Todd’s Blog

©Marvel Publishing, Inc.

In case you hadn’t heard, the original art for the very first Spider-Man story from Amazing Fantasy 15 has been donated to the Library of Congress by an as-yet unknown donor. One thing that slipped by me was the surprising revelation that the logo on that first story was pasted over an earlier, completely different version that seems to be part of the art as drawn by Steve Ditko. You can read more HERE, and links to a larger version of the photo ABOVE and the entire PAGE are there.

Fascinating stuff. The logo — really more of a title — that Ditko drew is made of block letters outlined in little scalloped points, and filled with sections of spiderweb. Blake Bell points out that the word is NOT hyphenated, and corrections to the lettering in the story add hyphens to the name, so that was clearly a later addition. Apparently the Ditko logo was connected to the figure by more webbing, which was covered with white paint before printing, leaving just the new logo and the figure.

I don’t think the Ditko version would have ever been used on the cover of the character’s own magazine, it’s too delicate for a cover logo, but it is a fascinating addition to the Spider-Man logo story! Thanks to Stephen Wacker at Marvel for pointing this out.

©DC Comics, Inc.

I love this title. Mark Waid’s writing and the art of George Perez capture all the things that attracted me to comics as a kid: thrilling action, adventure, great characters, humor, fun. Only, they do it better than most of the ones I was reading back then. In lesser hands, this would be a ho-hum formula book: mash together some characters that have nothing to do with each other, let them fight something. Mark makes it so much more than that, and George steps up with art as good as anything in his long and storied career.

Inkers Bob Wiacek and Scott Koblish do a fine job with all that detail, and colorist Tom Smith and letterer Rob Leigh also add to the reading experience. Great work from everyone, as on the page above.

The actual storyline here isn’t that important, really, so I won’t even bother to try to encapsulate it. The journey is more than any such summation. Go, buy, enjoy!

We’re having a major storm here today, the kind called a Nor’easter, as it brings strong wind and rain in from the ocean east and northeast of us. Nothing like as bad as the tornadoes it caused in the midwest, but still quite strong winds. The main casualty in our yard so far is the oak tree right behind our small pond. It was a live tree, but had suffered damage many years ago, probably a lightning strike, and never did very well since. The break shows the interior was partly rotted out.

This was a near thing, just missing the World Series of Birding event by two days. Some years ago there was a Nor’easter right on the day, and it was probably our most miserable birding experience ever, standing for hours in horizontal rain and fierce winds. Much better being home and dry, but hoping no trees come down on the house. I’ve already had to clear branches out of the driveway twice today.

This year’s World Series of Birding went fairly well for our team, the Bluewater Wind CMBO Century Run. The weather could have been better: light rain showers for much of the day, and the birds found could have been higher: we got 138 species, but in all it was a fun day.

It began at the Hidden Valley Ranch in the center of Cape Island with, I think, 20 of the 24 total participants and leaders present for the 5 AM start. Despite what the picture above suggests, none of the actual team were horses. We always begin our count here, and this year, as happens sometimes, we were in a large field with the horses from the riding stable. A large herd this year, about 20 horses. They weren’t countable. The horses followed and nudged us for about the first 10 minutes, looking for carrots or other human-offered snacks, but when we didn’t provide any they lost interest and moved off. One participant said it was the first time she ever birded with one ear on bird calls, the other being nuzzled by a horse.

The skies were clear when we met, but clouds soon moved in, and the air was damp and chilly. Some birds were singing, but we didn’t find as much variety at Hidden Valley as we often do, with only a small number of migrating warblers, vireos and others. We did find and have good looks at Prothonotary Warbler, one of the most visually stunning small birds you are likely to ever see, with a bright yellow body and blue-gray wings, and heard a screech-owl calling, always a tough addition to the list. In case you haven’t read my earlier posts on the subject, this 24-hour event is a fundraiser for conservation organizations. Each team tries to see as many different species as possible in one day, and pledges a certain dollar amount for each species seen. It’s a game, and a competition, but not for money — at least money for the players. By 7:30 we had moved on to our next spot, the Cape May Point State Park with a total thus far of 38 species. Some years we accumulate as many as 75 by then, so things were slow, and as we got to the park, the rain began.

This photo is actually from a little later in the morning as we looked at the beach near the state park, and found our first rarity, shown below.

