I’m having a good time now finishing up episode 37 of A Coming Out Story (finally). It’s a good sign when I find myself laughing while I’m adding all the little details after the inks are done.

Speaking of which…I can really fuss over the smallest of lines, especially around mouths and eyes, because just a tiny change makes a Big difference in a facial expression. I’ve redrawn mouth and eyes dozens of times and you might think I’m not actually changing anything, but it’s that little difference that can make a scene work.

So just this morning I was working on one of the strips and noticed I could do something with one of the figure’s eyes that made a big difference in the running gag in this episode. It’s a dialogue between my left and right brain characters and the joke is right brain is completely blissed out and I just pasted the same drawing of him with a blissed out expression throughout the episode. But then I realized I could do something with his eyes in two of the panels that makes the moment in them hit the bullseye and it was so satisfying to see it happen on the screen while I was doing it.

Probably next to nobody will notice what specifically I did, but it makes the whole episode work Much better.

Like I did before, I’m adding the strips to the episode 37 page as I finish them, but no live link until it’s all done and I have a chance to look it all over. But those of you who can figure out how I was building the links to the individual episodes can go see it happening as I add the strips. Probably be finished in two or three days more.

The amount of concentration I need to sustain to do any sort of drawing quickly becomes exhausting. But I am retired now and I can put a day’s work into it, if a bit haphazardly. I have to walk away from the drafting table frequently just to let my mind wander.

This next episode of A Coming Out Story involves a lot of drawing because it is so important to me to get the feel of what is happening in it right. In most other episodes can use a few tricks to make the going faster. For instance, in the previous one I drew a background once and then copied it into every panel. And for every episode that takes place in the school, I’ve got a long drawing of a hallway with lockers and water fountains and classroom doors that I plug a section of into the artwork. But in this episode, every single panel but one has to be 100 percent original artwork. And the amount of concentration I need to sustain to do any sort of drawing gets very exhausting.

It would probably not be so bad were I a trained artist. But I am self taught and I am not kidding about being a hunt and peck draftsman. The electric eraser gets more use than the pencil. Some days I wish I’d moved mountains to get myself into the Maryland Institute College of Art. But then this entire story is about one of the other central regrets of my life. So it goes, as the Tralfamadorians say…

I’ve given myself a goal of getting the pencils done for one panel a day, or hopefully one entire strip, which this episode are all two long panels each. That gives me eleven days to finish the pencils at most, or less if I can do two. But that’s less likely so it’s not going to happen at lightning speed. But the pencils are the hard part. Once they’re done the rest of it goes pretty fast.

I need to get this story finished. I’m feeling my energy levels dropping in a scary way, since spring. And there are still maybe another thirty episodes to go.

I have a new LED light board now. The large ArtGraph I had for ten years failed due to a poorly designed power switch setup. My first thought was I’d fix it myself, but the unit is not designed to be openable and fixable. After a lot of struggle I managed to peel the top cover off it and saw that it’s all riveted together inside and in order to get at what the problem was would take me drilling out a bunch of rivets and probably rendering the until unusable anyway. So I took a look at what it would cost to replace it and well, things have got a lot less expensive and much nicer in ten years, so there’s that.

This new one from U.S. Art Supply is thinner, a tad lighter in weight but solidly built, has a variable brightness control, and cost a third what the ArtGraph one cost. Not that I’d buy anything from ArtGraph ever again. The one I had was so solidly built I thought it would last a lifetime, but one bad design decision and the whole thing is trash. In the online chats I’ve seen people reporting rudeness from their customer service droids when asked about sending things back for repair. So apparently you can’t even pay them to fix their products. But after looking inside one I can see their point. It just isn’t worth it. As always, you’re supposed to be a good consumer and just buy a new one. Which I did. Just not one of theirs.

We’ve a nice electronics recycling station at the city recycling center nearby. So the old light board isn’t just going into a landfill.

Starting the pencils on episode 31. Once again it’ll just be three strips, four panels each. Maybe if I just treat it like it’s a paying job I might get these done sooner. I want to get all three in this story arc finished by year’s end…which is just a few weeks away so maybe that’s a tad optimistic. The pencils are the most difficult part for me, since I’m really just a self trained hunt and peck draftsman. But mostly…I’d say four fifths of it, is overcoming my self doubts and just doing the work. Once I get into it and build up a head of steam for it, I can bang things out pretty well. The electric eraser (off panel in this photo) does get a lot of work though.

I have a template that gives me the size of each strip, and grid lines for two, three and four panels to a strip. I have saved line art that’s just the two, three and four panel frames, that I copy over to the working line art file after I’ve scanned in the line art and copied it over to a master image file. If the panels are oddly sized I tweak it in GIMP using a transform tool that lets me extend or compress the panel sizes.

