Hey friends, I just wanted to point out that Frank Santoro’s next Comics Correspondence Course is about to kick off. Frank is of course a talented cartoonist in his own right but he’s also someone who thinks and talks about comics more/better than most people I know, a “true head” as we say.  He was in town for a few days this winter and not only was it a joy to riff on stuff we both love, surrounded by piles of old comics, but I felt like I actually learned stuff from him in looking at my own art and talking about it with him, not to mention at his workshop at Floating World. I have a couple friends who have taken the course and they can’t say enough good things about it. Anyhow, highest recommendation, and like he says he’ll work out payment plans and around your schedules:

SANTORO CORRESPONDENCE COURSE FOR COMIC BOOK MAKERS

SUMMER 2012 – Deadline for applications is May 30th

Application guidelines:

The new course begins June 4th. You can start late if need be. The course is a walk through my process of how to make a 16 page signature. Lots of fast drawing and composition. Lots of simple sequencing. We focus on timing. And color. And working in layers like a printmaker. If you are interested – please send me some work – small jpegs of things you have done. And tell me about yourself a little bit. There are ten spots open right now. I also need to see 3 figure drawings and 3 landscapes – all done on blank 3 x 5 inch index cards in direct pen – no pencil underdrawing. You should be able to do these 6 drawings in less than one hour. Draw fast and loose.

The course is 500 for eight weeks. I ask for a good faith payment once you start – half if possible. If not talk to me and we can work something out.

Basically it can be done on your own time – it is intense for the first four weeks and then you are more on your own. The idea is to use me during those eight weeks as an editor. After the eight weeks I will be less available – so if you don’t finish – that is okay – you can finish on your own time. It has worked well so far as a projected deadline. And if you blow it, so what? You do it when you can. But since so much of comics is about getting it done – I try and get you to work in a system that can get it done.

Check out a comic done for the course by one of my students here.

Email me – capneasyATgmailDOTcom

In the comics-publishing frenzy to package and reprint anything thick enough to support a spine and an ISBN, the largest untapped vein of great comics at this point has to be Dennis The Menace comic books.

As brilliant at drafting and staging as he was, Hank Ketcham never quite developed the same mastery of sequential art; his solo Dennis Sunday strips and rare comic-book work is OK, but nothing like what his assistants/employees later produced; Dennis‘ “Stan & Jack” uberteam being Fred Toole [who also wrote for the Sunday strips] and the obscenely underrated cartoonist Al Wiseman, who drew roughly the first 15 years of the comic-book series.

It’s something of a mystery, why Wiseman’s work never developed anywhere near the fandom that his spinner-rack contemporaries like Carl Barks, Stanley & Tripp, Kurtzman & Elder or even Beck & Binder have enjoyed. Aside from regular praise and credit as a major influence from Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Toole & Wiseman’s work seems to have never made it into the collective hands of both the underground and the alternative generations of cartoonists.

So, in the true spirit of comics activism — a blatantly futile, possibly self-serving gesture that’s undeniably feelgood — I have decided to regularly post my favorite panels from Dennis stories until this grave injustice is finally rightened. Enjoy, and then write to your favorite publisher and demand that they hire me to package at least some of this work for print immediately. If successful, I promise to keep my byline off the book jacket spine. Or just enjoy the pictures, see if I care.

I guess one could make the argument that this work suffers from Dennis being such a one-note/annoying character. To that argument I say: Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Yes yes, Barks and his precious ducks — OK, the boys are trapped in a blazing inferno and you can only save one of them; to do that, you merely have to write down his name and unique personality traits in a sentence within, say, 30 seconds.

[I can't believe you let Donald's nephews die.]

Anyway, the other problem with the Dennis-is-annoying argument against these comics is that he’s rarely their protagonist; for the bulk of Wiseman’s run, Henry Mitchell is often the hero or at least the most sympathetic/audience-identifiable character; if he appears in a story, he’s usually struggling to deal with the chaos his child has wrought.

