I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got three new comics.
Check them all out here:
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I decided to do something a little different this week. I decided to work with someone else’s image. I do that on occasion. Normally coming up with an original image is the most fun part of making a piece of art for me but every so often I like to work with an image that’s not mine. That’s why I chose to do a cover homage to Neal Adams Batman #241. I’m not going to lie to you. I picked that cover because it’s a fairly easy one for me to recreate. Neal Adams can make some very illustrative and intricate covers but this is one of his more simple ones. There is only a single figure and a cityscape. Neal Adams is way out of my class in terms of illustration but this is one I can handle.
I don’t own a copy of this comic but I’m familiar with the cover since it’s one of Adams’ more famous Batman covers. I looked it up on the internet and found a good scan of the cover. I also managed to find a bad scan of the original art for the cover. That was important. I’ve only made a couple of cover recreations myself but I’ve set some others up for other artists to do. In setting them up I like to recreate all the original production marks on the paper that was originally used. I didn’t have any examples of DC Comics cover paper from 1972 until I found that bad scan. I then recreated the paper markings digitally.
The next thing I had to do was recreate the Batman logo, trade dress, and other cover lettering. I already made the Comics Code stamp for past cover recreations so that was done. Then I had some decisions to make. Was I going to make a historical recreation or an homage? They’re two different things. One is more of a copy and the other uses the original as a starting point. I decided to go with homage. Like I wrote before Adams is out of my league as an illustrator so why would I want to try and copy his style? That also freed me up to not follow the design of the cover as closely as if it was a recreation.
The first thing I decided was that I didn’t like all the type on the cover. It made things too cluttered and took away from the beautiful simplicity of the Neal Adams’ design. I dropped the extra blurb and the whole line about Robin’s backup story. I wanted the “DC Batman” part that’s in the upper left but decided to delete the Batman head below it. I saw no point to the head. With all the other top type got it didn’t fit there anymore anyway. I kept the 52 pages circle plus the number and Comics Code but that big caption at the bottom had to go. It’s clutter and adds nothing as far as I’m concerned.
I then spent some type digitally recreating the logo, 52 circle, and the Batman head and bat behind the logo. The bat was a little tricky because it’s not actually symmetrical as you think it would be. I made it symmetrical and then had to shift things around to get it to match up. The logo was straightforward enough. All this type recreation stuff is already in my skill set so it’s not too hard for me to do. Just takes some time.
With all that type gone it gave me the opportunity to make the Batman figure larger. I blew it up digitally and found the size and place I wanted Batman in. That was easy enough. The hard part would be drawing the missing parts of the city. Since I got rid of that giant caption at the bottom there was now a hole with no city drawn in it. Not to mention since Batman was now in a different place there was missing city where he used to be. There was a lot of missing city.
The logo and trade dress was all done, the paper markings were all made, and I figured out the modified layout. The next step was to printout the black line of Adams’ drawing in blue line for me to draw over. So that’s what I did on al eleven by seventeen inch piece of paper. I then took a pencil and treated Adams’ drawing like it was my underdrawing. I didn’t trace but I drew right on top of it. It’s not hard to do since all the hard work is already done and the figure took me no time at all. It was that city that took up my time.
Luckily Neal Adams is no slacker and he drew the city in a proper perspective. He didn’t fake anything and I easily found the vanishing point he used. That helped a lot but I don’t draw many cityscapes like this. I can imagine him knocking that city out fairly quickly but I had to take my time to get things to look right. I eventually got things to where I liked them but it took me a while. After I finished with the pencilling it was easy enough to scan it in and add the pencils to the logo and such. Then I turned the pencils into a blue line and printed them out on the same page as the black logos and such. It was ready to be inked and finished.
Once again I had a fairly easy time inking the figure. I inked it in my own style but all I really had to do was follow Neal. The cityscape must have taken me twice as long as the figure. I think I did some good work adding to what was already there but it still took a lot of mindfulness. I had to think about it as I was doing it. Make sure I got everything correct. I think I did a solid job but certainly not as good as if Neal Adams drew the whole city himself. You can’t have it all.
The final thing I added in was the moon. It’s a simple circle so I left it out until the end. I didn’t want to do it in pencil and then have that printed out in the blue line for fear my circle template that I was going to using in the inking stage wouldn’t perfectly line up with the blue line circle. It was just as easy to drop the circle template on the page and draw in ink. So that’s what I did and the piece was finished.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got nine new comics.