I’ve got all this down to a pretty uniform workflow, which is what made moving it over to GIMP a stressful process. But it turned out not to be so bad after all. Just a few tweaks to it and I’m back in business.

[Update…] Well well…I got the first strip pencils done…generally. There are still details to flesh out, but the essence of it is done. Took about two hours.

I need to remember this. I can do the work in a reasonable amount of time. Most of the time between episodes of this story has been dallying because I’m afraid of not being good enough to draw anything but crap.

Well…and not being able to figure out how to tell parts of it…

And it’s true that some of what I’ve drawn in past years I’m appalled to look at now. But that’s normal. You get better at a thing the more you do it. At this stage of my life I’m doing some of the best artwork I’ve ever done. I really need to stop being afraid that I’m no damn good.

Opening banner for something I’ve been working on for well over a year now…

I should try to finish this, since I’ve been working on it for nearly two years now. Thing is I keep seeing panels I hate and I have to do them over again and I get discouraged.

Bear with me here please…

There’s an element of risk in giving the world a glimpse of your libido, which I suppose is why most writers of erotic fiction use pseudonyms. It’s especially true if your libido tacks in a different direction from most. I suffer here from a double penalty of both being gay, and being an American gay male who isn’t all that into guys that look like they model for superhero comics. It makes me nervous even talking about it. Yet I spent my formative adolescence on a diet of underground comix, men and women who were heroically…some might say a little Too heroically…willing to honestly write and draw about human sexuality and their own specifically. Howard Cruse is one of my heros in that regard, but there were so many others that gifted their talents and insights to Gay Comics. Even so I’ve struggled with how transparent to be in A Coming Out Story.

My initial concept of the character that represents my libido was he would simply be…in the underground comix tradition…a naked me. I tried drawing that over and over and was never comfortable with it. I just couldn’t do it. And then I thought…wait…that’s truth. And the first four episodes came immediately to mind, and I knew I had something I could go with. This is why the libido character is always wearing a fig leaf. As he says in that first episode “I’m your libido, not Robert Crumb’s libido.” Truth.

So I’m not the most brazen of cartoonists (my mild mannered fig leafed libido is a running gag in the story), which means I get nervous whenever I venture into this territory. Whenever I attempt something like You Can Leave Your Hat On (it’s a riff on a song by Randy Newman…the banner here is a riff on R. Crumb’s Keep On Trucking comic (which he now hates) which was itself a riff on a blues song Truckin My Blues Away by Blind Boy Fuller) I have to get the artwork as right as I can. That way if it provokes jeers I can shrug them off because I’m satisfied I got it right.

Some years ago I showed a cuteness I’d drawn to a gay guy I no longer hang out with, who cracked that he looked like he was one estrogen shot away from a job at Hooters…

Which only goes to show that even gay guys can be sexist jackasses. People like that are why males blessed with that beautiful angelic face often have a bad attitude about it.

Thing is, even allowing for the misogyny of it, there is still the coarseness by which people draw their lines around what is male and what is female. You’d think gay folk of all people would know better, yet I have been asked repeatedly (by that those same guys I no longer hang out with) if I’m really gay because the guys my libido alerts on just aren’t ripped enough, look too feminine, just aren’t manly enough.

Much of this is gay guys reclaiming their masculinity from a culture that blasts a torrent of abuse at gay males over gender conformity. So I get that pushing back thing. But I’m a solid Kinsey 6 regardless of what you think of my tastes in men. In A Coming Out Story episode 20, I have this argument with my libido who assures me that “You like Y chromosomes, just not the big overly muscled ones.” The punchline is when he asks me about photographing the next swim team meet. Even in some gay circles that kind of thing makes me weird. Hey guys…we’re gay…we’re all weird by the majority’s reckoning. Get effin over it!

So…anyway…I was struggling with this one because while I knew exactly what I want it to be I could not get comfortable with making it as sexy as I needed it to be to get my point across. For a while I was going to really go for it on this one and make it completely not safe for work…and I just couldn’t. But I think I know now how to walk right up to that line and still get my point across.

And yes..that’s Mr. Short-Shorts and Go-Go Boots. I first drew him around the same time as I heard You Can Leave Your Hat On played at a club in Laurel where I went to see classmate Rev. Billy Wirtz play. I assumed it was about a straight guy talking his girlfriend into dancing naked for him, but there was a lyric that jumped out at me…

Suspicious minds are talking
Trying to tear us apart
They say that my love is wrong
They don’t know what love is
I know what love is…

That spoke to me, obviously, as a gay man. And then this entire cartoon…mostly…came to mind. When it happens like that I know it’s something I have to get out of me. But this one’s been a struggle. 