(These panels are from “Ghost Town,” as published by Hallden in Dennis The Menace #37 [August 1959] and later reprinted in Dennis the Menace Giant #13 and Dennis the Menace Pocket Full of Fun #31. Yes, I’m aware that I posted almost nothing but single panels while talking about how great Wiseman was at drawing comics. Come back next time and I’ll show you some damn pages.)

I asked a handful of SG artists from both the website and the magazine to send in art for the show – in the end the show consisted of myself, Aidan Koch, Jennifer Parks, Farel Dalrymple, Kazimir Strzepek, Levon Jihanian, David King, Malachi Ward, Ian MacEwan, François Vigneault, and T Edward Bak. The space was limited or I would have shoved even more homies in there.

So it was one beautiful Friday afternoon before the show that Ian, my wife Krista and I headed up there to peep the show and see some friends. I managed to take a couple photos here and there, and stole a couple from pal Max Clotfelter’s facebook account.

Here’s Ian and Kaz getting sleepy Friday night at the Redwoods bar. They were playing TCM (instead of a sports channel or Seinfeld) on a big screen and Ian and I were overly impressed by that. Not a bad place to pass the time, plus some good people watching. Krista and I talked about how nice it was to be in a bar and not recognize a SINGLE PERSON (Portland, for all its charms, is a relatively small/big town).  Tom Van Deusen and Dalton James Rose came and met us for a drink, but before long it was time for some Tacos Gringos and deep deep sleep on Kaz’s couch. I wish I’d thought to take some pics at Kaz’s place, as he has a CRAZY amount of awesome old toys and pages of Mourning Star to ogle. I somehow never realized Kaz works at print size?!??! the pages are TINY. Kaz, if you don’t watch out you’re gonna get hand cramps!

Anyhow, the next morning Kaz and his lady Jesica joined us for brunch before Krista and I went down to the waterfront for some olde-fashioned tourista action. We made a beeline for Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, as Krista has a squished penny collection that needed adding to, but we also met some new friends there, like Sylvester:

And here I am shoving Krista into a wall of disgusting bubblegum. This alleyway was COVERED in chewed up gum, it was sort of like being in a HR Geiger bioform tunnel.

After a couple hours of sun-worship, we met up with Ian and Dalton at Half-Priced Books, which we joked is one of our favorite comic book stores. Seriously, I always find some crazy out of print gems, and the .25 cent comic selection is awash with lots of great back issues. This time I picked up a cheap reader copy of Jeff Rovin’s Encyclopedia of Super Villains, mainly because I have such fond memories of poring over the Encyclopedia of Super Heroes as a kid. I doubt it’ll have as much of an impact on 36 year old Zack as 16 year old Zack, but that’s a nice Ernie Colon cover!

From there, we decided to bop down to the Fanta Bookstore, check out the show, and grab some grub. Larry was busily cutting up labels for the art and waiting on his “signage guy”, and pointed us towards Smarty Pants, a sweet sandwich shop around the corner. We were all starving and in need of a beer, so Ian, Dalton, Krista & I headed over and enjoyed some refreshments before the show:

and by the time we got back, it was all set up!

Please excuse the cropping of the edges of the show, and the general low-res nature of the images. I posted these photos to Instagram and my phone decided to delete the originals so these are the only evidence of the show that I have. Larry did a great job framing and hanging the show!

And look at that signage! Worth waiting for, very Pro! That’s a blown up version of Eleanor Davis’ logo from SG Mag #1, btw.

It wasn’t too long before people started to show up, and I became more focused on socializing than taking pics. Here we have Kaz, Max Clotfelter, Marc J Palm and myself all comparing our “Kuatos”. Hey, we’re cartoonists who drink beer!  Cut us some slack.

Scott Faulkner checking out the show. Kaz & Ian debate pen nibs or something. More of that/different angle:

Aaron Mew! I love that guy! He’s a funny boy. Pals from the local comics scene that showed up that I managed to not get photos of include Kelly Froh, Tom Van Deusen,  Jacq Cohen, Lillian Beatty, Dalton Webb, Tony Ong, Eroyn Franklin, Matt Southworth and probably more. A great time was had by all.