Check them all out here:
I’ve been enjoying my color inks again this week. I recently wrote about my “Ice Blue” faux comic book covers that I made in blue acrylic ink but this time I was using the ink for something different. I was mixing something old with something new and coming up with a yet another series of drawings. My “Blue Punk” and “Red Punk” drawings.
It started with me just wanting to use my color inks. The first question is usually “Use them to make what?”. That is often the hardest question to answer. Doing something takes a lot of work but figuring out what to do can be a real stumbling block to getting going. So I decided to mix a couple of ideas and use some old drawings.
The first idea was my comic book size faux comic book drawings. Not the eleven by seventeen inch full size comic book original art drawings but the print size six and a half by ten inch drawings. But I didn’t want to make faux comic book covers. No logos, no trade dress, and no paper markings. I wanted them to be drawings on their own. But for some reason I wanted them at that comic book size. I think because it’s fun to bag and board the final drawings. Makes them seem cooler somehow. And easier to handle.
The next thing I had to figure out was what to draw. That’s the eternal question. It takes a while to draw something and I wanted to use the ink and not spend so much time with a pencil. Even those “Ice Blue” drawings, as simple as they are, take a bit of time. I’d say penciling each “Ice Blue” figure takes about and hour and a half. Maybe two hours. And that’s a short amount of time to spend on a drawing.
I could have gone with some spontaneous ink drawing. That’s where I draw in ink with no preconceived idea of what I want to draw. I do a lot of that but mostly at a smaller scale. One of the things about drawing that way is that you have to make a lot of spontaneous ink drawings to get a few good ones. That’s how the process works. That’s why I do them at the small size. Doing them at printed comic book size would mean a lot more work. And that is working on the drawing rather than working with the ink. Working with the ink is what I wanted to do.
I ended up looking through my old scans of drawings. Since I scan in all my art as a matter of course I have years and years worth of drawings as picture files on my computer. That makes them easy to look through. Some of those drawings got turned into finished works and some never did. Sometimes I even rework drawings into something new and that is what I did here. I decided I wanted to ink some figures/characters so I looked around and found some of my old “Message Tee” drawings that would be good for this new project. I made a hundred and fifty drawings for that strip of people standing there in T-shirts. They were often weird looking people. They were perfect for using again and making even weirder.
“Blue Punk #1” was the first of these. I didn’t even have the name yet but had the color. Since I had already worked with the blue ink I figured I’d start with that again. I printed out the drawing in blue line and onto bristol paper for inking. Since the drawings were fairly stripped down to begin with I decided I would add plenty of stuff in ink. I didn’t want to keep things simple as with the “Blue Ice” drawings. At first I stuck mostly to what was there in the original drawing but after that basic figure was inked I added more stuff.
The first and most obvious thing that I added was the giant eye in the middle of her shirt. As I was doing the initial inking I realized something had to go there. It was a wide open blank spot made to put writing in for my “Message Tee” strip. It couldn’t stay blank and I didn’t want to write anything there so I used one of my old favorites the all seeing eye. I’ve worked on many different variations of the all seeing eye over the years so it was natural for me to reach for it again. I could draw it right in ink and come up with a lot of variations. Plus it’s not the first time I’ve gone with giant eyes on chests. It seems like a natural to me. The strange radiating lines around the eyes came in part from eyelids and eyelashes and in part from motion lines. They create their own little world around the eye.
The backgrounds are a bit of a mash-up too. As I was inking the figures I had no idea what to do with the background. In the “Message Tee” strip they’re all filled with blocks of color. That wasn’t going to happen here so after some deliberation I decided on using a side of the brush technique to make linear patterns. They are sort of like the way I draw buildings in my ink drawings by building them up out of various horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines. But in the “Punks” drawings I scaled up the technique and used it to make a flat but patterned background.
The rest of the drawing is all about marks. I threw lots of folds in the shirt and lots of little tick marks on the faces and arms. Plus the hair is filled with lines. None of these were in the original drawing but I wanted them there now. The face got even more decorated too. I like decorating faces in drawings. It the end the drawing looked a little like some weird punk rocker from an alternate world. I liked that and it gave me my name. Then I pulled out the red ink.
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.
I wasn’t able to make it to the shop this week so I’ve got no comics. But here is a video I made this week showing some Richard Corben comics.
Check them all out here:
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.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got six new comics.
Check them all out here:
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.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got ten new comics.
Check them all out here: