Radiant Comics

I’ve reading a lot of old comic books lately. I decided that’s what I want to do with some of my quarantine down time. Since the comic shops are back open I’ve been reading some new comics too but I’ve been reading a lot more old ones. I like to mix up the series that I read. Instead of reading twenty straight issues of “Comic book A” I like to read an issue or two of “Comic book A” followed by an issue or two of “Comic book B.” So I’ve been reading at least two series at a time.

I went back to the 1980s and pulled out one of my old favorites that I don’t think I’ve read in over thirty years. “Grendel” by Matt Wagner. There is even a current “Grendel” series that’s on my pull list but the one I’m reading was the series published by Comico in the mid-1980s.

The first twelve issues are written by Matt Wagner with pencil by the Pander Brothers, inks by Jay Geldof, colors by Tom Vincent, and letters by Steve Haynie. There were some “Grendel” comics before this one but not many. And the anti-hero of the piece (Grendel) actually died before this series began. This series stars his adopted grand daughter Christine Spar.

The whole idea behind this “Grendel” series is that after the original Grendel, Hunter Rose, (who was a super villain) died the idea of Grendel infected society like a meme or virus and continued on.

The first twelve issues staring Christine Spar were fairly straight forward. Christine is a big time celebrity editor because she wrote a best selling book about her grandfather Hunter Rose. Then her son gets kidnapped and killed by some weird Kabuki cat vampire guy so she steals Grendel’s mask (which has all sorts of tech built into it) and his weapon. A double bladed spear with all sorts of tech built into it.

I can remember when I first read these issues back in the 1980s I didn’t like them as much as the Hunter Rose Grendel stories. Maybe because these ones weren’t drawn by Matt Wagner or maybe it was because I just thought Christine Spar’s story was less interesting. Either way I liked these issues a lot more now than I did back then.

I also come into it this time knowing it was a twelve issue story with a beginning, middle, and end. Reading it month to month back then it was a continuing story that I supposed would go on forever like any other super hero comic. Or at least go on as long as sales supported it.

The Pander Brothers art also got better and better as the twelve issues went by. Not that they were bad to begin with but they were still young at the time with growth ahead of them. I found that they grew as Christine Spar’s story grew too. I won’t go too much into the plot but suffice it to say that she gets into hotter and hotter water as she seeks revenge for her son and Grendel gets into her head. The police and Argent “The Wolf” are also looking to squash any Grendel copy cats. It’s good stuff.

The next three issues of “Grendel” (numbers 13-15) were some of my favorites back in the day. They are written by Matt Wagner and drawn by Bernie Mireault (rhymes with “Zero” as Wagner tells us in a preface). This was my introduction to Mireault and I went on to buy and love his comic “The Jam.”

These issues start Li Sung who was briefly Christine Spar’s love interest in the first story. He met her in San Francisco and moved to NYC because that’s where she was. He stayed on in NYC getting a job stage managing an off Broadway show. They he got obsessed by Grendel. The meme got him.

The main antagonist in this story is a cop with a cybernetic eye. Did I mention that issues 1-17 of “Grendel” take place a few years in the future? They’ve got flying cars, cybernetic eyes, and the such. Anyway this cop is trying to find some journals that were written by Hunter Rose and Christine Spar. He wants to wrap up the Grendel case with them.

The pressure of being under police scrutiny drives Li Sung to sew his own Grendel mask, get a bow and arrow, and attempt to hunt down the cop. I think he also hunts down a mugger before hand. These issues are dark and moody as Li Sung also writes in a journal.

After those three issues Matt Wagner is back on the art chores for the next four issues that are broken up into two experimental stories. Both stories are narrated by out cop with the cybernetic eye except he’s old and on a beach as he tells them. The first story is a police procedural tale told in little postage stamp sized panels with narration and dialogue underneath them. There are maybe sixteen panels a page.

I found the technique pretty absorbing and the small drawings were really well done. It takes a lot of distilling down of shapes and forms to draw that small. The story is of a cop investigating corruption that leads to Grendel in the end. It’s not a pretty end.

Issues 16-17 are more a low life criminal procedural. A low life criminal who makes a living keeping his ear to the ground and selling information to the cops (or whoever) picks up something that put him in Grendel’s crosshairs. Neither of them is happy about it.