Before too long, though, we had to pack up and head home. What a great trip. I’d like to send a super special big shout out to Larry Reid for both the invite to do the show and the excellent hospitality we received in Seattle. The whole thing was just so damn nice and refreshing. And hey, if you’re in Seattle in the next few weeks, the show will be up until June 6th!

Why yes! Yes, it is!

Stumptown is here and it’s time to have fun in Portland, currently blessed w/it’s unofficial status as a “Top Two” comics town (what the other city might be I will let the scholars debate).

If you’re not here or on your way already,  you can still make it. Should be a fun time.

I mean, LOOK AT THIS:

I started making a map with all our friends and their locations and blah blah blah, but man I had to stop or else the map would have looked like this:

Anyhow, yeah here’s the deal:

PRESS GANG, including STUDY GROUP, FAMILY STYLE, and FLOATING WORLD COMICS is #occupying a grip of booth space over in the 200 block, 207-209.

SG friends, family & contributors are all around us as well!

• Tom Neely at a-20
• Sparkplug Comic Books at a-19
• Revival House at booth 211 (including homedawgs Chris Cilla, Tims Root & Goodyear, & Jason T. Miles!)
• It Will All Hurt (and some other stuff) creator Farel Dalrymple at a-12
• That Wuvable Oaf Ed Luce at 206
• Pony Club Gallery, including LONE WOLF creator Jennifer Parks at 205
• Studio J-Fish at 204
• Max Clotfelter & Kelli Froh at a-13
• Oh shit, Jesse Moynihan at a-9

WHAT IS UP WITH PRESS GANG: 

STUDY GROUP: I’ll have some copies of all of our SG publications, as well as a handfull of Bodega Press books, INCLUDING both volumes of MOURNING STAR by Kazimir Strzepek, who will be in attendance!

Also at the Study Group table, Sharknife and PENG! creator Corey Lewis will be splitting time between our spot and the Oni Press booth, selling copies of his super-dope Layered Jacket Mini.

Snakebomb maestro Jackson Wyatt Hayden will also be there repping his crew and the Snakebomb anthology.

SG Magazine #1 interview subject Craig Thompson will also be signing copies of the magazine for one hour, either on Saturday or Sunday… I can’t remember. It’s the same day he’s signing at the CBLDF table. Whatever. Craig has a great, super revealing 20 page interview in the new issue and it’s basically a “how to” course of it’s own complete with TONS of previously unpublished Habibbi process art. Craig has graciously offered to sign some copies at our table and chat a bit. So, uh it’s either Saturday or Sunday from 3-4 that Craig will be hanging out.

I’m also going to see if I can talk the Magazine co-editor Milo George out of his zen monastery for one of the days, so you might see him around. If he shows up, let him know what you think of his Craig interview or the ever popular Old Comics Weds posts!

Additionally, I’ll have a bunch of prints, including these new ones:

FAMILY STYLE:  Francois will be there with all 3 of the recent ELF WORLD anthologies, and you probably haven’t seen the very excellent #3 yet! MOME and ELF WORLD contributor Andrice Arp will be in attendance.

FLOATING WORLD COMICS: Jason will be there with all of his awesome new books like DIY MAGIC and the brand new Benjamin Marra AMERICAN PSYCHO DRAWINGS newspaper they just collaborated on.  It’s beautiful! Ben will be in attendance and he’s also debuting his new comic LINCOLN WASHINGTON: FREE MAN, which is balls out awesome!

Jason also organized all the panels, and along with pal Ryan Alexander-Tanner’s workshop schedule, this fest has A TON of exciting things to do when you’re not shopping and yukking it up with hung-over cartoonists. Check out the full schedule here. Of potential interest is a panel on Sunday from 2-2:45 called “The New Underground” which I’m on with a bunch of awesome peoples. here’s the blurb:

Frank Santoro referred to the current independent comics scene as a dawn of a new “Golden Age”. There is a theory that if you go deep enough underground you hit the actual main stream. This generation is equally fluent in zines and Tumblr accounts; genre exploration and abstract art; printing process and independent distribution. Join panelists Chris Cilla, Max Clotfelter, Farel Dalrymple, Julia Gfrorer, Jack Hayden, Jason Miles, Jesse Moynihan, Emily Nilsson, Zack Soto, Angie Wang and Malachi Ward for a roundtable discussion on the future of underground comics.

