The Weirdos, Part III: Art So Terrible It Almost Looks Human

August 15th, 2022

Do you ever wake up and wonder what’s real?

When I was a kid, I always dreamed of having my own comic book; as an adult, when I began creating it, I was determined to “do it the right way.”

Paper. Pencils. Ink. Lots of coffee.

Of course, there is no right way to do anything.

And doing The Weirdos like this was both genuinely rewarding for my heart & soul, and an undeniable headache.

Starting with the paper itself.

I knew I would be publishing black & white issues, but I also thought about the future of the series and potentially collecting it as a graphic novel. To do that, I would have to color it; I got into watercolor painting at the beginning of my sobriety, and decided that would be my path if I chose to go so far.

So I drew the entire series, all five issues, on massive pieces of watercolor paper.

Since a regular copier was too small for my medium, I would have to go to FedEx Office to individually scan every piece of paper through their giant scanner.

As for the artwork itself: it’s not easily definable. I see elements of classic superhero art, sure, but also animation, manga, and, especially, newspaper comics like Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes.

It all culminates in something very me and, more importantly, very human.

Doing things on paper often forced me to make hard decisions and leave lines in that irritate me to this day. It also made me really think about emotion and my linework and the most important thing to me: clarity of communication.

Something has become very clear to me five years later (yeah, I can’t believe it either: The Flying Squirrel #1 came out in August 2018!): my very human art was not a detriment to the story, as I duly felt as the issues were released. No, the exact opposite was true: for my very human story to connect like it has, the art — not created in a computer, not through the tools of Photoshop or AI — had to be as human as the characters were.

This isn’t to say that digital art isn’t “as real”; I, myself, made the transition with my Brushfire series, created entirely on tablet.

This is to say that The Weirdos got told in the best possible way I could tell it.

I have recieved so many messages over the years, and a lot of them have had a similar theme: people have been getting burned out on our systems. Even (or especially) the mighty Marvel machine. Their series and films have started to leave some people cold, and they found a warm space when they picked up my book.

Ironically, what they find is what Marvel started doing in the 60’s.

They find flaws. They find people who are anything but perfect, but who have potential, and the ability, like we all do, to get a little better, every single day.

They find something real.

Something very human.