What to do? I looked around and found something that is working a lot better than the old blue leads. Pictured above is a 0.9 mm mechanical pencil and indigo blue leads that fit in it. The leads are thick enough so that they give a nice beefy line like a wooden pencil, but are a consistent thickness or thinness so they never have to be sharpened. That isn’t the case with the thicker leads that went into the clutch pencils. I was constantly using a lead pointer on those things.

The blue leads aren’t non-repro, but, as I said before, we’re living in a digital age – it doesn’t matter. I can build and build the sketch with the blue pencil and then refine it with black. I scan it in and ink it digitally on a separate layer.

The indigo leads are fun to work in. I start out really sketchy and light and start leaning on the pencil more heavily as I make decisions about lines. I know it’s a poor craftsman who blames the quality of his work on his tools, but a 0.9 mm mechanical pencil with blue leads is making doodling and sketching just plain fun for me again. I love this pencil!

Of course, if they stop making the leads, I’ll be sunk. Maybe there will be another color. I don’t know. I’m not sure what the industrial purpose of these indigo leads is now if any. If that market dries up, they will go the way of the non-repro leads. I’d better stock up!

I may ink and color digitally, but I’m not ready to sketch digitally. I think I’ll always be analog in that regard.

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As a bonus, have a look at the sketch for this panel before it had all of those pixels slopped over it:

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I haven’t posted a series of my visual metaphors in a while, but I was pleased with the way this one turned out so I figured I would foist it on you, my loyal readers.

This series is about an engineer who is transitioning from a technically centered aspect of his career to more of a people centered aspect. There is doubt and a little trepidation along the way, but in the end, he sees it all working out well.

The future is unclear, but it will be bright.

The images are a combination of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Sometimes I’ll sketch a little thumbnail, but usually I just dive right in and start pushing around pixels in response to my client’s written metaphor. I usually start with some images I have floating in my digital morgue. If I can’t find what I want, I’ll run out and shoot a picture of an object or a texture. If that doesn’t work, I’ll draw or paint the whole darn thing digitally. It’s really a number of techniques all thrown together, and it makes my client happy.

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As I was digging through my filing cabinet looking for stuff for my retrospective of DUCKWORK, I found this page from an old school catalog showing what once was the Philadelphia College of Art. The blue border shows the boundaries of the old campus. The shot was taken from the Southwest aiming towards the Northeast.

In this picture which I have doctored the red area indicates a large section of the city that is no more. Anderson Hall at Broad and Spruce that held the classrooms has reverted to an office building. The school still owns the building at Broad and Pine, but the spot next to it, Arco Park, the stores, apartment building, The Swamp, The Bellrich Hotel, Corson’s Pharmacy – all gone!

This shot is almost the opposite angle of the catalog photo. This is from the East pointing West. In the background, you can see the fabulous Drake Hotel. The thing that looks like a 45 record changer or part of the spaceship from Silent Running is the Kimmel Center. It’s a massive music hall and performance center that has eaten up the red area in my doctored photograph.

Here’s another view looking South on Broad Street. The building on the right is where PCA held the majority of its classes. It is once again an office building with dueling steak houses on the ground floor, strangely enough. The windows with the green awnings is one steakhouse and the other has the red awnings. Weird.

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It was 1982, and DUCKWORK was a dead duck, but one of the ex-Ducks decided to have a party. Being that I talked incessantly about film and had mentioned the cinematic efforts of Plague Productions more than once, somebody suggested a film festival. I could bring my reels and we could fill the rest of the evening out with commercial films which were mainly released in 8mm format by a company called Castle Films. They weren’t the entire film. They were more like highlight reels that told the story in a greatly condensed form.

I had some horror films like The Mummy and House of Frankenstein. I think Matt Wagner had some of the old Batman serials from the ’40s; Bill Cucinotta brought some reels, and there were a few other things to pad out the bill.

So it was decided. The kids were going to put on another show. Matt decided to hold it at his apartment which was among some student housing in a tenement-like building in the 1400 block of Spruce Street. It was a large apartment that Matt shared with two or three other roommates and it, and it was called The Swamp.

Matt also did me the honor of drawing this poster for the party.

