"Try stamp collecting."

—My father, while helping me move, on account of the fact that about 85% of my possessions seem to be comic books, graphic novels or prose books about comics and graphic novels.

Oh no!!! Change!!!!!!!

Don't worry, EDILW isn't going anywhere, but the person who writes it is...has, actually. I just moved from Columbus, Ohio to a new HQ in a small Ohio town, and I'm not entirely sure how it will effect the blog at the moment.

This town doesn't have a comic shop of its own, and the nearest one is 45 minutes away, so the regular "Weekly Haul" feature, in which I reviewed the new Wednesday releases right after I read them, may be going away, or going biweekly or...I don't know just yet. (Maybe I'll be switching to trades permanent like, now? Or are there services that deliver single issues to you through the mail on the day of release? If so, lemme know if you know of any!)

Additionally, I no longer have the Columbus Metropolitan Library system, which buys pretty much every graphic novel, to borrow from, so access to comics I'm curious about but not enough to pay for may be fewer and farther between. And I've still gotta figure out the scanner situation, as I never had my own, but used the one at the library I used to work at.

Also, I don't an Internet connection at my new house yet, so it may be a few days before I'm blogging at 100% strength. In the mean time, I'll definitely try to keep updating once a day, so long as I can find the Internet, but Blog@ will take priority over EDILW, so you can see me there.

Hopefully by this time next week, everything will be back to normal, with the possible exception of "Weekly Haul" no longer being weekly. Thanks for your patience during this transition and thanks, as always, for reading.

So anyway, this is just a post letting you know that EDILW may suck a little bit for a little while.

Apparently I sometimes take requests.

A terribly important survey:

Everyone knows that when you draw a character talking, they should always have their mouth open, right? Well, as I've been drawing more and more and coloring in those drawings with colored pencils, I've become aware of a problem I can't seem to come up with a satisfactory solution for.

Specifically, what color should an open mouth be?

There's no problem with black and white, of course, or if the expression of the open mouth is a smile or gritted teeth, in which case I'd just leave it white to suggest the teeth. But what if it's a non-tooth-y open-mouthed expression?

Should the open mouth be black, to indicate the shadow that would exist if you're looking at an open mouth from a certain distance? (Like, looking at my self in the mirror making one of those expressions, it looks black). Or red or pink-ish, because that's what color the insides of mouths are? (It's not like I draw any other shadows, after all). Or should the mouth just be left un-colored...or perhaps colored in, the same color as the rest of the head...?

I can't decide which looks best/least-bad.

Your input would be appreciated.

The most important comics publishing news in the history of ever

This afternoon I finished drawing the inside front cover of the comic book I've been writing and drawing off and on for the last...oh, eight years now (Although it looks like it was hurriedly done over a weekend; about seven and a half of those years were probably spent on procrastination). That was the very last page I had to finish, so now the book is completely complete. Now all I've got to do is scan it, send it to the publishers and then start begging you guys to give me some money for a copy of it! Hooray!

Unfortunately, I just realized that counting the front and back covers and inside front cover, it's actually twenty-nine pages long, instead of the necessary twenty-eight, so I'm either going to have to cut the one-page epilogue, the back cover (and print the epilogue where the back cover would have been) or the inside front cover. None of which is a necessarily terrible loss or anything, but it sure sucks to have to decide to axe something after all that work, due to a simple counting/math error.

The lesson? Stay in school, kids! Study hard!

Anyway, details and an interminable amount of self-hype to follow in...a couple months, maybe...? In the mean time, start saving your dimes!

(Above: Panel three, and parts of panel five and six. See that house? I totally drew that house like five years ago)

Well, that's one way to reduce one's comics collection

(Above: Never around when you need him)

So, unfunny story: Some motherfuckers broke into my apartment over the course of the last few days, popping out a screen window and climbing through it into my back room.

They made off with a very sad list of hardly-worth-anything-to-anyone-but-me shit, including:

—an old applesauce jar one-quarter full of nickels

—most of my DVDS, including She's All That, "Hey look it's Alyssa Milano in a state of undress!" movie Embrace of the Vampire, Transformers: The Movie, just about every Miyazaki movie, the Star Wars: Clone Wars micro-series and, most unforgivably, the Remix! Special Fan Edition of Empire Records! (Grrr!) Thank God they didn't find Beverly Hills, 90210 Season 1...

—a plastic fishing tackle box containing a couple of two dollar bills and a commemorative gold coin from the first Gulf War (it was a Christmas present), and some foreign bills from France, China and Canada

—and, most relevant to EDILW, two long boxes full of comics.

