Joe Madureira's Last few comic runs have been all pencil and pretty insane. Inhumans , Spiderman, Ultimates 3 . Unfortunately sometimes a little over colored but its still there.
Michael Turner's work post Top Cow was all straight from his pencils. I've seen the original art and the pencil lines are sooo tight it's amazing the quality work he was doing while fighting cancer.
Some of Eric Powells The Goon comics are uninked pencils, usually with color, it adds to the foggy, melancholy, ugliness often present in those stories. When I tried doing self-publishing in the past, I scanned my pencils and adjusted the contrast, partially to keep the grainy, organic nature of my pencil work.
What I remember about doing pencil for repro was using non-repro blue pencils for layout. Before they nerfed the system and stopped making real non-repro pencils. Newer (past 20 years) ones are lighter and glossier. What I remember about watching my friend do commercial work for repro in pencil (RE: "how do they not smudge") was working on small areas with a ruler levering the hand away from the paper and a spritz of hairspray after each level of detail.
I was sure that 'A Cotton Candy Autopsy' was coming up. Collected from 'Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children' - Artist: Dan Sweetman. Cult Classic comic with super strong pencil. Maybe you'd recognize it from the Mr. Bungle cover that was cribbed from this.
Jay Anacleto is an artist that comes to mind. He was an artist that wasn't drawing for an inker. Image published his comic Aria at one point. It was digitally colored while keeping the pencils as pure grayscale with no threshold used. Amazing stuff.
Khary Randolph did The Adventures of Spawn comic in pencils only (I actually colored it) - I think he pencils super-tight and then adjusts levels and threshold after he scans - you can find the penciled pages for it online and it's hard to believe those aren't inks.
NATHANIEL DUSK 2 was a greater showcase of Colan’s pencil work with no inks at all, combined with excellent color work, creating a natural feel that he always evoked. Keep the Kayfabe comin’!🖖♾
I was hoping to see Adam Warren's "Empowered" in this episode and was not disappointed. His pencil style of doing comics is so alluring. He is truly a master. One of the first times I saw pencil reproduced in a comic was in Fernando Fernandez's mixed media masterpiece "Zora and the Hibernauts". I am amazed to this day how he managed to combine several different techniques on a single page.
Jim Aparo on Aquaman, Steve Skeates pointed out to me that a panel on the last page of a story was shot straight from his pencils! Honorable mention to Aparo was an advertising artist for years also early on Phantom,Aquaman & Brave&the Bold he would pencil,ink,&letter a 22 page comic! Steve Skeates told me all that at comics con back in the 90’s! RIP Steve Skeates! Very underrated writer!🙏
Manuel Fior’s ‘the interview’ is the best comic I’ve seen done with dry media, ever. Charcoal & graphite, it looks like nothing else across the globe. Its gorgeous.🙏🔥😤
18:47 I knew you had to bring up Adam Warren at some point; it would have been weird if you didn’t. I’m not sure why he chose to do Empowered in straight pencils, except maybe for time, but his skills definitely show through
I was a Clean Up Supervisor of Charlie the Dog on All Dogs Go To Heaven. We used pencil to get a thick and thin dark line over the Animator’s Artwork. It was a great project to work on and I still love doing clean up though I’ve moved on to Storyboards over a long career.
I'm still amazed that Adam Warren can get those tones without smudging the page. I think he uses a 6B pencil for some of it. It's a miracle nothing's smudged.
Add Michael Zulli on Sandman issues 70-72 "The Wake" and Joe Kubert' s graphic novel "Yossel" where he plays with sketches. Also Comico's "Bloodscent" illustrated by Gene Colan.
All of these comics you reviewed are awesome, I’m definitely hunting down Gene Colan on Nathaniel Dusk, Rob Liefeld’s Re-Gex and Splatt on Fighting American
Love seeing raw pencils used as the finished art. Some great books here, especially the Black Panther by Turner. If you like to see pencils vs. the inked version, check out Avengers #1 (Perez) and Thor #1 (JRJR) regular and rough cut editions.
The stuff where they approach it like an inker makes me wonder what the point is if you need to lightbox it and really mess with the levels to get it to work. I really like the tonal stuff over colors that Gene Colan and Dwayne Turner did, though. It reminds me of a lithograph or something.
So this is a hazy recollection from seeing Steve Mattson ( 25:40 ) at SDCC a long time ago but i think that the way they did that book was the line art was on some kind of acetate sheet and Steve was coloring directly on a board that the sheet was affixed to.
Jim Lee's Pencils were printed on the Superman Unchained #1 Director's Cut Issue and are great, also Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965 by Joe Kubert is illustrated in almost exclusively pencil
Pencils all day long. Love it. I remember in one of those Brutes and Babes by Bart or maybe later on with Greg, in Wizard, they did a pencil vs inked and 'why we ink' b/c of reproduction. Great stuff.
