Radiant Comics

Time flies. It has a way of passing that, in hindsight, makes things that happened a while ago seem like they happened just yesterday. That thought entered my head because I made some large drawings this week for the first time in a while. After I did them I checked my calendar and “A while” was longer ago than I thought. As I write this it’s August of 2018. I thought it had been about two years since I made my last large 20×28 inch ink drawing but then I looked it up and it turns out that the last one I drew was in January of 2015. That’s three and a half years ago. How did that happen?

I like making large ink drawings. I made a bunch of them from September 2012 until January of 2015 but then I stopped. One of the things about making large drawing is that I have to be in a large mood to do it. I have to believe that it’s important to make them. That’s true of making most art but the larger the piece the more I have to believe in it. That’s because they take up more time and space so they better have an importance to me or I’ll stick to smaller and easier to manage stuff. I don’t think that’s an unusual thought process either. It’s tough to be ambitious when there is no reward for the ambition.

When I first started making these large ink drawings I bought a new drawing board to put on my easel. It’s a 24×36 inch white pressboard that fits the large paper nicely. For the last six years it’s been sitting on my easel if I don’t have a painting on there. Since I haven’t had the ambition to make a lot of big paintings in that time it’s been on there a lot. I also put my 11×17 inch finished drawings on the drawing board so that I can look at them. Since it’s a white board I find the glare coming off it makes the drawings hard to see. So I keep one of my large ink drawings on the board at all times. That means for the last three and a half years I’ve been looking at whatever 20×28 inch drawing that is on the board and thinking to myself that I should draw another. Then time passed.

I think it was my annual birthday BBQ that got me motivated. I guess the aftermath of my BBQ might be more accurate. Y’see there is always a post-party letdown. Leading up to the BBQ there is lots to be done. The day of the BBQ there is lots to be done and a lot of fun to be had. Then the day after it’s all over and here comes the realization that every day can’t be a party. That’s the post party letdown. With me it can linger well into the week. Somehow in that funk the thought came to me to make a large drawing. I think I decided that some ambition would be good for me.

I looked through my pile of unused drawings for something appropriate. I remember thinking over the years that this one or that would make a good large ink drawing so I had a few to choose from. I picked one, printed it out in pieces on four 11×17 inch pieces of paper, taped the four sheets of paper together, and then transferred the drawing to the large sheet of paper using graphite paper. After that I started the drawing using markers, French curves, a brush, and ink.

Oddly, about fifteen minutes after I started I hated the drawing. Making a 20×28 inch drawing is a process and I seemed to have forgotten how to draw using that process. It was frustrating. I wanted to tear up the paper and start over. Or give up all together. But being that is was fairly late in the evening I decided to give it a rest and tackle it the next day. That was a good decision.

The next day I dove right in. I remembered how it was done and even added a few new things. One of the first things I came to grips with was that I should have completed my smaller drawing. It was a 6×9 inch drawing and really wasn’t ready to be blown up to 20×28 inches. I skipped making a finished 9×12 inch drawing so now I would have to do some finishing on the large drawing instead. This wasn’t the end of the world but was a step I usually didn’t have to do.

This particular drawing is called “Dance Through” and the 6×9 drawing was made on July 28, 2015. It’s been sitting around for a while. I worked on the large drawing for about 20 hours. That about usual for one of these. It’s not quite the same ambition as a 50 hour painting but it’s a lot more than a four hour drawing. I think one of the problems I had with it at first was that it has more small elements, like the woman at the top left, that in my other big drawings. It took a while to sync them all up and get the shapes and spaces right. It also took a lot of textures. I think I have about ten different textures in there as well as the black line. That took plenty of organization.

Working on this did it’s job. Sometimes it takes making a work of greater ambition than normal to really get into it. It pulled me out of my post-party funk and into the act of making art. It took a lot of thought and a lot of doing. By the end of making it I decided to jump right into another one. I spent my weekend making a second 20×28 inch drawing. This time of a large face. It was easier than the first one since the drawing was finished but by the end of drawing that second one I was finished. I had forgotten how much work they take and two in a row was tough by the end.

Still I’m happy with them. Happy enough that with some rest I even started a third. This one I’ll take slow.