It was a good time. I think we projected the movies against a wall or a bedsheet. The place was packed. My movies got a good response as did the other movies. We all laughed hysterically at the Batman and Robin serial. I think the version of The Mummy is my favorite although it was heavily condensed. This 8mm version had sound and the picture quality was terrific. It was edited very well and felt like a poetic dream projected large in that apartment. Boris Karloff’s sonorous voice sounded especially eerie beckoning a lost lover from across the seas of time. Great stuff.

For me, it felt like the last hurrah for the DUCKWORK gang. DUCKWORK was done, but the Ducks were still a fairly tight group. We still saw each other in classes or in the halls of PCA or got together when we weren’t buried under an avalanche of school work.

Next time: Wrecking Ball

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Monkey & Bird by Joe Williams and Tina Garceau continues at CO2 Comics! Read the strip here!

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I started writing another Willceau Illo News entry about one of the last round ups for the Ducks and DUCKWORK when it started to get way  too long and convoluted. I decided to have mercy on my readers if any and break it up. It also needed some background and some blanks filled in. So here we go:

Brian, my younger brother and I grew up in that strange era of the 1970s in a strange place known as New Jersey. Neither one of us had any aptitude towards athletics nor were we necessarily mechanically adept so that meant that both sports and cars were not for us. We ended up with what was behind Door No. 3 – cursed with creative inclinations. Besides, you had to do something once you realized how dangerous it was impersonating Evel Knievel on a bicyle.

One or the other or both of us at one time or another received cassette tape recorders as Christmas and birthday gifts. Soon after we tired of trying to tape songs we liked directly from the speaker of an AM radio blaring a top 40 station, we started doing bits and comedy routines on tape. These routines were either audio spoofs of movies or knock-offs of comedy records that were wildly popular at the time. This ultimately led to us freeing our Dad’s 8mm movie equipment from storage and giving motion pictures a go. Our first movie, Brian Bubonic and The Plague, was a punk rock, musical farce shot silently.

This led to what is probably our best film, The Huns. It was a project for Brian’s Early European History Class. My guess is that the teacher got bored and decided to let his class take a shot at a project creatively rather than forcing them all to write term papers which he would have to slog through and grade. Let the kids paint or draw or build a diorama or do whatever they wanted so he wouldn’t have to suffer reading  a chicken scratch on loose-leaf paper analysis of the Fall of The Roman Empire. Brian offered to make a film about Attila the Hun, and a whole bunch of his classmates jumped on the bandwagon all claiming to have co-authored the script in order to get a full class credit. Brian wrote the script and edited the film. I directed. The other kids did what I told them to do which was mainly march past the camera, look mean, and most importantly, don’t look at the camera.

It borrowed heavily from Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers which was being played to death on HBO at the time. It also borrowed liberally from Animal House with a bit of Monty Python thrown in.

Turning the Huns into an urban street gang was a stroke of brilliance. For one, it made it a lot easier to create the costumes. The problem was we didn’t know how guys slicked their hair. It was the late ’70s. The wet head had been dead for years and everybody, female and male, used blow dryers. We didn’t know what Brylcreem was and wouldn’t know where to find it so we figured we would try Vaseline. Brian was the guinea pig and below is the only photographic evidence. It looked great, but it took two weeks for Brian to wash that crap out of his hair. There was no way we were going to get a whole cast to grease up their hair so we opted on having the boys wet their hair down and comb it back between takes.

The Huns had a separate soundtrack on tape that was synced badly to the film. There was a lot of stopping and starting of both the tape player and the projector. It was low tech but we were happy with the result, and the cast and crew wound up acing that history class project.

We made a number of other films. If there was a grade or some kind of class credit involved, we would have a fairly sizable cast and crew. If it was just for fun, it would just be Brian, Mickey Connelly, maybe a niece or nephew and me. We attempted making horror films, but they invariably all ended up being comedies because nobody could maintain a straight face.

Yes, one day I will digitize these movies. First I have to find the soundtrack for The Huns. I’m hoping Brian has it stowed away somewhere.

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While I was looking for sketches for my abandoned opus Gomer Pyle Goes to Viet Nam, I found this sketch for another possible DUCKWORK strip. This was either going to be Mommy Dearest II: The Revenge or Joan Crawford Has Risen From the Grave. Obviously, Joan’s adopted daughter was going to get it EC Comics style in retaliation for penning her famous tell-all. Don’t mess with willful and driven Hollywood Stars even after they are dead!

