The reason I buy all of my art supplies online isn’t just because it’s cheaper: I’m a sucker for picking up pretty much any new drawing tool I happen upon in a “bricks and mortar” store.  I usually manage to avoid the temptation, but last week I found myself in the local Michael’s dropping off some things to be framed (50% off framing sale going on now, y’all!) and as a wandered through the drafting isle, I saw this–the new Koh-i-nor Rapidosketch pen:

You’re probably familiar with the Rapidograph pen from the same company.  They’re pretty much the industry standard technical pen.  I have a set, which aside from a few replaced points, is about ten years old and I use them mainly for panel borders and balloon outlines.  They are, though, not particularly great for working in a sketchbook.  The problems here are mainly two things: First, there’s inconsistent ink flow at high speeds.  When working a little more slowly, as on an original comics page, they’re perfectly fine, but for quick casual sketches they tend to “skip” pretty frequently.  Second, they can tend to really dig into the paper you’re drawing on and this can be a real problem, especially of you’re working on flimsy paper such as those Moleskine tablets that folks really seem to love.  (Yeah, sure, Robert Crumb seems to be able to sketch with them fine, but, Hell, that’s ’cause he’s Robert Crumb.  Normal people can’t sketch well with Rapidographs… trust me.)

If you’ve seen any of my random sketchbook pages I occasionally post, you know I tend to sketch directly in pen.  My normal tool of choice is the Rotring Art pen, which, in addition to having neither of the above faults, also features a “split” point which causes it to preform like a really tight crowquil, giving you just a bit of line variation.  This Rapidosketch thing, though, seemed like it was worth a try.  Based on the name, I assumed it was designed specifically for sketching–and the box even boasted the Viagra-like claim of “consistent performance,” an allusion, I assumed, to the Rapidograph’s well-known inconsistent ink flow I mentioned above.  All signs pointed to a cool new pen.

Things began to sour a bit, though, when I got home and started to investigate the pen further.

First off, it comes with no instructions.  If you’ve used Rapidographs before, this is not a big deal, but if you’re new to this stuff I can imagine it would be a bit mystifying to try to figure out–particularly since if you store them incorrectly they tend to clog up.  On a similar note, although it came in the same packaging as a Rapidograph, the little circle indentation where the circular “wrench” (for removing the pen point) would normally be  is empty.  This is a recipe for disaster, as you really need to remove the point before re-attaching a freshly-filled ink reservoir or else you’re essentially pressuring your ink through the point mechanism and you’ll be dealing with a leaky pen right off the bat.

As I took the pen apart in preparation to fill it, I noticed that it’s innards looked suspiciously like the innards of a regular old Rapidograph, as you can see below:

While there’s some new sheathing around the mechanism, it’s pretty similar–and my technical pens are pretty old so I may be comparing old apples with new oranges here.  Out of curiosity, I removed the points, and as you can see, they’re pretty darned similar:

But, hey, for all I know, the interiors of those points could be radically different and the Rapidosketch could really be some new design intended for sketching!  I loaded the thing up with ink and gave it a roll.

First off, there’s no discernible difference in the line quality between this pen and a regular Rapidograph pen of the same size:

To get a true feel for the pen, I cranked out a page of sketches–my usual subjects: hands and drapery.

If there’s a difference between this pen and a regular Rapidograph technical pen, it’s far too subtle for me to discern.  I experienced fewer problems with intermittent ink flow than with the standard technical pen, but I’d chalk this up to my technical pen’s being nearly a decade old, not to some substantive design difference between the two pens.  Similarly, the Rapidosketch seemed just as likely to tear into the page, and–just like a Rapidograph–encountered problems working on paper with any tooth to it.

The verdict: As far as I can tell, the supposedly-new Rapidosketch pen is just a regular old Rapidograph that’s been “rebranded” with a different-colored barrel and cap–and is being marketed somewhat deceptively with the new name “Rapidosketch.”  If you’ve already got a technical pen and enjoy sketching with it, you’ll gain nothing from buying a Rapidosketch.  And if you’re looking for a technical pen that’s more suited to sketching than a regular Rapidograph, this ain’t it.

Each week, over at ComicsReporter.com there’s a feature called “Five For Friday” in which readers are asked to submit a list of five answers to some comics-related question.  This week’s challenge:

Name Five Items Not Primarily Weapons That Only Exist In Comics You’d Bid For Were They To Magically Appear On eBay.

You can check out all the responses at ComicsReporter.  Here are my answers:

• Buddy Bradley’s Kaz-designed truck (AKA: “The Polio-Mobile”)
• The Sea Hag’s magical flute
• The “Frost Axe” LP from “Black Metal”
• The Rocketeer’s jet pack
• A Dagwood sandwich actually assembled by Dagwood

(* No, not the dopey “DC multiverse” kind.)

So, here’s another bookmark I found in my recent organizing: Evidence of a Parallel Universe.  This is from waaaay back, but the reason I bookmarked it wasn’t necessarily for its scientific import: like most comics folk, my brain has pretty much one track–and it’s comics.

When I saw this article, and a flurry of others around the same time on this topic, what I thought of was not the stunning scientific and philosophic implications of possible evidence in favor of the multiverse theory of reality, but rather, I began ruminating on what sorts of parallel universes there might theoretically be in which the history of comics is almost–but not quite–the same as it is in our world.  Here’re some parallel “comics universes” I’d like to see:

World of Less-Cutesy Manga

Nowadays Manga is ubiquitous, but it wasn’t always so.  American and Japanese comics developed in parallel, but in near-total isolation.  Much of early Manga, though–and particularly that of Osamu Tezuka, the “father of Manga”–was heavily influenced by the work of Walt Disney.   The Disney studio was of course the dominant animation house when this crossover was occuring post-WWII… but it didn’t have to be.