Howard Chaykin has used all kinds of processes and techniques to render his line work for repro. With regards to pencils and how he creates halftones sometimes it's hard to discern what is simply graphite and what might even be a china marker or grease pencil. *forgot to add that his use of Duoshade art board #269, see American Flagg, also created pencil-like textures
My design and illustration training goes back to the very early 1990’s, so thinking about the tools of the era, I think Steranko made a photostats of the pencils and then made films of those.
Michael Zulli’s Sandman. From the final part of the series, The Wake. I haven’t read it in almost 20 years, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but in my mind’s eye that must’ve been produced from pencils.
JRJR’s creator-owned comic "Shmuggy & Bimbo", (with help from Howard Chaykin in the writing department) was supposed to be shot from the pencils as a homage to Kirby’s Street Code, but I don’t know if this ever saw the light of day, if it did I’m sad to have missed it.
I love this video. I am always interested in what tools are used on projects, and it's great to see such experimentation with pencil reproductions. Thank you, guys, for all you do! I really like Tom's G.I. Joe/Transformers books.
Would someone like Mike Grell be sort of a mixed case? 'cause there are inkers credited in most of his work, and some of the line work looks inked, but a lot of other elements look like straight pencils (as observed by someone who's just a reader like myself).
I’m doing a custom bind of Don McGregor’s work and one volume is devoted to his work with Gene Colan. The pencil work on their collaborations for Detectives Inc. and The Spider were not colored. Check out their collaboration on The Spider!
On Empowered, Adam Warren uses black ink to get some of those really flat darks. I have an Empowered original and the lettering (including SFX) is definitely done with ink.
Ben Bishop did his comic The Aggregate with only really tight pencils and went on to TMNT The Last Ronin and The Lost Years to continue with direct from pencils art. Frank Fosco leaned in a cartoonier penciled look for the ongoing webcomic Something Big with Chuck Dixon.
There is a really beautiful Gene Colan and Don McGregor pulp comic The Spider where Gene Colan just has his raw pencils with very little leveling. It is worth checking out.
I'm pretty young (I'm 22) so my first examples of only pencil were Humberto Ramos on some of his comics, like the Avengers disassembled mini series or Revelations, and Joe Mad on Ultimates 3 and his 3 issues of Inhuman
There's like 3-5 Wolverine issues by Dwayne Turner, starting at like issue 69 I think. i randomly picked up 1 in the dollar bin, and his drawing style really stood out to me, I've gotten other series he's done and I don't think he's drawn anything the same way as he did those Wolverine Issues. I seeked out all the Wolverine issues he did, and then checked out some other stuff but everything else I saw didn't look like those Wolverine issues.
Great video. I really like the pencil to color, but I was hoping for a few more examples of black And white examples. I’m sure there are some good examples of Indy comics that do just black and white with graphite or charcoal. One that I was just looking at was The Battle of Churubusco by Andrea Ferraris. Totally different than his Donald Duck comics.
Salvador LaRoca did also the original X-treme X-Men circa 2001 all in Pencil. There's also a short run in Thor by Pascual Ferry, before or after the Everything Burns story, maybe 2014? They both looked pretty cool
Cary Nord + Dave Stewart on Conan! That was the first time this style resonated with me. That run was gorgeous!
Joe Madureira's Last few comic runs have been all pencil and pretty insane. Inhumans , Spiderman, Ultimates 3 . Unfortunately sometimes a little over colored but its still there.
John Byrne did the Captain America issue in pencil specifically because it gave it more of “Golden Age” look to the art.
Miyazaki’s Nausicäa manga was mostly drawn in pencil (after the first few chapters I think) as a way to save time
That is correct.
Michael Turner's work post Top Cow was all straight from his pencils. I've seen the original art and the pencil lines are sooo tight it's amazing the quality work he was doing while fighting cancer.
Some of Eric Powells The Goon comics are uninked pencils, usually with color, it adds to the foggy, melancholy, ugliness often present in those stories. When I tried doing self-publishing in the past, I scanned my pencils and adjusted the contrast, partially to keep the grainy, organic nature of my pencil work.
What I remember about doing pencil for repro was using non-repro blue pencils for layout. Before they nerfed the system and stopped making real non-repro pencils. Newer (past 20 years) ones are lighter and glossier. What I remember about watching my friend do commercial work for repro in pencil (RE: "how do they not smudge") was working on small areas with a ruler levering the hand away from the paper and a spritz of hairspray after each level of detail.