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Issue No. 6 was the last issue of DUCKWORK. I am not sure of the reasons why, and I’m hoping that Gerry Giovinco does his history of the paper because he was directly involved with the nuts and bolts and all of the behind-the-scenes issues involved in publishing that student paper. Me – I was a clueless freshman who hung out, handed in 3 installments of a strip and irritated everyone with a constant stream of movie trivia and trivialities. I know money was an issue as always. The school was playing musical deans at the time, and the old guard was going out and the new one coming in, wanting to make changes. I know that everybody was trying to get their academic act together. The workload was tremendous particularly for the illustration majors. Time was a precious commodity. What was the sense of working on a school newspaper if you were going to flunk out of that school? Crack those books! Write that term paper you’ve been avoiding!

After issue No. 6, I was proceeding with the idea that there was going to be future issues and was working up ideas for other strips. I was going to continue my trend of mocking classic and sub-classic television programs and started to work up sketches for Gomer Pyle Goes to Viet Nam.

I found these sketches in an ancient, GBC-bound sketchbook. I don’t know why, but I must have been using an 8-H pencil at the time. These drawings were so light they were practically non-existent. I had to really play with levels in Photoshop to get something to show!

Anyway, Sargent Carter having heard one too many “Golly’s” and “Shazam’s” seizes on an opportunity to ship Pyle off to South East Asia. Carter figures Pyle won’t last a day and he’ll finally be rid of that lumbering lunkhead forever! Of course, just like the TV show, nothing works out Carter’s way. Pyle sees action and gets blown to bits. He is shipped back to the old Sarge in a small crate. Carter opens the crate finding a basket case Pyle still alive! Naturally it ends with a deliriously grinning and quite mad Gomer Pyle shrieking, “Soo-Prize! Soo-Prize! Soo-Prize!”

Maybe it’s a good thing DUCKWORK ceased publication.

The story was based on/ripped off from one of my favorite comics in my collection – Weird War Tales. Comic companies had done so many variations of war and Western comics, why not offbeat ones? In the cover story, the GI buys a talisman from a shaman. The shaman promises the American that he can not die as long as he wears the talisman. The soldier figures that he has just got an incredible bargain. The problem is that the talisman only keeps the wearer from dying – not from harm. He ends up at the end of the tale in a wicker basket hoping that somebody will remove the talisman thus granting him the sweet release of death. John, my older brother, bought it, read it and threw it to me as he always did at the time. He may have read it and forgot about it. I obsessed over it. The cover is etched in my mind. I still have it. The comic had the Comic Code seal meaning it was safe for kids, but it gave me the willies!

Eventually word came down that the school was not going to fund any future issues of DUCKWORK. Gerry thought we could keep it going by selling advertising space. That’s what regular comics and newspapers did! There were ads in previous issues for art supply stores, small shops and cafes. We would just have to dedicate more space in the paper for advertising. The problem was that the Ducks would do the selling. Not everyone can be a salesman. Making a cold call to a little shop is tough. I was miserable at it. I think the cheapest ad was $15 for placing a business card on a page. No bites. The other Ducks were equally successful. It was dispiriting. Who wanted to go from store to store, door-to-door just to be rejected? Besides who wanted their place of business associated with comics about cannibalism, necrophilia and over-sexed water fowl? Showing potential advertisers copies of the paper was a deal killer. An inept sales staff and the utter lack of time caused by the crush of school work amongst other commitments meant that DUCKWORK was a dead duck.

I think Comico was starting to come to life. Gerry Giovinco, the driving force of DUCKWORK, had much bigger fish to fry than a little school newspaper. He was on the precipice of independent comic history!

Gerry will hopefully clear up the timeline in his column over at CO2 Comics.

Anyway, the plug was pulled. The DUCKWORK sign came off of the door of the tiny office on the 13th floor. I remember passing it a few times and trying the knob. Locked and unoccupied. DUCKWORK was dead. Nothing else came in or was started up to fill the breach. No other paper was started up. Not even mimeographed typewritten dispatches! No other Spanky McFarlands came forth to declare that he was going to put on a show. The party was over.

Next Time: Epilogue Part II!

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