Radiant Comics

As an artist I’m not particularly skilled at likenesses. What’s a likeness you ask? That’s when an artist draws a specific person so it looks like that person. If someone draws a picture of John Wayne it is immediately recognizable as John Wayne. That’s a skill that artists posses in varying degrees. Some have a natural talent for it but in the end it takes practice and it’s not a skill I practice much.

There are two ways to capture a likeness. One is by looking at the person as you draw. The person poses for you. This is the classic artistic method that goes back to the beginning of drawing. You see the person and you draw the person. Sure there are various tips and tricks in drawing a person but in the end it’s drawing from life. The second way is to draw from a photograph of the person. This is by far the more common way these days as photographs are easy to find or to make. It’s a lot easier to find a photo than to find a live model.

Drawing from a photo can be further broken down into two methods of working. One is to just look at the photo and draw from what you see (using a grid over the photo would be a variation on this) and the other is to drop a piece of paper on top of the photo and draw right over the top of it. Though you have to make sure you draw. Don’t trace. There is a difference. Tracing leads to an amateur job. This drawing method can also be done digitally.

I bring this subject up because I was working on some likenesses this week. I decided I wanted to make some cartoon art cards of the cast of the TV show “Friends.” Cartoon art cards are the art cards on which I draw a character’s face and a word balloon and then write and letter something for the word balloon. I usually make up the faces or sometimes draw known super heroes but this time I wanted something different. I wanted some likenesses.

This isn’t even the first time I tried to draw the cast of “Friends” as cartoon art cards. Last year I attempted the same thing and failed. I picked an episode of “Friends” and took screen shots of the various characters to draw from. It was season seven episode five. I tried the drawing right on top of the photo method and failed miserably. Nothing came out right. It all looked terrible and I abandoned the cards. That’s never fun.

This time I decided to give it a try but not draw over the photos. I’d look at the photo and then draw. I’d try to capture a caricature or likeness without copying the photo. This method can be even harder but I gave it a try. Keep in mind the drawing is also very small. An art card is only 2.5×3.5 inches and there is a word balloon on top. That means the face is only about an inch and a half tall. That is a really small face in which to capture a likeness. Especially of such well known faces.

I remember being told in my early 20s that I had a talent for simplicity. I didn’t like that idea very much. Complexity is much more praised in the world of drawing and it took me a long time to embrace my talent for simplicity. Simple is also very hard. When drawing something with very few lines there is not any room for error. If I were to define a face with a thousand lines I could be off with fifty of them and no one would ever know. They blend right in. But if I try to draw a face with thirty lines I can’t be off with any of them. They all count. If one or two are wrong they stand out. There is no place for them to hide. So attempting to do likenesses with simple drawings is a tough gig. That’s why I failed the first time.

Of the six cards I drew I think Phoebe came out the best. I think that might be because her hair in this episode was so distinctive. I captured her face shape fairly well and her eyes are good but her nose and mouth are pretty generic. There is no way they really can be anything else. They are so small.

I think Monica is also okay but only because of her hair. She has long, straight, jet black hair in this episode and it’s pretty distinctive. I only did okay in capturing the shape of her face and I missed a bit with her eyes. But they’re only a sixteenth of an inch high so I did what I could.

Rachel’s hair is also okay but her face is generic. I didn’t manage to capture the quality of her jawline or her eyes and nose but it’s still an okay little drawing. In context I know it’s Rachel but if I saw it as an individual drawing I might not get who she is. I like the drawing though.

Chandler came out the most like a caricature. Maybe it’s the glasses but he looks like a cartoon version of Chandler more than the others do. He might be able to guest star on an episode of Scooby-Doo. I’m not sure if I want them all to go in this direction or not but I like this Chandler.

Ross is solid. His sticking up hair is close but just misses by a little bit. I think I captured something with his eyes though. Like Rachel he works in context but maybe not on his own. Room for improvement here.

Joey was the most trouble. I couldn’t get him at all through three tries. The one I show here works but I had to do it by the “Draw over a picture” method. No matter how matter how much I tried I couldn’t capture his look. I like the way his hair came out here but previously I couldn’t capture it at all. My first three Joeys looked nothing like him. Even in context he didn’t read as Joey. It was really frustrating and I gave up twice before switching methods. I’m much happier with this one.

Overall these likenesses, except for the first three Joeys, went pretty well. I’m putting them up for sale on my Etsy page and maybe someone will buy them. If they do I might do some more from another episode. We’ll see.

