#I���ve been meaning to draw this comic for awhile!!

[dherzogblog]

songs/20

Happy Holidays Everyone! I started making these yearly playlists in 2001 as an attempt to connect with friends in the wake of 911. It was just before the dawn of ITunes, and way before social media. We were not in touch like we are today. I burned dozens of individual cd’s one at a time, printed up customized jewel case covers and snail mailed them all out. It was an annual month-long labor of love. Over the past few years, streaming music has made it much easier and faster to compile and distribute, and frankly much more fun. I still look forward to putting the playlist and blog together and sharing it with all of you. Particularly this year as it gives me a chance to connect with so many friends I haven’t seen in quite some time. It was a tremendously challenging year for all of us. I was grateful to have had my family here in LA the entire time, we remain healthy and well. The west coast Herzogs know just how lucky we have been. The next year will not be without its own challenges, but I'm hopeful we are able to move past this pandemic and the exhausting events of the past 4. More than that, I look forward to seeing each and every one of you in 2021. Until then, be safe, be well, and be good to one another. Enjoy the music.

ox peace, dh

Los Angeles CA. December 2020

Khruangbin - Time (You And I) Don’t ask me to pronounce the name of this eclectic trio from Texas, but this dubby disco tune had me returning to its chilled out groove often during the last few decidedly “un-chill” months. Dreamy and funky, the groove takes me back to NYC’s early 80′s club scene and Ze Records releases from the likes of Kid Creole and Coati Mundi.

Anderson .Paak- Lockdown Scenes from the front, June 2020

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Bill Withers (1938-2020)- Use Me The legendary Bill Withers left the playing field at the top of his game in the early 80′s, hardly heard from again. And while he didn't pass from Covid, his healing pop hymn Lean On Me seemed to be everywhere as people found music to help them cope with the challenges of the pandemic. Withers left behind a legendary and enduring group of hit songs that moved easily from soul to folk to pop, not to mention the subtle rolling funk of this one.

Black Pumas- Fire Strong debut from an unlikely Austin duo that garnerd both buzz and grammy nods. The critics are calling it “psychedelic soul”. Not quite sure that nails it, but like the artists coming up next, they’re carving out new ground while drawing inspiration from classic sources.

Gabe Lee- Babylon

Marcus King- Wildflowers and Wine

Charley Crockett- Welcome to Hard Times

Three artists that are literally changing the face of Country and Americana music. Soulful, authentic and diverse, reaching back for inspiration but always looking forward. If you like this sort of stuff they are all worth checking out. Each album is filled with quality songs.

Low Cut Connie_ Private Lives Philly’s Low Cut Connie are back at it with a double album that plays like the soundtrack to a boozy night at your favorite bar. Sweaty, funky and not a little bit messy. If Peter Wolf and Bruce had a kid it would be this blue eyed soul boy. Adam Weiner grew up in the shadow of the Jersey shore and can't help but have a bit of that E Street hustle.

Willie Nile- New York at Night One of New York’s beloved adopted  son’s dropped this love letter right into the jaws of a battered metropolis driven to its knees by the pandemic. It was heartbreaking to listen as the “city that never sleeps” came to a full stop. Somehow I still found myself coming back to it, imagining night’s ahead, when NYC is back on its feet and I’m roaming its streets. Looking for music, a beer, or maybe just a slice, and fueled by the irreplaceable energy and promise of the greatest city on earth.

The Long Ryders- Down to The Well Americana pioneers the Long Ryders reunited last year for a surprisingly solid album. This single sounds like it could have been recorded during their 80′s heyday featuring their trademark Byrds like jangle and harmonies, but the lyrics mark this song as unmistakably 2020.

The Speedways- Kisses Are History UK power pop outfit reach back to the the 60′s on this sweet slice of retro pop perfection.

Billie Joe Armstrong- That Thing You Do

In the early days of the pandemic we had all our kids (+ a significant other) at our house for a few months. It worked out great and we were luckier than most. The biggest issue was keeping enough food, weed and wine around.  There were some great nights with amazing meals, followed by gathering around the TV together. We re-watched The Sopranos, binged Billy On The Street, and revisited some of our favorite movies. One night we went back to a old family favorite, Tom Hanks’ underrated love letter to the one hit wonders of the post Beatles era, That Thing You Do!  I’ve seen the movie several times and it never fails to please. A true feel good film and a perfect Kodak snapshot capturing a simpler time in American pop culture. 

While we watch the unlikely chart topper’s The Oneders  fizzle as fast as they rose to fame, its not really the point. The movie is really an old fashioned love story. Playing like a perfect hit song you can listen to over and over, full of both hooks and heart. I always thought the title track, written by Fountains Of Wayne leader Adam Schlesinger  (who we lost to Covid), brilliantly captured the British Invasion sound every group wanted after The Beatles stormed America. Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong must agree. During the pandemic he cut an album’s worth of cool covers including a faithful version of this one.

Gerard Way (W/Judith Hill - Here Comes the End A tale of discovering music in 2020:  Heard this on a Netflix trailer for the series The Umbrella Factory. Turns out it is performed by Gerard Way (My Chemical Romance) who also writes the comic book the series is based on. (got all that?) He’s joined on this searing garage/psych rave up by the talented and versatile Judith Hill doing her best Merry Clayton.

Hinds- Spanish Bombs I’ve been following this Madrid based, all female outfit of punky garage rockers for a few years now. I think they are pretty great. This track, recorded for a Joe Strummer tribute bursts with an unbridled joy the stone faced and politically minded Clash could never muster. I bet Joe would love it though

The Secret Sisters- Hand Over My Heart Have enjoyed their harmonies for some time now. This one gives me vague Wilson Phillips vibes and I don’t really mind. 

Tame Impala- Breathe Deeper I know I’m supposed to like this guy, all the cool kids do, I’ve even seen the band at Coachella. Over the years very little of the music has stuck to me, but the pandemic offered a bit more free time to dig into this funky dubby, chilled out jam, and it stuck with me. Not to mention that 2020 was all about deep breaths.

Ledisi (feat.Corey Henry)- What Kind of Love Is That Ledisi is back with some slinky, sultry R&B and jazzy vocals

Dinner Party- FreezeTag An R&B/Jazz collective featuring Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, 9th Wonder and Kamasi Washington use sweet soul on heartbreaking and all too familiar tale..

Toots and The Maytals- Time Tough  I’ve written an awful lot about my love for Reggae over the years. Right after Bob Marley kicked the door down for me, Toots showed me around the house. Ska, rock steady, and roots. He was true reggae royalty and sadly we lost him to Covid, just after he released what would be his last album. Check my Toots tribute blog and playlist.

Mungo’s Hi Fi- The Beat Goes SKA! These clever UK roots reggae collective never fail to surprise. This kitschy Sonny & Cher cover managed to make me smile every time I heard it. No mean feat in 2020

Stone Foundation (feat. Durand Jones)- Hold on To Love Frequent collaborators with Paul Weller  (he appears on a track on the album), Stone Foundation are back with another batch of their UK soul revival stylings. This one features Durand Jones ( of Durand Jones & The Indications) on vocals and some great reggae style horns at the top.

The Pretenders- You Can’t Hurt A Fool Can’t resist a good torch song, especially sung by the smokey voiced Chrissie Hynde. Was kind of shocked at how many good songs were on this album.

Shelby Lynne_ Don’t Even Believe in Love Sultry country soul and one of her strongest albums in awhile.

Jaime Wyatt- Neon Cross Outlaw country has a new bad girl. And in case you didn’t think she was serious, she enlisted producer Shooter Jennings (and his mom Jessi Colter on one track) to help make her point. 

Daniel Donato- Justice 25 year old guitar prodigy call his music “cosmic country”.  Ok, now I’m listening. You should be too.

The Jayhawks- This Forgotten Town 30 plus + after their debut this Twin Cities alt country group led by founding member Gary Louris continue to deliver. They find their inner Neil Young on this one.

Lucero- Time To Go Home God I wish I was in a bar right now listening to this, even if I might be crying in my beer.

John Prine (1946 -2020)- Lake Marie We lost so many this year, but this one really stung. A true American songwriting treasure, who was still making great music against all odds right up to his untimely passing. His songs are known for their simplicity, and economy of words. but this one goes against the grain. I’m still not exactly certain what it’s about. Sorrowful and haunting, yet somehow uplifting and redemptive. I heard him perform it live here in Los Angeles a just over a year ago and it has stuck in my head ever since. There is surely a place in heaven for the great John Prine.  He sang about it on his final studio album in 2018. Ironically it became the last song on his last record.

Thanks for making it this far....

***Play the entire songs/20 Spotify playlist HERE!***

[oycomics]

Nib it on the board

I was planning to use the same type of pen to do my lettering as the one I tried for my panel borders (just in a smaller size) and, of course, ran into the same rapid failure issue as that process ( see: Long Way Rounded ).

Plus, even if the pen not lasting longer than a few weeks of strips wasn't a problem, the pressure I needed to apply to produce nice letters was starting to take a noticeable toll on my hand. If my hand wasn't numb after 6~9 strips, it was at least cramped up, which meant lost drawing time while I recovered.

And since there's typically much more lettering in a comic than there are panel borders, this was an even bigger problem that needed solving. If all else failed, I could have just not done panel borders at all and grudgingly redeveloped my rounded border plans. But for lettering, not being able to quickly and neatly write in the words would mean . . . sigh . . . going back to digital lettering.

Go back to digital for the lettering? At that rate, why not go all digital again?

No.

I lost my cartooning soul to that once already. It's taken until now to get it back. This whole redevelopment time over the last 7 years (oh . . . oh, wow, has it been that long?) has been about getting back to cartooning the way I originally learned it, but doing it better and faster so I can be near or on par with how fast I worked digitally.

Plus, logistically, pre-planning for space for the lettering would mean the art would suffer (that works in comic books, for strips not so much). In the long-run, I wouldn't really save any time.

So I began an experimentation phase where I finally tried using a dip nib to do my lettering. I've been a long-time fan of dip nibs for drawing, but lettering always seemed too precise of a skill to trust to them. And when I did try, I wasn't comfortable with the results, so I never took the time to try out very many nibs.

(Insert "Why didn't I do this years ago?" trying out dip nibs montage here.)

The Turner & Harrison 310 . . . is not the nib I settled on for my lettering (though, it could substitute in a pinch easily enough), but it set me on the right track to focus in on other italic-flex style nibs with the little crescent breather hole.

In researching italic-flex style nibs, I stumbled on a most curious model: the Esterbrook Radio 913

This is curious because my primary nib for inking the art in the new Oy is the Esterbrook Radio 914 (made famous in usage by Charles Schulz for Peanuts and hard to come by for a reasonable price . . . and not JUST because I bought up 2 dozen of them myself years ago).

What were the odds that the model number just before my primary drawing nib could become my primary lettering nib? Very good as it turned out.

I ordered a handful of 913 nibs online. Thankfully, this nib is MUCH easier to find than the 914, and cost-effective as well (I've paid more for modern-manufactured nibs).

The results were fantastic! It had a similar line to the T&H 310 and a couple other nibs I tried, but with a superior spring-back for better control and overall nicer quality. Plus, since I didn't need to press as hard as my old pen, I was able to letter for awhile with zero hand cramps or numbness by the end.

This also meant that every ounce of ink on the page would be the same for the borders, lettering, and artwork. I'm a huge fan of consistency!

Oh, but I didn't stop there . . .

Since I was recalibrating my methods anyway, I decided to try and see if I could speed things along even more using two methods:

1) Instead of creating both the guide AND spacing lines with the Ames lettering tool (fellow hand letterers, if you're not using one already, you should), I tried only creating the guidelines and I would just eyeball the spacing. This had the happy side effect that I could also just use certain holes along the left side--making more lines in one step while doing about half the number of passes--than bother with that center circle thingy anymore.

2) On top of the mild craziness of step #1, I decided to go full crazy and try: Inking the words DIRECTLY. Literally from pen to paper with no lettering completed via pencil first.

I figured, I'm already eliminating that "let's do the same work twice for no good reason" step from my panel borders, why not try it with the lettering?

It was a bit nerve-wrecking at first (there's a lot of mental math to kerning and word spacing on-the-fly) but once I got the hang of it, I couldn't believe the time savings! For any minor mistakes, I can use white-out, for major ones I don't mind doing small tweaks on the computer; I could even rewrite the whole thing if needed since it's not an hour's worth of lost work.

It varies by how much dialogue there is and how many different characters are talking in one panel . . . oh! oh! And if there are sound effects . . . math, math, and more math . . .

But on average, I'm going from blank page to inked panels and letters in 10~15 minutes (EXAMPLE: the comic pictured above is actually a "Sunday" spread across two pages. I completed panels and letters for both pages in 22 minutes total). Add on time for drawing (I work in batches so I'm not waiting idly during ink drying time) and I'm averaging about one hour per strip.

After taking anywhere from two hours to even three or more each before, I was hoping to trim my average to ~90 minutes per (very close to being on par with my average digital speed), so getting to one hour (pretty much on par vs. my digital average) . . . I'm just a little bit excited about that.

Basically, in the time it took to write and edit this blog post, I can now get an entire strip completed. Which means, that's one less strip that's done now . . . whoops.

OK! OK! Back to the drawing board.