This immature Lesser Black-backed Gull is one not often seen in the United States, though they do turn up occasionally in Cape May. We were happy to add it to our list. A soggy walk around Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area turned up a small number of additions, as did a walk at The Beanery. A few other brief stops here and there around Cape May Point pulled in a few more.

By lunchtime on the Hawkwatch Platform, around noon, we had 80 species on our list. (That’s Ellen in the lighter green raincoat.) The further you go, the harder it is to find more new ones, and it became obvious that the spring migration had not favored us this year. Our team is called the Century Run because it has always found at least 100 species. Some years that’s been easily accomplished by noon. Not this time. After lunch we moved on to other locations nearby.

Here are some of us at the Nature Conservancy property known locally as The Meadows scanning a group of gulls in a pond there. We found another rarity here, after a tip from another team leaving the scene.

On game day, teams do not generally help each other or share information on their finds, but some exceptions are made. “Whatever you do, don’t spend a lot of time scanning through ALL the gulls in the back pond,” the leader of the other group told us, smiling. We got it. We went there, and looked carefully, and found this all-white gull, an immature Iceland Gull, rarely seen in New Jersey, and almost never at this time of year. No telling what this one is doing here, but we were glad to add him to our list.

By 3 PM the main part of our count came to an end with a reading and comments on the official team checklist, to make sure we all agreed. We came up with a total of 97 species. I’ve been on at least 14 of these Century Runs, and I think this is the only time we didn’t reach 100 species by this point. But, you do your best and get what you get. The second part of the count would now begin, driving to birding hotspots throughout the rest of Cape May County, trying to add to our total before the end of the day. A few participants decided to end their count at this point, but most continued on in a car caravan. We regrouped and looked for birds on Ocean Drive, just north of Cape May, and at Nummy Island, south of Stone Harbor, adding another 20 or so species, including another rare one, Marbled Godwit. That took us well over 100, thankfully, and to 5 PM. Ellen was tired, and asked me to drop her off at home as we headed further north, and close to our house, which I did, before rejoining the group. While I did that they stopped at Beaver Swamp and got the nesting Bald Eagle there.

I rejoined them in Belleplain State Forest, where we picked up many resident songbirds missed earlier, including the Eastern Phoebe, conveniently in a known nest atop a light fixture at a public restroom in a campground. The rain had been tapering off for several hours, and at 7 PM the sun finally came out and the skies cleared. At least it gave us another hour and a half of light, and between Belleplain spots and Jake’s Landing we added more species. As dusk fell at Jake’s we were up to a much better total of 135 species. Some of the group opted to continue on to try for a few night birds like Whip-poor-will, but I was tired and went home at 9 PM. Many participants in the World Series of Birding would still be trying for those last few species until nearly midnight before bringing their team checklist to the official finish line in Cape May. That’s always been described to us as a fun party, with lots of free food. I wouldn’t know — I’ve never been to it! Our team always ends up near our house, and though I’d love to go to the finish line, it’s just too tempting to go home and crawl wearily into bed.

Official totals are up at the WSB site. You’ll find our team total of 138 near the bottom of the list, with the winning team, the Nikon DVOC Lagerhead Shrikes reporting an incredible 229 species! Sure, they covered the whole state, but even so, I don’t know how they do it. It’s not their first win, either.

The 25th annual birding competition is over. There’s a breakfast banquet today in Cape May for any participants who want to attend, where birding stories of intrigue, tears and laughter will be told. I’m home working, but I’m with them in spirit. And many teams will be already making their plans for next year. There’s always next year.

The World Series of Birding begins tonight at midnight. Our team gathers tomorrow morning a little before 5 AM in Cape May. It rained steadily and hard all morning today, but most of that should clear out by tomorrow early, giving us a window of reasonably good weather for the event, before more rain moves in Sunday. Ellen’s been loading her stuff into the car. I’ll wait until tomorrow morning to do that. Looking forward to it, as always!

Skipped my Friday morning birding today, too wet, but went down to the Cape May Bird Observatory for my three-hour volunteer time behind the desk there. It was a madhouse, with teams from all over gathering to get out of the rain, shop, and swap stories. A film crew from “Animal Planet” was there interviewing them. Met two teams from Vermont, one from Spain! So it really is a world event this year.

I’ll report on our day as soon as I can. Check the website above for team results.

