As you may recall from previous blog posts, I love creating promo graphics for stage plays. If I can’t be out there wallowing in greasepaint myself, I can at least have fun drawing pictures about the finished products!

Anyway, the dates of this four-performance run are April 6, 13, 20, and 26. Call 212 695-6909 for reservations.

Twice before I’ve provided promotional graphics for plays by Doric, most recently for the TOSOS II production of A Perfect Relationship. But it’s the poster I drew for the 1982 production of Street Theater, Doric’s re-telling of events and archetypal personalities surrounding the historic Stonewall Riots of 1969, that is stirring up memories today.

At right: a panel from "Billy Goes Out"

What a moment in time that was. Storm clouds were gathering over the Sexual Revolution, as then conceptualized, but few of us had begun coming to grips with their sinister import.

Soon the communal submersion in erotic abandon that swept the late-’seventies gay subculture (at least in urban centers like New York City) would be undercut by a terrible epidemic. We can see the arc of that tragedy clearly now but few could then. Historical hindsight is frequently cruel, offering many instances of idealism being blindsided by even blinder realities.

By 1982 stirrings about a mysterious "gay cancer" had begun generating anxiety in the gay community, but a true appreciation of the illness’s nature and implications hadn’t fully taken hold when house lights dimmed at the Mineshaft for Doric’s Street Theater.

In its heavy-breathing way (a paradoxically tender way that those disinclined to question conventional heterosexual assumptions often find hard to comprehend), this was still a time of innocence for urban gay men. For several years, propelled by the exhilaration set in motion by the 1969 rebellion being recreated by Doric Wilson in stage terms, the guilt about sex that had long been imposed on gay people’s psyches had been losing its stranglehold. Long-bolted doors were being thrown open one after another.

Not the temporarily bolted door at the top of the Mineshaft’s basement stairs, though. That bolt was wisely kept in place while Doric’s show was in progress. As hip as anyone present was bound to be if he or she had been moved in the first place to venture downtown to see a gay play being staged at a club whose very walls dripped with notoriety, common sense was not being abandoned even if propriety was. The theatregoing vibe and the orgyroom vibe were unlikely to have meshed well during an intermission’s millings-about.

So two worlds were kept separate for a couple of hours each night at the Mineshaft. Those of us in the audience who were at ease in both of those worlds had to smile inwardly, though, at the soft, contrapuntal sounds of restless footsteps drifting downward from above the stage lights.

While a work of art unfolded in front of us, the Mineshaft’s normal round-robin of eroticism — made possible by the very historic event being dramatized in the work of art we were watching — proceeded without pause above our heads.

Being itself. Enjoying itself. Paying no heed to art.

The result: an essay that was published in our local paper’s Op-Ed section earlier this week. If you’d like to see what he wrote in its entirety, click here.

—From Eddie’s essay "Missing What We Never Knew",
Published in the North Adams Transcript on March 26, 2007

[Note: if you’d like to read the whole essay but
the link above no longer works, try this one.]

I will be doing black and white line art, no cross hatching. Color graduated tones. I’m basically going to draw and ink the motion lines with the rest of the artwork, yet my confusion comes in how to transform the color of the motion lines to another color in Photoshop and fade it to make it look like motion lines. Ultimately I’m trying to achieve smooth free and loose motion lines rather than if I would use the mouse and draw it directly on the computer, which would cause "nervous looking motion lines."

HOWARD TO GREG: Nothing beats the pen tool for creating "smooth" motion lines. Just create the path you want, convert the path to a selection, and fill the selection (on a separate layer) with black, gray, or whatever color you like.

Since you’re shading and coloring digitally, you automatically have at least one special tool available: partial transparency for layers. Coupled with broad brush effects or the eraser tool set on its brush rather than pencil mode, you can create a streak through the "air" that is strong near the sword (or whatever) and fainter as you approach the opposite end of the trail.

If you like you can use the blur filter to soften the edges of your actual speed lines.

