Red Thunder: Lost in the Realm Below

The title says it all. This is a Secret Heart Attack Special that sits a bit outside of the main narrative but informs it. After the events of issue 1, I wanted to do a standalone story where we get to know Red Thunder a bit better, and this is the tale that emerged:

Cover to Red Thunder: Lost in the Realm Below (not final).

This is pretty close to the final cover (although I can see bits here and there that I might tweak.) I’m looking at all the Underworld stories I can (Inanna, Orpheus, Inferno) and channelling a bit of Gustav Doré and Frank Quitely for this. I’m also resurrecting an old character I created almost 20 years ago, in 2005. Her name is “Yaya Kadabra” and she first appeared in the Project: Hero anthology I co-edited with Elbert Or. So much fun:

Cover for Project: Hero by Marco Dimaano, circa 2005. The anthology included works by Dean Alfar, Vincent Michael Simbulan, Nikki Alfar and more, and was edited by myself and Elbert Or.

“Yaya Kadabra: Magic Caregiver” is an 8-page comic I wrote and drew when I was much younger, and she’s a very Filipino magic character with a “cat of shadows” named Anino. She’s much older now, and serves as a kind of mentorship role in this story, guiding the plot. I think she’s awesome, and it makes me want to include her in the main Secret Heart Attack narrative.

Yaya Kadabra: original character design and new sketches.

The whole thing is scripted and laid out, and I’m halfway through pencils. I’m aiming to have it out by August, but we’ll see. I’m juggling this with a new DC Comics project and another poster thing for Live Nations, plus a bunch of awesome comics-related events for my day job at The Art Students League of New York. It’s a busy time but I’m kind of loving it, as all these different projects are conceptually feeding into each other with quite a bit of harmony.

This is the stuff I had in the back of my head when I set up Secret Heart Attack. I wanted a whole universe to play with, populated by characters I could take anywhere with whatever story excited me. So (as always) there are more stories bubbling in the background. I have a standalone Mother Earth story in the hopper, an Unmaker tale, Gigaboy, and more.

I’m also about halfway through Secret Heart Attack #2, which I’m taking my time with. It’s Act 2 of the story and I want to make sure it’s super excellent before sending it to print. It will be quite a bit longer (at least 30 pages) and I’m taking my time with it. Hopefully Red Thunder tides people over while waiting.

Lastly: I can’t believe this is my first blog post of the year! I’ve lately been more active on Instagram and YouTube, so make sure to follow me over there. Happy spring! Summer is on its way! ☀️

Instagram Apocalypse

So this week has been a special little social media armageddon for me.

My Instagram account (which I’ve built up over the last 14 years to 5k followers) was hacked on Monday. The attacker had taken over one of my friends’ accounts and pretended to be them, messaged and phished me. I was doing grocery at the time, my brain full of a recipe list I was trying to recall as I hunted down ingredients, when I received a message like this:

And, distracted and multitasking as I was, I thoughtlessly did as they instructed, thinking I was “helping them.” I was, except “them” was not who I thought. Within seconds of a verification link, they had locked me out of my account, changed all my credentials and edited my username with underscores and numbers.

I’ve spent the rest of the week since trying in vain to contact support via both Instagram and Facebook, while the hacker posted Bitcoin crypto-spam on my Stories and attempted to swindle more people out of their information while pretending to be me.

Wednesday night was the worst, as that’s when the hacker messaged pretty much everyone in my DMs, attempting to steal more accounts. Most of them saw through it and contacted me separately, confirming that I was, indeed, hacked. A few were sadly hacked as well.

Photo: Lorenzo Di Cola | NurPhoto via Getty Images

This whole thing has been a nightmare. I’ve been struggling with feelings of despair and guilt. It’s one thing to lose an account which I’ve lovingly curated and built up over years. It holds a lot of memories. I’ve made some very dear friends on that account, and it’s how I’ve maintained many relationships as I’ve moved continents.

But it’s quite another thing to have a malicious entity use your face and name to steal other people’s information. The thought of that really breaks my heart.

I’ve been encouraging everyone to please report the account. This past week, it’s become clearer and clearer to me that the likelihood of me reclaiming that account is very low. The hacker really did a number on me, and the revision of my username basically invalidates any backup security codes I had.