I finally stared watching movies again. Why did I stop watching movies? I’m not exactly sure but the short explanation is that they got too long for me. Or that I lost the patience to sit still that long. It’s really not about the movies it’s about me. I can’t sit down and concentrate on a movie for as long as I used to be able to.

I can still watch TV but I’m not a TV binge watcher. One TV show is either 42 or 22 minutes long without commercials. I usually watch between an hour and a half and two hours of TV a night before I go to bed. It relaxes me and calms me down. Otherwise I get tired and wired. That’s how I describe my state of being when I’m still wide awake and want to get things done but my concentration is shot for the day and I have no energy left to actually do anything but be restless and maybe pace. It’s like I want to draw but can’t anymore. Sitting down and relaxing is what I should do because tomorrow is another day but it’s not always easy to do without the distraction of entertainment.

Also with TV I can stop between shows and brush my teeth, get a drink, or whatever. I can’t do that with a movie because I’d miss parts. Movies demand your attention all the way through for the full two hours. I don’t seem to have that in me very often anymore. I’ve watched a few full movies over the last couple of months. I finally caught The Guardians of The Galaxy Volume Two and enjoyed that one plus I watched the two John Wick movies which were good but that was about it for the winter. Maybe there were a couple of more in there that I’m forgetting right now but not a whole lot more.

Meanwhile over this past weekend, plus a couple of days, I’ve watched three movies. What’s the difference you ask? I finally decided to not watch the movies all the way through at once. Y’see, I always have twenty minutes to half an hour to watch something. I do my exercises after diner and usually have on a TV show while I do them. Since I stand and work I sometimes need twenty minutes to sit in a chair and rest. I can put something on then too. I’ve run out of or gotten bored with half an hour TV shows so why not put a movie on? I can always catch the rest of it later. That’s become my attitude.

A second factor is that I can also watch the movie on my iPad. Not always but sometimes. As easy as it is to watch a movie on my TV occasionally it seems like too much effort. I have to turn on the TV, turn on the stereo, wait for the TV to boot up and connect to my wireless network, and then pick something to watch. It’s not like the process takes more than a minute or four but opening up my iPad and launching a movie watching app takes seconds.

It’s a different experience watching a movie on an iPad. One of the good things about it is that the picture is crystal clear and taken in at a glance. I know most film makers want you to see their movies on the big screen but with a little screen it’s easier to see the composition. I’ve found that sometimes scenes can look prettier on the small screen because of that. Plus there is an intimacy when holding an iPad in your hands and watching something. Of course that’s a drawback too. You have to hold the iPad and that gets tiring after a while. It’s a good thing I don’t do it for that long.

One more thing that has annoyed me about watching movies is the sound. I’ve got a good sound system hooked up to my TV so that’s not the problem. The problem is that I like to watch action movies. They have lots of gunfire and explosions. The dialog happens at one level of volume and then that’s cranked up for the action scenes. I know that’s the way the film makers want it but I’m always turning the volume down during the action scenes. I don’t need super-loud gunfire, tires screeching, or explosions in my movies. It doesn’t help me instead it takes me out of the movie. Since TV shows have less of a budget there seems to be less of that super-loud noise. At least when I’m watching on my iPad the volume isn’t so loud.

What movies did I watch this weekend? Let me tell you. The first was Den of Thieves. I think that one was over two hours long and I watched in in three or four pieces. It was pretty good. It was a caper film that we got to see from the point of view of both the police and the criminals. Lot’s of characters and lots of action plus it kept me guessing. There was also a lot of moral grey area so I wasn’t sure who I was rooting for. Did I want the criminals to succeed or not? I think that was handled well.

The second movie was The Commuter. Another action movie that takes place on the Metro North train that runs between Cold Spring and Grand Central Terminal. It was also a pretty good. It starred Liam Neeson as an ex-police officer caught in an impossible situation on his commute home as evildoers force him to find a hidden person on the train. Good stuff with lots of tension. Even with breaks in between scenes.

The third and final movie was The Accountant. Yet another action movie with Ben Affleck as an accountant who has really good combat skills that come in handy when some rich criminal wants him dead. It had and interesting and unusual climax as Affleck squared off against the final end-battle boss. Sometimes these action movies are very much like video games.

So there you go. Half an hour at a time is the way I like my movies now. Just enough time until I want to get up and move around a bit.

A strange thought struck me this week. I have read a lot of comic books. Being that I’m a comic book collector that doesn’t seem like such a strange thought but it really is. When I say I’ve read a lot of comics what I mean is that you’d have to work hard to find a person who has read more comic books than I have. That didn’t use to be the case but now I think it is and that’s what a just realized.

