Radiant Comics

On Friday October 3, 2025 I was at the civic center in Poughkeepsie NY. What was I doing there? I was part of the Hudson Valley Region Portfolio Day 2025. It was put on by a group called The Art Effect and at it were a whole bunch of art schools who were there to look at high school students art portfolios and tell them about the schools. It was open from 3:30 PM until 8PM and I was busy the whole time.

The entire evening I was looking at some talented student portfolios and talking to them about their art. I always try to be even handed with my critiques and give praise and constructive criticism because I don’t think harsh critiques do any good.

I’ve heard a lot of bad critiques in my day and they are worse than useless. The first thing you want to do when giving a critique is to try and figure out what the artist is trying to do. What message are they trying to get across. Then you go from there and try to help them in what they are trying to do.

They bad critiques that I’ve seen completely ignores whatever the student is trying to do. The person giving the critique tells the student what they are doing wrong and how they should do it without taking what the student is trying to do in mind at all. They turn the student’s piece into their piece. I always shake my head when I hear someone giving advice like that.

The evening went fine. All the students were eager to talk about their art with someone and I can talk art all day. Some of them had a parent with them and the parents were also eager to hear about their children’s art.

These days high school students are a lot more talented than I was back in high school. We didn’t have a lot of access to art stuff in the early 1980s. I had good art teachers all through school and a good high school art teacher but it was only one out of seven classes in a day.

My high school teacher was very good at teaching me to think about art and be creative but it’s not like we had figure drawing classes. It was a regular high school art class that had to keep all of the students who weren’t even interested in art busy. It wasn’t until college that I had a real drawing class.

I think I had two art books in high school. An Andrew Loomis book about drawing heads and hands and the John Buscema book, “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.” Plus I had the “Official Marvel Tryout Book” which showed us all how comic books were made. The first two books were really too advanced for me at the time but I studied them the best I could.

Today’s students have much better access to art materials. There are also endless art tutorial videos online. A student can come across an animated series that becomes a favorite and then go online and see a video on how to draw their favorite characters. Animation has a lot more influence on drawing then when I was in high school. We didn’t even have a VCR to tape anything let alone a digital file to freeze frame. As a result of this I saw some good art out of these high schoolers.

There were some students who wanted to draw comics. One of them asked how he was supposed to figure out what to draw in the panels. How to layout a page. I recommend Wallace Wood’s famous “22 Panels that Always Work” as a place to start and then the two books “Understanding Comics” by Scott McLoud and “Graphic Storytelling” by Will Eisner.

The art stuff was mostly easy for me but then came a question about writing. “How do I write a comic?” I don’t think I’ve ever answered that question before. It came from a student who had created a lot of characters but didn’t know what to do with them. She wanted to know how to create a story for them. I fumfered around with a few ideas before giving the simplest answer I could think of. It came down to the method of writing. I’m big on methodology.

I told her to first decide on how many pages the story is going to be. I decided on eight pages. Take a sheet of paper and write on eight lines page one, page two, page three, etc… Then you write a single sentence about what happens one each page. They go to a diner. They talk in the park. They go for a run. Whatever you got. After the first two or three pages/sentences I often will skip to the last page and write how the story ends. I like to know the ending at the beginning.

After you have one sentence about what happens on each page you get eight sheets of paper. I decided that we were going to have six panels on a page so on the first piece of paper you write “Page One: Panel One” and then on the next line “Page One: Panel Two” and keep going until all six panels are on the page. Then write what happens in the panels.

Do this for eight pages and you have your story. You can even add any notes about the dialogue in the margins. After that is done you can get started on the art by figuring out your layouts. Make small thumbnail drawings of all the pages. This is how I used to write my comics back when I was doing traditional comic books. Since I mostly do comic strip work these days I write with a different method and haven’t thought about my old way of doing things in a while. That’s why it took me a moment to think of it when I was asked the question about writing.

That was my evening that Friday and I think it went well. I hope the students got something out of it. Maybe they’ll even get some writing done out of it.

The whole set-up!

Last week I wrote about my favorite drawing pencils the Pentel P207 .7mm mechanical pencil. I guess that got me all excited about pencils and that one specifically so I started looking at them on the internet. Just to see if they have some new versions of it. Instead of finding those I found some .7mm colored pencil leads. A batch of ten different .7mm colors. That seemed pretty cool.

