Artists I Like: Rune Ryberg

I'll do a few posts rounding up artists whose work I really enjoy. I'll present a few examples and talk about why I like them. I'll link to their pages and other ways to find out more, if such exists. These are presented in no deliberate order other than the order in which I thought of them and did the work of posting about them.

INSPIRATION

There's something remotely cannibalistic about being an artist. I "consume" art, process it inside my mind, then things come out the other end that include bits of the art I consumed. It's a lovely analogy, right? But that's how it is for me. I often say I don't have any original ideas. It's true. Nothing I've ever came up with was cut from whole cloth, as they say. It's patchwork, at best. Sure, sometimes it's novel and maybe you haven't seen anything quite like what I do. But believe me: what I do is riff on what I've seen. That's all I can do.

Art inspires more art. It's a continuous cycle of creation from some ancient beginning to some unforeseen ending. All we are doing is riding that ride, trying to make something beautiful to keep all this beauty alive.

RUNE RYBERG

Rune Ryberg is an artist whose work I discovered randomly on Instagram. As soon as I saw it the first time I thought it was magical. To describe it is hard. To my eyes it's a dose of Richard Sala and a dash of Ed, Edd n Eddy filtered through a classic European comics vibe. Rune is Danish and I honestly don't know much more about him than that. I'm not even sure you can get his comics in English, though I've seen them online in English. The website only lists Danish and French language comics.

His drawings are wiggly wobbly, and definitely feel inspired by the 2000s Cartoon Network era (though that's just a hunch and might not be true). His drawings flow and move. They are kinetic as hell. His comic pages are smooth, constantly in motion, and tell us as much about the character's inner worlds as their outer worlds.

I stared at some of these pages trying to figure out what tools Rune uses. My guess was traditional drawings with dip pen, then digital colors. Turns out I was right about the drawings but he seems to be using Micron pens for inks, at least for his main lines. But the colors... in some works, such as Death Save, they are very flat and I thought digital. But other works are clearly some kind of watercolor or markers. So I'm not sure.

He has a kind of drybrush effect in some of the shading and I'm not sure what he's using there.

Notice how his lines vary in weight a little bit, but not much. Under that, he's often using flat colors to great effect. Vibrant, rich colors that also convey simple depth.

Wonderful stuff. I would pay a handsome price for a big, fat coffee table book of Rune Ryberg art.

Paper and Book Sizes

Here's a blog post about my history in the fine world of art and publishing, as it relates to paper and book sizes in particular. Because this shit really matters if your goal is to print something.

Earliest memory of making a zine: 1980, trailer park by a river. In my room, which was really a hallway portion of the trailer in which I had a bed and dresser, sitting on my bed with pencil and typing paper and some comic books.

Actually, now that I think on it, I'm not sure how many comics I had at that time. But I did have a full BOX of Marvel Comics Super Heroes Rub-A-Tattoo packs! These were like bubble gum trading card packs, but with dry transfer images of the various characters. At this time, my experience with comics was limited to a stack of old Donald Duck, Hot Stuff, and Archies some cousin gave me. Plus whatever cartoons and TV shows they had, such as the Hulk and Super Friends.

Anyway... I knew I liked Spidey and The Thing and Hulk. And I was fascinated by the comic book as an object. So I took my typing paper (8.5" x 11" cheap white paper... equivalent to A4 but slightly different because we Americans can't just adopt the most universal stuff like everyone else). I folded a sheet in half so it was now 5.5" x 8.5" and I drew a battle between The Thing and Spider-Man. I have no memory of what happened in the "story" or to what degree I actually finished it. I believe I only did one sheet and I marveled (get it?) at how much like a comic it didn't look.

Fast forward to teen years. I didn't try to make a book again for a while. But I was very interested in doing it. When I got into RPGs I made my own games and the format was usually just a sheet of typing paper or whatever kind of paper I had. Often it was loose leaf binder paper from my school stash. Or a spiral notebook. Whatever worked.

But a few years later, in 1987 or so, my friends and I decided to make a REAL comic. I had seen copies of an APA, so I knew people were doing this kind of thing. People were just making their own comics and books and printing them on Xerox machines (that's what we called photocopiers). Then they would trade them or sell a few locally, mostly through the mail.

This was the "small press" scene. Our comic, called Fast Lane, ran for 3 or so issues. I can't remember exactly how it went, but some of them were full size (8.5x11) and some were "digest" size (5.5x8.5). They were all photocopied when we used the machine at a friend's dad's place of work. That was a fun memory, laying out the pages on the office floor on a Saturday morning to collate and staple them. I think we ran 50 copies. Some were sold to kids at school, most were just given away.

