Sequential Art and Nostalgia

by J.S. Wells · December 3, 2017

Since moving to Providence I’ve been trying to revive the skill, drive, and love of creating. For the last several years most of my creative energy went into jewelry making and I even took a class at The Steel Yard earlier this year to help along with that. As things go, the jewelry making fulfilled a need to make some kind of return on artwork as well as having something physical in my hand to show that I did, indeed make something. I’m planning a more detailed post about that sometime in the near future but the point is that I’d been suffering a bout of dissatisfaction with all of my recent artwork being digital and without physical substance.

This week I’m taking another workshop, this time from AS220, on Visual Storytelling. While the jewelry making got me through some unfulfillment in life I still have this underlying need to get back to my roots of comic art. In preperation for the class the instructor asked us some questions about our influences and what medium we’re planning to work with, as well as to provide a couple examples of our work. To find a couple examples to show I spent the better part of yesterday going through old artboards that have been packed away for almost 20 years…

I’ll send you back to this old post that I put up here almost 3 years ago for a little more background as well as a link to the page I have set up to centralize some of my old Artwork (link also on the sidebar) so I don’t keep rehashing the same old things over and over as one is wont to do in a fit of nostalgia. On this travel back in time, however, I did dig up a bunch of work that I haven’t looked at in a very long time. The decaying, off-color Zip-A-Tone on some of the work really shows…

For those of you too young to remember, printing grays and gradations was wicked expensive back in the day so you had the choice of hard ink drawing with whatever form of pen work you could use to emulate shading or you could get expensive Duo-Shade bliss (like the early Eastman and Laird Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) or, you could get your X-Acto skills sharpened to cut and peel your way to Zip-A-Tone purgatory. I can’t seem to find any of the very few drawings I did on Duo-Shade as I could’t afford much of it back then. If you click on any of these pics and look at them full sized you can better see the dot pattern of the plastic stickers that make up the shading. It was a royal pain in the ass.

Unfortunately, I originally started the story pictured here, called ‘Hideus’, with washed shading (pictured right) a lot like the digital stuff I’ve been doing lately. I had to start all over from scratch as it was to be the follow up to the Electric Funeral story published in Pure but we all fell apart long before that.

Someday I want to revisit this story as it seems that I re-wrote it and re-started it at least 4 times and never felt like I got it right. It’s funny as the story deals with personifying the inner voice of debilitating depression into a wretched being that continues to hinder the main character from achieving any form of a fulfilling life though externally instead of internally.

I did recently find some Photoshop brushes that emulate the old Duo-Shade but I haven’t put them through the paces yet. I think I’m going to give them a shot on whatever the next project is, maybe for the class.

Among all of the old comic work I flipped through I did find a short story that I’d forgotten that I did. It was to be a series called “Living in the F.O.G. (Fear Of God)” which follows a young boy who never speaks as Bible verses go terribly wrong to his young imagination.