STEVE TO HOWARD: Enjoyed your comic [For those who came in late, Steve’s referring to my Mark the Art Guy webcomic—H.C.] for Adobe. It has that animated Wolverton/Crumb look I like. But I have to ask: did you ink all, much or any or it with Illustrator (and a Wacom?). I’ve just discovered how smooth the brush tool in it works with my graphire and I’m using it to ink some drawings for a flash animation. Never thought my shaky hand would be able to ink with the computer.

HOWARD TO STEVE: I’m glad you’ve enjoyed my Mark strips. As for the tools I’ve used for that project: Adobe Illustrator has been extensively used for special effects (for simulating elements that have precision aspects like, for example, the grids that appear in my Mark strips when Vanishing Point is used).

But no, the Wacom tablet I bought years ago (but never mastered) has not been involved in my Mark drawings. I really should have another go at getting comfortable with that device; I know a lot of artists who really like it, as you do. Looking at a screen instead of my hand while I was drawing spooked me! I’ve gotta get over that—but finding time to learn new skills has been hard of late.

There’s a lot of digital-to-pen-&-ink-and-back-to-digital back-and-forth action in my way of working (some of which I’ve touched on in earlier blog entries), but my initial drawing still happens on paper. Sketches are scanned for fine-tuning compositions and finished art is scanned for clean-ups, corrections, and coloring. But thanks for reminding me that I really shouldn’t be letting that Wacom tablet gather dust on a shelf!

HOWARD to BLOG READERS: If you visit Steve’s web site, Caricatures Etc., you’ll discover that he can whip out a mean caricature from a submitted photo. Got a friend who deserves a unique gift sometime soon?

And then…

I’ll use the strip’s closing panel as an example since, while working on it last June, I saved all the stages of its development with this kind of demo in mind.

WHAT’S IN A PANEL?

As a rule, I need to know three things when I begin working on a new comic strip panel: (a) What’s the picture going to show? (b) What words will accompany that picture? and (c) How am I going to fit picture and words together to make a balanced composition?

This particular panel revolves around a mom who is nursing a newborn while conversing with a "Narration Block Lady." With neither a baby nor a lactating mother handy to use as live models, I went searching on the Internet for photo reference material. Google Images provided me with the cozy image you see below.

I placed the resulting mother-and-baby sketch into an Adobe Illustrator file containing text that I had typed out earlier. Illustrator is a great application to use when experimenting with various text-and-picture relationships because of the ease with which you can nudge blocks of words this way and that, changing their line-breaks and tweaking their phrases as needed.

Back when I first began using this system for building compositions I determined through trial and error that if I typed using a plain Helvetica font stretched to 115% of its native width, the resulting stacks of words would approximate the overall spacing of my typical hand-lettering. So typing my narration in advance makes it easy to see how assorted arrangements of words will work visually in combination with whatever picture they need to share panel space with.

Once I have arrived at blocks of typed text that look good to me, I will trace them by hand so that the end result has the warm imperfections that come with hand-crafting.

FROM ROUGHS TO INKS

Turning back now to "Neighborhood Secrets": with my panel composition loosely planned, it was time to send the magazine’s editors a rough version of the art I would later draw carefully.

So with the strips preceding panels indicated in a similarly loose manner, I emailed my rough version of the strip to the magazine for approval. The editors liked what they saw and gave me a thumbs-up to proceed with the finished art that the magazine’s readers would ultimately see.

The first step in this final stage of drawing was tracing an enlarged printout of my rough in pencil onto 2-ply bristol board. Then I started inking.

The middle drawing above is my "completed", or fully inked, artwork. I put the word completed in quotes because of the large, obviously empty areas that clearly need to be black but that I didn’t bother filling in by hand (like the mother’s hair, f’rinstance). In olden-days (before the arrival of digital graphics software) a lot of time would have been spent filling those areas with India ink. But that’s a variety of mindless labor that can now be turned over to computers, as long as you don’t mind giving up the pleasure of physical artwork that looks the same as its printed counterpart. Once scanned, I knew I would be able to fill such areas with perfect fields of solid black in the blink of an eye. Photoshop’s wand tool stood ready for action.