I was sure that 'A Cotton Candy Autopsy' was coming up. Collected from 'Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children' - Artist: Dan Sweetman. Cult Classic comic with super strong pencil. Maybe you'd recognize it from the Mr. Bungle cover that was cribbed from this.
Jay Anacleto is an artist that comes to mind. He was an artist that wasn't drawing for an inker. Image published his comic Aria at one point. It was digitally colored while keeping the pencils as pure grayscale with no threshold used. Amazing stuff.
Totally missed Mark Shultz who did a complete pencil issue of Zenozoic tales.
Khary Randolph did The Adventures of Spawn comic in pencils only (I actually colored it) - I think he pencils super-tight and then adjusts levels and threshold after he scans - you can find the penciled pages for it online and it's hard to believe those aren't inks.
NATHANIEL DUSK 2 was a greater showcase of Colan’s pencil work with no inks at all, combined with excellent color work, creating a natural feel that he always evoked.
Keep the Kayfabe comin’!🖖♾
I was hoping to see Adam Warren's "Empowered" in this episode and was not disappointed. His pencil style of doing comics is so alluring. He is truly a master.
One of the first times I saw pencil reproduced in a comic was in Fernando Fernandez's mixed media masterpiece "Zora and the Hibernauts". I am amazed to this day how he managed to combine several different techniques on a single page.
Jim Aparo on Aquaman, Steve Skeates pointed out to me that a panel on the last page of a story was shot straight from his pencils! Honorable mention to Aparo was an advertising artist for years also early on Phantom,Aquaman & Brave&the Bold he would pencil,ink,&letter a 22 page comic! Steve Skeates told me all that at comics con back in the 90’s! RIP Steve Skeates! Very underrated writer!🙏
Manuel Fior’s ‘the interview’ is the best comic I’ve seen done with dry media, ever. Charcoal & graphite, it looks like nothing else across the globe. Its gorgeous.🙏🔥😤
Manuel Fior is a God
Thank you for recommending this. I just finished it and it is beautiful.
Eric Powell in The Goon
18:47 I knew you had to bring up Adam Warren at some point; it would have been weird if you didn’t. I’m not sure why he chose to do Empowered in straight pencils, except maybe for time, but his skills definitely show through
I was a Clean Up Supervisor of Charlie the Dog on All Dogs Go To Heaven. We used pencil to get a thick and thin dark line over the Animator’s Artwork. It was a great project to work on and I still love doing clean up though I’ve moved on to Storyboards over a long career.
I'm still amazed that Adam Warren can get those tones without smudging the page. I think he uses a 6B pencil for some of it. It's a miracle nothing's smudged.
Add Michael Zulli on Sandman issues 70-72 "The Wake" and Joe Kubert' s graphic novel "Yossel" where he plays with sketches. Also Comico's "Bloodscent" illustrated by Gene Colan.
All of these comics you reviewed are awesome, I’m definitely hunting down Gene Colan on Nathaniel Dusk, Rob Liefeld’s Re-Gex and Splatt on Fighting American
I'm so happy you featured Adam Warren. I have a page of his original art on my wall. Fun fact, he does Empowered entirely on 8.5x11 printer paper.
So happy to see Chandler here. Please do more of such old style visual novels. I think this belongs to a series. Would love to see them!
Adam Warren's pencil work is just incredible!
Love seeing raw pencils used as the finished art. Some great books here, especially the Black Panther by Turner. If you like to see pencils vs. the inked version, check out Avengers #1 (Perez) and Thor #1 (JRJR) regular and rough cut editions.
First Comics printed Mike Grell's Sable in pencil.
The stuff where they approach it like an inker makes me wonder what the point is if you need to lightbox it and really mess with the levels to get it to work. I really like the tonal stuff over colors that Gene Colan and Dwayne Turner did, though. It reminds me of a lithograph or something.
Liberatore’s Earth Versus Saturn (Video Clips collection 1985) is a fave for dark contrast pencil lines
So this is a hazy recollection from seeing Steve Mattson ( 25:40 ) at SDCC a long time ago but i think that the way they did that book was the line art was on some kind of acetate sheet and Steve was coloring directly on a board that the sheet was affixed to.
Jim Lee's Pencils were printed on the Superman Unchained #1 Director's Cut Issue and are great, also Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965 by Joe Kubert is illustrated in almost exclusively pencil
Pencils all day long. Love it. I remember in one of those Brutes and Babes by Bart or maybe later on with Greg, in Wizard, they did a pencil vs inked and 'why we ink' b/c of reproduction. Great stuff.
Frank Brunner's Sword of Dragonus first printed in Monsters Unleashed (Marvel, 1973 series) #2
Cary Nord's Conan was also pencil work w/o ink. I loved those comics.