I was out for my usual bike ride the other day when something unusual happened. The cable for my front derailleur broke. I can’t remember the last time that happened. For those who don’t know a road bike generally has four cables on it. Two cables for the brakes (one for the front and and one for the back brake) and two cables for the derailleurs (also front and back).

The brakes are self explanatory but the derailleurs might need some explanation. They’re the part of the bike that changes the gears. One end of the cable is attached to the gear shift near or on the handlebars and the other end is attached to the derailleur. Move the shifter with your hand and the cable moves the derailleur which then moves the chain from one gear to the next. The front derailleur moves the chain on the gears near the pedals and the rear derailleur moves the chain on the back wheel.

When I cycle I usually only use two out of my sixteen gears. A high and a low. I keep the chain on the third ring down on the back gear cassette and then move the front derailleur from the big gear to the little gear when I want pedaling to be easier. I find this works for me as I don’t like to do a lot of shifting. There is no such thing as being in the perfect gear so I don’t bother to try. I like my two gears.

When the cable snapped I lost my ability to change the gears in front. I no longer had a low and a high. Since I was out on the road I adjusted my rear gear until I found a medium and settled into that. That’s also how I rode for the next two days as I waited for my new gear cable to arrive once I ordered it off the internet.

They must be making cables better these days than in my youth because I can’t remember the last time I changed a cable. I remember changing a lot of them back when I was a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s but I don’t think I’ve changed a cable in at least 15 if not 20 years. It’s really been a long time.

My current bike is about eight years old and has a new type of shifter on it. Before this I always had the old type of shifter. That was two levers mounted on the bike stem right below the handle bars. Pull one lever to adjust the back derailleur and the other to adjust the front. Now my bicycle has the gear shifts integrated with the brakes. Squeezing the brake grip with your hand depresses the brake but pushing the brake grip sideways makes the derailleur move the gear up one notch. Next to the brake grip is a thumb release that when pressed moves the derailleur down a notch. Pretty simple but I’d never put a cable in one before.

The cable I ordered came with a set of cables. One for the back and one for the front. The back cable is a bit longer but otherwise identical. It was easy enough to string the cable through the brake grip and along the eyelets on the bike where the cable sits but that’s when the fun began. With an old style gear shift the tension on the cable was important (or at least that’s what I remember). With this new style tension wasn’t as important. The derailleur sat in one position regardless of the tension on the cable and then the cable moved it into a second position. Seemed simple.

There are also two little adjustment screws on a derailleur. One limits how far the derailleur can move from side to side and the other shifts the derailleur’s position ever so slightly from left to right so you can make fine adjustments.

Everything was going fine except that no matter what I did the derailleur wouldn’t stay in that second position. It would shift the gear from the smaller ring to the bigger ring but then the derailleur would move back to the smaller ring. I had no idea why.

The derailleur always starts in the same position but as I mentioned before the brake grip has two possible positions. Depressed or undepressed. I switched back and forth between the two but still couldn’t get it to work. I even used a block of wood to move the derailleur into different starting position and then put tension on the cable but all that did was mess up the derailleur’s starting spot.

This went on for two hours and I cannot tell you how frustrated I was. But then to cap it off the cable broke. I don’t know what happened. I must have somehow set the cable to have too much tension on it. Then I moved the brake grip to try and shift gears and heard a snapping sound. I wanted to scream but instead I calmly grabbed the second cable, strung it through the brake grip and eyelets, and then took a break for dinner. What else could I do?

After dinner I decided to tackle it again. I tightened up the cable, tried the shifter, and it shifted up and stayed there like it should. Huh?!? It worked?!? I have no idea what I did differently but somehow it now worked as it should. Once it was on right I spent the next ten minutes making fine adjustments to try and get the derailleur not to rub on the chain. That’s usually the eternal battle with the front derailleur and it was quite a battle here.

I ended up losing that battle as I couldn’t get the chain to stop rubbing totally. I finally gave up and said I was done. The next day I took the bike out for a ride and was annoyed by the rubbing. It wasn’t a lot but it was there. But as I’ve noticed with my bike over the years the derailleur often stops rubbing by itself somehow. And it did as I rode.