I don’t even know what we’re going to talk about, but that’s a cool bunch of people to be lumped in with. There’s a bunch more, including a presentation by pal and MOME contributor T Edward Bak, a Skype-powered layout workshop w/Frank Santoro, and a digital inking tutorial by Ben Marra.

SO YEAH. Stumptown. If I’m wearing sunglasses inside it’s because I’m hungover.

I don’t know if it was always there and it just took the wrong inkers to bring it out — the two Kirby covers in this post were both inked by Joe Sinnott, which makes this even more baffling — but The King’s figures developed a certain teddy-bear proportion that gave even Hitler a cuddliness that I hope wasn’t intended.

The most extreme example of this has to be the cover of The Art of Jack Kirby, inked by Kevin Eastman:

I couldn’t find a scan of the back cover, which features the most hugable Red Skull, Dr. Doom, Darkseid and Galactus you will ever see.

[11PM Edit: By My Victuals, BETRAYED! -- Jeremy "Eagle Eyes" Pinkham just pointed out that in the above Invaders cover, "Thor looks like he's struggling with a painful bowel movement, and lo and behold between his legs we can clearly see he's literally shitting bricks."]

One of the more baffling aspects to Kirby’s post-1970 career is how often editors had his faces re-inked to make them slicker, more delicate; his Superman heads at DC redrawn mostly by Murphy Anderson, but then John Romita and/or the Marvel bullpen touch-up artists would do the same to Jack when he returned to the company a few years later. Here, in the focus of what’s an otherwise pretty straight-forward late-1969-looking Kirby/Sinnott image is a rather dainty Romita face for Captain America, a character Kirby never learned to draw correctly, and what looks more like a JRSR face for Master Man as well.

[Hello, humorless nerds who have stopped reading this to jump straight down to the comments box to chew me out about CLEARLY NOT KNOWING THAT JACK CO-CREATED CAP IN 1941 LOL.]

What’s especial odd about the above cover, considering the alterations, is the Human Torch’s face; that’s a Johnny Storm face and hair [and maybe his uniform, too; the WWII Torch had yellow cuffs], not a Jim Hammond. I really like the open-lined faces and oddly Fosteresque solutions for drawing eyes that the K/S team developed toward the end of Kirby’s Fantastic Four run; it’s nice to see that again, even though that style got the wrong Torch onto the cover.

In comparison, Gil Kane turned in some snazzy, dynamic covers:

They’re nothing to give Alex Schomburg a sleepless night, much less Paul Bacon, but this pair of Kanes are nice to look at. I always liked when his figures looked chiseled out of instead of rendered in.

By the way, the above are covers from issues I have nothing to say about, except maybe “Wow, this comic was cheap, stupid and lazy, in the bad way.”

Because I can’t post much of anything without dragging poor Frank Robbins into it, here’s a page from issue #3: I would be very surprised to learn that it wasn’t dragged out and used as a cudgel as least a few times during the last few years of shitty/inconsistent characterizations of Captain America.

Even when faced with a true, not merely existential, global threat to the freedom and safety of America, Cap won’t let a teammate even pimp-slap a Nazi officer.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Frank Robbins owns [or pwns] the monkeyass of any person who has ever held a loaded #5 brush to a piece of paper and been paid for the results. That he may have done all of the art on Johnny Hazard for its entire 33-year run [aside from illness and vacations] is amazing; Peanuts is undoubtedly the greater one-man achievement in the funny papers, but Charles Schulz never had to draw hot women and B-17 bombers in perspective, now did he. When the serialized-adventure strip began to die out in the early ’70s, Robbins transitioned to adventure comic books with a spastic burlesque of the superhero body that suggested he was always more comfortable drawing a hero in a three-piece suit than in a primary-color union suit.