A Coming Out Story, episode 29, is…er…coming out slowly. So I’ve been putting up the strips as I’ve finished them, if you want to take a pre-release peak. This is why I’ve been a bit lax in posted to the blog here. I’ve been spending all my free time in the art room.

I have the last two panels up now, but they’re unfinished as yet. As I add details and such I’ll update them. When it’s all finished I’ll post a link, but anyone who’s been following this story already knows where to go.

I don’t know if I’ll continue doing this posting the unfinished strips as I go along. This particular episode is where the story takes an important turn, and soon the kid I once was will have to deal with a wee bit of self discovery…or more specifically the end of denial. After the heart attack last October I’m feeling some pressure to get this thing finished while I still have time to finish it. And there is still a lot of it left to go. This one has been so time consuming. I’m gonna try to make the episodes a bit smaller in size from now on. This one I could have easily split into two separate ones.

The last two strips in episode 29 involve…boots. 60s, early 70s boots guys wore, with a zipper down the side for getting in and out of them. The ones in question were black leather, and before I started work on this episode I had an idea of how to do them in the monochrome/cross hatching technique I’ve been using throughout the series, but I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. Getting a three dimensional lighting effect off a material that’s dark and unreflective to begin with isn’t something I was sure I could do.

This is where my utter lack of formal training really bites me. But I’ve been working with this stuff for decades now, and I had a hunch about how to go about representing it. Plus, and this was a big help, I had a photograph of the incident in question to work from for reference. So I could see what the end result was that I had to get to, I just wasn’t sure I knew how to get there. But I just now gave it a shot and I’m really happy with the outcome. Looks better than I’d hoped. This is how untrained hunt and peck artists get their self respect points.

I’m done with Photoshop and anything basically to do with Adobe. I paid full price for a Windows copy of Photoshop so I could run it on my Windows laptop if my art room Mac crapped out on me in the middle of something I was working on. Some months ago Adobe bricked my copy on the basis that I’d bought a bulk license copy from the reseller and that license had expired…several months before I bought the copy. This despite the fact that Adobe went ahead and activated my copy anyway, and let me keep on using it for two more years. So one morning I start Photoshop and instead if getting my desktop I got a HUGE popup telling me my copy was invalid and demanding I fix the problem. And of course the fix would have been to start renting the product instead of buying a new perpetual license since they don’t sell those anymore. Now it’s all rental software. And I am not the only one by far who isn’t taking that bait. But that’s obviously why they bricked my copy.  It wasn’t a problem when I activated it, and I’ve spent thousands over the years on Adobe software and before now considered myself a loyal customer. But their software rental policy isn’t working out very well for them, judging by the static they’re constantly getting on the social media forums, so they started looking for excuses to turn off anyone’s copies they could, to try and force those of us who were standing pat on CS6, the last perpetual license they sold, to become renters. 

When I called support and complained that I’d paid full price for that copy the corporate droid at the other end told me to feel sorry for all the money Adobe has lost to piracy. At some point I need to make a Sorry For Your Loss sympathy card to send to Adobe for all the money they’ve lost to artists who’ve gone elsewhere due to their software rental scheme. I’ll make it with GIMP.

The current version of GIMP is working out very nicely for my online artwork. In some ways it’s even better than Photoshop. At some point I need to find alternatives to Lightroom. mark my words, sooner or later they will turn off everyone’s perpetual licensed copies because they can. Somewhere buried in all those license agreements you have to agree to, is a clause allowing Adobe to unilaterally change the terms of the agreement whenever they want. When you buy software that can be turned off remotely whenever the maker wants you have bought nothing.

Continuing in our learning path, here’s another of our handy guides to drawing sexy guys. As Bach famously said, Playing the organ is simple…you just hit the keys at the right time and the instrument practically plays itself! Be assured that drawing is just as easy. Simply drag your pencil over the paper in the right places and you never go wrong!

Step 1: Start with a couple of circles for the glasses. In this lesson we will draw simple round frame glasses…

Step 2: Connect the circles together to form a frame. Add some lines for the temple pieces…

Step 3: Now add the rest of him…

Next: Drawing a distinction between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz!