©Neil Gaiman and Todd Klein.

This time we’re talking about inks and scanning. Above is the print after both, with most of the text blurred out, which I’m continuing to do so that when you finally get your copy, you can have the pleasure of reading it all then.

For inking this print I used my tried and true inking tools, some shown above. The text was inked with a Speedball dip pen using a C6 point, the smallest wedge-tipped one. I don’t actually dip the pen in the ink bottle, though, I fill the small reservoir above the point with the ink dropper from the bottle. One or two drops is all you need. For the titles, initial capital B and borders I used Faber-Castell TG1-S technical drawing pens, like the one above. The size marker on it says it’s a size 1 (0.40mm), but that’s not true. I actually have a size 0 (0.35mm) point in that pen, the smallest size I use. The ink is Calli Jet Black India #010, used in both the dip pen and the tech pen. It’s part of a supply I bought about 10 years ago, don’t know if it’s still available or not. If I were buying ink today, I’d go with Higgins Super Black, which is also fine for lettering.

Here’s my drawing board setup, showing some of the tools used to create the inked print. Circle and oval templates were used on the titles and borders, as well as the T-square and triangle. A smaller triangle, hard to see at right, and a small french curve were also used on the titles. The text was all lettered freehand. The circle for the moon was, of course, done with the circle template. The geese and candles were inked freehand with the tech pens, the 0 for outlines, larger points for filling in. When it was all inked to my satisfaction (and, remarkably, I didn’t need to paint out any large mistakes with white paint and redo), I erased the remaining pencil lines with a white Magic-Rub eraser and brushed the crumbs off with the crumb brush, seen at upper right. Now I was ready to scan it.

My scanner is a Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL, which has a scan area of about 12 by 17 inches. This is larger than most scanners, but ideal for scanning comics art, as you can do the entire page in one go, in most cases. (Occasionally comics art is done larger than 11 by 17, but that’s rare.) Above is the upper left corner as scanned, actual size, without any adjustments except for a little increase in contrast. It looks pretty good, but I know from experience that there are little imperfections that I can improve in Adobe Photoshop, and that process is my next step. First I convert the color scan to grayscale, then increase the contrast even more to make sure all my black areas look solid black, and to eliminate any ghosts of pencil lines or dirt. Then I convert the grayscale to bitmap, a file format that has only black or white. My original scan is at 600dpi, so even though the bitmap will change all edges to hard lines, it will still look fine.

Here’s a closeup of just the decorative B, in bitmap format, and with minor imperfections cleaned up. You can see how the edges are now very precise, but the cleanups are probably not evident, so I’ll show you a better, and closer, example.

Here’s a raw scan of part of the title. Notice how the lower points of the I and S are not very well pointed. And there are little extra blobs of ink in other areas that I’ll remove in Photoshop, using the selection and eraser tools.

Here’s the same area, in bitmap format, with all the edges and points fixed. This process takes hours, but it gives me the result I’m looking for. Most of the changes are subtle, but do affect the final printed result enough to make it worth doing. And since I’ve inked the entire print at actual printed size, I feel it’s a great help to go through the process. When I hand-letter comics pages (rarely now), I’m lettering at a larger size than it will be printed. Most comics art is reduced to between 64 and 66 percent before printing. This lessens the impact of small imperfections in my work.

Some tiny details can be lost in this process, but you can’t have everything. For instance, above is a section of raw scan showing some of the geese.

Here’s the lead goose in bitmap format, enlarged, as it will appear on the print. As you can see, some of the shading in the wings has filled in. But it still works fine for me.

When the fixes are finished, I convert the entire scan back to grayscale format, because I’m not done with the art yet. I now want to add a background of light gray texture showing light radiating from the moon, and around that, gray clouds, making a more convincing night scene behind all the text. I’ll talk about how I did that next time.

©DC Comics, Inc.

I haven’t seen the video this is tied to, but I have read and enjoyed the earlier series by writer/artist Darwyn Cooke, and this one is equally good. Cooke’s style, particularly his way of drawing familiar DC superheroes, took a little time for me to get used to, but once I did, I came to really enjoy it. Cooke’s background is clearly animation, and like Bruce Timm, he uses a stylized approach, but with much more texture and detail than Timm.