I'm not even sure if I have copies myself anymore. In fact... I'm almost certain I do not. Pity.

So anyway, pretty much all small press folks (I didn't hear the term "zine" until the 90s) worked at some iteration of 8.5" x 11" in the USA because that was the by far the most common and cheap paper you could get. Every Xerox machine used that size by default. And when you're doing guerilla publishing, you use what is available.

The three common paper sizes in the USA are:

Letter: 8.5" x 11"

Legal: 8.5" x 14"

Tabloid: 11" x 17"

Every photocopy machine would handle these paper sizes and every place with a machine almost certainly had a pack of each. So you could plan your book in the following easy increments:

Full size (stapled flat): 8.5" x 11"

Full size (tabloid folded once): 8.5" x 11"

Digest (letter folded once): 5.5" x 8.5"

Mini: (letter folded twice): 4.25" x 5.5"

Printed on my desktop, c. 2004.

Virtually all comic zines of that era were black and white because the cost of doing color was incredibly high by comparison. And to get GOOD color was even more expensive. This is why I have been a black and white line artist for much of my life, though the internet sort of changed that for me and I've done my fair share of color work in the past 20 years.

There are other options, of course, such as folding a legal sheet in half or folding a letter sheet down the long way to make a really tall, skinny zine. But those were rare to see. Most folks stuck with the variations listed above because they were easy, common, standard. And one thing that us comic book folks really enjoy is a standard format*.

My zines have taken on various formats over the years, but I'd say the bulk of them were "digest" sized. This was, in my experience, the most common format for small press comics. All through the 90s I was involved in various small press co-ops, making and trading my comics with other creators. It was fun times. I have a TON of old zines in storage I should bust out and share pics of.

One huge leap forward for me was when I got a black and white laser printer. It's just as good as a photocopier (of its time... this is an older printer now), so I could make zines all day long. But there was one problem: the INTERNET happened. Suddenly print books were not all the rage and zine folks were doing a lot of digital stuff. The small press networks I had grown with over the years flagged, sometimes fading away entirely. I retreated from that scene, feeling like the connections I craved there were now being met more readily online. Over time, we would also see the cost of mailing books go up and up and UP until it made no sense at all to mail a single digest sized comic to anyone. The cost of the book was far, far less than the cost to mail it.

To close out on this rambler, in the USA, in my own experience, it was most common to do your comics and zines in black and white in size formats compatible with 8.5x11 sheets of paper. Because that's what we had to work with.

*Hey, calm down. I'm not saying weird formats are bad. Hell no! I published some zines in weird formats. I did the tall skinny thing with Random Order Comics & Games issue 1, for example. And if you went to any small press conventions you'd see all kinds of weird books! People are super creative about this stuff. This post is just talking about the most common uses of the materials that were available, filtered through the lens of the small press comics world. Most small press comics folks were not interested in having a weird format, they wanted something as close to a "normal comic book" as possible, to be honest. But it was super expensive to do a professional print run. We slummed it with Xerox machines.

 

Arcades! Pew Pew

Personal post talking about my interactions with arcade video games.

My earliest memory of video games, I think, was Space Invaders. Two separate memories.

The Dinner Bell

There was a restaurant called The Dinner Bell and it was in the same building as a cab service and the bus stop. This was in my home town and it would have been sometime between 1978 and 1980. My parents got divorced in 1978 and this memory was when I went with my dad for a weekend. He drove a cab, so I basically hung out at the Dinner Bell while he was doing that. I had a few quarters he had given me because they had a video game called Space Invaders.

Now, this version of SI was a flat top table. You'd sit in a regular chair and the joystick and button were under the table top at the end. Folks would also use this table to eat and drink, so it wasn't terribly clean. I was fascinated and played it with however many quarters I had... probably less than a dollar's worth.

Being a truck stop, cab service, and diner all in one... the place had smells. Lots of them. It wasn't terribly busy, just a handful of people milling about here and there. I don't even remember any of the people there at all. But my grandmother worked the diner, so she was probably there too. The memory is fuzzy. The Dinner Bell went out many years ago and I believe it is now a Save-a-Lot grocery store. I don't think we've had a bus stop in this town for decades, as far as I know. But boy, every town used to have one.