First of all I have to mention that I’m not much of a colored pencil guy. Last year I gave away three sets of colored pencils to my students. It seems that every few years I’d see a set of them go on sale (usually for around $20-$30) and I’d buy one to try them out. I’d try them out and never do anything with them. You think I’d learn a lesson but somehow I’m always up for another set. That brings us to last weekend.

Though the set of ten sets of colored lead was only about $10 I knew that wouldn’t be enough. There was no way that I was going to have one pencil and switch out the lead everything that I wanted to use a new color. That would be too inconvenient and as a result I would never use them. So I decided to see how much ten new Pentel P207s would cost me.

Buying them new in a two pack was $10 for the two. That’s $5 a pencil and it would cost me $50 for ten of them. Then I saw a dozen of them new for $40. That was still a little too much for me so I decided to check eBay to see what people had for sale over there.

Often I find cheap stuff over on eBay but this time it was a little weird. A lot of people were selling the same Pentel P207 that I could buy new for $5 as a “Vintage” mechanical pencil for more than that. Not a ton more but often for $7-$10. I wasn’t sure what they were smoking but there is nothing vintage about a mechanical pencil that they still make and it’s made the exact same way. It’s not like the new ones are somehow inferior.

After some looking I did find a good deal. Four two packs of the Pentel P207 for $20. It also had a “Make an offer” so I decided to offer them $15. Why not? The button is there. They came back with a counter offer of $16 and took it. With shipping and tax the set of eight pens cost me about $20.

With ten new color leads on the way and eight pencils I was two pencils short. I figured I might have two extra from art supply go bags but I only had one. I have a few of them in my starting rotation and I thought I would take one from there. But then that started to annoy me. Why break up other sets I have set up? So I went back online and ordered a new two pack for $10. That brought my total of new pencils up to ten.

After ordering that two pack I felt a little buyer’s remorse. Why didn’t I just go back to eBay and spend another $10 and get eight pencils for $20 instead of two pencils for $10? The answer was that I didn’t need the extra six pencils so why spend the extra $10? I still felt a little foolish though.

When I finally get all the colored leads and mechanical pencils I set aside a morning to set them all up. I knew that I had to mark each pencil to show what color lead it was holding. I colored a ring around the back of the pencil with one of my acrylic paint pens to correspond with the color in the pencil. Red for red and so on. I was very satisfied with myself after I got this done. Then the frustration started.

I went to put the first color lead, it was pink, into the pencil and it wouldn’t fit. Usually to load one of these pencils you remove the metal erasure cover and the eraser from the back of the pencil, drop in a few leads, replace the eraser, and then the eraser becomes a button you push on to advance the lead. I pushed the button and nothing happened.

When this happens it usually means that there is a blockage in the tiny little cylinder that is in the front of the pencil. The lead is supposed to come out of the cylinder. I put a thin wire through the cylinder tip but nothing came out. It wasn’t blocked. Then I went to thread the lead through the tip by hand. I’ve done this before and it’s not hard. But this time the lead wouldn’t go through. It was too big for the opening.

This is where the frustration set in I got all these new pens and all these new leads and they don’t fit together despite them being made to. After not getting the pink loaded I decided to switch to a different color. That one went through. I was happy about that but still upset about the pink one.

All told eight out of the ten leads fit and I loaded the up fine. Dark blue and pink would not load at all. Despite that I decided to make the best of it and try them out. They are rock hard leads.

I’m guessing that the leads have to be rock hard since they are so thin but I like my pencil leads a little softer. Colored pencil leads specifically are better soft so that you can get a lot of color onto the paper. With wooden colored pencils usually the cheaper ones are hard and waxy and the expensive ones are soft and smooth. These ones felt hard and waxy.

The leads also broke easily. I had to use them at a certain angle and with a certain amount of pressure or the tip would snap off. I usually don’t have to do that when drawing with this pencil so it will take some getting used to. I probably will never spend the time to get used to them.

I spent $20 on the first eight pencils, $10 on the next two, $10 on the pencil leads, and $7 on a pencil case to keep them in. So that’s $47 on a set of colored pencils that I’ll now probably never use. I could have spent that money on a nice set of wooden colored pencils. You can’t win them all. I can always use the mechanical pencils with the regular lead that I like. I could put together a whole set of different softnesses of lead! Hmmmmm…

The one that’s hard to read is the oldest.

Let me tell you about my favorite mechanical pencil. It’s the Pentel P207. It’s usually blue and the size of the lead is .7mm. I can’t tell you exactly when I first used one of these pencils but I think it was them1980s. I also like to use it with a softer graphite then is stock. It comes with HB graphite (the equivalent of a #2 pencil) but I prefer to put the softer 2B graphite in it. I also have some with B graphite in it but I can barely tell the difference between the B and 2B.