Cables can get loose over the years and start to not shift correctly so I’ve often had to adjust them. Many time before I haven’t been able to get the chain not to rub but then a day latter it stops on its own. I’m not sure how that happens but it’s happened enough to make me think things have to “Settle in” after I finish adjusting stuff.

I’m glad I got that cable in right because for a while it looked like it wasn’t going to happen. Everything is back in order now and my rides are fine. Happy day.

I think serendipity is bringing me this week’s bit of writing. It involves a few of my art habits converging to present two of my pieces in a way that I haven’t seen them before. Side by side to compare and contrast.

The first of my habits is my attempts to sell some of my art. To get it out into the world and make a little money. This is mostly a futile endeavor but I do it anyway. First off artists are on the wrong side of the supply chain of escalating art prices. For example: I know some comic books artists who have been producing work all their lives. Usually they get an assignment, draw the comic, have it published, and then the original art is returned to them. They can keep that art or sell it on to collectors.

Most of the artists sell the art on because comics don’t pay a lot of money so selling the art to pay the bills makes sense. The problem is that they didn’t get a ton of money for the art. If they sold a choice piece back in the 1980s or 1990s they may have gotten a few hundred dollars for it. That can add to to decent money if you can sell a dozen pieces or so and I’n sure they were happy to get paid. But now some of those same pieces have been sold over and over again at increasing prices each time until they’re worth tens of thousands of dollars. But the originals artist doesn’t see a dime of that. He’s at the wrong end of that chain with no way to get on the right end.

Of course I can’t even get that two or three hundred dollars for my stuff. I’m just too unknown. That’s the way the world works. But I post my stuff on eBay and Etsy anyway. I’ve sold some small $10 and $20 pieces but that’s it. I post some of my larger in drawings and faux comic book covers for $100 to $150 but I’ve only sold one of those in three years. That’s even a cheap price for them as they often take a day or two to make. But it’s still too expensive for people if they even notice it. But still I post them because a person has to try.

So that posting habit lead me to pulling out some 11×17 inch ink drawings to post on eBay. I’ve been using Etsy recently to try and sell my art so eBay was a bit of a throwback. I had a bunch of ink drawings stacked in a vertical file (another of my habits) so I dug through them to find ones to post. Then I didn’t put them away since I needed them handy in case they sold (I’m such a dreamer) so I put them on top of my small scanner (piling things on flat surfaces is another habit).

Of course I eventually needed the scanner so I had to move the drawings. Where did I put them? Well, another of my habits is to put recently finished work on my easel so I can look at them. So I put the drawings on the easel but put them behind my current work which made me forget the old stuff was even there.

I’ve recently started the habit of posting videos on Instagram. I’ve been posting photos and scans of my art for years now but video is something new for me. I want to get my face out there and humanize my art. Let anyone who wanders onto my feed know there is a person who makes this stuff. So today for the video I wandered over to my easel to give people a look at what was there. I was actually a little but surprised since I forgot those older drawings that I pulled out to post on eBay were there. I went through the drawings, showed them off, and then left them as they were.

As a sat here a little while ago waiting for the end of the day I glanced over at my easel. I always do that almost without thinking as I want to see and judge what work I’ve finished lately. Except this time it was two pieces from February and April of 2016 that were in front. It was a bit of a surprise. They were familiar but it has really been years since I looked at them closely. And they were both quite striking from a distance and worked well together. I wish I had planned it.

The piece on the left is a red ink drawing of a fire goddess. It’s a simple thing made up of a semi-nude woman drawn with red lines. It’s draw from a photo but modified with lots of flame iconography. Her hair is solid red but sticking up in points to suggest flame. Her paints and bikini-like top also have that same solid red with pointy flames on top. Besides that bent triangles around her arms and side also suggest flame. It’s not the most sophisticated piece ever but it works. My favorite part is how the white of the paper seems to glow among all that red. I don’t know that my green or blue ink drawing ever worked as well as this red ink one.