Morgan's Grocery

I'm very fuzzy on the name, but I do believe it is Morgan's. This was a little grocery store way out in the sticks with a gas pump. In those days, roughly 1978-1980, my mom was living with Lee, who would later be my stepdad. Lee was a... lazy entrepreneur. He basically did odd things here and there. Not

handyman stuff, but more of a "let's try to sell this junk" kind of vibe. Mom met him when he was driving an old white pickup delivering loads of coal to various houses. At that time mom and I lived in a red shack her dad built and it was winter time. She had heard of Lee delivering coal and had requested a load. He brought it, dumped the coal next to the house (no cellar that I recall, but I was only 8 so maybe I'm wrong).

Next thing I know he's living with us.

Anyway, one of his little gigs was picking up cans on the side of the road. You could walk a highway stretch and fill a bag with aluminum cans pretty easily back then. Everybody just tossed their trash out the window in those days. It was shitty. Anyway, we did that. We walked the highways picking up cans*. One highway had Morgan's store on it and sometimes we'd pop in there, if we had any money, and buy some snacks. That was breakfast and lunch for the day: a honey bun and a carton of milk or a pop.

Morgan's had Space Invaders too. This time it was the traditional stand-up cabinet style. Every time we went there I'd beg mom for a quarter. Sometimes she's give me one, sometimes she would not. Depends on if we had any to spare**.

So Space Invaders was my first experience with video games. I played it only randomly here and there, and only because it was the game they had. If they had a different game, I'd try that one too. And I sucked at them, probably because I'd get to play once, maybe twice then I wouldn't have another chance for weeks or months.

Convenience Store

Ok, this one is weird. Because in my head there is a memory of an official chain of stores called "Convenience". There was for sure one store that was located near an apartment we used to live in and had the word "Convenience" right there on building. And I recall Ernest P. Worrell doing commercials for Convenience. But alas... my child's memories are tainted and flawed for Ernest did commercials for various stores and brands and it appears that "convenience" was the catch phrase of the time for little quickie marts and I confused it as a name brand***.

But the point is there was this convenience quickie mart near the apartment and we could walk to it for groceries and things. And yep, they had some video games. Almost every store at that time (by now... 1980-1982) had at least one video game. It was like having vending machines. Some company would bring you a game, put it in the corner, and you and the company would earn money from kids pumping it full of quarters. Almost no effort on the part of the store.

This store had Galaga! And they had Moon Cresta! My memory is poor, so I am not sure if they had both at once or if one came later. Because this store pops up in my memories more than once over the course of a few years.

Oh... they also had a silly little game called Pac-Man, but nobody cared about that, did they?

Stanford Auction House

Back in those early 80s days, we were really into flea markets and auctions. We would go to them every single day to sell junk. When we lived in Stanford (the first time), there was a red auction house on a hill. I remember it well because it had a flea market in the day, auctions at night, and sometimes they had cool things like wrestling. I saw Leapin' Lanny there!

Anyway, that place had a video game and it was Donkey Kong. Basically NOBODY came to that building. I remember it was very disappointing to my stepdad because there was no crowd, no traffic. We sold at the auction, which was ok. But the flea market was just dead. But they did have two things. They had Donkey Kong and they had a seller with tons and tons of old paperback books. I would look through them, searching for the naughty ones. I was about 12.

Donkey Kong was great. I loved playing that game. I got decent at it because we were trapped in that building for hours at a time and if I could squeeze any quarters out of mom, I did. And I plopped them immediately into Donkey Kong. But it wasn't enough to make me a master. I was, at best, a noob even at my height.

Atari 2600

I'm not gonna spend any time discussing this. I encountered the 2600 when I was 12 at my cousins' house and when my mom got a job a few years later she splurged and bought one. We played it constantly. She played so much Pac-Man she could easily roll it over through all the levels multiple times. But that's a discussion for another post. Let's stay focused on arcade machines.

The Pirate's Cove

Our local mall (malls were a big deal in the 80s) had an actual arcade called The Pirate's Cove. It was awesome. It was kinda dark, loud, and always had plenty of kids hanging out. By kids I mean teens like me. We owned that joint.

The Cove had all the cool shit. Yeah, they had Pac-Man and probably had Space Invaders. But this was the later 80s... those games were old hat. They had newer shit like Golden Axe, Raiden, and, my favorite, Rastan! And since by then I had started working, I had plenty of quarters to blow. I played the holy shit out of Rastan, Raiden, Twin Cobra, Golden Axe, Double Dragon, Outrun, and Gauntlet. Those were glorious days.

I started dating girls, going to college, and getting married soon after... these high school days were pretty much my last days of arcade magic. I haunted a few arcades after it, but the magic was gone. The Pirate's Cove turned into the Fun Tunnel (lame), home video games were dominant, and an era died. The arcades went into deep freeze for a long time.

*Jesus we were poor. I look back on it now in amazement when I think about the things we did and the things we didn't do and I put the pieces together I realize just how deep, deep, deep in poverty we really were. As a kid you don't necessarily know or notice that shit. You just exist. You play and eat if there's food and do what your folks say. But god damn, thinking about those years... those were rough times.

**Side note: My memory is that it cost a quarter to play arcade games from the late 70s pretty much through most of the 80s. I remember as a teen going to the local arcade, The Pirate's Cove (how cool a name is that?) and it was always one quarter to play games. Then suddenly we started to see these fancier, bigger games with seats and steering wheels that cost 50 cents and I was like "50 cents?? You gotta be kidding me!".

***Yeah, so that's not the only one. Before my folks split up but I was old enough to remember (1975-1977), my mom bought me a Big Wheel. Now, Big Wheels were a big deal back in the day. That shit was hot to a kid. And it was not cheap, I'm sure. Especially for poor people. But my dad allegedly had a job at that time and so mom bought me a Big Wheel for my birthday by putting it on lay-away. Now, lay-away was a term used by retail stores for when you would take the item to the lay-away counter, pay some percentage of the total price, and they would keep it for you until you paid it all off. It was a way poor people could slowly purchase an item that was too much to buy at once so that the item didn't go away before you had the cash to buy it. But my wee brain thought "Lay-Away's" was a brand name for a store. I remember going to "Lay-Aways"... I have no idea what store it actually was! Possibly Sears.

Ink Talk

I have been on a brush pen kick for months. My first experience with brush pens was back in 2000 or 2001 with the Pitt brush pen, which is not a "real" brush pen but a felt pen with a brush-shaped tip. The Pit is great, and you should try it out, but that tip wears out REAL quick*.

Sometime in the late 2000s I picked up two excellent brush pens and didn't fully appreciate them at the time because I was on the cusp of switching almost entirely to drawing digitally. I got a Sailor Profit and a Pentel Pocket.

Zip ahead to recent times and I have re-connected with traditional art in a big, big way. I've dusted off these old tools, picked up new ones, and have been experimenting and learning and growing as much as I can.

So anyway, this post is about ink. Because these types of tools are really, really picky and will gum up if you use the wrong stuff in them.

Sailor Kiwaguro ink bottle is sexy.

YouTube has been a great resource for learning and from various videos I picked up the suggestion that the ink you get with the Sailor (my personal favorite brush pen) is perhaps not the ideal ink. One I kept hearing about was Sailor Kiwaguro. So I picked up a pack of Kiwaguro disposable cartridges to try out and fell in love instantly. Now I got myself a bottle of the stuff and I plan to switch to an ink converter as soon as I burn through the rest of these dozen cartridges.

Of course there's a trick if you don't want to use a converter. You can use a blunt syringe to just squirt more ink into an empty disposable cartridge and reuse those bastards over and over and over again. But beware! Make sure you stick that syringe tip all the way past the opening and just give it a gentle, tiny push or else you'll have an ink explosion. Yeah, it happened to me.

Kiwaguro is a pigmented black ink that is pretty waterproof and dries fast. I like it.

Black as night, black as pitch...

Then there's this Noodler's black water-based ink I got thanks to many recommendations. This shit is VERY black. Whereas Kiwaguro (and most inks) have a bit of a dull finish, Noodler's finish is kind of dense and matte... almost velvety. It has a texture. You can feel the ink on the paper. But there's a problem: erasing.

If you're like me, you sketch in pencil, ink right on the pencils, then erase. When you erase over most ink, it might lift some of the pigment and dull the black just a little. Mostly not noticeable. But Noodler's loses quite a bit of opacity to the eraser (see pic). So while I do love the thick, black feel, I am not happy about the eraser situation. I will probably not use Noodler's on important drawings, though it is great for doodling.

Before erasing and after erasing, Noodler's black ink takes a beating.

*There's a super secret though. If you pull the tip out of the Pit brush pen you will discover that it can be flipped around and you've got a BRAND NEW TIP. Very cool. I had no idea back when I was burning through these things in the 2000s. 

Another Sketchbook

Another little sketchbook filled with some fanart doodles and other nonsense.