But I’m hoping that if enough people report the account, Instagram will take it down. The fact that it exists right now, using my identity in malicious ways, is monstrous and offensive to me. I just want it gone.

In the meantime, I’m processing the loss of this.

As a tool for connecting to people, I really really valued Instagram. My daily habits included posting to Stories (a lot of dog videos, hellos and check-ins with whatever I was currently drawing.) I used it to help motivate my work. And while I can work without it, I miss having that feedback.

It’s going to be a slog building everything back up.

Ce’st la vie. Aside from being more careful with security, I’m looking at this as a reminder to not get so attached to one platform. I’m happy I still have this blog, my YouTube channel, Twitter and heck, even my Facebook account. At least I still have some of my network of family and friends on there.

For the time being, I’m going to keep trying to get the account back.

At this point, it’s just a repetitive circle of trying to get Instagram’s automated security to validate my identity. I’m told some people managed to get back in after weeks and months, so even in this dire apocalypse, hope springs eternal.

Slow is Steady is Fast

A few fragments this morning:

1.

I took the title up top from Cartoon Gravity this morning, an excellent newsletter that I just discovered:

"The US Navy Seals (I think) have a thing that they drill endlessly into new recruits: 'Slow is steady, and steady is fast.' I heard it years ago and I still think about it all the time; it's about the most useful thing I've ever learned. (Try it out next time you're frantically trying to put all your shit away in time to get off a train as it pulls into the station). Up until now, though, I had never thought to apply it to my to do list. But it turns out that if I take some extra time organising my day, it makes that day a little more effective."

More on Trello, automations and a bunch of interesting links I've yet to dig into.

But I really like that phrase, "slow is steady, and steady is fast."

When I think about it, it applies to so many things, from resistance training and weight loss to creative habits and making a book. I have a sprinter in me that thrills at the idea of rushing breathlessly to the finish line and making it by the skin of my teeth, but that is neither a healthy or sustainable way to pursue one's goals.

2.

Two weeks ago, I had to film and handle a/v for a live event and TBH mismanaged the entire affair. Part of it was a perfect storm of miscommunications and technical failures, but thinking back on it, I suspect a major personal failure was letting the anxiety of rushing overwhelm me.

Last night I had to film another live talk (with the amazing Laura Raicovich), and this time I built in a TON of set-up time into my schedule. This allowed me to slowly and deliberately check all connections and make triply sure that everything was in working order. It left me with about 40mins of time to spare before the event, but the balance to that awkward waiting time was that nothing was rushed. The set-up was immaculate, and the event that followed was the same.

I had some really good conversations over dinner and drinks after. We discussed institutional structures, the temptation toward stasis, the problem with neutrality (it's not actually 'neutral' but a vote for the status quo) and the ethics of speech. We also talked about Steven Universe, Neil Gaiman, YA books and the tragic fate of legendary gig space Maxwell's Tavern. All in all, a good night.

3.

Here's a shot of what's currently on my desk. Moon Knight is on my mind. I've been enjoying the show so far, and the second episode in particularly satisfying. I also like how they've fused his original costume with the aesthetics of an Egyptian mummy, really leaning into the iconography while fulfilling the palette and silhouette of the original comics costume.

Work proceeds apace on the graphic novel, though I am a few pages behind.

There's an unexpected density to the visuals that I'm quite liking, and it's forcing me to linger on moments that I breezed through when I wrote the outline. I've been posting brief glimpses of it to my Stories on Instagram as I labor away at it during the interstitial moments of my day--on the bus, during breaks, etcetera. I'm thinking I might take some vacation days from work later this month just so I can catch up on my schedule. 

Speaking of which, I'd better wrap this up. It's Friday and I'm going to hit the gym, work and everything else super hard today. End the week strong. 💪

Andrew Drilon / New York / 4.8.2022

The Wreck of a Perfect Idea

Aimee Bender is one of my favorite writers ever. Her stories were foundational in my education as a writer, particularly “The Rememberer”—about a slow motion breakup between a woman and her boyfriend, who is experiencing “a reverse evolution” from human to ape and so on. Her stories are casually strange and deeply humanistic, exploring themes of cruelty, hope and self-actualization, and for all their prose they often feel like works of poetry: thoughtful, elegant, crystalline.

She has a new essay on Lithub tackling the idea of “writing without a plan” and quoting a great line from Iris Murdoch, “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”

Not just some books. Every book. And by extension, every piece of art.

…But there is a very important implication worth examining that is tucked inside his statement, upon which it rests: if the thing on the page does not match the thing in the mind, then there must be an actual thing in the mind that is perfect and whole. What appears the page, then, is just a weak, disappointing copy.

But is there any such thing in the mind? Is it even a thing?

It’s a thought worth mulling over. I’m working on a book right now and I’m struggling with plans and failsafes and perfect structures that I’ve laid out in a spreadsheet, a kind of notional scaffolding which has (worryingly) begun to bend and crack under the weight of reality. And I’m only 10% done with pages.

My limitations as a cartoonist, my lack of time, the limits of my resources—all of these things have begun to put pressure on my perfect plans, and every page that comes out feels malformed, taunting me to double-back.

Aimee seems to have gone through something similar:

Soon after that lunch, I felt myself struggling with a novel that I later drawered (and later than that, pillaged). I wrote a sign on a piece of printer paper with a Sharpie and stuck it above my computer that said: There is no book in your mind.

What I wanted to tell myself, and to tell John, and what I would learn in the future from Iris Murdoch, was just that: There isn’t necessarily a perfect image or story or moment you are transmitting to the page. I kept trying to force that novel into a shape I had imagined for it, and it simply didn’t work.

I love that thought: “If there is no book in my mind, then the only way I can find a book is by writing it.”

Read the full essay HERE.

Blogging this now as a reminder. I’m going to MoCCA Arts Fest today to buy rare euro comics and minicomic treasures for inspiration, but it’s back to the salt mines in the morning. Happy Saturday!

Andrew Drilon / New York / 4.2.2022

The Fall is Eerily Prophetic

Just finished reading The Fall vol. 1, Image Comics’ reprint of the Swiss apocalyptic adventure series by cartoonist Jared Muralt. Honestly, Muralt’s art is what primarily attracted me to the book—his ligne claire style coupled with these gorgeous digital colors (that balance warms and cools with such confident clarity) are just pure refined sugar for my eyes. Even the graphic design is excellent. Check out the cover:

I mean, how can you resist, right? This, coupled with Image Comics’ larger-than-usual size (it’s like 8.5x11, sort off European size) and a reasonable price point ($16.99 for 152 densely-paneled pages including process-oriented extras) made it an auto-purchase.

I’m familiar with Muralt’s art from his Instagram, as I apparently impulse-followed him years ago without knowing he made comics. His work reminds me of Aedena-era Moebius: very clean and expressive and interested in the solidity of the environment. His recent posts about this Buglands comic present an imaginative world that feels both whimsical and joyful:

The Fall, however, is anything but whimsical and joyful. I actually got quite depressed while reading it. Translated from German and borrowing bitter flavors from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it chronicles a world falling apart from the perspective of a family struggling to hold itself together. A global pandemic coupled with an economic collapse slowly destroys society over the course of the book, leaving its characters scrambling for food, water and shelter as they navigate an increasingly dangerous world. A callous military enforces starvation-inducing quarantines, plague-ridden bodies are piled up along highways, pets are slaughtered for food and what begins as unease builds surely to an almost overwhelming despair by the book’s midpoint.

I should stress, though, that none of this is conveyed in a melodramatic manner. Muralt’s layouts and shot choices create a kind of clinical distance from all the action. We never linger on gore or zoom in on death. Most of it is implied or seen in the distance. The focus remains squarely on our characters as they grapple with their new reality from their limited viewpoint. It’s a very tasteful and sobering way to tell this story. When we finally get close to the action (like in this early scene where the father journeys to the center of the city with his children to find his wife) it feels like we’re being enveloped in chaos.

Honestly, the whole experience is kind of exhausting. The plot pretty much steamrolls the characters into worse and worse situations, doling out just enough hope to keep you reading, only to snatch it away at the last minute. It doesn’t even resolve by the end of the book, promising future volumes (which I’m not sure I’ll even want to pick up.) If it weren’t for the artwork I probably would’ve given up halfway, not for any lack of craft, but because it’s just so thoroughly depressing. Though it wasn’t quite as dire as this comic, having lived through the chaos of the last two years, this isn’t the kind of narrative experience I want to indulge in right now. It’s too close to real life, and too soon.

What’s interesting though:for all of The Fall’s plot similarities to the current global situation, it was apparently created three years before COVID-19. Yet another instance of comics presaging the future!

All that said: I don’t regret picking up this book. Again, Muralt’s art is worth the price of entry alone. There’s also a nice interview in the back plus sketches and process shots, which I always love in a comic book. Just be aware of potentially triggering subject matter, as I know I’m not alone in feeling tired of the pandemic. It was quite fun reading The Walking Dead back in 2003 but in 2021 this kind of story just doesn’t do it for me anymore.

On Burning Out

It’s mid-August in New York and I’m writing here again for the first time in over a month. If you detect a little guilt in my tone, it’s because even though there isn’t a huge audience for this little blog (which was part of the point of starting it) I set a goal for myself to do at least one of these a week.

It’s been six weeks since I hit that goal. There are reasons for this, which will sound like excuses but they’re not.

In short: July was an intense month.

At work, we launched a new space for artists and a video series that I’m writing, filming and hosting. On the social front, I had family visits from two different countries. They’d both gone through a long and brutal quarantine, and so I tried to give them as much time as I could during their stay. I also started on a few new projects, spurred on by my approved work permit and an eagerness to pursue paying projects. All this on top of the YouTube channel, a running habit, setting up a store and feeding social media.

These are all good things, of course. Just too many at the same time. (Like I said: reasons, not excuses.)

And so: I may have burned myself out a bit.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. Usually, when I burn out, it’s preceded by a successful period of prolific output. I get excited because things are working just as planned. People around me get excited. I commit to more things and I pile on, because I feel invincible.

“I can do it all,” I tell myself, and before I know it, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Downtime is the first to go, and adequate rest with it. Quality starts to slip. I wear myself out meeting every task. Something in the machine fizzles, sparks and spirals out of control. BOOM. Crash and burn.

This is a pattern that has gotten less dramatic over the years. This time, there was no crash-and-burn.

July was busy, but everything went as intended, minus those blog posts. I’ve gotten better at recognizing when I’m about to hit my limit and pulling back. We are our own worst taskmasters sometimes. Remember: to thyself be kind.

Yesterday was Free Comic Book Day and I took the entire day off: went to Forbidden Planet, picked up a bunch of books and devoured them at a coffee shop, on the train home and for the rest of the evening until I feel asleep. Today, I’m still indulging in a bit of healing over my Sunday chores. I’m writing this now after an epic laundry-folding session, letting the words unspool and sit on the page just so. The stress is fading. I feel relief.

Writing this has been such a comfort. I hope it’s been a comfort to read. More soon.

Andrew Drilon / New York / 8.15.2021

Between Every Rainbow

This is one of my favorite strips from Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac, the middle part of an epic serialized story in 2005 wherein Danders the guinea pig gets lost in the city as he tries to make his way back to his cage in the preschool:

I suspect it’s a micro-parody of Homeward Bound and all those animals-quest-for-home stories.

Speaking of, here’s a panel from WE3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely:

He is indeed a GUD DOG. God, this comic is so good, I tear up every time I think about it. If you get the re-released version, they threw in a few more pages that weren’t the original. The climactic “IS COAT NOT WE” moment gets shown and some other nice bits.

It makes me think about Morrison’s “hyper-compression” technique and how much story he actually leaves out of most of this work. Think of all the little scenes we’re missing when we read or watch anything; what beautiful interstitial moments are often left on the cutting room floor? Think of how cruel you have to be to abandon the inbetween.

I was dog-sitting this past weekend, which is probably why I’m ruminating on animals seeking home. We walked around Hell’s Kitchen several times, enjoying the vibes of the Pride Month, where rainbow flags fly high from the tops of buildings and sparkle from people’s clothes.