The .5mm version is the more popular size and I think I tried and used that one first. It was way back in high school in the early 1980s that my mother brought me home a .5 Pentel pencil from a garage sale. It had the standard HB (or maybe even the slightly harder 2H graphite) and I liked it but I didn’t use it all the time.

It was probably in college in the mid to late 1980s that I discovered the .7mm Pentel 207 and maybe the softer graphite. I definitely discovered the pencil then but I suspect that I may not have had found the 2B graphite yet. The softer graphite for that pencil wasn’t, and still isn’t, as widely available as the harder HB stuff. I might not have found it until the early 1990s when I started going to Pearl Paint in NYC.

I used a lot of different pencils in the first half of the 1990s. I used a lot of regular wood drawing pencils of all sorts of brands and hardnesses. I even used lead holders and a lead pointer for a year or two. Those are a specific type of pencil that there is no wood around but instead the graphite is by itself and you insert it into a holder the size of a pencil. You sharpen it by spinning it around a lead pointer which is a circular piece of sand paper. Some people use those all the time.

I slowly found out that I much preferred the softer and darker graphite. A lot of cartoonists and comic book artists use a harder pencil that leaves a lighter line so there is less erasing and it keeps the page neater. I always seemed to gouge the paper with the hard pencils and I would leave ruts in it. I was too heavy handed trying to get the line to be darker. I am better off using the softer graphite so that I can use a light hand and still get a dark line. I’m okay with the mess the dark graphite can make.

In the 1990s when I was using all those different pencils I didn’t use my Pentel 207 as much as I use it today. I kind of got board with it. That pencil can really only make one line (a thin .7mm one) and I wanted to use my pencil in a variety of ways. I ended up using wooden pencils of the soft 4B and 6 B variety. I don’t have a preference in brand and still use those ones today if I use a wooden pencil.

It was probably around 2010 when I started using the Pentel P207 more. I think it was around then that the size of my pencil drawings got smaller. I ink almost everything on 11×17 inch paper and I used to draw everything at that size too. That’s when I would use the wooden pencils.

I would do preliminary drawings on 6×9 inch paper and then blow those drawings up to 11×17 inches and do a finished drawing that size. Then I would transfer that drawing to another 11×17 inch piece of paper and ink it. After a while of working like that I started to find making the second drawing to be redundant. I could get all I needed to get at the 6×9 inch size if I drew with the .7mm mechanical pencil and skipped the second larger drawing.

It was also around this time that I discovered there is also a larger .9mm mechanical pencil that Pentel makes. I got a couple of those and use them on occasion. I still use the .5mm when I need to draw finer detail and I also discovered that Pentel makes a .3mm pencil but I haven’t found any use for that one.

I’ve used other brands of mechanical pencils but I find these Pentels to be the best. I like the way they feel in my hand and they last forever. I still use the original one that I got in the 1980s but I have some others too.

I’m writing about my favorite mechanical pencil because I just bought a bunch of new ones. I saw that Pentel has been putting out these pencils in new colors. They are only about $4 to $5 a piece so they’re not expensive. I bought a set of three shiny metallic ones plus a set of Kimono colored ones. They’re fun.

This past weekend I was looking at art supplies online and saw that there was a set of ten color .7mm leads. I’m not a big color pencil guy but this intrigued me. The were only $12 for the set but that would also mean that I’d have to get ten new Pentel P207s. I wouldn’t want to be switching out ten different colors in one pencil. That would make me never use them.

I found I could get a dozen of the mechanical pencils for about $40 but that seemed like too much money to me. I went over to eBay to see what I could find there. Oddly there were a lot of people selling these pencils as “Vintage” and charging more for them. I saw a big pile of about fifteen of them for around $50. I kept looking.

The pencils come new in two packs for around $10. I found a person selling four new two packs for about $20. I made him an offer of $15 and he countered with $16. I accepted it and with tax and shipping paid about $20. I thought that was a good price.

The pencils were all the blue color .7mm and when I get them and the color graphite I’m going to have to color code the pencils. Maybe I’ll put a dot of color on the end of them the has the metal eraser color. I’ll figure that all out later. Now I’ll draw.

I’m okay but yesterday (September 16, 2025) I took a fall. It was right in the middle of the sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan as I was walking to the train at Penn Station. It go me thinking about age and gravity.