Initially writing/drawing Batman, the Shadow and war/ghost stories for DC — not to mention largely inking his own pencils — Robbins was a more dynamic version of the fully realized but limited-by-definition adventure-strip cartoonist whose syndication lifeline was slowly fraying and splitting while the strip’s actual continuities were still capable of throwing sparks [as compared to Capp or Caniff's published endgames, which were as vibrant and exciting as watching old men try to set fire to wet piles of last year's leaves and newspapers.] But when Robbins moved from DC mystery men to Marvel superheroes, his figure work went apeshit, with results that baffled and/or enraged at least two generations of nerds who grew up and came to value his ebullient but realist cartooniness over contemporary fan favorites like Mike Kaluta and Neal Adams.

It’s a shame that Robbins didn’t live long enough to be properly hailed by the comics press when they, um, matured; on the other hand, getting a TwoMorrows tongue bath [at best a consolation prize for those sad, milky-eyed old timers hunched over drawing commissions in artists' alley with their wife/child/grandchild/future-executor-of-their-will doing most of the talking/translating] seems like a bigger insult to a figure like Robbins than him getting no recognition at all.

As the ’70s wound down, Jack Kirby went to Ruby-Spears and worked on some of the worst cartoons of the ’80s, Steve Ditko drew Transformers/Go-Bots coloring books and Hulk Annuals. John Romita Sr. went to an office and punched the clock to do touch-up work on lesser artist’s drawings. Adams created Skate Man. Kaluta and his Studio-mates disappeared up their kitschy fine-art assholes. Frank Robbins moved to Mexico to enjoy life and paint the last 16 or so years of his life. By any sane standard of life, he wins.

“To Die in Darkness!” is credited to Roger McKenzie [scripter], Robbins, Frank Springer [inker], Bob Sharen [colorist], Denise Wohl [letterer] and Bob Hall [editor]. Stop me if you’ve heard this from me before, but this is not a very good comic book. I share it here because it’s historically interesting, the last interior comic-book art of Robbins’ career. His facility at drawing the unholy living fuck out of everything in a supercomic except what 99% of what its audience wants to see is undiminished while his superduper figures have gone back to looking just as bizarre and distorted as they were a few years earlier, when Robbins was new to Marvel and struggled to dial back what a brilliant slumming comic-strip artist would think the cretins who read this slop wanted in the drawings of their stupid heroes.

Why the regression here? This doesn’t seem like a rush job. Was Robbins fed up with penciling this crap, doing most of the narrative heavy lifting ["scripter" meaning that McKenize only wrote the dialogue, right?] but with the final product still at the mercy of the editor and whoever was picked to ink his work? Did Robbins know this was his last full job to do before his retirement? The issue is dated November 1978; Hazard ended in late 1977. What compels an artist of Robbins’ skill to essentially work two full-time jobs from roughly age 55 to 60? Was he cranking it out all that time to buy his own golden parachute from comics? What sort of relationship did did he have with Alex Toth, his aesthetic brother from another mother, who was born to be the greatest adventure-strip cartoonist ever but was born half a generation too late to realize his destiny? Robbins was born September 11, 1917; Toth on June 25, 1928; Robbins was closer in age to their ur-source Noel Sickles [January 24, 1910] than he was to Toth, yet his career suggests that he had a far easier time finding his way through this ever-modern world than the mercurial and reclusive Toth, albeit without leaving nearly as large a body of century-class work in his wake. Was Robbins merely a “draw to live” artisan with superior skills? His near-absolute disappearance from comics post-1978 suggests that he saw it as a job, and his painting being his art. Would Robbins have been like John Stanley, who died around the same time as Robbins did — a rather bitter man, disinterested in attending comicons where people will ask him to talk at length about some two-week job he did his best on at the time but couldn’t recall much about decades later? No, it would have been better to have interviewed Robbins than not.

