BackMatter: The D. Bethel Sketchbook Now Available

May31
by on 31 May 2017

My first trade paperback collection of a comic series (commonly called a “trade”) was probably the collection of the four-issue miniseries of Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.S for Image Comics. The redundancies were immediately recognized––I already had all four individual issues, but with a collection I didn’t have to risk damaging the inherent value of those issues (spoiler alert: those individual issues are still worth cover price twenty years later) by reading this trade instead.

Most likely my first trade, the 1993 collection of Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.s mini-series.

The best part was the surprise waiting for me at the end of the collection: a few pages worth of development sketches and notes from Jim Lee himself, letting the reader in on how he pulled these characters and story out from a hazy idea into reality and it blew my mind. At that point, for me at least, the comic book industry kept the sausage works carefully hidden behind the curtain, preferring to only show us the shiny, finished product. But here was a rock star of the industry actually showing us messy drawings, half-baked concepts that eventually congealed into full characters that I fell in love with.

I thought such revelations were a one-off, but as I bought more trades––they were fairly rare at that point in the early 1990s––I noticed that most of them had this extra material in the back, to the point now where it’s a standard practice. It’s so standardized, in fact, that this content actually has a name: the back matter. Much like, after a certain point, special features were expected on DVDs and filmmakers would actually plan making that content before/during/after shooting, back matter in trades is something that the creators actively plan for, whether the section brings together all the variant covers for the issues in the collection or it has annotated scripts or other developmental information.

A more recent trend among artists is the release of yearly sketchbooks, collecting drawings––both finished and not––that captures their process for the year. Even though I’ve been making comics for ten years as of 2017, I still don’t think of myself as an artist, for a variety of reasons––mostly due to self-doubt. But since all of these Sketch Fridays and other drawings are posted once online and disappear into the archives, I realized that most of them were good enough to give them another push into the eyes of readers (or potential readers), so that’s where BackMatter: A D. Bethel Sketchbook comes into play.

The BackMatter Sketchbook Collection

A look inside BackMatter.

Long John doesn’t have a trade quite yet––with hope, it one day will––but this would be the kind of stuff I would put into the back matter of a trade. Ideally, I would like to do a Sketch Friday book that has the drawings as well as, at least, some of the accompanying blog posts, but that increases page count and drives up the price.

It was fun to put this book together and, to let you in behind the curtain, it’s loosely organized into three sections (as indicated by the folders into which I organized the files): Personal––meaning non-comic drawings, Long John development drawings, or random doodles, Nerd––meaning fanart of specific comic book or video game characters, and Fan Art––an iteration on the former, but whereas the Nerd section is just drawings of characters, Fan Art is me playing with those characters as well as art inspired by comics, video games, etc. Like I said, it’s a loose organization, but it made sense at the time and is not needed to enjoy the book.

Of course, if you order a copy, I’ll throw in a one-of-a-kind Long John drawing in there for free as well as a Long John bookmark.

With all of that said, again BackMatter is now available for sale on my Etsy store for $5 (plus shipping). It’s a nice little package that you can show your friends or have on the coffee table. Thank you for your support!

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Sketch Fridays #39 – Shockwave, Part 2

May26
by on 26 May 2017

Sketch Fridays #39 – Shockwave

As mentioned last week, Shockwave rounds out the roster of the team Josh Tobey and I created together in high school––as early as 1994, it seems––and have been redesigning for the last month or so using my (our) modern aesthetic sensibilities and tastes. The last remaining character to redesign was one called “Shockwave,” or “the character with electricity powers.” And, as such a description indicates, he was a bit underdeveloped as a character, but they all kind of were. I think that the only character on the team to have a full name (outside of the code name) was Razorpoint (Shane Yashido) and, even then, Shockwave had the most hazy backstory/development of all the characters (with the exception of, perhaps, Backfire because girls are scary).

To that end, Shockwave––who started life as, apparently, a character named “Firespark” who then became “Firestorm” before settling on “Shockwave”––was mostly a tabula rasa character when approaching the redesign. Last week we saw the character’s creator share his crack at the redesign and, this week, I round out this trip down memory lane with my interpretation.

Firestorm, the prototype for Shockwave, drawn in 1994.

Unlike Katana before him where I designed my interpretation before seeing Josh’s reimagining, this time I had seen Josh’s version beforehand and tried my best to not be influenced by what had already been done.

The original character’s power set was basically electricity-based. For the redesigns, both Josh and I started from that foundation. In fact, both he and I had the same thought: as a character that generates electricity, think of him as a conductor––what kind of design could we come up with that could contain that amount of power?

Another (blurry) Firestorm from ’94, based on a pose by Jim Lee.

For my redesign, I again went into the character and how he relates to the premise of this reboot. If all of the members of the team (except Katana, though he may be revealed as a possible source) are infected by this techno-biological virus, then how does it manifest differently for Shockwave against the rest of the team?

My first thought was to go full John Carpenter, body-horror with Shockwave, to make him a mass of banded steel and pipes that was a cross of the blob (from the classic horror movies) and Tetsuo’s final form in Akira. After thinking about that for awhile, I came to a few conclusions: first, that’s gross and hard to draw. Second, of the redesigned characters so far, what hasn’t yet been done? To this point, all of the characters (Backfire and Razorpoint, specifically) have a visible manifestation of the virus and their bodies have become modified amalgams of biological growth and techno-organic infestation.

Which led me to  a simple question: what if you couldn’t see the infection? Which begged the follow-up: what if the reconstitution of flesh into bionics were completely internal?

So, the basic interpretation is that, of all the members of the team, Shockwave looks “uninfected” in that no real techno-organic material has surfaced. Instead, it’s his internal systems and organs that have been affected, the consequence of which seems to allow him to generate massive amounts of electricity. However, as is the case with electricity, it is difficult to manage or control through basic willpower. So, he wears an insulated suit that has technology built into it that allows him not only a modicum of control over this energy, but also allows for a variety of uses.

Development sketches and notes for the Shockwave redesign.

I wanted him to fly, since that was integral to the character back in the ’90s, so I tried to (with my limited knowledge about electricity) reason out a way to do that. So, the gauntlets he wears, with the bar across the palms, allow him to basically act as an electromagnet. He can pull things toward him and push them away and, after much practice, can allow him to levitate, at first, and ultimately fly. On his thighs and on his back are actually batteries that allow him to store excess energy generated as well as to tap into them to give his own systems a boost when he needs extra speed or to let out a huge blast of electricity.

Ultimately, it was fun adding accoutrements to the suit and not have it look too silly (to me) and I feel he has the most overlap, visually, with his old self’s costume. That makes sense because, for both Josh and me, we both apparently had a lot of fun drawing this character in high school and he was basically just a costume.

Looking at these characters now yields a very unexpected response. I thought it would just be a throwaway exercise but, for all of them, I look and see four characters I would actually like to draw and write, to flesh them out (give them names, for one!) develop backstories and a team dynamic and, perhaps, tell their story. I don’t know, but the surprising fallout of this experiment was how inspiring it ended up being. There are more characters in my sketchbooks from that time, but I’ll wait on bringing them out and try doing some other stuff for Sketch Fridays for awhile.

I’ll wrap up with one last really old, embarrassing drawing that has Josh and I drawing our respective Mary Sue characters on the same page. Those early drawing years were fascinating because I was drawing so much and, looking through these sketchbooks, I was improving so fast (the leaps I made in 1994 alone are staggering) that I kind of almost wish I could travel back in time and watch happen in real time. I kind of wish I still had that amount of gusto, but I also know that even though it’s more incremental now, I’m still improving. One thing I know for sure is that if I went back in time and showed fourteen year old Dan the work I’m doing now, he’d hate it. Top to bottom. And then he’d go right back to drawing, getting better with every line.

My character, Venture, with the medieval version of Josh’s character, Katana, in a collaborative drawing from 1994.

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Sketch Fridays #38 – Shockwave

May19
by on 19 May 2017

Sketch Fridays #38 –– Shockwave. Art by Josh Tobey.

With this character, we come to the end of our retrospective redesign of characters Josh and I created in our teenage years; however, we’ll be looking at this character for the next few weeks as, once again, both the character’s original designer, Josh Tobey, and I will be redesigning the character of Shockwave, the final member of our superhero team called, alternatively, Cybers, CyberTech (or “Tek”), CyberNet.

These last few weeks have been incredibly busy for me as the school year wrapped up and I had to wade through the grading mire. So, my redesign will be up next week and, until then, we’ll be focusing on Josh’s design, which makes sense since it is his character.

Of the design, he had this to say:

Redesign was pretty straight forward. I thought of him as a conductor. His suit and facial implants bring an old sci-fi element to his design. Metallic and bulky seemed right with his new design.

Shockwave drawings by Josh from 1994.

Shockwave, as a character, was left rather undeveloped. His original design, while as nebulous as the other characters, had a pretty strong aesthetic. He was kind of “the heavy” of the team. He was the most tricked out, technologically speaking, and his power revolved around electricity and electromagnetism. This allowed him to be the only character with ranged attacks built into his power set, being able to fire blasts of electricity from his hands. He was also able to fly. Beyond that, however, he didn’t really have much of a story. I think the closest thing to a backstory we have for him is a tw0-sentence description that alludes to him being a military man who was a POW at some point. To summarize, even though he wasn’t particularly an actual character, he was probably the most fun for us to draw (tubes! chrome! electric sparks!)

Shockwave by Josh Tobey, from 1994.

This description also notes that “70% of his body is bionics,” and, to be honest, that’s what I remember most about him. Of the team, he was the most extreme case, more man than machine. Kind of like Robocop, I guess (for a bit, he even had a visor very reminiscent of Robocop).

So, like Backfire, Shockwave is ostensibly a clean slate and a redesign can kind of go anywhere.

Since this is Josh’s final contribution to this round of redesigns, I figured I would use this chance to fully embarrass him with even more old drawings of these characters. Created at the same time as the Shockwave drawings above, he apparently went through and drew a standing post and an action pose of each character and, since they’ve all been redesigned, I humbly offer these glimpses into the past to you (and sorry, Josh).

Backfire by Josh from 1994.

Razorpoint by Josh from 1994.

 

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