His storytelling and dialogue are top-notch, and evoke the past glories of the characters while maintaining a fresh feel, not an easy thing to do. Darwyn draws the main story here, and is joined on others by J. Bone and David Bullock, obviously from the same animation background. All three stories, featuring Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman (above), Robin and Kid Flash, and Wonder Woman and Black Canary, are a lot of fun, and there are some cool bonus pages featuring character designs and other material from the video, plus an amusing recreation of old DC house ads. A nice package, and certainly recommended.

©DC Comics, Inc.

I’m not particularly fond of westerns, but I am fond of good stories, and this is one. I missed the first run of BAT LASH in 1968, and only know of him from a few brief guest spots and by reputation, which has always been high among comics folks. I did know that his adventures were written, or co-written by Sergio Aragones, and when I saw that he was also working on this new series, with art by the great western artist John Severin, I thought I’d try it.

I believe this story begins well before any earlier adventures of the character, as we see him here as a teenager, part of a large family, and in romantic pursuit of the daughter of a nearby rancher. As the girl is of a much higher station in life, this gets the lad in deep trouble in no time, and he is only rescued with the help of some Indian friends. Sergio has plotted a non-stop action-filled adventure, but with plenty of emotional content among the characters, very much in the vein of the best western films. Bat is the young daredevil, with enemies on many sides. His family has many of the same enemies, and we are soon shown that it’s all about the land they’re on, which others want, and will use any excuse to get. Local law is corrupt, and in the hand of the big landowners. Bat and his family stand little chance against them, but they fight bravely for what they have.

Severin’s art is fine, though at times shows his age in some of the drawing, especially faces. But he really knows this stuff, and it shows. And his storytelling is always terrific. The dialogue by Peter Brandvold is excellent. I believe he’s a western author, and I don’t know that he’s done comics before, but he gets it. None of the usual mistakes made by novelists writing comics are evident here. Letterer Rob Leigh gets to have fun with western and Victorian fonts on the title pages, and does a good job throughout, as does colorist Steve Buccellato.

I hear this isn’t selling well, and that’s a shame. I don’t know that the original series did either, but it survives in the memories of long-time fans. This new series will too, I think. Highly recommended!

I mentioned on Friday that Ellen was sleeping in that morning. It’s because the night before she’d had the first appearance in this show at her skating rink in Wilmington, Delaware. Figure skating is Ellen’s hobby/recreation, and she’s been going there about once a week for the last twelve years, taking lessons from several instructors. Every spring they put on a show, and this is the first time Ellen’s been in it. She always said no because it meant going there several extra evenings and weekdays for practice and rehearsal, but this year her instructor Courtney talked her into it. Ellen’s part was small, the cast huge, but I wanted to see it, and last night (Saturday) I went with her for the final performance.

It was a fun show, and I enjoyed it. Most of the numbers featured groups of kids of various ages, sometimes with a few adults. Interspersed were older, more advanced teens, and at the very end, several professional skaters, culminating in the big star appearance, Johnny Weir, US National Champion and World Bronze Medalist this year. I took pictures, but no flash was allowed, so they’re mostly impressionisticly blurred. Above is the opening “Hollywood” number, which went pretty well. Ellen said the first night the “D” was upside down and backwards.

Other numbers I liked were a group of small boys all dressed like Charlie Chaplin, complete with suits, canes, derby hats and mustaches. Typically they wobbled and fell a lot, but dressed like Chaplins it was funny and appropriate. At the end of the first half, an elaborate Cinderella routine with several numbers was quite impressive, and had some clever props, such as the carriage above pulled by older boys.

Ellen’s moment came near the beginning of the second half, in the number “Aquarius”, song from the musical “Hair.” Ellen’s part was to bring out “the moon,” a lighted globe, and raise it at the correct point in the lyrics, (”when the moon is in the second house”), then she handed it off to someone else and skated around a bit more. I thought she did fine, though she gets nervous, and said she did better the other two nights. I don’t think she’s cut out for show biz, but it was a good experience for her.

Shown here at the end are show stars Austrian medalist Victor Pfeifer, U.S. National Bronze Medalists Kimberly Navarro and Brent Bommentre, and Johnny Weir. All were terrific, as were some of the other up and comers that skate in Wilmington and also performed.

Ellen was thrilled to get to meet Johnny backstage. We’ve been watching him skate on TV for the last few years, and his performances at this year’s World Championships were excellent. The expected American rivalry we thought would happen there between him and Evan Lysacek didn’t happen because Lysacek was injured and had to miss the competition, but Johnny did quite well.