The art on this one is experimental to as all the panels are vertical from the top to the bottom of the page. There are also notes at the top and dialogue and narration (by our old cybernetic eyed cop) at the bottom. The art in general is very Harvey Kurtzman influenced. I mean a lot. Some of the drawings look straight out of a Kurtzman appreciation sketchbook. It’s another good story.

That’s where I’ve ended for now with “Grendel.” I bought up until around issue 40 but I have almost no memory of what happened in them. I think they were stories told even further ahead in time as the Grendel meme haunts society. I know he becomes a devil like figure that eventually has its own cult. It’s be interesting reading them again.

This Corvid-19 pause/shutdown/quarantine is bringing me down. Just like everyone else. I’ve had a hard time getting anything big done, like my big ink drawings, or even thinking about any type of big projects, such as making a book out of my faux comic book covers. I read that’s because all of our brains are kind of in a survival mode where we’re all thinking about the right now and can’t plan long term. As a consequence I’ve been working on little things.

The little thing I’ve work on for the past few days are some of my tentacle monster drawings. I made some of them in the past, about 15 of them, but haven’t worked on them in a while. They’re just monsters made up of mostly some kind of big floating head with a sideways mouth and tentacles for the bottom of the body. I don’t know why I came up with them years ago but I can make lots of variations of them.

The original ones I made were drawn in black ink and then colored with markers on 5×7 inch paper. I used whatever paper was on hand. Mostly Bristol board but some of them are on a thicker mat board. I figured that’s what I’d do for these ones but then I looked at my markers and wasn’t in the mood. I had recently used my markers to color some of my faux comic book covers and I was tired of them. I decided to go with gouache.

I recently bought an empty watercolor pan set and filled up the pans with a bunch of tubes of gouache that I’ve had hanging around the studio for years. I figured it was a good time to try them out. I also have a Pelican pan set of gouache that I’ve been using for decades so I pulled that one out. Turns out that most of the colors overlapped on the two sets.

All there is to these Tentacle monsters is the monster, which takes up most of the picture, and a a background made up of five or so bands of color. The fun and variety in them is all according to the variations in drawing and color of the monsters.

The first thing I do is draw the monster in pencil. This isn’t too hard. It takes some thought as the monsters are simple so getting variation in them is crucial. The vertical mouth and its two columns of teeth are almost always the same so I vary the shape of them slightly every time. The two eyes are also simple so I’ve go my eyes open for different ways to draw them from monster to monster. Then there is the overall shape. Sometimes it’s round, sometimes rectangular, and sometimes angled.

After the pencil drawing is made I hit the inking stage. I often use a marker to ink these things but this time I decided to go with brush and India ink. For the first four I used a classic Windsor Newton Series Seven brush and inked them in my normal thick to thin line weight style.

For the second four (I’ve made eight so far) I decided to pull out my cheap brush and use my side of the brush technique. That’s where instead of making a smooth line I make a rough line by drawing the tip of the brush across the paper sideways. I vary the pressure on the brush as I drag it making the line even more uneven. It gives the drawing a different look than my smooth line ones and sometimes it’s just fun to do. Perfect lines can be a drag and imperfect ones can be the antidote to that.

After the inking is done is when I add the color. It’s actually easy to do in marker. Marker is instant color and is dry right away. When I decided to use gouache that means it’s going to take a little more time as gouache is a water color and it takes time for the water to dry. That’s why it’s good to do four of them at once. I can switch between them when the water is drying.

The coloring is the part that takes the longest. Not only are there a lot of color decisions to be made on the monster but I also have to figure out the colors on the background. This is also where I find it easier to switch between the paintings. I can dip my brush in red and color a few red areas on one monster and then switch over and color some red on another. That way I don’t have to rinse my brush as often. It’s the little things.

After I get all the color done I usually have to go back into the drawing with ink again. The watercolor (or even the marker) sometimes goes over the black line. This tends to make the black ink a little duller. If I go back on top of the ink line with some more ink it brings the shine back to the ink and really livens the piece up.

The final thing I do with these tentacle monster paintings is to add some highlights to them with a white charcoal pencil. I like to keep the highlights subtle and the white charcoal works better for that than a white gouache does. It gives the drawings a little more life.

I’m not quite burnt out on this tentacle monsters yet so I have four more pieces of paper ready to go. This time I used four sheets of my 5×7 inch precut watercolor paper and took a different approach to the background. Instead of the five stripes of color I decided to pull out my liquid watercolor and put in some washes.

First it was yellow, then orange, then red, and finally some blue around the edges. I did this all wet-on-wet so the colors would blend into one and other. I also did it across the whole paper so now the tone of the background will show through the monster a little bit even after I paint him. It’s a technique I’ve used fo other things but it’s new with the tentacle monsters. I look forward to seeing how it’s tuen out. And that’s a good thing.

I was just listening to Rob Liefeld’s “Robservations” podcast about the “Heroes Reborn” portion of his career. One of the things he said was that since he was a West Coast guy he had no idea what was going on back East in the Marvel offices at the time. That’s what I’m going to tell you.

I’ll start this by saying that this isn’t a criticism of Rob Liefeld or Jim Lee. They did nothing wrong. They were trying to make a living and make some comics. I reserve my criticism for the higher ups at Marvel of the time. That’s kind of easy for me because I didn’t really know them but they were the ones making the big decisions that affected us all so I think it’s fair.

I was just a lowly Bullpenner at Marvel Comics. I was one of the people who did the print production work to get the comic books out the door. I wasn’t privy to any high level meetings or goings on at the top or even the middle. I, and those like me, had to deal with all the policies of the people at the top as they were pronounced. They said jump and we jumped. That’s how jobs everywhere work.

Since “Heroes Reborn” was so long ago I’m going to have to do my best with time frames and dates. I have some photos from that time period and I always wrote dates on the back of them so that’s often how I remember when things happened. Being that it was the age of film I sometimes only have the month and year a photo was taken. Not nearly the precision of the Digital Age. But this story will start with a series of photos.

One day in December of 1994 I went around the Marvel Bullpen and took everyone’s photo. From our boss Virginia Romita all the way to the latest hire there were 36 people in the Bullpen. That’s a lot. It was peak employment at Marvel. But things were bad and we all knew it. There is a good book called “Comic Wars” by Dan Raviv (Comic Wars) that tells all about Marvel’s bankruptcy and the corporate shenanigans that drove Marvel there if you want those details. At this time bankruptcy was still a year or so off but that’s the path we were on.

There were a lot of “Lasts” for Marvel in 1995. In January of 1995 was the last big corporate Holiday party. It was at the hotel that is above Grand Central Terminal. The story goes that the woman who was in charge of the party knew she was on the “To be Fired” list so she went all out and over budget. It was a big party.

I thought August of 1995 was the last Marvel corporate picnic but it was not quite the last one. Not nearly as big a budget as the Holiday party we all got on busses and went out to Craigmeur Recreation Complex in Rockaway Township NJ for an afternoon of fun and games in the summer sun. We had one more in 1996 and that was the last.

The reason I took that series of photos in December of 1994 is that I knew we were never all going to be together like this again. It was almost over and we were all waiting to see what was going to happen. In February of 1995 it happened. Mass firings. I don’t remember how many people were fired but it was a lot.

On the tenth floor of 387 Park Avenue South worked Editorial and the Bullpen. On this day it started with a phone call. I don’t know who was first but they got a phone call to go upstairs to Human Resources where they were told they were fired. Then the rest of us waited to see who was next as the phones rang all day. You knew you were done when your name was called. It was brutal and things were never the same again. The boom years were over.

During the boom years Terry Stewart was the president of Marvel Comics and he was a pretty accessible guy. It’s not like I knew him well but he liked to come down to the tenth floor and chat and see what was going on. At Christmas he’d even put on a Santa hat and hand out presents to us Bullpenners. According to the internet his replacement Jerry Calabrese was hired in April 1995 and I couldn’t pick him out of a line up. I’m not sure if I ever actually met him but he’s the guy who Rob Liefeld said he dealt with about the Heroes Reborn stuff. I heard his name but never saw him.

From the time of my taking the photos to the firings in February and beyond I’d say the general feeling of the Marvel offices was a feeling of being adrift. There was no plan. It wasn’t the comics that got Marvel into this mess. They were still profitable. It was the suits upstairs buying companies on Marvel’s credit. Those guys I never saw and never met.

For example in March of 1995, a month after they fired a lot of staff, Marvel paid a hundred and fifty million dollars for Skybox. A trading card company.That was crazy. Even a lowly Bullpenner knew that. The trading card business had been in decline for a while and Marvel pays top dollar for a trading card company?!? It was baffling and didn’t fill us with confidence. The day the news of the purchase was announced the whole office was abuzz with confusion. A lot of us were very familiar with the trading card business and had no idea why Marvel would do this.