I really like that Frank Robbins’ last page as a supercomics freelancer shows a drinkin’-mad Daredevil about to pick a fight with Hercules … the god … after having broken into Avengers Mansion and somehow kicking both Captain America and the Beast’s asses, because he’s mad at the Black Widow and it’s his series so he wins. Two Gene Colan fill-in issues later, Frank Miller joined the DD crew and I never find out how Daredevil Vs. Hercules fight turned out, and that’s OK with me.

So come say hi and pick up the new  Elf World #3,

Study Group Magazine #1,

 DIY Magic

& Object 5!

I think that’s all we’re bringing this time around.

PS: has everyone been reading the new serials JACKS and THE BLONDE WOMAN? Pretty cool, huh!

I’ve been getting some positive feedback on my coloring, and while it is only a relatively minor part of making comics, it’s also something I’m very proud of.

You can get good instructions on the technical aspect of digital coloring on Dustin Harbin’s blog here: http://www.dharbin.com/blog/how-i-do-it-coloring/ . This article is just a series of my own extremely valuable opinions.

I think that most proper cartoonists make color decisions without really thinking about them. Maybe they read up on color theory or took a class on it, but it’s counterintuitive to see color and aesthetics as a “science”. I’m not trying to say there’s only one way to approach color, but to me it’s important to be able to justify to myself my different color choices, so I set some rules for myself. Here they are.

This photo was taken during a big fire just off the highway. Light and color are the prettiest when they show us more than what we expect.)

1. Iconic vs. Real

The first question you want to ask yourself when coloring is do you want your colors to tell the truth, or do you want them to give the illusion of your own subjective reality? Yes this is a loaded question, and yes, the correct answer is you want your colors to tell the truth. By the truth, I mean that your colors should tell the reader about the characters, situation, mood, or whatever. Our brains simplify and compartmentalize certain things into certain colors. I mean…the sky is blue, right? and grass is green? right? right? WRONG. The full spectrum of color is alive in all things. Trees have purples in them. There are really very few limitations you should place on yourself for the sake of making something look “realistic” because your human perception of reality can not be trusted.

You can use color to codify your characters. Spider-man can walk through a rainy forest for a day and even though he’s covered in mud, he’s still bright red and blue. Why? because in a comic you’re responsible for upholding the truth and in Spider-man comics, Spider-man is red, black, and blue*.

Color can be used for more than describing what something looks like. A color can set the mood or simply make the panel look pretty. Realism can really limit all the different tools you have at your disposal.

2. Color the page, not the thing

I decided that each page, or even spread, should be treated as one picture. even though the reader reads one panel at a time, she also sees the whole page at once. It’s important to me that the page looks cohesive most of the time. The exception to the rule is when changing scenes within a page. I think the reason for this is that you want to use the color identity of the page to be a bigger representation of the scene.
The first 2 pages of Danger country has a broader color palette than the rest of the first chapter because it’s a sort of quick overview of the entire world, and I wanted to make it colorful to bring a sense of wonder.

The nighttime scene uses a medium brown in place of the black because I wanted to keep the values sort of close together so that the fire and the night sky end up making it a little harder to see a lot what’s going on in the foreground. Lack of contrast makes it hard for the eye to settle on any one area of the panel, and that makes it look more chaotic. That’s the plan, anyway.

The third scene is actually 2 scenes. Evan’s encounter with the elves and Evan’s encounter with Uncle Rodger. I wanted it to begin as a stark contrast to the previous scene, so the darks are much darker and the light areas are much lighter. I also wanted to use cooler colors (greens and blues). As Evan speaks more and more to Uncle Rodger, I wanted the background sky to shift subtly from grey to pink. This was for a couple of reasons. 1) I wanted to codify the scene as being separate from the encounter with the elves, and 2) I wanted to give the illusion of sunset, and bring a sense of urgency, gravity and intensity to Rodger’s wound situation.

3. Color wheels work, damn it.

When coloring on a computer, easy access to a million colors sometimes makes me feel lost. A lot of colorists decide to extremely limit their palette, but I don’t think that works either. A color wheel is a good compass when I have certain set colors I have to work with (like the colors of a character’s costume), and I’m trying to figure out what color to use next. I can go into a whole art school basic color theory lesson here, but instead I’ll direct you to this page that I found by googling color wheel. http://www.tigercolor.com/color-lab/color-theory/color-theory-intro.htm Check out the parts about color harmonies and warm vs. cool colors.