Really, who steals comic books? It's not like I had a bunch of Golden Age classics laying around or anything. The only place to even sell comics in Columbus will give you three-to-five cents an issue, so these chuckleheads are going to make somewhere in the neighborhood of $10-$20 on them, tops.

I don't keep real great inventory, but it looks like they stole one box containing random, non-Justice League DC super-team books—the last volume of JSA, various volumes of Titans related comics and, most gallingly, All-Star Squadron and Young All-Stars comics, which I'm always trying to find in back-issue bins(This makes the need for Showcase Presents: The All-Star Squadron even more urgent!)—and a box of WildStorm and Image titles from the '90s—The Maxx, Darker Image #1 (including Rob Liefeld's "Bludwulf"), and the first year or so of Spawn, which I was going to will to nieces (Maybe they'd be worth money by the time I die...?)

Anyway, I've wasted most of the night looking for clues, tallying up losses, talking to police officers, calling the places that buy used comics and DVDs, setting bear traps beneath my windows, and sharpening the bladed objects I keep at hand while sleeping, so I'm afraid I don't have a good comics post in me tonight. This is all you get! The burglars also stole my will (and time) to blog, curse them.

A conversation with a casual comics reader

(Above: Just what my apartment needed!)

Anyone who's had to move since they started reading comics is well aware of one of the side effects of the hobby—comics tend to quickly accrue. You may bring them into your house only a handful at a time, but handfuls become stacks, stacks become piles, piles get put into white, rectangular cardboard boxes and those boxes multiply. Comic books are fun to read, they're fun to talk about, some people find the act of collecting them really fun, but man, they are not fun to move from old apartment to moving truck to new apartment.

Robert Duffy, the creator of indispensable Columbus website Donewaiting.com and a friend of Every Day Is Like Wednesday, has hauled comic books from apartment to apartment before, but he's planning to move to New York City soon, and understandably doesn't wanted to have to haul them there. In central Ohio, as with much of the Midwest, space is of course in no short supply, whereas from what I understand, most New York City apartments are only slightly larger than your average comics longbox, and I guess for some reason Duffy didn't want to share a longbox with his wife, cat, dog, and a bunch of old comics he was never going to re-read.

Duffy considers himself a casual comics readers—"I'm not in deep, you know?" he's said a couple time—he had a pull-list at the Laughing Ogre, he's been to local comic cons and to San Diego before, and follows particular writers, but doesn't, like, blog comics are follow comic characters' fictional lives (That is, he doesn't read Batman comics just to keep up with Batman, or X-Men comics because he started reading X-Men comics and wants to keep his collection complete). Like a lot of casual readers, Duffy reads a lot of trades, and he was planning on taking those with him, but as for the comics? The single issues he had in a few white short boxes? Those were going in to a garage sale and, if they didn't sell there, into the trash.

If I didn't want them.

So the other night I met Duffy on his porch, where there were maybe a half-dozen short boxes full of comics mostly from the late-nineties and early aughts, bagged and boarded and not bagged and boarded, and a large, re-purposed grocery store box, crammed with wrinkly, yellowed books from the '80s, although they looked more like they were discovered in an Egyptian tomb of some sort. The books were books of Duffy's, as well as ones a friend who was moving had previously given him (yes, apparently comics are sometimes spread like an unwelcome burden, given from one moving friend to another).

Sadly, there were no first appearances of Batman, or even Spider-Man, but a lot of Vertigo books and early Ultimate books I already had, plus a ton of old X-Men and mutant comics I didn't. (So if EDILW does a Deadpool, Cable, Wolverine or Gambit week later this summer, you'll know who to blame). Oh, and there was exactly one (1) issue of Warriors of Plasm, which is a requirement in every comics collection, I think. I'm not sure I've ever flipped through a set of longboxes without finding a copy of Warriors of Plasm. Maybe they came free inside all longboxes?

Anyway, while looking through the boxes and determining which I'd take off Duffy's hands to add to the comics-midden in my apartment, which prevents me from ever even contemplating moving, and which he should add to the garage sale pile, we, naturally enough, talked comics.

"Oh! While I've got you here in front of me," he said at one point, "Can you tell me, in as simple terms as possible, where Bruce Wayne is at the moment?"

I paused, and then asked if he'd read Final Crisis.

"No, but I read the one where Batman died and came back to life, with the guy who was really his father or not his father."

"Okay. So you read the one where he came out of the ground and was all, 'Batman and Robin can never die'?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah..."

"And did you read the one with The Lump and the, like, dream sequences and..."