New York City lifted its restrictions this month and all the festivities feel like people have forgotten we’re still working through a global pandemic, which is a bit unnerving. I wore a mask the whole time while the dog trotted next to me, happily oblivious to any of these complexities. Little anxieties welled up between our steps, between every rainbow. But the celebratory vibe persisted, and we made it home okay.

The Studio In Your Head

As some of you may have noticed, over the last few months, I’ve been nonstop obsessed about the iPad Pro. I’ve made several videos on this.

“Obsessed” is such a good word for it. So much of my mind space has been dedicated to unpicking all of its advantages and disadvantages in the same way I would, say, a dip pen or walnut ink. I think it’s natural for artists to feel this way, as art tools often feel like superpowers. Except instead of this one giving you super-strength or invisibility or the ability to do useless somersaults, art tools can give you smooth gradients or steady lines or chunky textures, the ability to animate or letter like the pros.

And the iPad Pro has really come super far since its inception a decade ago as a “large iPhone”—now, paired with the Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard, it’s turning into what is, for me, the ideal mobile comics-makings studio.

Anyway, I go into it in more detail in the video below:

Spoilers: after much hullabaloo, I ended up returning the M1 iPad Pro. Why did I do that, after so much excitement? Well, because I can’t afford it. Or, more properly: given my limited financial resources, I don’t think it’s worth the money. And that came down to the way the iPad manages RAM, or rather limits it, so that programs that SHOULD be able to use 16 gigabytes are hampered by the operating system.

After publishing this video review, I thought the story was over, and I would merrily traipse into the sunset with my less-RAMmed but just-as-capable 2018 iPad. But then! Last night! I noticed 9to5mac published this article based on the latest developer beta of iPadOS 15:

“A newly documented entitlement will allow app developers to request privileged access to RAM on iOS and iPadOS,” writes 9to5mac.

“A newly documented entitlement will allow app developers to request privileged access to RAM on iOS and iPadOS,” writes 9to5mac.

What does this mean? Well, no doubt it means that, come the big September update, apps like Procreate and Clip Studio will be updating to take advantage of all that extra RAM and we’ll finally get all those sweet, sweet layers the iPad provides. It also means my video isn’t going to age very well. I’ll probably have to make a follow-up video correcting my assessment if things progress accordingly.

My hope is that when iPadOS updates this September, all the art apps I use follow suit. And THEN maybe I’ll think about buying the latest iPad Pro with 16GB RAM. Times like these, I am reminded of how patience is a virtue I often lack.

Anyway, while waiting for developers to work their magic, I decided to test out Clip Studio on the iPad today. I already own and like it on the PC but the iPad version is subscription-based, which has turned me off until now. My friend Luciano Vecchio does comics for Marvel using this program on the iPad, so I should have been testing it earlier, seeing as he gets such beautiful results out of it. Here’s my first doodle from this morning:

It’s been really promising. I’ve switched on the 3-month free trial and I’ll be putting it through its paces for an upcoming comic I’m working on. I still have to give it a project name. Maybe Project Inside? I dunno.

Wow, this blog post really turned into a bit of a babble today, huh? I’m not sure why I called it “The Studio In Your Head.” I guess it’s something to do with how we want our tools to align with how we envision ourselves using them? Get the real-world studio to match up with the one in your imagination; that kind of thing.

I hope you’re all having a good week. July is almost here, and we’re well into the heart of summer. Talk soon. 💭

Fragments in the Void

Today’s bus sketch.

Today’s bus sketch.

Okay, so I’m just starting a quick sentence to note down that I don’t feel like I have anything to write about today.

My mind keeps coming back to that quote by Austin Kleon, about how you don’t write daily to say things that you already have to to say—instead, you’re writing to figure out your thoughts and parse them out in words. (Note to self: find the actual wording of this quote for later.)

I think I get the principle of it, but its practice and execution feels much easier said than done. Obviously, as a human being, I have no shortage of thoughts, but they’re mostly disjointed, scattered fragments that often don’t cohere into anything that resembles all the lovely writing I read on a daily basis.