Sketching in preparation for work on A Coming Out Story,  episode 20. It begins another short story arc with me having been tasked by the student newspaper to cover one of our home games…and then I stumble into the object of my thoroughly confused affections and try to strike up a conversation. Little teenage geeks don’t do conversation well however, and especially while the butterflies in their stomach are fluttering up a storm…

I’ve been posing myself a bunch lately to get the posture of my figures right. I do that with the digital SLR on a tripod, and a  remote shutter release with a long extension cable. Then I scroll through the images on the camera’s lcd display to find a good pose and work from there. It doesn’t matter that I’m no longer that lithe (scrawny) teenage boy I once was, all I need is to see how the anatomy works, how the hands and arms reach around to the camera, how the body stands while I’m busy with the camera, legs, torso, head, how the camera bag hangs off the shoulder.  Once I can see it I can draw something that gets the look right.  

I still have the camera I did most of my student newspaper and yearbook stuff with, but as it turns out I also still have that camera bag from back in the day. I’d almost forgotten how it was to have both the camera and that “gadget bag” with spare film, filters, flash, batteries, light meter, and several lenses, hoods and lens cleaner in it slung around me. It was Heavy! Nowadays when I’m a working photographer I have a smaller, lighter bag that just holds a few essential things because with the new DSLRs and modern zoom lenses you don’t really need much extra.

This next story arc is a lot funner than the last one…

Unreasonably proud of myself for squeezing out one tiny little pencil sketch for ACOS tonight, even though I was dog tired all day long because I didn’t get Any sleep last night. Insomnia comes and goes as it damn well pleases. But inking that sketch tomorrow and scanning it in will complete another strip, and the next few should come together pretty quickly too.

But then I have a series of way more complex panels to do… You’ll see why.   In the meantime, Tripping Over You has become my favorite web comic. You should take a look. The creators are Way More Diligent about keeping to their schedule than I ever was.

I just this morning finished the pencils on an episode of A Coming Out Story that’s more than a tad out of sequence…about four episodes after the story arc I’ve been trying to start since…oh…almost a year ago. (sigh) But it got me started again.   The story arc that’s supposed to start appearing next is the flashback to the sex ed class I had back in junior high…it was eighth grade, 1968…I can verify that because I still have my old year books and one of the gym teachers that taught it was only there when I was in eighth grade.   The guy I’m drawing is a composite of him and several other awful gym teachers I had over the years.   I can’t emphasize this enough: everyone in the story except me is either disguised or a composite of several people.   This is particularly true of the object of my affections.   I don’t want anyone embarrassed by things they did ages ago, in what was practically another world when it came to understanding sexual orientation.

The story arc after that one is an imaginary conversation with God.   Both these story arcs serve to get the times I grew up in and my frame of mind during adolescence more fully understood.   But I don’t want to post them out of order.   After these two mini story arcs then the action moves back into the main story arc and I’m at a football game taking photos for the student newspaper, and I go to the snack tent to grab something to eat only to discover You Know Who is working the snack tent.   I’ve been looking forward to drawing this part for literally years now.

It’s taken me a long time to fully appreciate that I’ve got my most creative energy in the morning. The thing about those of use who don’t or can’t earn a living by our artwork is we have regular jobs and that takes time away from the work of doing art.   And the problem with that for most of us is during the work week you try to do things in the evenings after work and that just doesn’t work.   Unless you’re a night person, brain does not function at the levels required then.

This holiday stay-at-home vacation has really driven this point home for me:   I am at my best creatively in the morning.   So I need to work on anything that requires that kind of thinking and concentration at the beginning of my day, and schedule the follow-through, or routine or drudge work in the afternoons. I do it this way I get tons of stuff done. I was already trying this at work, since a lot of what I do there in terms of programming and system engineering is a kind of creative thinking.   So I schedule my day to hopefully do the creative stuff in the morning and then the follow-up and routine stuff in the afternoon and I get a lot done.

But this holiday vacation I’m really seeing it. I get up and go down to the art room and do some work and leave the cleaning chores I’d planned for the afternoon and lo and behold I actually get things done.   What I need to do is get up early so I can have an hour at my drafting table before I go in.

Pencils done on the cartoon for the next issue of OUTLoud…finally. With enough time left over to spend the rest of this lovely day inside carefully doing the inks and charcoal. I am not nearly good enough at this that I can rush it and expect to produce anything other than crap.

One of the great masters of the political cartoon art form British cartoonist David Low, once said each of his cartoons took three days, “two days in labor, and one day removing the appearance of labor.” Mine take about that long, mostly because I spend a ton of time redrawing and correcting. But I can’t put in full days on a cartoon like a full time professional artist can, so I need to have about a week to do one and that’s really putting it behind events for something that’s supposed to be as topical as a political cartoon. I’m doing something about an event that happened earlier this week that won’t appear in the newspaper until next Friday. Hopefully it’s good enough that it won’t matter too much that it’s old news.