NEXT COMES COLOR

I color my present-day comics slightly differently than I colored the illustration used several years ago as a case history in my demo called "How I Color My Comics Using Adobe Photoshop." (For those who are interested, there are several such technical demos residing in the Cartoonists Corner of my main web site.)

The digital coloring method described in that demo is still the one I use for most color illustrations. I’ve modified my procedure, though, when it comes to coloring comics. Comics have special needs. The readability of small hand lettering calls for an extra level of crispness, and pagefuls of black outlines look best when they pop off the paper in a very distinct way, setting off the surrounding color without getting mired in it. At least, that’s how I feel about the comics that I draw!

With those concerns in mind, here’s how I go about coloring a comics-style feature like "Neighborhood Secrets." First comes the B&W line art I’ve discussed above, which is first inked on paper and then scanned and refined in Photoshop. Before color enters the picture I set aside one copy of the art for later use, saving it in Bitmap (line art) mode at a nice, sharp resolution of 600dpi (dots per inch).

This CMYK file can be safely sampled down to 300dpi without a noticeable loss of quality. Colors don’t require the level of sharpness that B&W line work does.

In most ways I will color a comic strip like "Neighborhood Secrets" in the same layered manner I describe in the aforementioned Cartoonists Corner tutorial, so I won’t repeat all that here. But there’s one major difference. Once I’ve finished my coloring I won’t flatten my CMYK file until I’ve deleted the layer containing my original drawn outlines.

Why was the outline layer there in the first place if I was going to trash it in the end? Well, it’s been needed until now to serve as a guide for the application of color on layers below it. But with my coloring now complete, such a guide is superfluous. In fact, it’s objectionable! In this file I want color and nothing but color. The strip’s crucial black outlines (and the lettering in my word balloons) will be supplied by the B&W version I saved earlier.

NOW COMBINE EVERYTHING IN ILLUSTRATOR

Here comes the final step. In Adobe Illustrator I will stack my 600dpi B&W image on top of my 300dpi color image and save a copy of the result as an EPS file. The black outlines will stay as crisp as one could ask and the colors will stay purer. I won’t be dogged by the darkened, smudgy look that comes with imperfect color-registration once the art goes to press.

This is what is so terrific about the EPS format. You can preserve the two different resolutions and modes in a single file that’s easily imported into most layouts programs. By contrast, the color in JPEGs or TIFF files gets mashed together with the black outlines. You don’t have the option of retaining a sharp 600dpi resolution in a drawing’s outlines if the color in the drawing is saved at 300dpi. Every black line in a TIFF file will always have some red, white, and blue ink in it. If the colored inks aren’t applied to paper by the printing press in precisely the position that they’re supposed to be, color will peek out from the black lines’ edges, making them appear slightly blurred. This happened with some comics of mine that were published in Heavy Metal years ago, and with some episodes of Count Fangor in Fangoria as well. I hate when that happens! I’m for crispness in art as well as in breakfast cereal.

A CLOSING NOTE
(EXCLUSIVELY FOR PHOTOSHOP GEEKS)
CONCERNING MY COLORING SYSTEM
AS DESCRIBED IN THE CARTOONISTS CORNER

Take a deep breath and prepare for picky details, children. Instead of using SELECT>SIMILAR to isolate all the black pixels on my outlines layer so I can hit SELECT>INVERSE and delete any pixels that aren’t black (as described here), I now activate the "NON-CONTIGUOUS" button in my Options Bar before selecting a random black area. This produces the same effect that a SELECT>SIMILAR command did in older versions of Photoshop; that is, every black pixel in that area will be selected with one click of the mouse. But in Photoshop CS2, non-contiguousness rules in this circumstance.

Got that?

Actually, the old SIMILAR command continues to occupy a slot in Photoshop CS2’s SELECT menu, but for some reason it no longer does what it used to do. At least, not on my iMac.

Full credit for our glamour quotient must go to our faithful costumer Cathy Groves (although I myself claim styling credit for Queen Esther’s radical cardboard-flip hairstyle).

Arthur didn’t yet exist, of course, when I first met Martha and John at a Cartoonists Guild gathering a year or so after my 1977 move to New York. They were then co-editors of a magazine called Comedy, a publication that, alas, didn’t last remotely as long as it deserved to.