This is compounded by the info-dense world we live in, where an ocean of notifications, messages and ideas threaten to drown us in information. So many of my day-to-day musings never resolve into anything substantial. Incomplete, they float off into the void, conclusions aborted, as my attention divides across manifold distractions.

I suspect this is the same for everyone. Good writers just have the clarity of purpose, and probably a good measure of patience, to organize their thoughts on paper.

That’s where the craft of it comes in, I guess. Find a nugget of a fragment of a whisper of a thread, and braid it together with some offhand knowledge. Splice in some memories and wrap it up in language to produce a readable string of sentences. I dream of doing this without struggle, letting the words flow out of me the way I imagine it does for the great writers of our species. Until then, I’ll keep plugging away at it, like Murakami on a marathon, focused on the journey rather than the destination, each word a step that takes you further toward that horizon.

Hey look: a few paragraphs just materialized. Not bad for having nothing to write about. More tomorrow.

It Will All Hurt

I read Farel Dalrymple’s “It Will All Hurt” this past week and it had quite an impact on me. My comics reading this first half of 2021 has been mostly illustrated in that hyper-polished Marvel and DC “house style”—with crispy ink lines, mathematically-perfect vector lettering and the shiny “cut-and-gradient” Marte Gracia-style coloring. Which is beautiful, mind you, but when most of your reading is dominated by an overall look, reading something like Dalrymple’s graphic novel is quite a lovely shock to the brain.

The experience is actually quite hard to capture in words. The plot revolves around a motley crew of interesting characters (a robot, a shrinking girl, a talking cat, a squirrel animorph, etcetera) on a quest to defeat an evil Red Wizard. They trek across a surreal wasteland and come into various encounters along the way, from abandoned science fiction bases to disguised tentacular horrors and sword-wielding rats. The plot doesn’t seem all that important. It’s just a broad canvas to hang the rest of the Dalrymple pictographic experience on.

And what an experience it is! This is probably the only comic I’ve read (outside of maybe Lynda Barry’s work) that captures the feel of leafing through a gifted artist’s sketchbook. The book has page after page of art that is aggressively lo-fi. Ink lines bleed and pencil marks stray and liberal watercolor washes over you. Backgrounds drop in and out as needed. Most of the book seems to hang on a 6-panel grid structure, but even this often becomes malleable to accommodate whatever feeling the moment requires. 

Consequently, while there’s a lot of artistic prowess on display here, it never feels like it’s showing off. Instead, the book reads like an honest obsession put to the page, with a gently-moving story that stops for odd narrative asides, scribbled notes and beautiful visual chapter breaks. Despite being quite surreal, “It Will All Hurt” feels grounded and personal in its execution, and that lends the book all of its charm.

I find this so inspiring, and it’s now sitting on my desk as a kind of totem to remind me of some comics-making virtues I often ignore. In my quest to make “professional” art I can often leech out the energy of the quick sketch, polishing away the wild heart of imaginative drawing. It’s a bad habit that’s rooted in insecurity, and I need to change that. I’d love to just relax into drawing, trusting that the reader will join me for the ride despite not being whatever preconceived idea I have of what’s “acceptable.” I’ll keep trying.

NoBoy and the Inside Ocean of Why

The original first page of this comic, 5.5 x 8.5”, graphite on copy paper.

The original “Page 1” of this comic, 5.5 x 8.5”, graphite on copy paper.

When making comics, sometimes it pays to just wing it.

I drew this little 5-pager out on cheap copy paper with no plan—just following my nose panel by panel until it got to the end. It’s really hard to articulate the process, because a lot of it was about just going by feel, like wandering through a new city or inventing a new song.

But every beat in this story was informed by the last one, and I let my amusement guide me as I attempted to escalate the ridiculousness of this little tale. Much of it was informed by the pandemic trash fire that was 2020, with every day seemingly crazier than the last. The ending kind of alludes to the cyclical nature of time last year. I still find myself wondering what day of the week it is (the answer was always “Blursday.”)

Once I had the five sketched-out pages, I redrew them in proper print-ready size using Procreate on the iPad, tweaking a few things along the way (like the title, obviously.) Scroll down to read the entire story. I hope you like it!