Cartooning. I’m trying now to get back into the routine of regularly producing my political cartoons, at least biweekly for Baltimore OUTLoud. This next issue’s cartoon will be the first I’ve done in nearly a year. It’s topic is the Met Opera’s giving the stage to several Russian opera stars, putting on an opera by Tchaikovsky, and refusing to condemn the horrific outbreak of anti-gay violence in Russia. In its way it’s similar to what the International Olympic Committed is doing. They’re all looking the other way to protect their profits and their access to power.

But in order to do this cartoon I needed to go online for images I could reference in the cartoon, images we’ve (most of us paying attention) all seen from the wave of violence in Russia. Images that will stick in the collective memory of our people for generations I am convinced. And that is reminding me now why I needed to take a break from doing the cartoons. Looking at all those pictures makes me so angry I keep having to walk away from the drafting table.

I keep telling myself it’s okay if I can just channel that anger into the cartoon. I keep telling myself that this kind of thing is Exactly where the political cartoon art form can be at its most effective, and that I need to get this out because it’s necessary. But it’s difficult trying to work when I’m this angry.

When you gaze long into an abyss…

From cartoonist Howard Cruse I bought one of the original pages of artwork to his amazing graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby. It’s page one of the story and I feel kinda privileged to have it. That novel is an amazing, powerful work…if you haven’t read it yet you really should.

Howard posted a note about how the artwork contains a correction patch to resolve how he’d initially drawn the story’s main character, with how he’d drawn him as he continued working on the story. It took him years to finish it, and when he got done he could see there were some changes he needed to make on the pages he’d drawn years before.

That’s normal in artwork that’s meant for publication, and those of us who buy originals of this sort of artwork do (or should) value it for precisely that wonderful insight into the artist’s process you get from seeing how the work was made, corrections and all. And I, just a happy amateur, know how it is to look back on what you did years ago and see everything that’s wrong with it. Look at my early strips of A Coming Out Story and compare them with the most current ones and you can see my drawing technique on the series improving pretty drastically. As they say, practice makes perfect…especially when you have no idea what you’re doing. If I wanted to make those early strips look consistent with the new ones I’d pretty much have to redraw them all from scratch.

My work does not have the polish a formally trained and really good professional can put on it. I am a hunt-and-peck draftsman at best. But grant me this at least: I am doing my best. Sometimes I look back on what I’ve done previously and I cringe. Hell, sometimes I look at what I’ve just done and I cringe. But I keep telling myself that if I give up I will never improve, so I keep doing it.

And…I have the need. If you feel it too then you know what I’m talking about. I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. The drawings, the photography, I get no reward for any of it other than that feeling of fulfillment when it’s finally out of me, and, surprisingly, a very small but devoted readership for A Coming Out Story (some of whom keep nudging me from time to time to keep working on the damn thing). So when I sit down to my drafting table I give it everything I have. But I am no professional artist. I know this. Hopefully the story I’m telling makes up for the skills I lack.

I got the inks finished now on episode 15 of A Coming Out Story.   This one has been like pulling teeth.   There’s something to be said for not digging up your past.   Double for not trying to find your first crush after so long.   But I am more determined then ever to get this out of me because I think it’s worthwhile, not just as a personal exercise in exorcising my inner ghosts, but as an accounting of what it was like being a gay teenager in the years after Stonewall, but before the APA decided we weren’t mentally ill anymore.

There’s something to be said for all that advice out there about not searching for your first crush.   But I had to. It’s been since March 2011 that I posted episode 14. There were times I thought I’d never finish this one. When I started this cartoon series I had no idea where the object of my affections in this story was, what his life might be like, or even if he was still alive at all.   After the AIDS Quilt was first unveiled in Washington D.C., I used to have nightmares about walking along its rows and finding one with his name there.   Every time I restarted the search for him it terrified me to think I was simply going to discover he was dead.

Then, shortly after I started this little online comic story I found him.   And…creatively…my head has been a mess ever since.   Somehow in the past couple of weeks I got a head of steam up for it again and I have just zipped through the finishing of the pencils and now the inks.   I finished inking this basically in just two days.   And my head is still as much a mess as it’s ever been these past six years.

I do not understand that right brain side of me anymore.   Not that I ever really did.

[Edited some…]

Baltimore OUTLoud (Hey, I do political cartoons for them!) wins the 2011 aRGies!

Congratulations to my fellow contributors, and especially to my editor, Steve Charing.     Great Job!   We done good!

Wherein our hero learns how useful the school library can be…

Click on the image to go directly to Episode 14, or click Here to go to the main page.