In the early days of American animation, Disney was in close competition with another animation house, Fleischer Studios, for dominance of the market.    The latter procuced the Popeye shorts, the early Superman cartoons and many others including Betty Boop.  The Fleischer Studios  had a very different aesthetic than Disney; their character designs were rarely “cutesy” and some of their cartoons were downright bizarre.  For example, check out this 1933 version of Snow White starring Betty boop and featuring everything from a rotoscoped Cab Calloway to a team of dancing skeletons.

So, here’s the first parallel universe I’d like to explore: a world where the Fleisher Studios–not Disney–was the dominant American animation house and was the big influence on Manga.  I wonder if there was more of this in the mix in the ’30s:

… and less of this:

… whether we might have a whole lot less of this these days:

World of Less-Whiny Indy Comics

Todays non-superhero comics are (thankfully) bursting at the seams with stories of all stripes, but it arrived at this state via a path originiating with the underground cartoonists of the ’60s and then moving from there through an unfortunate developmental stage in the ’90s that was populated with more than its share of sissified self-confessional autobio comics.

Yeah, sure there are deniers, but the intertwining between indy comics and autobio seems pretty obvious to me and its modern roots seem to pretty obviously be in the ’90s.  Just as a test, try naming the most successful GNs you can think of off the top of your head.  I’d go with maybe Blankets, Jimmy Corrigan, Cancer Vixen, Persepolis, Maus and Fun Home.  The only one of these that isn’t autobio/memoir is Jimmy Corrigan.  And, yeah, I guess I’ll wimp out and not “name names,” but I’ll let Heidi MacDonald and Katherine Farmar do it for me, since I’m a cartoonist myself and pissing off my peers is kind of a bad idea.

How did we get here, though?  My one word answer is this: Crumb.  Of all the ’60s underground guys, Robert (now just “R.” apparently) Crumb is the one who’s had the most lasting influence on the non-superhero comics that followed him.  He’s the one who established the template of the whiny, nerdy, no luck with the gals, lost in nostalgia, 78rpm record-listening, self-confessional cartoonist.  But what if he hadn’t been the one with the lasting influence?

Among Crumb’s contemporaries were folks who were 180 degrees from him both in their personalities and in the comics they produced–people like S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams and Spain Rodriguez.   Spain’s comics, for example, drew on the artist’s experiences on the road as a member of the biker gang, the Road Vultures.  His main character, Trashman, didn’t spend his time moping about women or reminising about ragtime music; he was too busy blastin’ on fools!

So, here’s the second of the comics parallel universes I’d like to see: a world where the lineage of the modern indy comics scene was rooted in a ’60s underground dominated by bad-ass psychedelic shit-kickers, not self-confessional autobio.

World of Skinnier, Sweatier Superheroes

This one’s pretty obvious, but…

Open pretty much any superhero comic book today and there’s a good chance you’ll encounter at least one character created by Jack Kirby–and, more important, the basic “visual language” of superhero comics you’ll be looking at has its origins in Kirby’s work for Marvel in the ’60s.   Almost the entire stable of Marvel’s key characters originate in the fertile brain of Jack “King” Kirby: Iron Man, The X-Men, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four.  Only two of Marvel’s top tier characters, Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, were penned by a different artist: Steve Ditko.

Ditko was a man of strong–albeit unusual–convictions, and something (no one really agrees on exactly what) ruffled his feathers at Marvel and he left, just 38 issues into the Spider-Man series.  Kirby, though, continued at Marvel and pretty much everything that came after in the superhero genre would wind up owing a heavy debt of influence to Kirby’s aesthetic.

What, though, if things had been reversed?  What if Kirby left early and Ditko remained?  That’s the third parallel comics universe I’d like to explore: a world where the work of Steve Ditko, not Jack Kirby, establishes the basic “template” for modern superhero genre comics.

I think you’d see three main differences between this world an ours.

First, most obviously, an aesthetic difference.  Kirby’s characters look huge, even when they’re printed in a 2 x 3 inch panel.  They’re big, they’ve got mass, they’re impossibly burly.

They’re also drawn in an incredibly dynamic way, seeming to almost leap off the page:

You can’t blame Kirby for it any more than blame Led Zeppelin for Whitesnake, but clearly all paths to this kind of depiction of the male form go through Kirby:

Ditko’s characters, on the other hand, tend to look a little underfed by today’s standards.

Second, I think we’d see a de-emphasis on physicallity and a bit more emphasis on the psychological.  As much as I love Kirby’s characters from a design standpoint, I find it difficult to really ascribe to them much of an “inner life,” no matter the quantity of Stan Lee-penned thought balloons.  On the other hand, Ditko–possibly because of his background in horror and SF comics–seems intensely interested in his characters psychological states.  I find it relatively easy to see a character like Peter Parker, as drawn by Ditko, as someone with actual inner mental states.  (I suppose it helps that a lot of Ditko’s characters are kind of bug-eyed crazy and sweaty looking as well!)

Third–and finally–I’d bet comics in this “universe” would make a lot more use of the diagramatic/iconographic properties of the art form.  As much as I love a lot of Kirby stuff, I find Ditko’s work more interesting, partially because of his tendency to draw non-literally and mix realistic drawing with symbology.  Probably the best-known example is the famous Spider-Man “half-masked face.”

My favorite example of this, though, is the (in)famous scene from Witzend #3 in which Mr. A allows a criminal to fall to his doom.   Note how in the first panel Mr. A is knocking “Angel” off the roof onto a flag pole below… yet, in all of the following panels, Ditko manages to place the pole in our view, often directly between the two protagonists.  Literally, this is obviously not where the flag pole is spacially in the scene depicted, but in a daigramatic way that’s where the needs to be, with the criminal’s life visually hanging in the balance.