Keep in mind that with all this going on comics still had to get out the door. We still had to do our jobs. Imagine being one of the creative people having to get comics written and drawn in that environment. That is no easy task.

The most outstanding thing I remember from this period is the lack of leadership from above. There were always new plans and old plans being changed. Everything was in flux. Some vice president somewhere would make a plan and then that plan would be abandoned a month or two later as that guy left the company. It seemed all those jobs were stepping stone jobs for executives and why wouldn’t they be? Who wants to be an executive for a comic book company that’s headed for bankruptcy? Better to get the promotion on the resume and then move on.

I remember editorial had it hard. They were the ones who had to shepherd the creative process and the rules by which they had to do that were changing all the time. They would be told “Yes” one day and “No” the next. It made them creatively conservative because there was no upside to taking any chances. Getting the comic books out the door became so much of a challenge that making the comics the best they could be was less of a thought.

I have no memory of when I heard of “Heroes Reborn” but according to the “Robservations” podcast it was right after Jerry Calabrese came onboard that Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee were in negotiations to take over some of Marvel’s books. I think he said they were announced at San Diego Comic Con in the summer of 1995. They didn’t come out until Summer of 1996 so maybe they weren’t quite announced yet. I’m not sure when we found out in the offices but it was probably fairly quickly after the deal was done.

The announcement of Marvel farming out its comics to be produced by Image Comics’ Rod Liefeld and Jim Lee was met with disbelief in the offices. First of all there were constant rumors at this time that Marvel was going to be shutting down and licensing out all its comics to other companies. Here that was happening on a small scale but if it happened on a bigger scale it would mean all of our jobs. How could we want them to do anything but fail? But believe it or not this was just one problem that we had to deal with. We had to put out one fire after another at the time. Constantly being screwed over became normal.

As a side note mid-1995 is when the Marvel Bullpen first began to computerize. We were switching over to desktop publishing and so had to learn to do our jobs all over again in a new way. In a meeting (that I wasn’t in) with some higher ups about buying the computers one of the questions an executive asked was, “If we buy these computers how many people can we fire?” That was what we were dealing with.

We were not happy with the leadership from Marvel’s upper management and therefore had no faith in them. Here is Marvel, a company that is swimming in debt it can’t pay, and the plan they come up with involves paying a lot of money (six million dollars according to Rob Liefeld) to talent outside the company. That’s after they had just finished firing a whole bunch of people making $35,000 a year because they said there was no money to pay them. What were we supposed to believe? That these people knew what they were doing?

Plus the plan didn’t even involve anyone who worked for Marvel. Talk about lack of leadership. How is anyone who works in the Marvel offices going to get behind a plan that leaves them behind? That’s just crazy. And it’s not like the Image guys were “Joining the team.” Jerry Calabrese went out and got a whole new team. The old team is never going to be happy about that.

I wasn’t in editorial but the Bullpen worked closely with them. My impression was that they were angry and frustrated. Their jobs were made harder long before this deal due to lack of leadership and not only did this deal make their jobs harder again but it even threatened them entirely. Imagine having to explain to your creative teams, who are also worried about their jobs and the future of Marvel, that “Heroes Reborn” is a good thing. That’s a tough sell.

It also irked editorial that Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee were given total creative control. The Marvel editors and creative teams didn’t have that. Their plans for the comics were constantly being thwarted by their bosses’ ever changing plans. The people on the inside had to play by a different set of rules than the guys on the outside. Here they were directly competing for their jobs with people from outside the company and they had to compete with one hand tied behind their back. You can understand the frustration.

Then we roll around to 1996. In February, just like in 1995, there is a second round of firings. Phone calls, the march up to human resources, and you’re gone. All over again. This time they even fired the guys making minimum wage. There was no money to pay a couple of Romita’s Raiders $500 a month?!? Really?

According to the internet it was “mid 1996” when Jerry Calabrese was fired. I don’t know if it was before or after the launch of “Heroes Reborn” but I can tell you that by the time it finally did launch nobody in the office really cared anymore. Too much had happened between the announcement and the launch.

I know Rob Liefeld said “Heroes Reborn” was a success and made Marvel a lot of money but it wasn’t enough and we all knew it. By the end of the year there was another mass firing, Marvel was in bankruptcy, and “Heroes Reborn” was a footnote. What seemed so important the year before to everyone in the office ended up being not so important. All the plans and changing of plans had come to nothing and, to us left in the office, “Heroes Reborn” was just another of the failed plans.