When I was growing up in the 1970s I collected comics (I consider 1976 to be my official collecting staring point) and so did a few of my neighbors. Lots of kids read comics at the time but fewer did as we grew older. By the time I graduated high school I probably knew no more than half a dozen people who collected comics. We had all probably read the same amount of comics whatever that amount was.

When I went off to college my major was art so I met more comic book fans. By the time I graduated I knew at least another ten comic book fans and, though many of them didn’t buy as many comic books as they once did, we probably all read around the same number of comics. We were all about the same age and had read a lot of the same ones.

After college I worked in the offices of Marvel Comics. There almost everyone read comics. And they read a lot of them. Being that I was only about 22 years old there were a whole bunch of people who had been reading comics for a lot longer than me. I never thought of myself as being a person who had read a lot of comics while I was there. Especially since I hadn’t been reading many Marvel comics for a few years at that point. There were people there who were reading and had read every Marvel comic. That’s a lot of comics.

A lot of time has passed since my Marvel days. It’s been almost thirteen years since I last worked there. Because of Facebook and the internet I’m still in touch with a lot of the people who I used to work with and many of them are my friends. We all have comics in common. But the strange thing is that a lot of them really don’t keep up with comics anymore. They occasionally buy and read some but mostly don’t. Meanwhile I have kept on buying and reading comics. That means the number of comics I’ve read has been steadily growing over the years while a lot of other people’s number hasn’t.

Since I consider my comic collecting to have started in 1976 that means I’ve been collecting comics for forty two years. That’s a long time. I’ve had a pull list (a pull list is where a comic shop sets aside the comics you pre-order for you to pick up every week) at a local comic book store since 1983. Before then I used to go to the local newsstand to buy my comics every week. Most of my comic book friends haven’t had a pull list in a least ten years.

At a conservative estimate of five comic books a week times forty two years means I’ve read just short of 11,000 new comic books. Those are fresh off the stands copies and don’t count back issues, collected editions, borrowed copies, and now digital comics. So 11,000 is now my starting point for having read a lot of comics. How many people have that big a number? But as I said that’s just the starting point.

I know that number is an underestimation because my database tells me that my current collection stands at about 11,500 comics and I’ve gotten rid of thousands of comics over the years. I think my collection peaked out at about 15,000 comic books years ago. Plus I actually read all those comic books. I watch comic book haul videos on YouTube and a lot of people buy comics that they either never intend to read or never get around to reading. Sometimes they buy then just to have them in their collection and sometimes they buy them with the intent to get around to reading them someday. Sometimes back issues are so cheap that a person buys them just for the hell of it. But not me. I’ve read every comic book I’ve bought.

Then there are the collected editions. I probably have a thousand of those on my shelves. They collect anywhere from five to ten copies of a comic. So that’s another five thousand comics I’ve read. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of collected editions over the years too. I’m still fairly new to digital but I’ve read a bunch of comics on my iPad over the last two years. Maybe five hundred of them. Once again that may be a low estimate.

It’s really that pull list number that made me realize I’ve read a lot of comics. I’ve bought comic books ever week for forty two years. Sure there were some weeks I couldn’t make it to the shop but since I had a pull list that meant I didn’t miss the issues. They held them for me until I could make it in.

So how could someone who hasn’t gone to the comic shop in the last twenty years have read as many comics as I have? They almost certainly haven’t. So a lot of the people who I knew at Marvel in the 1990s and who I then considered to have read at least as many if not more comic than me have a static number. Mine has kept growing steadily. It would be hard to catch up. I never even skipped a year like so many people I know have.

So that’s my strange realization for the week. I’ve read a lot of comic books. More than I realized.

I was a Marvel Comics kid. From the mid 1970s until the early 1980s I was all about the Marvel super heroes. In the early 1980s when George Perez started drawing the New Teen Titans I finally had a DC comic book that I liked too. But in the end I liked indie comics better. Pacific Comics, First Comics, Eclipse Comics, and lots of other small press comics. Even as a kid I liked Marvel’s weirdest, offbeat stuff best: Omega the Unknown, The Guardians of the Galaxy, The Defenders, Adam Warlock, and whatever other oddities they had made by talented people. That’s my taste. The creative out-there stuff.