Martha, John, Eddie and I quickly discovered that we were on similar wave lengths and a friendship was born. As for Arthur’s emergence, I fondly remember the phone conversation during which Martha informed me than a new family member was in the pipeline.

"I’m pregnant!" she announced.

"That’s great!" I enthused.

"Glad you like it," she replied. "You can babysit."

As you can see, I’ve had several decades to observe the Tebbel-Thomases household in action. John is a writer who knows more than I will ever know about the history of animation, and Arthur in young adulthood is demonstrating that his parents’ language skills have been effectively passed along by both nature and nurture.

Friendship and collegiality aside, It’s Martha who has had the most concrete impact on my own career. She was well-positioned to do so, being the publicity chief at DC Comics at a critical juncture.

And what a whiz she was at communicating her own enthusiasms to the media. I will always count as one of her signal achievements her success at charming New York Newsday into devoting its complete third page to full-color coverage of the "Death of Superman." That was quite a triumph for me to come upon while page-flipping over my morning coffee. I mean, Newsday was no rinky-dink publication. Bill Moyers once edited it, for God’s sake!

Supe didn’t stay dead, of course (do they ever, these planet-hopping men of steel?), but for a few shining moments, thanks to this and similar coups across the mainstream media landscape, Americans who had scarely noticed the comics shops sprouting among them were suddenly contemplating the uncontemplatable about a fictional being they didn’t even realize they still gave a damn about. Some even bought a copy of the comic book under discussion. Could it really be "true"? Could a superbeing croak?

Superman dead was a seller. I give Martha points for making sure the world knew to buy it.

Martha was also the mole at DC Comics who in 1990 planted a fateful, (if thoroughly counter-intuitive at the time) notion in my mind. Knowing that I was at loose ends creatively with the run of my comic strip Wendel having drawn to a close at The Advocate, Martha suggested, "Why don’t you think about doing a graphic novel for DC’s new experimental imprint Piranha Press?"

Her suggestion led me to compose a book proposal about a self-absorbed gay guy coming of age down south during the civil rights era (I can’t imagine where that idea came from) for submission to Mark Nevelow, who was then the guiding editorial force at Piranha (which later became Paradox Press, but that’s another story). It took months, but my proposal eventually led to a signed contract, after which a certain fringe cartoonist from the underground comix world found himself living on DC’s money while Stuck Rubber Baby slowly wrestled its way onto paper.

It took me years to complete my graphic novel (click here if you wish to immerse yourself in the sordid details), but Martha didn’t wait until publication date was near to begin building buzz at every opportunity. "Howie is working on a graphic novel that’s going to blow you away," was her frequent remark at social gatherings even as half the book still remained to be drawn. And if you consult SRB’s afterword you’ll see that Martha and John were among the Cruse loyalists who came to my novel’s rescue when it looked in danger of being aborted by personal bankruptcy, providing emergency funding by buying original SRB art sight unseen (and often not yet drawn).

Martha also pointed me toward Prometheus Books when I was hunting for a publisher for The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth. Again, her intuition bore fruit. Martha and John are not mere comics wonks, I should add. Their political passions always on target, they were quick to join the ranks of Eddie’s and my straight allies at gay pride marches and Eddie enjoyed their vigorous support when he ran for the New York State Senate in 1998.

Martha left DC a while back and the comics industry was poorer for the loss of her energetic advocacy. But now she is applying her skills to the online branch of the medium, having signed on as the Director of Corporate Communications for the aforementioned ComicMix, a new web site whose launch coincided with this year’s New York Comic Con. The site, edited by mainstream comics veteran Mike Gold, is now funneling a steady flood of comics-related news and commentary into comic fandom’s insatiable cyber-maw.

Martha herself will write occasional columns for the site (see her first "Ain’t I A Woman" entry), and I discovered while browsing that Arthur Tebbel is going to be chipping in occasionally with columns of his own (see "X-Men strand Gen Y"). Will Arthur’s dad John also join the ranks of ComixMix commentators? Only the Shadow knows.