"Yeah, I read the two-part tie-in Morrison wrote, just not Final Crisis or any of this Battle For the Cowl stuff..."

"Okay," I said, pausing again. I suppose the number of follow-up questions necessary to determine how to explain a simple question like where Bruce Wayne is should be a pretty good indication how relatively complicated this stuff is, even for those who buy and read the damn things.

"Okay, well, in Final Crisis, Batman got shot by Darkseid's Omega Beams, which have various effects, including killing people. So Batman was, like, skeletonized by them, and later we see Superman with Batman's corpse. But at the end of the story, there's a scene where we see Anthro the First Boy back in caveman times, and Batman—well, a shirtless Bruce Wane with a beard and his Batman pants on—is in a cave. And he picks up a piece of chalk and starts drawing a Bat-symbol on the cave wall. So he's apparently been sent back to caveman times. In another series, another guy got hit with Darkseid's Omega Sanction [Morrison's four-part Mister Miracle series, EDILW-ites!], and he was sent to a kind of hell where he had to keep reliving his life and all this terrible stuff would happen to him. So that's probably what happened to Batman. Or his soul was separated from his body. Are you reading or aware of Blackest Night?"

He wasn't, as he doesn't read Green Lantern, so we didn't really get into theories of how Batman can be both alive in caveman times and buried in a Gotham City cemetery, although Duffy kind of rolled his ideas at the idea of Batman's corpse being brought back to life as a zombie Black Lantern.

(Aside: Er, how was that? I was thinking on my feet! Is there an easier, more simple way to tell someone where Bruce Wayne is at the moment in DC Comics?)

Duffy mentioned that he just wanted to read Grant Morrison's Batman, and wasn't interested with the crossovers with the rest of the DCU. I mentioned that Morrison was writing Batman again in new series Batman and Robin and that Frank Quitely was drawing it, but the fact that it was former Robin, former Nightwing Dick Grayson starring in the series was a bit of turn-off.

That was prompted by a copy of one of Neil Gaiman's two "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" issues. Below that was a copy of Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, and so we started talking a bit about the series' former writer Sean McKeever, who also lives in Columbus. It turns out we both tried out his Teen Titans run and dropped it at the same time (the issue that ended with that huge roster of Tomorrow Titans or whatever the future Titans were called appearing in a cliffhanger splash page).

I dropped it because at that point I was trying to steamline my weekly purchases as much as possible and books I wasn't really enjoying were obviously good candidates for dropping (I was conflicted though, as that was the first time I deviated from my longstanding Buy Whatever Sean McKeever Writes policy). Duffy was turned off by the site of dozens of alternate versions of a bunch of characters he didn't know or care about.

So the news that McKeever was going to be writing a new series for Marvel, but that it would be about an alternate dimension girl version of Bucky who worked with an alternate dimension version of Captain America coming to the Marvel Universe obviously didn't sell him on the series. And that was before I even mentioned the names "Rob Liefeld" or "Jeph Loeb" or Heroes Reborn!

In talking about trades vs. single issues and crossovers, Duffy mentioned that "The Great Fables Crossover" actually forced him to drop a Vertigo monthly. Not out of disgust with the concept of the crossover or anything--he was reading both of the books involved in the crossover anyway--but because he was readign the books in different formats.

That is, he had started reading Fables in trade, so he continued to read it in trade. Jack of Fables, the Fables spin-off following the Jack character and his adventures away from Fable Town and the cast of the main book that live there, launched a while after Fables was already being released in trade, so he was reading that in monthly, single-issue installments. The two books—plus a special, three-part miniseries—started crossing over recently though, which meant Duffy had to quit reading Jack if he wanted to avoid the single issues of Fables.

Crossovers are common to the point of ubiquity in superhero lines of course, but relatively rare for the Vertigo imprint. Other than the Neil Gaiman spear-headed "Children's Crusade" crossover in the '90s, I can't think of any "hard" crossovers in which the chapters of a particular storyline appear in different titles like "The Great Fables Crossover." (Various Vertigo characters would appear in one another's titles now and then of course, particularly in that first generation of Vertigo titles like Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, Sandman and so on).

The point of such crossovers is, of course, to sell more books (if you were just reading one of the two, there's a pretty good chance you'll pick up the chapters in the other book, and, if you like them enough, maybe add it to your pull list—I know from personal experience that when I was first getting into comics, DC sold me on a lot of new series through their summer crossovers like this). In Duffy's particular case though, the exact opposite was true—they lost a monthly, single-issue sale through the crossover.

He'll probably start reading Jack in trade too, but here's at least a single study of a particular publishing strategy pushing a reader of a monthly away from the format and towards the trade format.

"You could do a blog about this," Duffy said. "A conversation with a casual comics reader."

So I did.

I had a busy weekend, so here, just look at these pictures

The weekend before last, I decided to try out this new pen I received as a gift a while back. I don't know much about pens and suchlike; most of the drawing I do is done in pencil, and then I trace over the good lines with a Pilot G-2 05, and erase the bad ones. This is a Faber-Castell PITT artist Pen B. Does that mean anything to anyone?

At any rate, it makes a line like a really nice marker, and it has a huge tip, about one and a half times longer than my normal pen.

(Above: Look at the size of that tip!)

I loved the way the way the lines it draws looked. Like, not that I was drawing anything yet, just if you drew a straight line on paper? It would be a really nice line. Provided you like the look of a straight black line on paper. Me, I love it.

So I stayed up about two hours later than usual, listening to/half-watching a Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD ("A Touch of Satan"; have you guys seen that one? Man, Emby Mellay is so hot, why wasn't she in any other movies?) while I pushed the pen around for a while, eventually moving from lines to the things I usually doodle—parrots, unicorns, rabbits, bald headed men—and ended up killing an hour or so just drawing pictures of myself with or as mythological creatures.

A couple weeks ago I read Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia, which was pretty great (if you like C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, and/or literary criticism, anyway). Miller wrote at one point that the faun character Mr. Tumnus was C.S. Lewis as a Narnian. I think that was the starting point...

Unicorns like apples. And virgins.


As a sphinx.

As another sphinx.

As a centaur.

With normal pen. See how much thicker and less squiggly the new pen's line is?

A few hundred more hours, and I think I'll be able to skip the pencil phase and switch to this new pen, so I can make big, fat lines like this all the time.

Wretched, aborted comics projects by Caleb Mozzocco, age 18

I spent some time this Memorial Day weekend cleaning out my "office," which is actually just the bedroom in my one-bedroom apartment where I’d keep my bed if I had a bed, but since I don’t*, I decided to make it into my office, where I’d keep my drawing table. But since it was way too cold in that room all winter to ever actually sit still at my drawing table to draw, I moved my drawing table into my living room, so the office basically became a big dusty room full of comic books (in longboxes and stacks) and piles and piles of papers, art supplies and things I didn’t know where else to put. It was a place I’d venture only once a day to grab my clothes from the closet or dresser, and otherwise ignored.

One of the things in one of the many piles back there is a suitcase I bought at a thrift store, and which is where I used to store all the writing I did in college. It’s full of papers and notebooks containing pretty much every thing I wrote in college—all of it quite dreadful. Poetry, short stories, ideas for stories, unfinished fragments, drawings of characters...it’s a graveyard for the products of 18-22-year-old Caleb’s free time, plus a few things created specifically for creative writing classes.

While rooting through it, I found a couple of comics projects from the period that I started and, like just about everything else in the suitcase, never completed.

I didn’t get very far with either, actually, but I thought it might be worth scanning a few images from them and posting them, if for no other reason than to publicly humiliate myself. I mean, that’s what blogs are for right?

The first is a comic I started my freshman year, when I was eighteen-to-nineteen; that would have been sometime between fall of 1995 and spring of 1996. I had a full script for it, written in my illegible, tiny printing on a few sheets of lined paper, the words occasionally broken up by little diagrams. I tried reading through it, and realized I can’t even read my own handwriting anymore; I have this weird problem where I can read my own handwriting for a certain limited amount of time after I write it, but I’ll eventually not be able to make it out. So I’m not entirely sure how the story ended, and I don’t think I even had a title for it.

I clearly remember laying propped up my elbows on my bed in my dorm room and drawing it though, on sturdy 8 x 11 printer paper from the school newspaper’s office, first in pencil and then in ink.

The story was about two young female roommates, one who played the heroine with a sort of super-power, and the other who played the damsel in distress.

The heroine was a girl named Nyx, which I believe is Greek for night. I’d found it in a book about witches I was reading at the time; I think it was Anton Szandor LaVey’s The Satanic Witch or maybe Satanic Bible, or possibly A Witch’s Bible by Janet and Stewart Farrar. (I’m sure there’s at least one Suicide Girl using that name by now.)

Nyx always wore black, and wore big, steel-toed boots with deep treads like the kind I used to wear (and used to love to draw) and horizontally striped leggings. I had designed a special hairstyle for her that I also used to love drawing; her face was supposed to be framed by two, long strands that curled at the end, and the rest of it was shaped kind of like a Christmas tree of black hair branches.

Here’s a picture of her:
(See? These are pretty bad even by my low standards. At the time, I was still trying to draw whole eyes, in a more anime style; I’ve since given up on drawing the sides, bottoms and whites of human eyes, and now just do pupils and the tops of eye’s to suggest ‘em. I also never used any kind of reference. So if I were going to draw a boot, I wouldn’t look at a boot first, even if the exact boot I wanted to draw was in the corner, but I would instead just draw my memory of a boot).

Nyx's friend was Lizzie, who had long dreadlocks (which I also liked drawing a lot) and wore hippie-ish skirts and tops, with clogs. One of my best friends in college wore clogs all the time, and I was fascinated by them; also around that time I remember reading a children’s book called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice which was written by Nancy Willard and drawn by Lee and Diane Dillon in which the apprentice wore clogs, and I remember studying how they were drawn so I could draw them. (I should see if I can find a copy of that book at a library; I recall it having a lot of great costuming and set design in it).

The plot was that Lizzie was scared of spiders, and was always either killing them or asking someone to kill them when she found them in the apartment.

One day, she finds a spider in the bathroom sink and hits it with her clog, throwing it out the window. It survives, and goes to The Castle of Spiders to petition The King of All Spiders to take action. See, spiders were protected from humans by the superstition that killing them was bad luck, but now people don’t believe in bad luck anymore and squash spiders with impunity.

Here’s the King of All Spiders:

He’s supposed to be a big spider who spun a body made out of webs, which was human-ish, but with eight human arms, and he lived in the web mummy construct's head. I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be a big reveal at the end; that the Spider king was just a normal if large spider disguised as a big scary monster-y guy. (Please note the shitty dialogue. "Shall be punished"? What the fuck, Past Self?).

He summons his soldiers, who are a bunch of big, cartoony spiders who wear bowler hats and smoke cigars, like the bully bull dogs in old cartoons, and they kidnap Lizzie.

Here are three consecutive panels, where one of them rings the girls' doorbell and then disappears, to distract Nyx:


A couple of talking bats, who were Nyx’s witch grandmother’s familiars, visit her and give her a magic umbrella that is actually a pair of person-sized bat-wings wrapped around a cane (So, when Nyx opens the umbrella, the wings fly off it and attach to her back).

The bats then lead her to the Spider Castle, and after that I don’t remember what was supposed to happen, and I can’t read the rest of my story. I guess Nyx just shows up and fights all the spiders and the King Spider, maybe? And wins?

That’s…that’s not really much of a story. Hero fights villains and wins? I’m not really sure what possessed me to spend as much time on it as I did—I had about six pages of it drawn, a seventh done in pencil, and the whole story scribbled out in prose first—beyond the fact that it was full of a bunch of things I liked to draw.


So, that’s that story.

The next one was from my sophomore year, 1996-1997, so I may have been 19 by the time I did it. I remember the impetus for it much better.

I was taking a class called Environmental Studies, which fulfilled my science requirement to get a BA in English. One of the final projects was to create something in any medium that had an environmental message. My first impulse was to do a comic book, and I started it before realizing just how damn long it actually takes to draw a comic book. I ultimately ended up doing a spoken word-like poem performance that a musician friend of mine helped record. It’s abysmal, but I’m still proud of the samples from an environmental documentary we put in it.

This project didn’t have a title either, but the plot was that there was this factory, see, and it was totally polluting a swamp in the Everglades or somewhere in Florida. And the chemicals were causing the wildlife to mutate into horrible monsters. Two characters would encounter and fight all these monsters, and the ultimate moral would be that the people polluting are the real monsters. Deep, I know.

This was the first page, an establishing shot of the swamp:

This was during Kelley Jones’ run on Batman, and it couldn’t have been too long after the two-part story in which Swamp Thing summons Killer Croc to live with him in the Everglades or in a Louisiana swamp somewhere.

I’ve talked about my love of Kelley Jones quite a in the past, and while I sure wish I could draw as well as him, if a genie were to appear and offer me the ability to draw exactly like him, I’d probably decline. I like the way Jones draws heroes and monsters and animals and settings, but I don’t really care for the way he draws human beings, particularly women and younger people. That is, I like his drawings of them, but I don’t think that’s, like, the ideal way to draw them (Except for his hands; Jones draws fantastic hands).

