The Ink Stained Wretch #175 3/5/25

Cones, Comics, and Con Inking!

Here we go with another of the banal, boring, and baleful bits of bather that are these newsletters! This week our SNL sketch is from Remulak France, we look back at the one and only job I ever did for Marvel, and talk shop about inking with brush pens ... on with the 'Wretch!

Sketch o'the Week: Jane Curtin!

Click here if you are interested in this original sketch.

Mebs! Unacceptable! We continue our famous "Saturday Night Live" characters series with Jane Curtin as "Prymaat" from the recurring classic SNL skit "The Coneheads". Jane was of course better known on the show for her "Weekend Update" news anchor role, but my concept for what will eventually be a print depicts famous SNL characters/skits, and the WU anchors don't really fit that bill. I could have drawn her as "Enid Loopner", but her Coneheads role is much more a part of Saturday Night Live legend.

The Coneheads was a popular recurring sketch on SNL, appearing in eleven skits from 1975-1979. In case you are not familiar with it, the Coneheads were a family of aliens from the planet Remulak secretly living amongst us on Earth. Dan Ackroyd played Beldar, Jane was Prymaat, and Laraine Newman played their daughter Connie. Beldar explained their often bizarre behavior to confused humans as their "being from France". Hijinks would ensue.

The Coneheads were popular enough to spawn a few adaptations. There was an animated TV special from Rankin-Bass in 1983 with character designs by Jack Davis! 1993 saw a live action movie titled "Coneheads" with Ackroyd and Curtin reprising their roles, and Michelle Burke as Connie (Newman played Connie's aunt back on Remulak). Unfortunately, the movie was a box office dud.

There was one other Coneheads adaptation back in the mid 1990's...

Conehead Comics?!?

Obviously the folks at Marvel Comics had higher hopes for the Coneheads movie, as they produced a Coneheads four issue miniseries in 1994, for which I was hired to do the pencils. The project was short term but a lot of fun. It was nice getting to work with a big-time comic book company. I was especially excited to find out the inker was going to be the legendary Marie Severin.

I was contacted directly by Marvel editor Hildy Mesnick about possibly doing the pencils for an upcoming humorous mini-series. They had seen my work on NOW Comic’s "Married . . . with Children" title and felt they wanted a similar blend of caricature and comic book style storytelling for "Coneheads". I had to “try out” for the job, if I remember correctly, by doing a few drawings of some of the characters including Ackroyd and Curtin. I was later told at least one other artist was also being considered, but that Dan Ackroyd’s opinions had tilted the gig toward me . . . I have no idea if that was true but I’ve been going with that version of the story ever since. The mini-series’ story was basically a sequel to the film, picking up where the movie left off and involving all of the characters that appeared on screen.

Working for Marvel was a lot different than working for NOW Comics. Marvel was much more demanding, but they were also very supportive and available to help. They gave me all the things I needed to do the job to the best of my ability and in a timely manner, right down to the official Marvel bristol boards to do the covers and pages on. Writer Terry Collins‘ scripts were well organized and easy to follow, and Hildy was a great editor to work with . . . especially considering we had some issues with the licensing people which I will get into in a minute.

I’m not incredibly proud of the work I did on Coneheads, although it was miles better than my Married ...with Children garbage. My drawing skills were still rough, despite having done about 500 pages for NOW prior to getting this gig. I was encouraged by Marvel’s enthusiasm over the cover I did for issue #1 (image way above), which they really liked and reportedly got put up in the office as one of the covers of the month. That cover was inked by the great Jimmy Palmiotti, by the way, which was very cool. One thing I will say is that Marie made my work look much better than it was. She was not afraid to correct or flat out redraw things over my pencils if they were not drawn very well. She left the faces alone, sticking with my pretty tightly drawn caricatures so none of the likenesses were lost, but figures, objects, and environments were fair game and she really made it look good.