I can remember when I was young hearing about some old person getting really hurt in a fall. Broken faces, broken hips, and broken bones are some of the terrible things that would happen to people when they hit the ground. It always struck me as weird because when you’re a kid you’re always falling down and then getting back up. It made me a little bit scared of getting old.

I fell on the ground probably because of an uneven piece of the sidewalk. I’m not even one hundred percent sure. I suspect that because many a time I’ve stumbled because of that. Those NYC sidewalks are made of big slabs of concrete. Sometimes those slabs shift over the years and the edge of one of them can be an inch higher than the next one. That edge can catch your foot. I’ve stumbled because of that many times but this is the first time I’ve fallen like this.

I played touch football for a lot of my life. We used to play at lunchtime in Madison Park back in the early 1990s when I worked at Marvel Comics and then in the late 1990s we played some pickup games with the staff of Wizard magazine. I played into my late 30s. There is falling all the time when playing touch football but it’s falling on grass and usually you are ready for it. I was not ready for that fall on the sidewalk.

Another factor in the fall was probably that I was carrying three bags that day. I had a backpack on, a shoulder bag, and a grocery bag in my hand. Plus I had my camera in my other hand. I was actually having fun carrying all that stuff and walking. It felt like I was ruck sacking up the street. I was making good time too. Maybe that was the problem. I was walking too fast.

I was always good at falling back in my younger days. By that I mean that I knew how to fall down without getting hurt. My body would automatically spread out and try to land not on just one point of impact but on many. I had fast reflexes and it wasn’t even a conscious process. I’d land on my forearms and the heals of my hands to spread out the impact.

I fell another time a couple of years ago in my bedroom. I was okay but it was such a stupid fall that it lodged in my memory. I must have been impatient and in a hurry because I fell putting my pants on after a bike ride. I was changing out of my riding clothes and into my regular ones and as I was walking as I was trying to put on my pants. Why didn’t I just stop? I never try to put my pants on while I’m moving. I hit the floor quickly (unhurt) and then felt stupid. I was lucky that I didn’t hit anything (like a piece of furniture) on the way down.

That’s another thing about falling. The speed. Back in my youth it would sometimes feel like I was in slow motion as I was falling. This would help me as I broke my fall. I can remember one time specifically when I bruised my knee pretty bad when this happened.

It was a time when I was playing a touch football game in the snow. There were a few inches of it on the ground. I happened to fall and I can still see myself in that fall. I was falling face first into the ground but then I turned my head and spread out my arms and legs so I was fairly flat. Being that I turned my head I could see the underside of my body falling. I guess the snow messed up my body’s sense of where the ground was because I can still picture my left knee cutting through the snow and hitting the ground first. That really hurt.

That sense of being in slow motion has left me anytime I fall. I turned fifty nine this summer so I guess age made it leave. With this sidewalk fall everything happened quickly. I was up and then I was down. Fast. Except for one moment.

Usually if I stumble on the sidewalk my legs try to get themselves back under me. That’s what stumbling is. This time I don’t even think they did. I didn’t even feel myself stumble. All of a sudden I was just going over.

I did manage not to fall on my face. There was no sense of slow motion but I did get my body turned so that my right shoulder took most of the impact. I’ve got a lot of red scrapes on that shoulder. The heel of my right hand has some scrapes too. I also have a bruise on the side of my right arm. The heel of my left hand has a little soreness plus there is a fingernail sized scrape on the back of my left hand. I have no idea how that got there. It’s all a blur.

The one moment that I can remember as a slow motion moment was right after my shoulder hit the ground. I somehow thought to myself that the fall was over. Then my head whipped a little and hit the concrete. It didn’t hit hard, it didn’t make me see stars, but remember thinking that I could have done without that. It was like an exclamation point on the fall.

After I fall a kind stranger pickup my reading glasses that flew off the top of my head and offered me a hand getting up. He asked if I was okay and I thought I was so he went on his way. I continued on my way too. I was way more shocked than hurt. My Apple watch even detected my fall and asked me if I was okay. It gave me a panic button in case I was hurt. I dismissed it.

I generally keep myself in good shape. I watch what I eat and exercise regularly. I cycle five times a week and even walk for exercise. I think that had a lot to do with me not getting too hurt in the fall. But it was scary and the ideas of falls get scarier and scarier as I get older. So I’m going to try to keep my feet under me.

Issue 300 B

Ten years ago when I started doing these “Dreams of Things” covers the whole idea was to do something simple. I wanted a series that wasn’t so elaborate that it took up a lot of my time. I wanted simple and powerful images that had a graphic design quality to the drawing. But as anyone who has ever drawn “Simple” knows (and I even knew it at the time but ignored it) it takes a lot of time to simplify things and break them down to their essential form.

Over time (a couple of years) the covers got more elaborate and more illustrative. And they took less time. One of the reasons they took less time was that I got my method of making them down. I would start simple and then get complex. I started each one with a thumbnail drawing from one of my inkbook/sketchbooks. All of those drawings were already simple so there is nothing to strip down. I still have to draw them and find the essential shapes but I’m down for that.

That brings us to today when I have already drawn over three hundred of these covers. For issue three hundred I’m making alternate covers (just like real comic books often have) and so the one I’m writing about today is issue 300 B. It’s the second number 300 that I’ve finished.

There is another series of comic book covers that I’ve worked on over the years. It’s called “Deep Space” and I think I’ve made about a dozen of those covers. They usually have someone in a chunky spacesuit in them. That someone is usually by themselves on some barren planet. They are faceless and lonely covers.

I sort of referenced those covers in this one. There is a person in a big chunky spacesuit but he is not in deep space. Plus he has those giant spikes on his shoulders. They seem inappropriate for a spacesuit. He also might be a little bit slimmer than my other space men but he does have the big boots.

The color on this cover is different than my usual colors. Almost all of these covers have to do with a dream-like space. Therefore the colors are often not literal. A sky can be green and the grass can be blue. My usual colors have a lot more to do with what color works in what part of the drawing rather than what that drawing is of. It’s a much more modernist sense of color than a reality based illustrative sense of color. If I need a bit of blue here then I put a bit of blue here even if that’s not reality. After all these are about the dreamworld.

What I did differently here is to decide that I wanted the doorway behind the spaceman to be bright. I don’t know what kind of doorway it is but it’s not a normal one. I used a scumbling technique of yellows going into oranges to create the sense of a bright light behind him. I knew that door had to be the brightest spot in the drawing and almost everything else had to be darker. It was a decision that would affect every other color on the page. I usually don’t make those type of decisions when coloring these.

The first colors that I put down after the doorway were the dark blues of the sky. I knew that I wanted a blue sky and not a strange colored sky to ground the whole piece. But it had to be dark to offset the orange doorway. I went with a textured sky to give it a bit of drama.

Along with the sky came those wooden palisades in the background. I often draw fences in these “Dreams of Things” pieces because they are a good geometric object but they also separate one area from another. Both literally and figuratively. In this case I colored one set like wood but the set behind them is green. These act more like trees because of their color. I often draw green triangle mountains in this spot and I colored them as such. All of the background has a lot of drawn texture in it.

Strangely the multi-hued grey that spans the space behind the boots of the figure was the toughest color decision. I had an idea for a lot of dark purple in this piece but I needed some neutrals too. I often use grey as a light neutral but here I went dark with it and even added in some purples. I put some lighter grey directly under his feet.

With the space under that light grey I dropped my first dark purple. This was going to be my darkest dark color answer sit back in space the most. Every other color would have to play off of it. I followed that up with some light ocean-like green stripes under that. I wanter a little bit of water in the scene.

The two U-shaped lighter grays followed as I finished up the bottom with some more dark purples and then finally those orange stripes in the middle. I wanted a little bit of brightness there but I didn’t want it to be as bright as the yellow in the doorway. So I used the darkest orange from the doorway. That got me where I wanted to go.

The space above the doorway was fairly simple. I wanted to keep it all neutral and mostly dark. I brought the dark grays from down the bottom up there plus a little bit of the dark sky color. I finished it off with some of the browns from the fence.

I wanted a little bit more light in the piece so the front of the top was done with some of that same dark orange from the bottom plus some dark reds. Still that yellow in the doorway is my brightest bright.

The last thing that I colored was the figure. I knew how I was going to do it all along so it was the easiest part. Some yellow rim lighting of either side of him to emphasize how strong the light was behind him and then he would fade into dark purple. I like the way it came out.

There is a strangeness to this piece that I enjoy. The shapes are all a little weird and off in a way that makes them seem familiar but alien. Why is that doorway bulging? Is the whole thing bulging? What world is this? It’s not quite as dream-like as my usual ones but seems a little more like reality. But what reality?

These are the type of questions that I like exploring. So keep seeking things out there.