Innocent Bystander

My Comics #2: The first page...

I toyed with the idea of drawing comics for a very long time. When I was a kid, I shanghaied a couple of my friends into playing a game I called "Stan and Jack," where I was (perhaps tellingly) Stan Lee and the friend was Jack Kirby, and we produced a new issue of Fantastic Four. It was a game in which I had to do all the talking, because my friends were like, "What...it's a funny book, I don't get it." I gave them pretzel rods to use as fake cigars, because I knew that's what Kirby did. He smoked cigars while he drew comics.

At an early age I felt I couldn't draw worth a damn. What I learned as I grew older was while drawing could be learned, a sense of design could not. You can read a lot about design and perhaps glean some kind of set of do's and don'ts, but I firmly believe that you're either born with a sense of design or you're not.

I began drawing late, when I was 14 or 15, after reading an interview with comics artist Al Williamson in a fanzine (Auction Block #2, with a Jim Hanley cover of Captain Marvel, if memory serves me). In it, he stated that he began drawing by copying Alex Raymond drawings from the Flash Gordon Sunday strip, so I started copying Al Williamson drawings from his Flash Gordon comic books. Within a few months or so I noticed that I was able to draw a face on my own. It wasn't a good face, but it was a face nonetheless.

From that I kept going, drawing little one-off comic strips, but keeping the whole drawing thing kind of secret from my high school-age friends. I had, after all, gotten an F in art class from Mrs. Lowe, for failing to complete my "papier mache" (the way the decidely hightone Mrs. Lowe pronounced it) bottle sculpture in 8th grade. I didn't want to blow the street cred that award gave me. But when I graduated high school and all my friends went off to normal college, I took 9 months off (no, I didn't have a baby) and decided I wanted to go to art school.

It took me close to 20 years after that to draw my first serious attempt at a comic book page. This is it:

And once I did that, it sat in a closet for a year or two before I drew another page.

To be continued...

My Comics #1: It all starts with a name...

If you're going to start your own comic book company, it all has to start with one thing: the name of the company. Hand in hand with that is, of course, a logo to go with it.

When I was looking around for inspiration for this new thing in my life, almost 20 years ago, I had to look no further than my kitchen doorway. Because there, at any given moment, might sit my cat Ollie. Ollie had this habit of lurking. He'd sit in the doorway, half hidden in the shadows with one baleful (let me amend that to "affectionately baleful") eye fixed on me, watching my every move. Ollie was not only a lurker he was a starer, too...kind of a "sturker," I guess. 

So both the company name and logo came to me pretty quickly. As a kid, we would play all kinds of hide and seek and chase games, late into the night, on the street where I lived. They included a cast of thousands, it seemed (it was a big street, with a lot of baby boomer families), and at the end of the game, when it was time for everyone to come in, we would yell at the top of our considerable young lungs, "ollie, ollie, oxen free!" Looking back, that was probably more of an "All-y" than the name of a cat (or comedy team member). In my case it just fit. I was producing comics that were decidely oxen free (no ox was hurt or killed during the production of my comics...I am incredibly proud of that achievement) and the whole "press" thing just seemed to naturally fit with the whole "ollie ollie oxen free" part.

Before I had the company name and logo, though, I had the title for the comic book I wanted to write, draw and produce: Innocent Bystander. I picked that because for many years I felt like things happened around me, not to me. That's changed a bit, a hazard of growing older, I guess, but in retrospect, I know now that part of that title came out of the way I observe life happening around me. I see odd things where no one else seems to see them. The juxtaposition of a sign with an item, maybe. The awkward phrasing on a hairdresser's window. All of it adds up, I guess. But that logo and company name--coupled with my comic book's title--all clicked for me.

For more on my comics over the years, please click here.