In fact, that whole job was like an expert critique and art lesson. I xeroxed my penciled pages before sending them in (since lost, sadly), so when I got the printed issue I pored over the pages to see where she tweaked things and where she completely redrew them. In every instance I could see where my drawing was off, weak or downright terrible and how she handled it. Things like drawing trees in a park scene and a goofy dog running to avoid a car, her corrections really showed me where I had been lazy or just deficient, and how much better it could be done. It was like getting paid for an education! The best part was I got to talk with her after the issues went to press, because the penciller and inker split the returned original artwork (I think it was 75% penciller, 25% inker) and they gave me her number so we could discuss which pages she wanted. I got the opportunity to tell her I was a big fan of her work, how honored I was to work with her and thanks for making me look good. She was a very sweet lady, and told me I could have all the original artwork, including her allotted pages. That made sense to me, because she probably had boxes full of original art from The Hulk, Sub-Mariner and God knows what else so what would she want some pages from Coneheads for?? Anyway, she sent me all her returned originals and even signed some of them for me.

Not everything went smoothly on the project. Anyone who looked over those issues today might notice that, while some of the characters are obviously caricatures of the actors from the film, others do not seem to resemble the actors from the movie at all. That’s because not all the actors would give Marvel permission to use their likenesses, and as a result I had to purposefully avoid making certain characters resemble the actors. This was not a parody of the film like MAD would do, thus making it a fair use issue. This was an officially licensed property and subject to the approval of the licensee. So, while I did caricatures of Dan Ackroyd, Jane Curtin, Chris Farley, Michael McKean and many others who did give their permission I had to completely avoid any likeness of a certain few, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty (cough …JASON ALEXANDER …cough …cough).

Like I said, a fun and interesting job, where I learned a lot about my skills (or lack thereof) and working on licensed properties . To be fair I had similar issues when working on the Married comics. There the licensing people had no problem with me making Ed O’Neill or David Faustino look as goofy as I wanted, but had me tone down my drawings of Katey Sagal and Christina Applegate until they were little more than cartoon character versions of them. This was true at first. Later I either got better at capturing their likeness and still doing a real caricature of them, or they stopped caring so much about it, because I was then able to treat them the same way I did the guys in the show.

That's my Coneheads/Marvel Comics story. I shall now go consume mass quantities of barley infused liquids.

Brush Penning

When I ink my work for freelance jobs I still do it the old fashioned way, with dip pens and brushes and real ink on board. That's just fine in my studio, but not very practical when I'm doing commissions at comic cons. For that I found a couple of brush pens that I like so much that I not only use them on those comic con commissions, but sometimes on studio jobs where I am up against a hard deadline and need to save some time. Inking with the pens is convenient, eliminates the need for drying time, and is a lot less messy.

The two pens I use are from the Japanese company Tombow, and are called the Fudenosuke WS-BH and the WS-BS. They are both "brush" pens in the sense that they have flexible points and allow you to create brush-like strokes, but the points are still more of a rubbery-like material and not fibers or hair-like materials like many brush pens are. That makes them better if you are heavy handed, or at least more forgiving.

The green barreled WS-BS is considered a "soft tip" and has a bigger and more flexible point on it. I use this one for bolder lines, although when it's fresh you can still get nice thin lines also. It just takes a lighter touch.

The blue barreled WS-BH is the "hard tip", and the point is both sharper and less flexible, giving you thinner and sharper lines. I use this for finer lines and details.

The pros for using these are that they are convenient, easy to just grab and start using, and still give you a good range of thick and thin variation. With my convention commissions, they don't bleed or smear when you go over them with Copic markers, especially if you give them some time to dry.

The cons are that the inks are not archival nor particularly dense black, so they are not as strong as real ink. The oils from your hands can also pick them up and cause fingerprints on your work if you are not careful. Finally the pen points get mushy or dry out or both after using them for a while. I might use up three or four of each of these pens over a 3 or 4 day comic con, but that is a lot of use. I usually have a fresh one of each along with two more used ones in play at one time, using the mushier ones for fills or if they are a little dried out for some drybrush-like effects here and there.

You can get these on Amazon, and often cheap if you buy packs of 20 or 30.

All in all I love these pens. This week's subscriber video is me inking this convention-type commission with these two pens:

Yes, it's just as thrilling and exciting to watch as it sounds! If you are a premium subscriber look below for that video!

Thank you for being a subscriber! As always, if you liked what you saw please share it with others. Remember I'm always looking for feedback, questions for the mailbag, and suggestions for future Sketch o'the Week subjects. Just reply to this email with any of the above! And always remember... it's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide!