a painting but I still can picture this as a sign on some remote European mountain.

You can see a few different shapes in the fur in this one. There is the basic black line that shapes the whole cat but since this was a painting I didn’t stick with just that. Painting offers the opportunity to use color and texture so that is what I did. We’ve got light pink strokes, magenta dots, and dark purple strokes all coming into play to make the cat’s fur. It’s a modernist painting approach where the paint isn’t literal but sees itself as paint on canvas. So at the same time we see the cat but know it’s made of paint.

Now we’ll fast forward to just a week ago. I was looking through my drawings looking for something to make a big ink drawing out of and guess what though one through my head. “People like cats.” I scan my stuff as a matter of course so I have all my old drawings and painting scanned in and waiting for me. I did a search for my cat drawings and found good old Arrow Cat. The only thing missing was an idea for the background.

The background of the painting was all about painting and that wouldn’t work in a drawing. I contemplated some kind of landscape behind the cat but that didn’t go with the graphic design drawing that I had planned. I even tried out some drawings of faces and such but none of that worked. It only distracted me from the cat. I ended up putting in various Mondrian lines in the background (I was working on the computer) and that seemed to pull it together. I knew the boxes it formed wouldn’t stay blank but I knew I could figure them out later.

That’s when I blew up the drawing to full size and transferred it to a 22×30 inch piece of paper. The original drawing had about the same number of lines that you see in the painting. I knew I would need more lines in the fur but once again I would draw them as I went. So after I transferred the drawing I grabbed my brush and ink and started inking what was there.

It took a fair amount of time draw the cat in ink. I kept the lines sharp and precise so that meant slow and deliberate. After I finished the first pass there were about half of the amount of lines you see in the finished piece. Then I stepped back to see what other lines were needed. I’s grab the pencil, draw some in, decide if they were correct or not, and then ink them in if they were correct. The fur still wasn’t finished after the second pass but I decided to move onto the back ground.

I knew I would need a lot of different textures in the background and that would take some time. It’s amazing that after years of experience I can just see what texture I need next. I’d stare at the background for a few minutes and “Vertical Stripes in the left box” would just come to me. I could picture it in my head before I did it. They come in order too so I can’t picture it all at once but as I go along I can picture the next one.

As I worked on the background I also worked on some more of the fur. I’d switch between them. Four or five boxes of texture and then a few marks on the fur. Pretty soon I had the background finished but not the fur. That still had some small touches to go.

It takes time for a young artist to learn when something is finished but I haven’t been a young artist in a long time. I can tell when a piece is finished pretty easily. I can look at the cat and see that it’s almost done but not quite there yet. If I look at it closely something will suggest itself. Some line or mark. I look at it until I see there is nothing left to do. Its not even a question. It’s almost done, it’s almost done. It’s almost done, and then “Boom!” It’s done. Somewhere on there I put down one last line and the drawing was done. That’s a good feeling.