I was at the desk as usual a week or so ago, working on a page of 1888, when I felt like listening to an episode of Around Comics, a since-ended podcast by a buncha comic fans from Chicago.  Lustmord was starting to get a bit too creepy for my taste by that time of night and Katers’ dry humor is always good.  Without really giving much thought to which episode to listen to, I clicked on one of the early hundreds — one of the Skottie episodes — and just let it stream.  It was AC 126, the tribute to Mike Wieringo, who had passed away on August 12, 2007, due to a heart attack.  He was 44.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time away from the journal lately, to concentrate on work and wedding preparations.  Naturally, marriage deserves a lot of attention, and there’s a handful of projects I’d really like to get done before the year ends, so I’ve really just been plowing through a lot of stuff.  Unfortunately, work took a toll and caused a bit of an artistic burn out.  Even the writing of this isn’t coming as naturally as I wish it would.  Long story short, work has felt like work lately.  And as dumb as that sounds, it’s really the only way I can put it.

But listening to that podcast, and hearing how Ringo inspired then-newbie artists like Skottie Young, Mike Norton, and Josh Middleton sent a bit of fire my way too.  The man was a superstar who never let his success go to his head and continued to churn out work daily like he was still trying to earn a name he already had.  Based on what these guys said about him, he never once thought of himself as a big deal, and this was after he had done stints on Robin, Flash, and Spidey.

And it struck me that here was a guy who didn’t lie about his creator-owned work being dearer to him than getting to work on the icons.  Tellos was the personal high point of his career, and he returned to mainstream work so he could eventually do indie work again.  But tragically, he never got to.

Too many of us whine about how hard the work can get, not even giving a thought to how much time we may or may not have left to even do it in.

I turned twenty-seven a week ago.  And I just thought it apt to take the time to ackowledge that a creative block is, more often than not, a state of mind.  A pitiful one.  And I am left wishing that my work ethic was a lot more like Mike’s — someone who was and will always be an inspiration me.

Thanks Ringo.  Comics are not the same without you.

Dead prostitute.  Nazi death camp.  Armored Horse.  It’s not a list of possible band names, but the last three things I’ve had to hit Google Images for in the past coupla weeks.  I’d say there are only two reasons why someone wouldn’t use references for their artwork — One:  Plain laziness; or Two: He has enough faith in his artistic prowess that he can draw straight from his head and put it down on the board.

Either way, I hate you.

The big misconception very early on, and I’m guilty of this myself, is that the finished art is supposed to be painfully faithful to the reference material — which, of course, isn’t the case; otherwise you’d be better off simply photoshopping the images into the panels or going full-on fumetti.  No, the ideal way of using the reference material is to stare at it, absorb it, digest, and then put on paper what you, as an artist, believe to be the key components of what you saw.  Sure, that sounds easy enough, but what you learn very quickly is that what you leave out is just as important is what you put into the drawing.  There is such a thing as over-rendered.  Temper it.

To draw from Asterios Polyp, as something is recalled, the brain has a chance to refine it.  In that sense, every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.

Why all this talk about the use of reference and such?  On my desk is a stack of authentic crime scene photos from the Autumn of Terror.  Wolfgang and the 1888 team just recently ran a successful funding campaign over at Kickstarter and everyone’s stepping into place to get the cogs running on the book.  The bastards have done it!

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Went to the mall the other week to get sleeping masks for me and Jad coz we’re going to bed at sunrise more often these days.  It’s frustrating how them clerks don’t know if they sell them along with the bed linens or in the cosmetics section.  Turns out it was in neither and I found them in the toiletries.  Go figure.

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PLUCK chugs along once a week at Zuda.  Lately got to draw a splash page showcasing Trugg One-Eye, as well as a sequence featuring many a half-naked lady.  Gabe White is a good man.  Home stretch for JUDAH pitch as Ian Areola joins the team as colorist.  After he colored the JENNY STRANGE pitch, I simply had to work with him again.  That project, however, is on hold as we wait for Zuda to officially post their new submissions policy, given that they ended their competition format a month or so back.  Got other pitches waiting to be worked on, so the Fort Bastard docket for 2010 is pretty much closed as far as new projects go.  You know who you are, and you are Saints of Patience.

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Wedding preparations are officially underway.  It’s fun and exciting and scary and stressful, but if you can’t mentally see me dancing through this journal entry, you don’t have a soul.  Yeah.  Jocular Johnny finally got one to stick around.  Learned from what came before.  Absorbed it.  Digested.  Built something better. Built something stronger.

Like I said… Reference.  It’s good for you.

Back to work.

The funny thing about being a comic artist for a living is that even though enjoying the medium is definitely escapism… the act of actually making the comics is very often not.  In fact, it’s the furthest thing from it.

You may be drawing images of fantasy, and the creative potential in that is near limitless, but I find it difficult to allow myself to get lost in that frame of mind when things are rough in the real world.  Of course, I may just be one of these overly dramatic types who can’t separate their lives from their livelihood, but consider this — how safe would you feel jumping into the deep blue depths if you weren’t sure you’d have a boat to swim back up to?

There is no spacewalk to fix the Hubble if the shuttle is not in place.

Continuing what I had started back in October, I’m going to lift the curtain on the thumbnail-to-inked-page process on PLUCK, my weekly webcomic for Zuda.  The whole season is going to be some 60 pages long, so if nothing else I’ll have a collection of fun little posts to look back on and be ashamed of learn from.Picking right up after page eight’s quaint little cliffhanger, our POV switches over to Pluck’s on page nine (above), and we see the king for the first time.  I originally wanted to show some sort of banquet right behind the king’s throne, but as I thought about it later on it made less and less sense for the king to let his subjects see he was all human like that.With Pluck getting a little too cocky on page ten, I wanted the king to put him in his place and to have a somewhat sinister air to him, hence the heavy shadow obscuring him in panel 3.  I changed character sizes in panel 4 and 5 mainly to make room for word balloons, but the layouts from the original thumbs are pretty intact.Panel 3, I felt, needed to be punched up a bit to give a bit more immediacy to the king’s words, so I scrapped the original shot and zoomed in on the king doing his best Uncle Sam.  I then made the amulet panel out to be the only predominantly black one in the page, to give it a bit more weight.  To mirror it in panel 7, I made Pluck’s frock blacker than usual, letting the amulet stand out a bit more in the overall layout of page eleven.

Once I started page nine, it had already been agreed that Gabe’s brother Matt would be coming onboard to provide lush colors for the comic.  So there’s a steady and very slow transition of me doing less and less blacks so that the line art can let a bit more color in.  Gabe is pretty hands on with the layout process and usually does his own set of layouts that I later build on, but we’ve gotten to a point in our creative relationship that we can pretty much riff on each other’s ideas very freely.  We’ll probably be moving in together soon as well.

Be good.  Go here.  Read PLUCK.

A friend who teaches animation and character design at a local university blackmailed me into serving as a panelist as his students presented their equivalent of a thesis last week.  Granted  a law school dropout with a dubious degree in political science may not be the ideal judge for someone’s creative work, I like to assume I have more right than most people (…in the area).  Well my teacher friend does, at  least.  Quinton Hoover plagiarism and complimentary donuts aside, it’s definitely weird being called “sir.”  Where did this respect come from, you weirdos?

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There’s been a bit of a lull in the art posting here on the journal.  I’ve been pretty swamped with the pitches I’m handling and making sure PLUCK comes out on time.  I should be able to post some really neat stuff momentarily though.  More than anything, it’s just a matter of permission.  Soon though.

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I got caught up on Hickman/Eaglesham’s Fantastic Four this week, and recent reviews on the podcast have made me see more and more the Pinball Nature of mainstream comics.  I mean think about it — If you start reading a book at its five hundred and seventieth installment, there’s no logical reason why you should understand what the fuck is going on.  But I did.

What does that mean?

Two things.

First off, every time a new writer gets onto a book, it’s a soft reset.  Hickman may be following up on some of Millar’s Nu-World stuff, but really, everything else can be latched onto quite easily by any new comic reader or fanboy who has just come back to the medium after an extended absence.  The FF is still a family of explorers.  Ben’s still ugly, Johnny’s still a dick.

Second (and this is really just an expansion of the first point), nothing really changes in mainstream comics.  You can take away Wolverine’s adamantium; You can turn Superman into an electric gimp; You can kill the goddamn Batman.  But it all goes back to normal eventually.  Give it a coupla months, give it a decade (hey Bendis), but things will reset.  Now raising these two points may sound suspiciously jaded or cynical, but there’s something about this cyclical nature that’s comforting.

And this is why comics are like a pinball machine.  It’s not a question of how many pinballs you have left, or of how long you kept one ball live.  No.  What matters is where that pinball went.  What did it hit?  Where did you think you were gonna lose it?  And most importantly, How did you save it?

The answer to that last bit, of course, is that it saved itself; but you were along for a great ride.