I read a lot fewer comics back then, and really pored over the ones I did read, particularly the Doug Moench/Kelley Jones/John Beatty Batman comics. Jones’ style doesn’t appear to be an over detailed one, but he used to really filigree the objects and settings in his panels. I loved the way he’d draw building or forests in the background, or every ripple in the water, or every scale on a reptile. Often I'd spend some of the time between issues with an issue of his Batman open next to me while I tried to figure out how he drew a hand, or a spine, or a night sky or whatever other aspect about a particular image really grabbed me.

I’m sure almost every element of this image came from those two issues of Batman. If I flipped through them today, I’m sure I could find that exact same snake, the reeds and lily pads, and maybe those trees. I’m pretty sure I just took a bunch of elements from a bunch of different panels and smashed them together here. I know the moon and the background trees were an attempt to do what Jones did; you can see his version of that moon on the cover I posted above (And I did a much simpler version of Jones’ background swamp trees more recently).

That degree of filigree really appealed to me, and I spent a lot of time drawing unnecessary stylistic details, which, whether I realized it or not, was really just a way to disguise weaknesses in my own drawings with busy-ness. Was that a poor drawing of a tree, or a very lame snake? Maybe, but look at all those lines on the tree, and all the checkered scales on those snakes in the background! It took me forever to draw them, and they’re full of lines, so they must be good right?

Here’s the second page, which I wasn’t planning on scanning due to how terrible the narration is, but what the hell: Yes, I actually wrote, “A verdant dark wet Eden, teeming with life…and death.” How did I resist the temptation to put an exclamation point after the word death?

Also, I’m pretty sure that’s the only time I’ve ever used the word "verdant."

In the third panel there, that’s one of the monsters created by the pollution. It was based very loosely on a picture of the Jersey Devil on the cover of some book I head in grade school about those sorts of cryptid monsters. The one on the cover was a mountain lion with horns, bat wings and a devil-like tail, but it was laying sprawled out leopard-like on a tree branch, the moonlight showing its tawny hide and rippling cat musculature, red eyes and feline face. Mine is crouching and hidden in shadow, which meant I didn’t have to make it look like anything other than a dark shape.

I bet that factory in the last panel is also taken from a Jones issue of Batman, but I don’t think it was one of the Swamp Thing/Croc issues, as I don’t remember any factories in it.

I was quite enamored with the opportunity that shadow and darkness provided me with not having to draw detail. On this page, I used it as an excuse not to draw this guy’s face, although I’m sure I told myself it looked more dramatic that way:


That giant leech was based on my memory of Rick Veitch’s mutant leech character from his three-part story in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #24-#26 (A common leech sticks on Raphael's skin and sucks some of his blood, which is enough to make the leech start mutating into a more humanoid form, and Raphy to start devolving into a more turtle-like form). I wouldn’t have been able to look it up for reference, since my TMNT comics would have been at my parent’s house while I was drawing this in college.

The guy doing the kicking was the hero of the piece. I can’t remember who he was or what he was doing in the swamp, but at some point he was supposed to meet up with the heroine and help her through the swamp. He would do most of the monster kicking, while her dress would get more and more ripped.

Okay, now things are going to get a bit worse.

This is the heroine:
I’m afraid I don’t remember if she’s supposed to be a plucky gal reporter trying to break the story of the industrial pollution that created all these monsters, or if she’s the daughter of the wealthy industrialist who owns the factory and she is trying to convince him to stop dumping monster-making chemicals into the swamp.

I think it may have been the latter, as she’s wearing a mink stole for some reason. I have no idea why I drew that, other than the fact that I must have seen someone wearing a fur like that somewhere and thought it would be fun to draw.

I remember quite clearly where I got her clothes and hair though. Rolling Stone had a cover with Gillian Andersen on it around that time which showed her decked out like that, and I remember spending part of an evening trying to draw it.

(In addition to trying to draw images from comics I liked, I'd also try to draw magazine covers and photos and ads I really liked).

That Rolling Stone cover may have actually been the genesis for the whole idea of this thing, as it involved a woman with a cool hairstyle in a tiny, ripped dress being menaced by a monster in a swamp.

Ha, I drew her totally cross-eyed. I was still apparently drawing whole eyes at that point, and hadn't learned about this thing called symmetry, which I guess is sort of important.

Here’s her father and/or the pro-pollution industrialist who owns the factory:

Ugh. The tops of these two pages are full of space because I was going to fill it with their conversation about whether polluting is bad or not, but I drew them both with their mouths closed, which is a bad way to draw people who are supposed be talking.