Howard Chaykin has used all kinds of processes and techniques to render his line work for repro. With regards to pencils and how he creates halftones sometimes it's hard to discern what is simply graphite and what might even be a china marker or grease pencil.
*forgot to add that his use of Duoshade art board #269, see American Flagg, also created pencil-like textures
Dwayne Turner doing a Wolverine run got me into comics.
My design and illustration training goes back to the very early 1990’s, so thinking about the tools of the era, I think Steranko made a photostats of the pencils and then made films of those.
Michael Zulli’s Sandman. From the final part of the series, The Wake. I haven’t read it in almost 20 years, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but in my mind’s eye that must’ve been produced from pencils.
JRJR’s creator-owned comic "Shmuggy & Bimbo", (with help from Howard Chaykin in the writing department) was supposed to be shot from the pencils as a homage to Kirby’s Street Code, but I don’t know if this ever saw the light of day, if it did I’m sad to have missed it.
I love this video. I am always interested in what tools are used on projects, and it's great to see such experimentation with pencil reproductions. Thank you, guys, for all you do! I really like Tom's G.I. Joe/Transformers books.
Juan Ferreyra pencil work on Colder was amazing. Enki Bilal's Nikopol trilogy is masterful. An old one but a great one.
Would someone like Mike Grell be sort of a mixed case? 'cause there are inkers credited in most of his work, and some of the line work looks inked, but a lot of other elements look like straight pencils (as observed by someone who's just a reader like myself).
I’m doing a custom bind of Don McGregor’s work and one volume is devoted to his work with Gene Colan. The pencil work on their collaborations for Detectives Inc. and The Spider were not colored. Check out their collaboration on The Spider!
On Empowered, Adam Warren uses black ink to get some of those really flat darks. I have an Empowered original and the lettering (including SFX) is definitely done with ink.
Mike Kunkel - Herobear and the Kid. BEAUTIFUL comic!
Ben Bishop did his comic The Aggregate with only really tight pencils and went on to TMNT The Last Ronin and The Lost Years to continue with direct from pencils art. Frank Fosco leaned in a cartoonier penciled look for the ongoing webcomic Something Big with Chuck Dixon.
Cary Nord's Conan series was pencil I believe.
There is a really beautiful Gene Colan and Don McGregor pulp comic The Spider where Gene Colan just has his raw pencils with very little leveling. It is worth checking out.
I'm pretty young (I'm 22) so my first examples of only pencil were Humberto Ramos on some of his comics, like the Avengers disassembled mini series or Revelations, and Joe Mad on Ultimates 3 and his 3 issues of Inhuman
Is it graphite pencil or color pencil like Prismacolor?
Awesome work guys
There's like 3-5 Wolverine issues by Dwayne Turner, starting at like issue 69 I think. i randomly picked up 1 in the dollar bin, and his drawing style really stood out to me, I've gotten other series he's done and I don't think he's drawn anything the same way as he did those Wolverine Issues. I seeked out all the Wolverine issues he did, and then checked out some other stuff but everything else I saw didn't look like those Wolverine issues.
Great show guys always informative about art techniques
I’m an amateur wannabe artist
I look up to you guys as artists great job
Well that John Byrne Angel issue just jumped onto my wishlist...
Don't know if it made it home, but gave you all a Blade of the Immortal and most of that was just pencil
Great video. I really like the pencil to color, but I was hoping for a few more examples of black And white examples. I’m sure there are some good examples of Indy comics that do just black and white with graphite or charcoal. One that I was just looking at was The Battle of Churubusco by Andrea Ferraris. Totally different than his Donald Duck comics.
Predator: Hell & Hot water has great un-inked pencils by Gene Colan. A lot of it takes place underwater and the artwork is effectively distorted.
Salvador Larocca went to pencils only about 25 years ago, and Marvel took about 10 years to figure out how to not screw it up.
Salvador LaRoca did also the original X-treme X-Men circa 2001 all in Pencil. There's also a short run in Thor by Pascual Ferry, before or after the Everything Burns story, maybe 2014? They both looked pretty cool
Adam Warren's Empowered doesn't get enough attention
I think Miyazaki's Nausicaa was all done in pencil
It was, but not the entire series.
Well, does "Pencil" drawn only imply Graphite or Charcoal? I mean "colored Pencils" would technically be pencils too...
have a look at the first years of Conan with dark horse, it is all colored over pencils, and it looks great.
Jerome Opena, Rick Remender Uncanny X-Men Run!
Awesome episode ❗🔥💯⚡👍
I think joe mad! Did some X-men in pencil
Joe mad on inhumans and the Levius manga is drawn in pencil.
Nice
Absolut, total forget about this one
Bernie Wrightson didn't ink City of Others. It looks like crap compared to his other stuff.