On the right is one of my “The Painted Lady” faux comic book covers. Issue twelve according to the number on the front. It’s in black and white and plays with pattern and positive and negative space. It’s also a photo referenced piece but it’s harder to tell at a glance because the patterns flatten it and it’s not about the gesture of the figure. In black and white my eye really has to pick through the forms to make sense of it all. Its nature is almost that of camouflage.

The two drawings look interesting side by side. Red vs black, clarity vs camouflage, lithe gesture vs stiff symmetry, and light and dark. I hadn’t seen them that way before.

I wrote this piece shortly after the blackout on August 14, 2003. Since I didn’t have a blog then I never posted it anywhere. As a matter of fact I totally forgot it existed until today. All the talk of the 15th anniversary of the blackout jogged my memory.

So here is my story of the blackout.

I was working at Marvel Comics on 40th Street in Manhattan. The lights went out at 4:11 PM. We all trudged down the stairs blissfully unaware that anything “historic” is going on. As we were milling around on the sidewalk I first I heard that the whole block was out of power. Then I heard some one say that it goes all the way up to 57th Street. Okay, I thought, I may as well go home. So I made the decision to head off to the Port Authority bus station as soon as possible. Along the way I kept hearing things. From people on the street and from the little hand held radio I had with me. This was blacked out, that was blacked out until I finally heard that the whole eastern seaboard was blacked out.

Now, whenever you here the phrase “eastern seaboard” you should know you are in trouble because the only time it is ever used is in some kind of disaster. East Coast, West Coast, Gulf Coast, Texas Coast, North Atlantic Coast, and Pacific Coast, these I hear all the time. I can point them out on a map. I don’t even know where the eastern seaboard begins and ends. They kept saying, on the radio, that “the whole eastern seaboard all the way to Detroit is blacked out.” Detroit? That’s six hundred miles from the sea. I’ve never even heard the Northern, Southern or Western seaboards even mentioned. So do they exist?

Meanwhile, I get to the bus station by 4:30 and find it closed. The sidewalk is packed with people but the station is closed. I turn around and head back to Marvel. I pick up Dan Carr and Jerry Kalinowski outside of Bryant Park and tell them that the Port Authority Bus Station is closed. Not what they wanted to hear. But a bunch of people from the office were headed over to the bar in the park to kill time and sort things out. What got sorted out was that this was a big blackout and getting home was going to be difficult. The Jersey people started for the ferries and the Long Islanders started heading for Queens. I live in Rockland County (NY), the red headed step child of NY/NJ transportation on a good day so I knew neither of those options would help me. I stayed in the park by myself and started looking around for people I might know. After a couple of laps I heard a voice calling to me and it was Matt Maley. He had come to the park to look for me, yeah we were just a couple of country boys heading for the trees.

So, stranded together, (Matt had to go all the way up to New Paltz) we came up with a plan to wait and give things a little time to clarify. We did a couple more laps around the park to see if anyone else we knew was there but found no one. Then we sat and listened to my radio for news (not much except for my favorite quote from the Niagara Mohawk power station guy who said, “We have no idea what this is”) and did some sketches. People were generally having a good time in the park and it hardly seemed like a blackout. We decided that 6:30 was a good time to check out the Port Authority bus terminal.

As Matt and I arrived at the terminal things did not look good. There were more people than before and the sidewalks were full. We walked around just trying to get some information if and when buses would be running. There was no real information. They were trying to run some buses from 41st between the stations but they weren’t being loaded and where they were going was a mystery. Still, we moved to 41st Street because that’s what we were told but let me tell you there was desperation and a little panic in the air at 41st. I didn’t want to get home that badly (plus my odds were long that any of those buses were going near my stop) so Matt and I retreated to 40th. As we were retreating there was almost a bad incident as, I think, a bus was moving forward with people in front of it trapping them against the back of another bus. The bus was stopped in time and panic and injuries averted. Well, I think averted because we were leaving as this was happening but there was only shouts of “Whoa, whoa, stop” and not screams.

At 40th street we had a decision to make. It was about 7 PM and we either were going to wait for a bus or walk to John and Sue’s in Brooklyn. I estimated that, best case, we would not get a bus until ten PM. And like I said that was optimistic. So we made the decision to walk to Brooklyn.

Only a block into our walk I hear a strange voice say, “Spare change Mister. Spare change for a hotel room.” I had my New York blinders on and was paying no attention to the beggar but it struck me as odd that some one would beg for hotel room money. I looked up and there was Pat Giles, and no, he wasn’t really begging for hotel room money. Pat had come from Penn Station and happened to wind up in our path. He told us that he was thinking about getting a room for the night but didn’t think his prospects were good. We told him our plans and he said, “Hey, I got a sister in Brooklyn so I’ll walk with you.”

So the three of us were off. Not a bad walk. Two hours and twenty minutes (for Matt and I) of pleasant conversation and attempts to reach loved ones by cell phone (about half were successful). As we reached the Brooklyn side of the the bridge, Borough President, Marty Markowitz was there with a bullhorn welcoming us to Brooklyn where the real New York begins. We parted ways with Pat at Atlantic and Court as he headed to his sister’s.

Matt and I reached John and Sue’s only to find they hadn’t arrived home yet. No biggie, because during one of our cell phone calls we found out that Keith Karchner was over at Steve Hughes and Megan Walsh’s apartment just a few blocks away. We got on the phone to Steve and told him we were on the way over. We passed the evening sitting on the roof discussing where the hell the Eastern Seaboard was. At about 11:30 PM we called Sue and Matt and I went over to her place to spend the night. John rolled home at about midnight after the days aborted attempt to take Metro North up to Beacon.

The following morning I heard two women out on the street talking, one of them said that there was no subway service. Not a good beginning to the day. Then the power come back on in the apartment at 8 AM so there was hope. We took stock of our options: Port Authority Bus Terminal- closed, Subways- not running, Grand Central- not closed but not running trains, PATH trains- running on a Saturday schedule and some NJ Transit trains were running. We checked with a car service and there was a half hour wait for a car to Manhattan. We thought about heading for Port Authority in hopes that the busses would soon start running but then we heard that the bus station didn’t have all its power back. It also was not likely to start running busses soon. So we decided on New Jersey. Two of the NJ Transit lines ran up into Rockland, one to within a couple of miles of where my car was parked. It was the Pascack Valley line for us.

Keith came over and we were ready to go. He said that cabs were easy to catch this morning so we skipped the car service and caught one. Sue had already advised us to take the Brooklyn Battery tunnel and not the Bridge because she heard the tunnel was clear. The cab driver asked us which we wanted (the tunnel is $4 and the bridge free so I guess the tunnel is the less popular choice) and he was visibly relieved when we said the tunnel so the bridge must have been a mess. We made it to the Christopher Street PATH station in record time. There was no traffic. If we had a car we could have been home in no time. Just before we left the cab I heard, on the radio, an announcement of which NJT lines were open. They didn’t mention the Pascack Valley line. Bad news but we soldiered on. After a brief, comical interlude with the three of us trying to find exact change ($1.50) for the PATH train we were on our way to Hoboken.

At the Hoboken Terminal we found ourselves trying to get tickets for a train that wasn’t running. The Pascack Valley line wasn’t running nor was the Bergen line. There were no trains north. But, I was told, they were running busses whenever they could up to Suffern (a Rockland County town on the Bergen line). If we just sat in the waiting area they would make an announcement when a bus was ready, maybe one would be ready in an hour. Not wanting to sit down and just wait we looked around for people with more information. No one had more information so we went back to the waiting area and had a seat. I called my sister, Jennifer, to pick us up in Suffern once we got there. We just had to get there. After 45 minutes of sitting and listening to barely audible messages over the PA system a man came by to take us (and a hundred others) to where a bus was supposed to pick us up. Fifteen more minutes later we were among the lucky ones who there was room for on the bus.

The bus ride was, thankfully, uneventful except for the fact that the driver was having a little problem with the route. This, of course, was due to the fact that we weren’t on a bus route and we were stopping at train stations so it was to be expected. One last little SNAFU was that we were let off on the road outside of the Suffern train station but there was no way into the station from where we were. Jenn came and got us, though. And then it was on to Nanuet to pick up my car. We were at my house be 3 PM where Shari Lynn picked up the boys to bring them home to New Paltz.