A few things happened since my last weekly post. I don’t have any games to talk about, but I’m (re)learning BlazBlue and casually learning Dead or Alive. As of writing this, there is a stinkbug crawling into my room through the window-mounted air conditioning unit, so I hope that he disappears or that I can get rid of him before he flies directly into my face.

If you’re at all interested in comic book art, you might be familiar with Todd McFarlane. He had a pretty decent run on Amazing Spider-Man, his own adjectiveless Spider-Man run that he drew and wrote like 15 issues of, along with the credit of designing Venom, creating Spawn and co-founding Image Comics. Whether or not you like his art (I personally think the cool factor is strong and it’s technically coherent but lacks much substance), one thing I wish more creators would do is be more transparent with where they started and what tools they used to learn how to draw. Especially for something like comic books.

This brings me to The Art of Todd McFarlane: The Devil’s in the Details, an art book that puts together just about every piece of McFarlane’s legacy with tons and tons and tons of commentary on why he was drawing, what he was drawing, and how. It usually runs somewhere around $30 on Amazon and is a pretty huge book. What interests me most here is the art he shows from his start in the late 1970’s, early 1980’s.

Quick note, the stinkbug revealed itself and accepted death right after I imported this photo. Photo taken using BitCam, if you were wondering – I don’t wanna be stingy about my artistic secrets. It’s a really cool app!

While I can’t track down the exact issues that these drawings are based off of, the excerpt to the left of these drawings gives a good idea and leads me into something everyone does… or should do.

“Once I got ‘the bug’ for comic books, the first thing I did was start to teach myself how to draw. The easiest way to do that was to look at the comic books that I’d bought and try to emulate some of the drawings.”

When any of my non-artistic friends or people who likewise never ingrained drawing as a habit at an early age ask me how to draw or where to start, I can’t even begin to think of a better start than copying. This goes for every last bit of your artistic journey. Most of your favorite artists got their start or continue to learn new things by drawing fan art or copying the lines and forms of art or photos that inspire them or display some technical value that they wish to emulate. If you think I’m lying, Norman Rockwell and Moebius are some of the wisest artists of all time, and they… Well, yeah. As an aside, I believe Moebius copied other comic books early into Blueberry to draw things he didn’t know how to draw, like clouds, but I can’t seem to find examples of this.

But, okay, you probably didn’t need me to tell you that. I think that the discourse around plagiarism and derivative art keeps shifting rapidly, and less than a year ago we saw an uproar of little kids trying to call hard working artists “plagiarists” just for using references because they were still riding the high of HBomberguy’s latest video. If you want any advice on that, then let me tell you that the people who care don’t matter, and the people who matter don’t care because they’re doing the same things you’re doing (unless they’re insecure). But all artists begin with imitation, and if it’s not imitation of other artists, it’s imitation of life itself. I think it’s important to remember that and to remind everyone of it when you catch other people slipping on really childish wishes like being able to draw anything any time with no reference. You might get there in 10 years, but it’s going to be because you got your start copying, even if you’re “talented.”

There are a lot of valuable things to pull from this book. You could even use it as art reference and practice what I’m preaching, but more importantly, I want more books like this to exist and to inspire others to proudly, transparently show off their journey with art. Social media has a pretty significant influence over us, and one of the many things about it that is seldom mentioned is how easy it is for people to hide what they’re really doing. You don’t know the process of your favorite Twitter artist because they think it’s better not to show you. What’s worse than that is that they scoff or moan when you ask what brush settings they use. No other community gatekeeps its information this hard, so I want to try and speak up a little about that. And if you’re wondering, yes I reference everything I draw, and yes I trace a little when first learning how to draw something I’ve never drawn or even seen before. You should too.

This next topic is less about art improvement, copying, social media etc. and is the main “thing that happened” since the last blog post. I already retweeted something about it and have been liking a lot of posts about it, so if you actually care enough about what I have to say to read this far in the first place, you probably already know that Steve Albini passed away on May 7th, 2024. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, he led a few bands of his own such as Big Black and Rapeman, recorded (he preferred to say “record” rather than “produce” which makes perfect sense to me, “production” has so many totally different connotations across genres, regions, music cultures etc.) plenty of 90’s hits such as Nirvana’s In Utero, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, along with a few projects for many smaller or forgotten bands like The Stooges, Six Finger Satellite, Failure and Whitehouse.

Whether or not you like his work or are familiar with it in the first place, Albini left quite a legacy. The thing that impresses me most is his refusal to ever, for lack of better phrase, sell out. He never took royalties on any of the albums he recorded, preferring to just be paid once for a job well done like any other worker, and kept his rates affordable for anyone and everyone to come in and do their thing. There are a few notable things about his recording style, such as his affinity for drums and tendency to drown out the vocals, but he generally let anyone who paid him do whatever they wanted with only the minor or most agreeable tweaks possible. Throughout his career, it always would’ve been the easiest option to ride the success of In Utero into way bigger gigs with way bigger names at way higher rates and with way expensive royalties, but he always valued the artists who were just interested in having their work recorded, no matter his opinion on their music. And he had some scathing opinions on a lot of bands and entire genres.

The best thing you can do, whether you want to honor Steve Albini’s legacy or just live for yourself and your own influences, is turn your ideas and ethics into actions. Hypotheticals are distracting and all those awesome morals in your head don’t actually mean anything if you’re not doing anything with them. It’s good to think about what to do, but you’ll only understand it when you actually do it.

And I swear to god that this is the most important part: if you don’t have that level of respect for yourself now, realize that the most important part of regaining confidence in yourself is accepting the possibility of pain rather than running from it so you can be comfortable with yourself. You don’t even have to fake it until you make it, you just have to make the conscious decision to put yourself in the way of disappointment and frustration until those feelings stop breaking your spirit. For creative people like you and I who live and want, the quiet status quo of avoiding challenge will make you feel miserable and hollow and will have you question everything you’ve ever done, whether you realize it or not.

In fewer words, use your fist and not your mouth.

Thanks for reading.