I used to always draw pin-striped suits, as that gave me an excuse to fill them with lines. I’m not sure what’s up with his eyebrows, other than that I must have not liked them and figured if I added a bunch of idiosyncratic details to them, they might come off as “stylized.” I think that’s the same reason why he as that Rob Liefield-esque brow shading going on.

I started one more page of this, in which the people on that tug boat, which included the woman character, were floating around testing the water for pollutants, and hit something (I think just a rock, as I don’t recall planning any giant monsters). That’s as far as I got with it before I realized there was no way I’d finish the assignment in the month or so I had to do it, and I gave up.

I never wrote out what was supposed to happen in it, but was just going to create it page by page until I ran out of swamp monsters.

And that includes this look at the terrible comics I started when I was a youngster. Maybe next time I need something to post, I’ll tell you about the superhero universe I created between the ages of 16-18. How horrifying is that? Well, it had a character named Gambit who wore a black-and-white-checkered suit like Ragman's, and he had chess powers. Yeah.



*I have a really large, bed-like couch, to anticipate your question.

I'm still not dead.

Me and this pale bald guy from this particular Perry Bible Fellowship strip have a lot in common today. Why, he's practically me. Except I have a nose and ears. And sleep with a stuffed Batman doll, not a teddy bear. And my pajamas are blue.

By the way, The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack is available for purchase at your local comics shop today. Coincidence?

I'm not sure if anyone's ever pointed this out before or not, but Rob Liefeld doesn't seem to be a very good artist

Few industry figures are as controversial as Rob Liefeld, who neatly divides almost everyone who experiences his comics work into either the love him or hate him camp. Actually, sometimes it sort of seems that everyone is in the hate him camp; I only personally know one comics reader who likes his work, and comics critics seem pretty unified in their assessment of his work as something between a joke and an aesthetic crime.

I can't say that I hate his work, or even dismiss it too strongly, as I have very little experience with it. Most of what I've seen of it is couched in other people talking about it. For example, Dick Hyancinth's extremely insightful (and balanced!) look at his work in these posts, or this amusingly written list of "The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld drawings." (I think I might have "read" a whole issue of Onslaught Reborn, re-diaalogued by Christopher Bird, but I can't seem to find it now. Did I dream that? Because that's a pretty weird, nerdy dream, even for me).

Otherwise, the longest in-an-actual-comic-book exposure I've had to his work was, let's see, the few page Aquaman sequence he did in a Jeph Loeb-written jam comic Superman Christmas issue, where Superman gave presents to each of his League teammates (Liefeld drew the Aquaman sequence, which, at the time, impressed me as a nice bit of stunt-casting, given it was the '90s-designed bearded and harpoon-hand Aquaman), and a "Bloodwulf" short from 1993's Darker Image #1, which I remember hating more for the shocking writing than the art (It was an extremely transparent Lobo swipe/parody; since Lobo is already a parody character, it's kind of hard to read Bloodwulf as a parody when brazen plagiarism seems the more obvious answer).

But Youngblood? X-Force? Cable? That stuff? Never read any of it. The covers and pin-ups I've seen are enough to let me know that they are quite clearly not my cup of tea.

So last night I thought about Rob Liefeld's art for an hour or two, which is longer than I've probably ever thought about it before, and I had a thought about why it might look the way it does.

For the last month or three I've been doing a Tuesday afternoon column for Blog@ looking at the Diamond shipping list for the following day's releases, and I usually do a one-panel cartoon of some sort to accompany it. In this week' shipping list, the thing that jumped out at me the most was the number of Obama covers a whole month after the inauguration, including one for Youngblood, Liefeld's signature series (although he seems to have turned over the writing and art duties to others).

So that's what I decided to make my column header cartoon about this week.

Drawing celebrity likenesses is pretty damn challenging, and talented folks like Erik Larsen, Todd Nauck and Phil Jiminez have shown how much trouble they have with Obama in recent weeks. It was hard to imagine that artist with such a notoroiously...individual style would succeed where someone with somone like Jiminez, who has such a meticulous, photorealistic style stumbled.

I thought about drawing Obama (whose likeness, by the way, I'm also pretty bad at drawing, as you can see here and here; in my defense, I'm not a professional artist, and accept no money for my drawings, nor does anyone have to pay to look at 'em) with as many of the sorts of elements Liefeld is notorious for. Like giving Obama gigantic shoulder pads, a Cable-sized gun with no handle, a mouth full of a slime, 150 teeth, hidden feet, and so on.

As I was scanning through Youngblood covers though, I settled on trying to draw Obama in the same pose as this goofball with a goatee on the cover of Youngblood #8.



So looking at the image for a visual guide, I did a quick sketch of the pose:


When I sat down to do the final one, which turned out like this—
—I was surprised that once I drew the basic outlines of the figure (the head, the kidney bean shape of the shoulders, the arms and left quadricep) and then, well, that's about all there is to it.

From there, it was already time to move on to the filigree—the clothes, the face, the little Liefeldian lines. Usually when I try to imitate someone else's art style, even for a quick piece like this, it takes forever, no matter how simplified the art might be (Bryan Lee O'Malley, for example, uses very few lines, and yet it took me a dozen tries to make a Scott Pilgrim head that looked enough like a Scott Pilgrim head that I assumed readers would recognize my intent).

It occurred to me then that maybe Liefeld's art looks the way it does because he skips some of the steps often associated with drawing. Perhaps he just sketches out the basic shapes of the figures, and then finishes them, going from rough sketch to detail work without anything in between.

Now, I don't know how Liefeld works, or even how most comics artists work. But in the sorts of how-to books I used to read in grade school, and in the ones I see in the library today, the ones with the step by step instructions, they always start with a few broad shapes, and then get progressively more detailed.

Like, say there was a four-step process involved with instructions on how to draw a unicorn. Step one would be two big circles for the front and back of the body, and a little circle for the head. Step two would be drawing lines to connect them into a horse-like shape and drawing lines for the legs and so forth. Step three would be drawing the unicorn body around that shape. And then step four would be drawing the horn, the mane, the tail, the eyeballs, the whiskers, and whatever details you wanted.

But if Liefeld were to draw that unicorn, perhaps he would just go from the three circles from step one to the detail work of step four, without worrying how the pieces fit together exactly.

Does that make sense?

Let me try this. Okay, here's a (light, pencil) sketch of the basic shapes that seem to be in that pose at the center of the Youngblood cover.



Sorry it's so light. I shoulda used pen. Okay, I imagine that's how a lot of comic artists might start out a panel or image, if only to have a good sense of what amount of space they're going to dedicate to a particular figure.

From there, they might slim it down a little, and start to include lines that would represent the skeleton of the figure. They might start to draw the body within those rough shapes, making the head shape more oval and human, making the bean-shape of the shoulders a little more shoulder-y, filling in where the stomach might be, or the rest of the leg, or perhaps the other leg (I can't tell on that Youngblood cover if the brown pointy thing coming out of the central figures right pectoral is supposed to be his foot, or the point of a shoulder pad Badrock might be wearing).

So maybe that would look something like this—


And then, once the the space-staking-out shapes have been turned into something closer to the figure being drawn, the artist might finish the drawing, drawing the flesh and clothing over the imagined skeleton and muscles.

But perhaps Liefeld just puts the skin and clothes over the initial shapes, ignoring the human skeleton and muscles. That would explain not only why his figures are so wildly anatomically incorrect, but why there's no real consistency to the anatomic features. (What he does with a human body can't simply be excused as a style, because it's so inconsistent; he doesn't make the same choices over and over).

So that's my theory: Maybe Liefeld goes right from the vaguest shapes to a finished product, without bothering with the mechanics of the figures. I'm sure a lot of artists don't bother sketching out skeletons and bodies either, but I bet those artists can do so because they've drawn enough bodies that they can kind of intuit where the bones would and should be under the skin and clothes of the people they're drawing.

I can't imagine why he might do this. It's not a simple matter of laziness, although there's certainly an element of laziness to some of his work (Why isn't that jumping figure on the cover centered? Why is the one hand visible, but the other going off the page like that?). Certainly all those little lines, the arm hairs and wrinkles and skin folds and scars and shadows take a damn long time to draw, perhaps just as long as it would have taken Liefeld to make sure he was drawing the limbs the same length, or to glance at himself in the mirror and see if he could do that with his head, or look to his left and see where his forearm muscle began and ended.

It makes me a little sad to think about Liefeld's work at all, let alone to this extent. Because he's so popular and, as far as I've read, so rich doing the art he's done, there's little incentive for him to grow or change in anyway. Liefeld's art, as it's been and as it is, worked and continues to work for him.

And yet comics history is not going to be very kind to him. Sixteen years have passed since that shitty Bloodwulf story in Darker Image, and yet all that seems to have changed about his art is that it now involves computer coloring that didn't exist in the early '90s. Meanwhile, Jim Lee, another artist whose work in the early '90s did nothing for me, has grown into an almost completely different artist in those same years.

Of course, if you can't be a great artist, being a rich and famous one isn't bad as far as consolation prizes go...