By the time the mid-1980s rolled around I was in college and had pretty much gone all indie comics. I stopped buying all my long standing Marvel comics, Spider-Man, Hulk, X-Men, Avengers, and Defenders. I had hundred issue runs of those series that extended back to my childhood but I wasn’t interested in them anymore. I still bought plenty of comics but they were all indie books. Captain America was the last Marvel or DC comic that I kept buying. I bought that one well into the 1990s before the “Heroes Reborn” storyline made me give it up.

I may not have bought Marvel or DC comics regularly anymore but over the years I would check in with them and read some of their comics. I wasn’t a huge fan of the late 1980s-early 1990s Lee/Liefeld/McFarlane stuff but I checked some of it out. I also remember liking some late 1990s Avengers comics. When there was a creator I liked on a book I would give it a look. Or if I got nostalgic for a character, mostly Spider-Man or the Hulk, I would check that out too.

I did this all the way up until the early 2010s. That was period in which I was buying mostly collected editions. If I wanted to check out what was going on in the Marvel Universe I’d buy a collected volume of something. I read “Planet Hulk”, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”, and “Spider-Man: Spider Island” that way. I thought they were all okay. But then I stopped. Over time I did get nostalgic and wanted to check things out but I didn’t. I haven’t bought any Marvel or DC comics in years. What happened? That’s the question I asked myself.

The answer I came up with is really a conjunction of three things. Especially as it relates to my childhood favorite Marvel Comics. The first part of the answer for me is that all the characters I grew up with are no longer themselves. They’ve all split into many versions of the same character. There are at least six different versions of Spider-Man, four different Hulks, five Wolverines, and a whole League of Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four). No longer are any of the Marvel super heroes special. Each is just a face in the crowd. The last time I got nostalgic to read some Hulk I couldn’t even find a comic that starred the Hulk I wanted. I wasn’t nostalgic for a knock-off version of the Hulk so I just gave up on it.

I think different versions of popular characters is a natural extension of a company growing and becoming more corporate. In other words it’s hard to stop. By “More corporate” I mean that more mangers and money people are hired. People whose job it is to make money off of Marvel’s intellectual property. And they do their job.

One thing you have to understand about making comics is that no one knows what will sell. With experience you can make some guesses but no one really knows. All the creative people I’ve known in comics, from editors to letterers, have always tried to make the best comics that they can. But they’re not the ones who make the decisions on what comics get made. The money people do that job.

So imagine you’re a money person at Marvel Comics. It’s your job to make as much money as possible for Marvel. Spider-Man and the Avengers are your best selling comics. So what comics do you want to make? More Spider-Man and Avengers comics of course. You may not ultimately know what comics will sell and which won’t but you do know that Spider-Man will sell better than Quasar. So you green-light Spider-Man projects and red-light Quasar ones.

As I said before the creative people are trying their best to make good comics but their creativity exists in this context. If you’re creator and you’re pitching a project you know your chances are better with Spider-Man than with Quasar. And if you’re creating a new character basing that character on an already popular character increases your chances of approval. So inventing Spider-Girl is better for you than inventing Quarry-Girl.

Creating yet another Spider-Man knock-off annoys me because it makes the character less special in my eyes. It makes me less interested in Spider-Man when he’s one of a thousand Spider-Characters. And that’s not even an exaggeration. There was a Spider-Verse comic that had endless alternate world versions of Spider-Man. Ughhhh…

That leads us to the second thing on my list. Creative choices get more conservative. “More corporate” also means more people have to approve a project. When Stan Lee was running Marvel in the 1960s, as far as I’ve ever read, he only answered to the owner Martin Goodwin. So if he wanted to get a project done he had to convince one guy. If you’re a creator at Marvel these days how many people do you have to convince to go forward with a project? I’m not even sure but I bet it’s three or four. At least.

Successful creators in this context will learn what will get approved and what won’t. They’ll tailor their stuff towards that approval process. The stuff that gets through this process easiest is the stuff just like other successful stuff. Hence we get six Spideys, six Hulks, six Wolverines, and so on. Every popular hero these days has a superhero “Family.” Creative choices get narrower. Instead of new and creative projects we get more of the same. We get variations on a theme. We get Batman and the Joker in a dozen different time periods and a dozen different alternate realities. That is the exact type of stuff I’m not interested in.

The third thing on my list is a simple one. The number on the comic book. The issue number that was on a comic was my last tenuous link to the comics I read in my youth. I collected The Amazing Spider-Man from about issues 165 until 265. So if I saw issue 467 at least it had a context for me. But over the years Marvel and DC have relaunched and renumbered all their comics. The number on the front means nothing to me anymore. That last connection is gone. So now if I want to check out the latest issues of The Amazing Spider-Man it doesn’t really exist for me. Instead it’s the latest edition of some other Spider-Man series. They don’t even bother to use volume numbers anymore.