After the show I was able to use flash for one much better picture of Ellen in her costume. This might be her only performance in a skating show, but at least she can say she was on the ice with Johnny Weir, at least briefly!

All images ©Neil Gaiman and Todd Klein

While the production of these signed prints might seem like a savvy business plan, in fact I kind of happened on it. After thinking about it for years, in January 2007 I started working on a website for myself. Looking at other websites I liked, I noted that all of them had an “items for sale” section of some kind, and I thought I should do that, too. I put together a short list of things to sell, including two 11 by 17 inch prints I had made in the 1990s, and when the website launched in July 2007, they were on my BUY STUFF page.

For the first few weeks I made sales, but that dropped off to almost nothing by the end of July, and I pondered what new things I could do to add to the list. New prints of my own lettering was an option, but I couldn’t think of anything really novel in that line. Then it occurred to me to try collaborating with some of the popular and well-liked creators I’d been working with for years. The first two that came to mind were Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Those were names that could get some attention and generate sales. Of the two, I was in touch more regularly with Alan, so I started with him, and we produced “Alphabets of Desire,” which to my shock was a runaway hit, with the first printing selling out in less than three days.

Okay, then, success! And, why not more? Within days of putting Alan’s print on sale in early December I emailed Neil about the possibility of him writing one for me. The answer came back, “Sure.” I was delighted to hear it, but reprinting Alan’s kept me busy for a few months. In March I brought it up again, and we talked on the phone. Neil is always busy, but he promised to try to come up with something. I threw out a few loose ideas, but Neil went his own way ultimately, which I thought was fine.

After a month of waiting, and several nagging emails, on April 23rd I received the text of “Before You Read This” from Neil, in an email titled “Shorter Than Alan’s”. Neil had complained about having to follow Alan, and I sympathized. We both thought he should go in a completely different direction, and he has. The piece is a free-verse poem about 400 words long. I thought it was perfect for a print: engaging, yet chilling. Mysterious, but with touches of dark humor. The kind of thing that would encourage rereading and rumination. So, now the ball was in my court. I told Neil I thought there’d be room for some images, things mentioned in the text. I knew I wanted to include some black candles (a slight nod to STARDUST), and a moonlit scene of flying geese.

The first thing I needed to focus on was the style for the words. My first thought was something art deco. On a piece of copy paper I penciled out a large decorative B, a few samples of “EFORE”, and then an alphabet came forth rather quickly, both upper and lower case. A bit art deco with additional quirks, perhaps influenced by Frank C. Papé, illustrator of the works of James Branch Cabell, an author Neil and I both like. Papé put fancifully lettered captions on many of his illustrations. Overall, the alphabet is a mix of shapes that appeal to me, and that’s really the closest I can come to an origin for it. I thought it would work fine for this print.

The full layout began this article, here’s a closer look at the upper left corner. Some of the letters changed a bit as I went along, but it’s essentially what was in the design sample. When lettering comics pages by hand I usually don’t have time to do this kind of pencil layout, but here I thought it essential, so I could pinpoint any problem areas, and make sure the text fit in two columns. Fitting the text is always the hardest part. The one shown here is actually the third try, the others were either too long or too short. I had to erase and start over, after making tiny adustments in the Ames Guide I was using to put in the horizontal guidelines. For this version I had to make some small adjustments and changes to the text. I ran this pencilled version by Neil, with a list of the changes, and he thought they were fine, though he did make one new word choice.

For the geese I began with a photo which I manipulated in Photoshop to create a high-contrast image, seen above. I then put this on my light box and loosely traced the geese onto my layout, moving them as needed, and reusing some, not using others. Here’s the result:

After I made this scan of the pencils I actually added a few more as well, since I had room in the right places. The entire layout came together successfully, I think. I only indicated the moon as a circle, I’d be doing more with that in later stages. By the way, this was pencilled on Strathmore one-ply paper with a “plate” or smooth finish, my favorite surface for hand-lettering. I used to be able to buy 2-ply and 3-ply, or thicker versions. I don’t know if Strathmore is even making this particular paper anymore, but I still have a supply of one-ply from years ago, and that’s what I used.

Next time I’ll discuss inks, scanning and more.