Again, don’t let realism bog you down. Coming up with a good color harmony outranks color expectations any day. This is why I think of a blue sky as the page killer. Speaking of blue…

4. Blue is not a color.

Blue is not a color. What I mean is, blue is not just 1 color. Blue is like 3 or 4 different colors. Treat blue very carefully. If you don’t want it to print as green, go into the color palette in photoshop and make sure there is no yellow by clicking on the “Y” field and putting it to 0%. Use the color picker or swatch palette at your own risk. I’m not saying “don’t use blue”. I’m just saying to try not to use more than 1 kind of blue (navy/teal/aqua/royal) per page. You can make it work if you’re Kali Ceismier or you want to spend a week on it and pull your hair out. But really, just cool it with the blues.

5. Swatches are dumb

Before I started coloring a page, I used to set up a series of swatches first, and place them together and see if they worked. Or sometimes I would make multiple color versions of the same thing and chase my wife around to get her opinion on which she thought was better. It’s just self-torture. Now I just use the hue adjustment slider, and click the preview on and off until I find something that works. Just trust your instincts and don’t dwell on it.

6. Break it, then fix it. (The 4 color rule)

One thing that I do is I try to keep my color brain tuned by doing a safe color harmony, and then adding a stupid color like purple or teal, and then adjust things to make it work. It’s easy to default to proven color harmonies that have worked for you in the past. I think people really notice and respond to when you change things up so it’s sort of important to do it. Use 4 colors at the very least.

7. Put some yellow on it.

This is sort of an indie comics secret passed down from cartoonist to cartoonist. Jordan Crane taught it to me. If you add 4-8% yellow on top of everything, it just makes everything more cohesive. I personally like to use a multiply layer, but that’s your call. It is like magic. I’ve also begun using other colors as panel overlays, for different effects or just to add variety or shift the mood.

8. Web and print are different.

A note about web vs. print. On the web you lose a little bit of control over colors but it’s sort of forgiving. You can add some black to your colors or some dirty texture, as I do with Danger Country. But for each page, I create separate web and print versions. The print version doesn’t have that dirty paper texture, because paper can get dirty all by itself. It doesn’t need my help.

This is also when you have problems with the blue. Blue is insanely hard to print right. It always comes out darker, and greener than you expect. Then you yell at the printer and the printer gets all pissed at you and hangs a picture up of you in the bathroom with a mustache and goatee. And there are a bunch of darts sticking out of it.

I keep remembering more and more rules. A lot of this stuff comes from doing it for a long time and messing up a lot. Or they are just approaches that worked for me. Obviously there is more than one way to skin a cat. All of these rules can be broken. I think they’re just there so that I don’t stagnate with indecision. The most important thing is to come up with rules for yourself, and form your own opinions, and let the inner essence of your being shine through onto the page.

* Except for when he isn’t. But that’s a whole other thing.

Links:

Color Theory 101 - http://www.tigercolor.com/color-lab/color-theory/color-theory-intro.htm
Kali Ciesmier – http://www.ciesemeier.com
and while we’re at it, Sam Bosma – http://sbosma.com
Jeff Soto (always pushing his own color palette) – http://jeffsoto.com
Dustin Harbin’s Article on coloring - http://www.dharbin.com/blog/how-i-do-it-coloring/
Jordan Crane (everything has a 8% layer of yellow on it) – http://whatthingsdo.com
The legendary and a little outdated Re Pro Guide (some still-useful tips on offset printing and setting up your color files among other awesome things) - http://www.scribd.com/doc/86312853

- Levon Jihanian

When last we left this early series by writer Ricardo Barreiro and the great Enrique Alcatena, our hero had …… yeah. You know, the plot for this comic just doesn’t matter. We all know where it’s going from panel one, so let’s just admire “Quique’s” art, which has transitioned from a very Kane/Ditko/Windsor-Smith/Zaffino mix, cut with a lot of exciting but still rookie moves, to a more consistent and polished but less bravura style.