Of course the worst thing for Marvel and DC is that I don’t even care. I can’t even be bothered to nostalgia read anymore. But lucky for me there are plenty of other good comics out there that I can buy. And I do.

I’ve drawn a bunch of ink cards over the last few days. They are baseball card size (2.5×3.5 inch cards) drawings that I make spontaneously with ink and a brush. I made twenty four of them over three days and over the last three years I’ve made over three hundred ink cards. The odd thing is that I really don’t know what to do with them. They don’t have a place in my process as the small ink drawings in my ink book do or a place in my “Drifting and Dreaming” comic strip as my regular art cards do.

I draw my ink cards in two different ways. One way is with my busted brush technique. That’s when I use a brush that is old and doesn’t come to a point anymore. The brush spreads out and has four or five points on it. That makes it hard to control but that’s the point of using it: to work in ink with a brush that’s hard to control is to give up the idea of making a perfect drawing. Of course I try to control the outcome of the drawing the best I can but it’s not like using a pencil and an eraser. I have to make the best of what marks I make. It’s a good way to loosen up my drawing and discover new ways to make images.

The second way is with a regular pointed brush. When I do this I tend to hold the brush straight up and down. That’s how Chinese calligraphy is done and if you ever have seen video of Eastern brush masters it’s amazing to see. I’m not quite that good. I usually hold the brush more horizontal and pull it across the page. That’s the European way. That’s how I make thick to thin lines but that’s not what I’m looking for with these ink cards.

It’s funny but I often have a tougher time making these cards when I use a good brush. With the busted brush I accept that things can be out of control and try hard to adapt to that. With the good brush I have to stop and think what kind of mark I want to make. That’s what I have to get over. That stopping makes me hesitate and I don’t want that. Usually the drawing that fail are the ones I do with the good brush. I make a few marks, try to make a decision, end up painting myself into a corner. Oh well, they’re small and I can start over.

One of the things about drawing this way, in a spontaneous style, is that you have to make a lot of drawings in order to get some good ones. Since the goal is not “To make a good drawing” but is “To make a drawing of a new image that I may no be able to consciously think of” good drawings don’t always happen. Out of the twenty four drawings I made, I’d say, that four of them are real winners. It’s not that the other twenty are terrible but they only succeed in part. It takes the ability to deal with frustration to draw this way.

It also always takes longer than I think it will to make a bunch of these drawings. Any individual drawing might only take ten minutes to draw but as a whole I can only get a few of them an hour done. That’s because things don’t always go my way and I often have to slow myself down and concentrate. It actually might be more like finding a place between concentration and distraction. It takes a mindlessness that’s hard to achieve. I have to concentrate on clearing my mind so I can try to draw with few preconceived notions and pull images out of the back of my mind.

Though I end up with many different types of images on these cards I can break them down into a few different categories. The first is tiny little full figures. I can do these with either the good brush or the busted brush. I draw a person or persons from head to toe and they’re usually an inch or two high. I also like to draw an environment around the figures. I’m torn as to which brush is better for this technique. I try to keep the figures loose and sketchy. Sometimes that’s easier with the busted brush but not always.

The second type is the waist up figure. This makes the face a little bit bigger and is all about the head and arms gesture. Though I’ve made plenty of them with the good brush I think I prefer the busted brush for these. It’s a little more gestural and that’s what I need. I sometimes tighten up with the good brush and end up drawing like I was working in my ink book . That’s not what I want. With the busted brush I can keep things looser.

The third type of drawing is the head and shoulders type. This one can be broken down into sections too. First is the monster heads. This is pure busted brush. I make my five by seven and ten by fifteen inch monster drawings with the busted brush so it naturally follows that I make these small drawings with it too. Lots of scratchy marks and crosshatching with the spread out bristles. The busted brush is good at scary drawing.

Finally there is the non-scary head and shoulders type. They might still be a little weird and scary but they’re not monster faces. The good brush works for this type. The busted brush can work too but I tend to want to make monsters when that one is in my hand. It requires restraint to make a regular face with the busted brush so why not just grab the good one? So that’s what I end up doing.

After I do the drawings I scan them into the computer in case I want to do something with them later. I still haven’t managed to turn one into a bigger drawing but maybe someday I’ll figure it out. Until then I’ll keep posting them on my Instagram and Twitter. What else am I going to do there?