La Zona Muerta

“Oh, DJ,?” you may ask. “What do you do when you aren’t lamenting the sorry state of pro wrestling, bitching about comic books, promising us Transformers photos you never take and the like?”

Well, mostly, I draw, at least as much as my old hands let me.

I drew a LOT as a kid. I had realistic expectations; I knew I was never good enough or, perhaps more accurately, not driven enough to be a comic book artist, but I did a lot of cartooning. I worked on my high school newspaper, did spot illos and was generally the kid in school you would come to when there was a drawing project that needed to be done. I painted bus kiosks with Dragonball Z characters (I don’t mean graffitti; I was awarded the opportunity to do so through school and the local transit authority and got my buddy to help me. The kiosk was around for YEARS before being graffitti-ed to death), I designed flags, I won an award for my dopey cartoons in the school newspaper. I was art guy.

My most infamous drawing during my high school days… hold on real quick. *scurries off to fetch the IPad*

So, it was junior year of high school. I was a nerd, but I was that kind of ‘funny enough to not be too bothered by people’ nerd, meaning I was only mildly bullied. Really, by junior year, I was enough in my own world with my own clique of friends and hangers on that I was left alone / ALMOST respected and people knew I was the school cartoonist guy, de facto editor on the school newspaper and the guy who ran the high school Anime Club (for my sins), the only actually successful club that wasn’t directly run by the school itself. We had a treasury and actual money coming in! I was mostly left to my own devices, worried more about role playing games and getting out of homework than I was my social life, which in turn, granted me a social life with the dorks of my kind.

I’ll refrain from using last names as to prevent doxxing, but let’s just say a fella named Tony came into town and our school that year and immediately acted like a big shot, talking to everyone, declaring himself to be the new, popular guy and declaring his intentions to both

a) run for student council

and

b) date our girls

I don’t think he actually used the term “date,” if what I did ends up striking you as cruel. He was a douchebag.

Anyway, I found the new guy repulsive, as did a number of other people, including people I didn’t like. Thinking back, this was Megapowers shit, me and my crew joining forces with some of the kids we didn’t get along with to bring new guy down a peg. I was the artist and had access to the school’s copy machine… and we collectively devised a plan. An anti-propaganda campaign against the new guy.

An approximation; I doubt I have any originals remaining and if I do… I don’t know what that says about a forty five year old clinging to the past. If you need help deciphering what it says, obviously you weren’t old enough to stay home from school and watch ‘Classic Concentration’

So, I whipped up something like the above drawing and abused my access to the school copier to print up HUNDREDS of these things at various sizes and handed them out to my friends and foes to plaster around the campus. The anti-propaganda was a success; Tony did not ascend to the lofty position of student councilperson. It probably wasn’t due to my hundreds of DIY badges but I like to think I played a hand in his failure… or at least a toe and a knee.

The cat confronted me a couple of days later after the election, wanting to know who put me up to making the signs and badges. I told him no one had (not exactly true, but certainly no one had twisted my arm). He freaked out but I knew I had enough ambiguity to protect me, as he wasn’t directly named so, when he demanded that the principal intervene, the school office did nothing. I think he wanted to fight me, but I was a heavy set, close to six foot dork who regularly play fought and grappled with my friends and, despite my somewhat overweight frame, my shoulders were broad and I was weight training, so I wasn’t a pushover physically. He thought better of it when he saw I wasn’t intimidated.

I then proceeded to bury him in a “guest” editorial for the school newspaper, careful to not use his name, only referring to a “bitter ex candidate for student council who tried to harass me,” which enraged him further. I MAY have included one of the badges with the article but the fog of thirty years veils my memories; I was passive aggressive, but I don’t truly recall if I was THAT passive aggressive. When he came to again try to come to blows with me, I laughed in his face and told him to take up his complaints with the scary and intimidating teacher who ran the school newspaper, the one that, for better or worse, I was a favored student of.

I didn’t hear much from him after that. He left our girls alone, as far as I know and I think he may not even have been around by senior year (again, memory is hazy. I certainly never had any more dealings with him).

Thus concludes my tale of dork beats wannabe jock. All of this to establish that I was art guy, and certainly not to assuage my own ego, however slightly.

Ahem.

I drifted away from art when I was a young adult, largely just because it frustrated me. Hundreds of stops and starts, each one taking a toll on my hands. I’m mildly double jointed in my thumbs, so I always knew my hands were going to cause me problems when I was older, but even in my twenties, I could feel problems cropping up, so telling myself my artistic inadequacies were due to my hands bothering me, while partially true, was a convenient out.

COVID, of course, hit in 2020. I hadn’t given up art entirely but besides doodles for my missus, occasional stuff for work and friends and on rare occasion, for my own satisfaction, I had largely stopped drawing. I got into watching wrestling auctions on the Highspots Network and was sometimes blown away by the art they would commision for legends to sign 8 x 10 glossies of and sometimes appalled by what was clearly just someone tracing a photo. I thought “I could do that,” and, when being laid off from my job looked like it could become a possibility, I strained a credit card, bought an IPad, a copy of Procreate and created this with the idea of selling it:

I guess this is pretty good; I think I’d do a lot better on this today. The face looks too copied from the source I got the photo from despite me laboring over it for hours to MAKE it look that way; it should probably be slightly more stylized. Creating this was not enjoyable enough for me to decide I wanted to hawk pictures like this to vendors like Highspots for a living

Ultimately, doing digital paintings of wrestlers was not going to be my way out of the pandemic, but I did rediscover my love of drawing and the ease with which digital tools helped my start / stop / get frustrated / really stop nature sort of got me back into the game. I only do work for myself or friends on occasion (having been sort of burned once, I learned the lesson of not working for free), and I don’t have much of an eye for graphic design, but I’ll draw the hell out of a subject for you if need be. I DON’T TRACE. Mostly. My process is long and convoluted and doesn’t help my beleaguered hands any; if I’m inking pencils I found online, that’s pretty straight forward. If I’m recreating something that already has inks, yeah, I’m tracing a bit by creating pencils for myself to refer to and then “inking” over those, so it’s a 2nd generation copy, I guess.

An example of what I’m talking about; I couldn’t find original pencils when I decided to recreate this one, so I essentially traced the original to make my own “pencils” to work on and then produced this, slightly deviating from the original work but staying probably 90% faithful

The missus always encourages me to paint or color my stuff and I hate doing it but sometimes, she’s right and I force myself to agree. I’m getting better at that. Here’s some of the oddball stuff I’ve tackled of late:

The beleaguered Dan Backslide from probably my favorite Warner Brothers cartoon: “The Dover Boys at Pimento University or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall.” I tried VERY hard here to flatly color Dan like a cel and sloppily paint the background to separate the two; I think it was fairly successful

A bully in the wrestling blogosphere evoked “Time for Timer” recently in one of his diatribes, so I said “hell no; Timer belongs to ME” and knocked this one out. The background is pretty close but the line weights on Timer aren’t as good as the actual animation. My biggest weakness; line weights

Which is why I do a LOT of Archie recreations; specifically to train myself on applying line weights more carefully. If my cartooning becomes even a tenth better, it’s from closely studying and recreating the work of artists like Harry Lucey, Dan DeCarlo and, above, probably the funniest of the lot, Samm Schwartz

Speaking of line weights and the hell (for me) of trying to make them look natural in Procreate:

The problem with doing Barks recreations is, if your lines don’t look natural, the whole thing falls apart. The image took me probably twenty minutes to draw. It was the next two hours of shaving pixels and RE drawing that were the problem

Leading to this, a world premiere I haven’t put on Bluesky or my Deviant Art yet (I’m waiting for June 9th; Donald Duck’s supposed birthday):

I don’t generally put my art over too much, but I’m actually proud of this one. It was TOUGH

There you are, a story of my misspent youth and some varying degrees of fun art. I do have some other wacky tales of opportunities art opened up for me in school at various levels; perhaps when I’m bored, those stories will be committed to screen. More art to come, of course, here at La Zona Muerta and also my Deviant Art page and Bluesky and probably wherever else I digitally hang out.