…

and then

It’s difficult to not see a P. Craig Russell influence in this work, most noticeably in the clothing and architecture. At times, Quique even captures PCR’s knack at making these otherworldly beings seem like they’re actors in costumes playing the roles of otherworldly beings.

…

In these post-Tumblr days, nobody really reads the text in these image-heavy posts unless it’s a solid paragraph or two, and even then I imagine most brosefs go “tl;dr” and move on to the next image anyway.

Ideal for your shitty band’s next show flyer.

…

…

…

…

Have I lost my mind, or is he kicking out the P. Craig Russell jams here?

In 1980s Marvel, fill-in issues sometimes made for strange bedfellows: In the gap between the conclusion of Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli’s “Born Again” and the next regular team (originally to be Steve Englehart and Louis Williams but ultimately Ann Nocenti and a revolving cast of pencillers before John Romita, Jr. settled in) coming on board, Daredevil featured some curious writer/penciller/inker combinations, but none as odd as Mark Gruenwald, Steve Ditko (credited as “Guest Breakdown Artist”) and Klaus Janson (“Guest Ink Finisher”).

This is one of those comic books that’s virtually review-proof — not because there aren’t things in it worth examining, but rather its authors have imbued it with a level of professional apathy that guarantees that anyone who goes anywhere near it will probably take the rest of the workday off until the idea fades from memory that the seven people credited with contributing to this piece of shit’s existence got paid for it. It’s the kind of bad idea that probably has a good story behind it but the numbing reality of the results are so discouraging that, y’know, who cares.

Gruenwald is clearly much more excited to play with his character Madcap outside of his regular gig writing Captain America; this could have been a Madcap one-shot for all that Daredevil is involved.

Steve Ditko is one of the greats in American comics, and a man of substantial integrity. He is also a grandmaster of making sure you know it when he knows that he’s drawing a bunch of bullshit. (Howard Chaykin being his heir apparent.) The ’80s were not particularly kind to Ditko, and it shows in most of his freelance work of the time.

With the right pencils, Klaus Janson can be a brilliant finisher, wringing every drop of drama, character, depth and texture possible out of those inky puddles he likes to lay down. These are not the right pencils.

Someone I don’t respect anymore once insisted that Marvel screwed up when they didn’t install Janson as the permanent Daredevil inker, like how ’70s Joe Sinnott made everyone who pencilled Fantastic Four look like Joe Sinnott FF with little bits of any personal style occasionally sticking out, or how Tom Palmer’s Star Wars inks stayed perfectly on-model, no matter who pencilled it. Anyway, Janson does his best to finish these DD pages like it’s 1981, and it really doesn’t do anyone any favors.

I sometimes imagine Janson inking these pages, getting more and more misty-eyed until he bursts out sobbing/Harvey Keitel-howling and then wailing “Oh …. Frank!!! Why did you leave??? We coulda had it all!!!”

You know you’re reading quality all-ages sequential art when the top tier of a page depicts a man taking an axe to his torso, then someone describing what that sounds like. “Like a bat striking mud” is far too vivid/nauseating a piece of writing to be buried in a hack job like this:

This is a surprisingly bloody story, considering it is a comic book for children, but then the coloring rarely reflects that — even when it’s referenced in the captions. It’s a story where an insane man giggles while he’s tortured with an axe and then burned down to charred meat; could the Comics Code Authority have objected to a little red ink on the axe’s blade, in some so-besides-that-what-did-you-think-of-our-play-Mrs.-Lincoln moment of prioritizing gone mad?

Apparently Madcap’s blood is invisible ….

… and sometimes it seems to have a pink corona

and

Again, I know this comic was (theoretically) made for kids, but why mention blood and then show no blood? This is not a very well-made comic book, my friends.

Here is a panel I think is well-made, except that it just reminded me that the gangsters in this comic come from some retro-alternate universe where ’80s comics writers used Rocky & Mugsy cartoons for reference. Still, I like this panel: