The Rack: Entrepreneurship
In today’s installment, we find Jerry to be very industrious.
The Rack: Calamity
The Rack: Dispirited
In today’s installment, we learn that just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should be.
The Terrible Secret About Today’s The Rack
Yes, even the most nimble of fingers can slip on occasion. The eagle-eyed among you will immediately notice that ghastly smudge on Danny’s left ear. You’ll also notice that it’s nowhere to be found in today’s installment. Nothing groundbreaking. Just lasso that smudge and delete.
But I figured it’s a nice opportunity to show you what my art looks like before I go in and erase the pencils under the inks.
You can see that originally I had Danny raising his eyebrow on the other side. But then I realized that his left eyebrow was higher. So, you know, duh.
You’ll also notice that the wall of Pull Boxes is gone. You’d never guess, but those are totally digitally inserted into the strip, as if it were Otah Gunga or something.
Click On The Image For A Larger Look
The Nib Whisperer
So, for a very long time, I had trouble with my beloved but ornery Hunt 103 pen nib.
It was, undoubtedly, the perfect nib for my line. I could go from nicely thin to nicely thick with more control than any wild-haired brush would ever allow. But it had its dark side. I found myself completely frustrated every other nib when ink would collect just shy of the tip, allowing absolutely zero ink to make it to the page, no matter how hard I pushed or wished it to.
So I looked online at what other illustrators did and found some helpful tips and then through lots of trial and lots of frustrating error, I came up with the solution you see above.
Two bottle caps. One filled with water, the other filled with ink.
(An aside about How The Bottle Caps Got Started. I found myself very unhappy with dipping the pen nib and holder into the bottle itself for the ink. You never know how much you’re getting, you waste tons of ink on your fingertips on on the cork at the end of the holder. It’s a disaster. Most inkers have solved this problem already, with some fancy, pre-made ink repository. Well good on them. I use bottle caps. And another pro-tip, I always pour any remaining ink back into the bottle. I ink green!)
After even more trial an error with this method, I found that dipping the nib in the ink and then the water gave me the most consistent and smooth line. Be warned, when your nib starts running low on ink when drawing a longer line, instead of just going blank, since the ink is ever-so-slightly diluted, you’ll get a sort of faded patch of line towards the end that you’ll have to go over.
But hey, it sure beats driving yourself into hyperventilation with nib after useless nib, no?
The Rack: Con Descending
In today’s installment, an embarrassing truth is learned about one of our favorite heroes.
Liberty City Tourism Board
The staggeringly industrious Fido_le_muet of GTAForums.com has cobbled together shots of the real New York City and lined them up against their counterparts in Grand Theft Auto 4‘s facsimile, Liberty City, in this thread.
Here’s a personal favorite, as I’m very impressed with their version of Coney Island.
Check ‘em out quick though, folks. The dude’s using ImageShack!
Great Pages In Comics History: Marvel Boy #4
In what will be an ongoing feature on this site, I’m going to take a rather in depth look at some of my favorite and most inspirational individual pages throughout the great pantheon of my lazily-strewn-about-my-office comics collection.
Marvel Boy #4, p. 5. By Grant Morrison, J.G. Jones, Avalon Studios, Matt Milla, Richard Starkings & Wes Abbott.
So, I spent this weekend at the New York Comic-Con, which ended up not being as crowded or annoying as I had feared. A lot of my time was dedicated to any and every panel Grant Morrison was involved in, and it was quite an inspirational and illuminating experience.
But at the last panel I went to, for Final Crisis, I couldn’t think of one question I had about the upcoming book, and so I asked a question to J.G. Jones about the nuts and bolts of his process when it came to interior art (seeing as it would inevitably be a departure from his wash-heavy, painterly style for the covers of 52. His answer (basically he just considers it painting in black and white, with no tones) and his further discussion of framing sequences and “cinematography” caused me to immediately unearth all of the work of his that I had available, and revisit it.
Marvel Boy #4 does feature what is probably a more well known sequence, just a few pages after this one. Marvel Boy and Oubliette chase each other up a building in a phenomenal two pages made up of 12 Panel Grids. It’s truly fantastic, no doubt, but something about Page 5 resonates just a little bit more with me.
First of all, you’ve got the first two panels, which are just a textbook example of fantastic action sequential storytelling. Jones knows precisely where to place Marvel Boy in the frame in both panels to convey the perfect and proper level of momentum. I could just go back and forth between those two panels for a few minutes, and just study them.
He also does some amazing things with the subway flare that makes Oubliette’s position, slamming out of a subway on a motorcycle (!!!!), so dynamic.
Avalon Studios and Mr. Milla also take a fantastic little chance in panel two with the color shift. I’m not a hundred percent sure what exactly in that Subway Station is causing it, nor do I really care. Green is certainly a predominant color throughout the series. Marvel Boy’s only surviving pal, Plex, is a green blob, his own costume is mostly green, there’s a lot of green all around. By bathing the whole panel in the color, it almost gives at a kind of strobe effect, as if an alternative to the Impact Burst you might find at that moment in the panel of a more traditional comic.
And then the last two tiers give us that great tumble and final pose that’s not just static, not a moment of Ex taking a breather, but one where she immediately fires at Marvel Boy.
There’s not a moment of pause in the action on the entire page.
Also of note, this issue is lettered in one of my favorite Comicraft fonts, Cutthroat. I first fell in love with it in the pages of Grant’s New X-Men, before that painful edict was handed down, and lowercase letters joined uppercase letters in a horrifying and completely un-comic-book-like combination.
From a purely technical inking standpoint, there’s just something that really catches my eye about this small detail:
Yeah, yeah, I know. Hot stuff, right? But seriously, the line of Oubliette’s thigh is absolutely perfect, especially the way that one little dash of torso meets it in the middle. Just impeccable draftsmanship.
So congratulations Page 5 of Marvel Boy #4. You are officially one of the Great Pages In Comics History.
The Rack: Just Cos
In this hot-to-trot installment, Jerry learns a bit more specifically about the limitations of his loved ones.
Hello.
Welcome to the brand new Homepage of yours truly.
First off, massive thanks to Kevin Church for helping me bring this feckless little homepage kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.
You can look forward to links to and insights into pretty much every new installment of The Rack, everyone’s favorite comic strip about comic shops.
In addition to that, you’ll be getting in on the ground floor of a project I’ve been kicking around for a very, very long time: Kevin Analog. I’ll be posting regular updates about the process of getting a comic out of your head and into someone else’s hands.
And I’m also going to do a fair share of examination of my general process, which I promised to start in my column The Draft, late of the sadly defunct comic world news.
So thanks for stopping by. There is more to come, I swear.
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Benjamin Birdie
Suddenly kind of aged, Benjamin lives in Queens with his cat. His Master's Degree in Creative Writing has helped him immensely with his primary responsibilities of drawing things.
He can be reached at benjaminbirdie (at) gmail (dot) com.
And do feel free to follow him on Twitter.
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His Comics
Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, this charming comic strip by myself and Kevin Church receives a sparkling new installment. A Comic Strip About A Comic Shop.