Radiant Comics

I got a bit of advice for artists out there. Sometimes you have to do things even if you really don’t know what you are doing. You might have a little starting point of an idea but no real direction for it so just start. You might not finish it right then and there but starting something can lead you in a direction that’s unseen at the moment. That’s what happened to me with a couple of little drawings that I was working on a while ago.

It all really started some years ago. Maybe ten. I worked on a group drawings that I never really figured out what to do with. They were pencil drawings of a woman’s figure done in a minimal outline with a, sort of, highly decorated cape all around her. I did some pencil drawings on paper and even some pencil drawings on canvas drawings. They were okay. There was the germ of an idea there but nothing ever really became of them. But recently I began thinking about them again. I began thinking about the idea of a female figure done in that outline and white silhouette style.

At first I made some small drawings in pencil. My baseball card size art cards. I kept it simple and drew the basic outline without even any arms and a simple cape-like cloth on the outside of the figure. I didn’t get all fancy with the shapes and patterns of my old ones and kept things uncluttered. I only made two little drawings and they say there for a week until I finally decided to ink them. Ink is how I refine my line and define the drawing. Once again I kept in simple and used a single weight pen line to ink the figures. I was happy with the little art cards.

It took me another week to decide to make some larger drawings out of the smaller ones. I still had no plans for how I was going to make them into finished drawings but I decided to get on with the next step anyway. After scanning in the card sized drawings I printed them out in blue line on six by nine inch pieces of paper and started redrawing them. I kept then relatively small at the six by nine six in order to keep them simple. Often if I make a drawing large I start to get too complicated with it too quickly. I was trying to avoid that. I ended up with two pretty good drawings after that but then they just sat there too. I still had no finishing move.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of my faux comic book covers. I thought about making these drawings into one of those but didn’t know which one. They didn’t seem to fit any of my existing comic book cover concepts and I didn’t want to work up a whole new idea complete with logo and trade dress. So there the drawings sat. I did take the time at this point to work up a third drawing. I had two female figures with long hair so I decided I wanted another with short hair. So I worked it up. Art card pencil, inks, and then six by nine inch drawing. Now there were three of them sitting there doing nothing.

As I was riding my bike one morning I started thinking about the drawings (before my brain turned off and riding took over) and the phrase “Ice Blue” came into my head. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because the drawings reminded me of Disney Princesses or maybe it was just the cold of the morning but I suddenly thought that would be a good name for the faux comic to put these drawings on the cover of. I got back into riding and put the idea in my pocket. I sat on the idea for another week mostly because I didn’t want to work on a logo.

One final thing triggered me finishing these drawings. I remembered I had a big bottle of blue ink. Last spring I bought three big bottles of colored ink: blue, red, and yellow. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them but I wanted to give them a try. I’ve worked on a few small drawings with them but nothing clicked with them so far. I even bought a couple more small bottles just to add to the collection. A green and a second shade of blue. In thinking about the name “Ice Blue” I decided I would ink the drawing in blue ink. That’s something I had never quite done before.

First I had to work up a logo. That takes a lot longer than you might think. There are a lot of mediocre logos in this computer age where people just take a word and type it in an interesting font and that’s that but I try to avoid such a path. I use a computer and fonts but that is my starting point. It takes a lot of time and manipulation after that. Usually a full eight hour day. Yeah, that’s for one logo. You can see why I didn’t want to work another one up. But luckily for me this one took me half that time. I don’t know why. I could have been that I had been thinking on the project for so long but the logo went quickly. I also decided that even though the figure would be inked in blue I’d print out the logo in black as usual. It would look weird to me if it was all in blue.

I was almost ready to set all three drawings up to be printed out in blue line and inked when I realized some work needed to be done on their faces. I would be inking them at ten by fifteen inches and they needed a little more detail and refinement in their faces. I was thinkings about redrawing them at a larger size but that seemed like too much of a chore. I ended up erasing the faces on the six by nine pencil drawings and reworking them at that size. That ended up doing the job so I scanned them in again, set them up with their logos and trade dresses, and printed them out in blue line to be inked.

I liked working with the blue ink. It was a nice change of pace. It has almost the same coverage strength as black ink so the process was mostly the same. I put some of the ink from the big bottle into a small Rubbermaid container and used that as an inkwell for my brush. I ended up liking that container. All in all “Ice Blue” issues one through three covers came out to my satisfaction. They look good in blue.

As you can tell from this blog I’m a comic book collector. Or at least that’s what I call myself for simplicity’s sake. I think comic book fans come on a sliding scale from collector to reader. On one extreme is the fan who buys a comic, bags and boards it, and then files it away in the collection unopened. This fan might not even read the comics in his collection. He just wants to own them. On the other extreme is the fan who buys a comic, reads it, and then tosses it away never to be seen again. I think these extremes are rare and most of us fall in the middle maybe leaning to one side or the other. I lean towards the reader side because, although I keep my comics, I read them all and only keep the ones I like. If the answer to the question, “Will I ever read this comic again?” is “No” then I’ll get rid of it.

As further background on my collecting I’ll tell you that I’ve been buying new comics off the stands since I was about ten years old back in the mid-1970s but I don’t buy many back issues. I did buy them back in my early days from ages about ten to twenty but since then I haven’t bought a whole lot of back issues. I have bought a lot of hardcover and paper back collections of old comics but that’s not the same thing as hunting for old, original printings, of back issues.

All this brings me to the thoughts I’ve been having lately about one of the main-staples of back issue buying. The first appearance. Specifically the first appearance and how it’s definition has changed over the years that I’ve been buying comics. First appearances used to be a fairly straightforward thing. Spider-Man’s first appearance is in Amazing Fantasy #15, Superman’s first appearance is in Action Comics #1, The X-Men’s first appearance is in X-Men #1. Not hard. Sometimes, like with Spidey, a characters first appearance wasn’t in a comic with his name on the title but it was still an easy thing to grok. Tales of Suspense #39 was Iron Man’s first appearance not Iron Man #1.

Things changed a little when a character first appears in comic that he’s not the star of. The Hulk #181 with the first appearance of Wolverine comes to mind. But first let’s digress a little bit to when and why first appearances matter. It’s a fairly easy question to answer. A first appearance matters when after a character is introduced that character grows in popularity. That means more people are interested in a character after his tenth appearance than at the time of his first. Some of those extra interested people now want to go and get the other stories the character appeared in so they can read them. That’s the key. They want to read the stories. That’s why for years “First appearance” was really short for “First story So-And-So appeared in”.

For decades Hulk #181 was worth fifty times what the issues around it were worth. It was the first story Wolverine was in and it was a single issue story. Except due to the continued and periodical nature of comics Wolverine was first seen on the last panel of Hulk #180. He was the cliffhanger. A brand new character showing up to kick the Hulk’s ass. But no one cared about it because Wolverine wasn’t in the story of Hulk 180. He didn’t matter to the issue and the issue didn’t matter to Wolverine fans. Hulk #180 would cost you a dollar (same as 178, 179, 182, 183) and #181 would cost you fifty dollars. That’s how it went. People wanted the first Wolverine story. It didn’t matter that he showed up at the end of #180 and the very beginning of #182 because there was no Wolverine story there.

Then things began to change. Through the late 1980s to the 1990s I watched the price on Hulk #180 creep up. It was still nowhere near the price of #181 but it still separated itself from #179 by a lot. First appearances of various characters became hot commodities and things changed. Now people wanted the first appearance of a character not because they wanted to read the story but because it was a desired object. The old “If everyone else wants something I want it too” routine. It’s the way we are as human beings. We value things that have value to a lot of people.

As a result of this commodification of first appearances the very definition of “First appearance” changed. People began to take the phrase literally and so “First cameo appearance” was introduced as a concept to cover comics like Hulk #180. Wolverine didn’t appear in the story but he had a cameo in it and surely that was important? Of course this concept was introduced as a selling tactic to get people interested in issues like Hulk #180 but that didn’t make less effective. The price of Hulk #180 has gone up and up with the popularity of Wolverine.

All this brings me to the present day. I still don’t buy back issues but watch a lot of videos on YouTube made by people who do. They show off their purchases and often tell us why they got them. What I’ve gleaned from this is that “First appearance” has gotten more literal over the years and maybe even more controversial. One character’s “First appeared” as a test tube with a label on it. That’s if you buy into it. Some people do and some don’t. Another “First appeared” as a background character at a costume party. Once again you buy into it or not. It all seems to be about creating demand and selling comics to me. After all sellers need something to sell and collectors need something to collect.

I’m going to end this with what got me started thinking about the whole first appearance topic in the first place. Ads. Yes, some people are now starting to claim that a character appearing in a ad for a comic is a first appearance. Whether it’s a character having a “Preview” of its comic printed in another comic or a few page sample in a catalogue some people want that to count as when the character first appeared. Not me. I’m old school. I’m interested still just interested in reading the character’s first story. Maybe a cameo. But you can keep the ads.

This week I’m pulling a painting off my shelf to take a look at. It’s a bit of a random process as my eight by ten inch acrylic on canvas paintings are in envelopes so I can’t see which one I’m grabbing. It’s not quite random as the first painting I grabbed was one of the few abstract paintings that I’ve done and it was not very good. I’m much better when working with images because that’s what interests me but every now and then I’ll attempt to make a painting without an image. I know enough about painting to pull it off but I don’t find them very interesting so I wasn’t about to write about one.

The one I pulled off the shelf is called “The Hold Down” and has the date on it October, 30, 2009. Six years ago. Time does keep moving along. As I look at this one I don’t remember making it yet it does look familiar. That’s probably because it has the motif of a face that I like so much. But it might be a little more than that. This face came from one of my small drawings that I do in my ink book. Those are where I do my spontaneous drawings in ink but I notice I have certain habits. Shapes that I tend to repeat when I start a drawing. Often I consciously stop myself from repeating them and sometimes I go along and see if I can vary the theme from the other times I’ve made such a shape. The headdress/hat on this fella is such a shape.

I can tell that when I first made the small drawing of this I started the pen in the upper left, dragged it dawn, and then swooped it around to form the left side of the hat. I can just tell. Straight lines and then swoops in the upper left is a motion I repeat often. I must have wanted to break that motion up after I did it because I made that “M” shape in the middle of his forehead. That is not a shape I make very often. I’m guessing that “M” shape also informed the rest of the drawing and made me decide to make the drawing symmetrical. As I’ve written before I generally use asymmetrical symmetry, the illusion of symmetry, but here I’ve got the real thing going on. Of course it’s not perfectly symmetrical but near enough so that I’d call it symmetrical.

I think there is also a familiarity to symmetry that also makes this painting seem a bit familiar. We’re used to symmetrical things so when we see them they fit into out world. Symmetry is part of the everyday industrial design of the world. From cars to TVs to phones most of the stuff we use has a symmetrical design. It’s familiar. Just like faces.

The first color I notice in this painting is the light blue of the face. Not the usual color for a human face so it right away establishes the fictional world of this painting. But it still doesn’t look especially fictional. I think the symmetry also has something to do with that. There is a general coolness to the whole painting due to that blue. The second most dominant color is the hot red of his hat but that is tempered by all the pink. If you mix blue and red you get purple and there is quite a bit of purple in this painting but it tends to be on the side of the blue.

The lines of purple and pink that surround the face both have a lot of white in them and therefor are not strong colors on their own and so can be influenced but the colors around them. Up near the hat they tend to look warm because of the red but they cool down near the blue. And since there is more blue the whited up lined help cool the painting down.

The yellow exists in a world of its own. It’s the whitest white, the brightest bright, in the painting but because of the symmetry it’s rather static. Normally, being so bright, the yellow would move a little more forward to the eye but here it’s more locked in place by the composition. Those two large circles of yellow can become like headlights if you stare at it but that takes a moment. All the yellow shines only once my eye unlocks it from the composition.

The painting sits on a neutral ground of browns. A red brown and a yellow brown are mixed in there but they all stay in place and generally don’t add to the warmness of coolness of the piece. They’re the colors that the bright ones bounce off.

The green bits are a bit odd. They seem to almost disappear. They end up framing the whole piece but in general don’t get too involved in the fight between warm and cool and the fight between foreground and background. They just exist along the edges. It’s a bit weird to me since I don’t usually use color like that but I bet it’s all a consequence of my decision to go with symmetry.

I’ve written mostly about the color and not much about the face because there isn’t much to it. The face is drawn with just about as few lines as possible and doesn’t stand out much on its own. It’s here that the asymmetrical symmetry lurks though. If I had drawn the left side of the face exactly as I had drawn the right side it would be a really boring face. That’s what I find with these faces that I draw. I can’t usually draw the different halves of the mouth or nose too dissimilar from each other so it’s the eyes that get distinct from one and other. Here I went with sort of a robot eye on the left with a yellow glow. It make the whole thing slightly otherworldly. Some sort of alien or robot is winking at you. Or that’s just how he looks.

In the end I have a lot of questions about this image. Who is he? Where is he from? What does he want? I have no answers to any of those questions and his face doesn’t give a lot away. But I never liked easy answers.

As of this writing I’ve posted fifteen hundred comic strips of my “Four Talking Boxes” comic strip. I started posting them back on January first of 2010 and have been posting five of them a week ever since. That’s a solid amount of comic strips and has made me want to release them digitally as a sort-of comic book. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now but haven’t quite wanted to put all the work into making it happen. It’s a lot of work.

I actually figured out the format a couple of years ago. I post them on this site as a horizontal comic strip but I don’t like the way that looks on an iPad. Too much wasted space. But when I first came up with the idea for this comic I decided to make all four panels the same size so I could reformat the strip into a vertical rectangle. The first two panels would be on top and the final two on the bottom. Of course, that meant reformatting all the comics. Reformatting so many things means a lot more work.

Luckily for present me the past me figured out just what to do to reformat the horizontal strips to vertical and saved it all as an action (a macro) in Photoshop. That means all I have to do is open the horizontal strip in Photoshop, hit a button, watch as the action runs to reformat the strip, and then type the strip’s number on it (the one thing I couldn’t automate). I don’t even remember what all the steps in the formatting are so it’s a good thing it’s all saved for me. It still takes time to do all that but considerably less time than if most of it wasn’t automated.

What really takes a lot of time is proofreading the strips. It’s always tough to proofread yourself even though I do it a few times before I post the strip. First I write a strip, second I proofread it, third I proofread it a few weeks later when I make the art, and fourth I proofread it the day it posts on this site. You think that would be enough but it wasn’t. Especially for the early strips that I did back in 2010.

In the beginning of the strip I was still figuring things out. It took me a while to learn how I wanted to do my lettering. I use a font that my friend and comic book letterer Dave Sharpe made but how I wanted the balloons to look and the lettering to stack is what I had to figure out. That took time. There are certain things I needed to learn to get to look right. Since a word balloon is a horizontal ellipse I want the top and bottom sentences to be the shortest with the middle ones being the longest. This sounds easy enough but unless you’re really paying close attention it doesn’t happen. And I wasn’t paying close enough attention in the beginning. I get it right seventy five percent of the time but there was always a couple of balloons that were off per strip in my early ones.

It also took me a while to catch on the the fact that I didn’t want any dangling I’s. That’s when the capital letter I appears by itself at the end of a line. It doesn’t look right. It throws off the balance of a balloon. I’d heard of that before and knew I should get rid of them but it take a while to notice them in practice. Now I eliminate all dangling I’s as a matter of course but back in the first couple of hundred strips I had quite a few of them.

Reading the early comic strips was quite a chore in itself. The strip has always been about conversation but the conversation didn’t flow in the beginning like it does now. It’s just different. It took me a while to catch on to that and not let it bother me. I did end up changing a word or two here and there but nothing too drastic. Sometimes I saw a clumsy turn of phrase that I couldn’t let stand but most of the time things were okay.

After I had all the corrections made I had to remake all the files that I had made lone ago. I needed a new gif file for the website. As long as I was making these corrections I may as well post them in place of the old ones. Then I needed a tif file for the book that is going to be turned into a digital book. That’s the main one that I make the vertical jpeg and gif files from. Making the tif file took the longest as that is the one I use the reformatting action on. The other two types I easily make with another action that re-saves them in the jpeg or gif format.

Here is a tip for you. A Zippo lighter is good for holding down the return key. My “Four Talking Boxes” strip is initially made in Illustrator but all the reformatting of size is done in Photoshop. So I drop the files on the Photoshop icon but before Photoshop opens them I have to make sure the parameters are correct and hit the return key. That means I have to hit the return key for every file. If I’m opening twenty five of them at once I place the lighter on the return key and it holds it down for me and therefor presses return each time. Some low-tech automation for you.

It took a remarkably long time to get these done. I’m up to the first two hundred strips so far but I want to do another fifty more for the first issue. It took all of Saturday morning, about four hours, to get the first hundred finished. I had changes on nearly every single one go them. I expected to have changes on maybe ten to twenty percent of them, after all I had proofread them many times, but it ended up being more like ninety percent. That’s a bit underestimation of time. Ah well, no one else if gonna do it.