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Category Archives for: ReyA’

One-Use Carte Blanch

01 August 2021 by Rey Armenteros

I was put in a situation when I had to use the white card. It was my ace in the event that anything happened. The semester was about to begin. My vacation was practically over, and I had to start thinking about getting things ready for the beginning of Spring 2021. Checking work emails, I was reminded of another email from last month. I was sure I had responded to it, but when I checked, I started to get that cold feeling when something important had been overlooked, and the guilty party was me.

I wrote the store representative I had had to respond to, mentioning to him that I thought I had given him my response, but I couldn’t find it in my emails anywhere. When I got his answer, my fears were confirmed. And because of my negligence, it was going to negatively impact the upcoming semester. I sat there, feeling like the monumental jackass that I was.

I thought about it for several minutes. I felt like I had to use that card now available to most of us. It was a get-out-of-jail-free card. I was going to tell him that I failed to respond to him because our household had been stricken by Covid 19. After carefully writing a well-balanced message, I sent my email to him and thought about what I had just done.

I don’t think it’s anybody’s business that we had to go through out trying times, but this was my job, and I had to give the store a sensible reason while I was pleading with them to work with me, even at so late a time. While the fact remained that I was overwhelmed last month with the state of our household, I didn’t want to cheapen the experience by providing it as an excuse for something I had failed to do. But what better excuse in these trying times?

When he wrote me back, the representative offered his sympathy, and he said he was going to try his utmost to get something done for me. He had just had two elderly family members go through Covid, and it was a very scary episode indeed. He did understand my situation, and then he explained why they could not fulfill the orders at the drop of a hat, giving me a brief explanation of the process of moving stock. They were going to do their best to get mine fulfilled.

I should have expected it, but I guess I didn’t see it coming. It started feeling like moves on a board. Though I love games, I always overlooked the likelihood that the person on the other side of the board possessed the same key piece I had just used. I was not too surprised when he pulled out the same card, making my monumental trials just max normal.

The only response at this juncture was to gush with gratitude, which I did, after offering my sympathy. But looking back on the whole misadventure of not having everything fall apart when we were overwhelmed with our circumstances, I don’t know how it could have played out any other way. I know it was my fault I didn’t respond to that one email, but I was able to do so many other duties without mishap even under the circumstances. It was like one of those bad video games from the 1980s when the game just kept throwing stuff at you before it took your third life and then “Game Over.” I did pretty well if only one thing slipped past me.

I got more emails after that. And it turned out they were going to be able to help me. Again, I gushed and told the representative and the other person involved with my emergency that they were awesome. I actually wrote a lengthy email about my gratitude, and I was sincere because they really pulled my fat out of the fire. But I got no response to this last message. I now chalk it up to their being so busy, with the semester starting and all, but I couldn’t help my initial reaction, when I sat there thinking that the only type of person who uses that card is a tremendous jackass.

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The Order of Points

26 July 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Writers of the line versus writers of the object. Writers of the object continue the thought on the next paragraph by going into the first point after introducing the three points in the previous paragraph. Writers of the line place the first point in the same paragraph as the introduction of the three points and then do not hesitate to place a point across two paragraphs or conflated with another point in the same paragraph.

The kind of writing that propels forward through an adventure of unknowns is the type that is following the line. But when each paragraph is a discrete piece and the writing places ideas in their right place, then it treats the verbal forms as the objects they represent.

Writers like Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis reside somewhere in the middle, because they do place the first idea in the same paragraph as the introduction but they move forward by placing everything else in its proper place.

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Proposition: A Good Mystery without Solutions

18 July 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The problem with mysteries is the mystery itself, what culminates in every bad ending with an overly-rational conclusion. This is a shame because the mood, the tone, and situation set up in mystery stories create immediate interest in the reader, who feels that they are being enticed, who cannot help but keep moving onward. Then the ending arrives, and the murderer is found, and every conceivable moment of note in the story is conscientiously explained.

The real mystery should encompass life’s mysteries where the answers sought are metaphysical. Maybe second person point-of-view along with first person to travel disheveled rooms, like those archaic narrative video games that brought you to room after room with clues and that were populated by not a single other person. I enjoyed the calmness of these game mysteries where it was just you and an endless landscape of interiors and exteriors, objects that became keys that led you to more places to find the final clue that would unlock the meaning of it all.

When I think of mysteries, I think of Raymond Chandler. I think of memos to myself, the writer. Just write like Raymond Chandler, I would remind myself. That was my solution, except there was the one thing that pulls his work down a notch. It was the pulp tradition that still held traces of evidence in his stories. Chandler evokes this in moments when his private eye, Marlowe, goes into his desk drawer and straps on the gun. This decision comes after incidences when he gets caught and beaten up, when he meets vampires and ghouls bred in Hollywood in exotic settings from a Conan the barbarian story. Unknowingly, Chandler tips his hand, revealing his sense of Dashiell Hammett, the creator of hard-boiled fiction who happened to write for the pulps like Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan. It was boy’s fiction, in other words. Boys needed to grow up tough to knock out the rival boy and then grab the girl. Hammett did not bother hiding any of these notions, and that is why some of his work is hard to read today.

Chandler is different, more flexible, with greater reach through the decades. Chandler credits Hammett as the source of the hard-boiled strain of the mystery, and it is true that Hammett’s best stories open the curtain for Chandler. Though Hammett created it, Chandler made his entrance afterward and truly perfected the form.

Even though it retains snippets of what I recognize as Conan.

As I have always said, I enjoy mystery novels… until we get to the ending. Perhaps it could be that I am strange, and there is something to be valued in having all loose ends tied up. I don’t know. To me, such clarity does not depict any reality I know. Mysteries in real life almost always remain mysteries, and you find this out eventually, after having sought their solutions for too long.

If a mystery story is like filling out every correct answer in a questionnaire, then the day I write one, I will use the questionnaire as a starting point and keep it close until we get near the ending, where the questionnaire has been cut into smaller pieces with its words reorganized so that it answers itself. I am not going to be the one to answer them. I propose tales that don’t require even half the answers expected, where the mystery goes beyond the crime, where the tone is a spiritual blood relation to the style of Chandler (without mimicking him, mind you), and doing away with that one flaw in every writer who introduces a gun and then is obligated to have it go off — where if you strap on a gun, you never end up shooting it, because if you get a chance to use it, you will see that it mires your path instead of opening it by blowing holes in it. The gun is not the one Chekhov propounded. It is a gun that makes an appearance that does not need to be shot at all, but if it is shot, you could end up merely hitting birds with it. But you still have to strap it on because the possibilities open up the moment you do. I like that kind of story where the possibilities do not narrow as you get to the end, but expand. You don’t know where the story is going, but it takes you…

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Techniques in Black

11 July 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Black lines are my way of chiseling definition in my acrylic paintings. Lately, I use lines that are alive with variation. It is the line type I witnessed in Japan when contemplating the Japanese calligraphy. The thick black lines in certain Japanese letterforms cover as much area as the white ground. The lines taper drastically, and one line would connect with another at an angle that feels perfect. I make lines that are distant relations to what I found over there.

Comic book artists spot blacks. This is when they choose certain areas in their drawings to cover in black, and they do this to propel certain parts of the image forward and for particular effects, such as creating forms that come out of a pool of black or balancing black areas with the non-black forms. Often, a figure will have almost as much black on it as not, like a silhouette that is partially visible. Having used such heavy-handed methods before, I am now bringing them back into my images to see how they tie things together.

In drawing with a brush, the hatching techniques you use can be more like “feathering.” This is when your parallel lines have more body to them; they taper in ways that are inherent to a brush. I have been looking carefully at woodcuts and wood engravings. There is a similar line there. It is usually a more rigid line, but it has the same taper. The difference is the lines are white instead of black, and yet they create black lines nevertheless; the black resides as the negative spaces of the white — or vice versa. There is also a simplicity to woodcuts that I covet in my complicated thoughts and permutations, in how I constantly turn and turn an idea until it is exhausted. Simplicity is the key to stronger images.

In my old search for styles when I was a youth, I came across two techniques that I used in my drawings. The first one came when I discovered that you can overload a brush or dip pen with ink and draw with thick, wet lines that slipped and thickened all over the drawing. You can manipulate blobs of black and create some of those black areas comic book artists were using. But I was using it in a silkier, more silvery way because I was allowing streaks of white to interplay with the black. Using this overly wet technique, I was imposing a shiny and smooth finish on everything.

A couple of years later, I was also working with broad black areas, and I found a way to give a figure dramatic lighting by infusing certain parts of a figure with pure black. And if you had enough of these black areas creating the figure, you didn’t even need a contour line to tie it together. A viewer would still be able to read these black and white splotches. Later, much later, I would see that this technique I “invented” had been used countless times by other artists, and I am thinking now of Kathe Kollwitz. The nice things about not including certain contour lines is that a drawing can insinuate something through strange juxtapositions without coming out and showing them.

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Moments with John Paul Leon – Last

27 June 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The last time I talked to JP, it was probably August of 2020. I had heard him interviewed in a video about the greatness of Alex Toth. I had heard his voice, and it sounded terrible. I immediately thought it was related to the cancer. I sent him a message, telling him I had heard his interview about Toth. We set up to talk that weekend. He was explaining why his voice had changed so much. It had to do with an error in a throat surgery he had a couple of years back. It might stay like that for a long time. I asked him to let me know when he wanted to stop talking, but we talked for two hours and then made it a point to talk the next day. On Sunday, we talked for three more hours. I felt like I spent the whole weekend with JP.

We did talk about Toth, but we also talked about the lack we saw in current movies and TV shows, and the end of Game of Thrones. JP was critical about such things, as I was (because this is what happens when you go to art school). I think he had read some of the novels from A Song of Ice and Fire, and in there, travel across Westeros or other parts sometimes took years. It was a small detail, but he felt that with every new season of Game of Thrones, travel became easier, allowing great distances to be covered in one-day journeys. It cheapened it, somehow. He asked me what I thought, because he was not too convinced about the show anymore. I remember telling him Game of Thrones was not perfect, but now that it was gone, we had nothing.

We would return to the topic of comics, always comics. JP talked about page design and how the most important element of drawing was line. I agreed on some of these points, because they paralleled my own views about drawing. We didn’t agree about everything because we liked different types of comics. He didn’t like some of the work I admired in the alternative scene, and I was no longer into mainstream comics. But we had much in common, especially in thoughts about the old comics masters.

Before we hung up on the second day, I asked him about his dad, and he informed me that his dad had passed away a few years back. I told him I was sorry, and then I made some reference to the passing of my dad. He had remembered. But as we talked about it, I noticed we were not talking about the same thing. I was talking about my father, but he was talking about my step-father.

And that was when it dawned on me. I told him I had no idea my step-dad had died. He said he was sorry, and we both were at a loss for words. I told JP I had always thought I would talk to him again. I should have tried to reach out to him. And now it was all too late. It put a real damper on the last minutes of the conversation. JP felt bad to have brought me the news, and I kept telling him he had nothing to feel bad about.

A month or two later, I was looking at JP’s art online, and I got it in my head I wanted to catch up with the newest work. I read Batman: Creature of the Night, along with some of his shorter work, and then I read Winter Men once again. I was sending him messages, giving him my thoughts on his work, on how toward the end of Creature of the Night, his line got thinner. “Perceptive eye,” he shot back. He said he was getting into drawing what they call a dead line, which was the opposite of the full-bodied line he was known for. He explained that he had been looking closely at Al Williamson. I said I had just been looking at his Empire Strikes Back work.

I was trying to ask him when we would talk again. I really wanted to talk about his work. Not just Creature of the Night, but Winter Men, which I had always felt was JP’s masterpiece.

Back in the days when I first read it, I remember the delays and how those hiccups almost ruined the pacing of the Winter Men story. He and the writer had to make changes because they were getting less and less of a page count by the publisher. In those days, JP expressed his regrets, especially about the ending. When I read the ending the first time, I think I allowed for his feelings about it to color my own experience with it. I agreed that the ending was a bit thin and that the work was a flawed gem.

But my recent reading gave me a very different perspective of the book. Bret Lewis, the writer, was extremely talented. The two worked well together, and I recognized that from the start. But this time around, I found no flaw in that gem. It felt more like a story cycle than one epic story. One big story is what I assumed it was, but a story cycle might have been their intention all along when the series was supposed to be twelve issues. I wanted to ask him about that. I wanted to say a lot in our next conversation. But in those days, JP wasn’t up for talks on the phone. I waited, and in the meantime, I was sending him messages about how the Winter Men read so differently to me now, and about how it was a crime that that masterful work had not been made into a nice hardcover! There was so much I wanted to tell him.

I had also wanted to ask him what happened to my stepdad. I told my side of the family, and my brother and mom were shocked that he had passed away. It affected us, and it came with that finality that all future intentions have been swept away. And that is how it is with JP now that he’s gone.

In our last conversation, I did tell JP about how proud I was of him. He was the one that made it! Every semester, I would tell my art students about my cousin that worked for comics professionally. I always had at least one student interested in doing comics, and I would point them to JP’s direction. As I would tell my student, JP was not exactly famous in the comics industry, but he was a highly-respected creator, often lauded by his peers. I told him I was proud of him because he was doing such a stellar job of keeping the flame of artistic integrity. JP never settled for cheating the backgrounds or allowing a bad day to affect his work. “Once it’s in print,” he would say, “it’s there forever.”

And here we are. It was inevitable that I would get to the point where I cannot locate anymore memories. It is natural. Some of the memories are gone. I believe many of them are not. They are just mixed up with other memories. Memories seem to conflate, so that every time we played a role-playing game, the multiple instances come together. Yes, there was that time we brought the Platoon board game to JP and Alex’s house, and we played it. I can still see the scenario we played and how it was going. I think that game only happened once. Conquest of the Empire was another of those one-time playing sessions, and I have a strong recollection of how JP and Alex had painted the game’s ships with Jolly Rogers to include pirate vessels as an optional rule. Like I said, they were the most creative kids I knew — altering board game pieces and making their own rules. But how many times did we actually play D&D? How many times did the three of us sit down to draw characters or watch a movie on TV?

The moments that come out at you are the ones that stay because of something said or because of something that happened. I wish there were more. I will have to hold the ones that I have and keep them till the end. John Paul was a singular person that had touched my life and the lives of many, many others. My great friend and kindred spirit — you will be sorely missed.

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

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Moments with John Paul Leon – Sixth

20 June 2021 by Rey Armenteros

John Paul Leon’s version of Milton Caniff’s character, Dragon Lady

When enough time had passed, I would send JP a message to ask him if he wanted to talk. If he was up to it, he told me. If he sounded hesitant for some reason, I never pushed the issue.

JP placed my attention on other great artists from the medium. I had seen Zaffino’s work before and remember not liking it on those Punisher graphic novels because it was so over the top, and to me, Punisher was all about unmitigated 1980s violence and vengeance. Since it was pure ridiculousness, I had placed the same value on the art. JP showed me some of Zaffino’s work in black and white, and he changed my mind about him. I soon started seeking out his work in black and white. JP’s prize possession was a Zaffino original he kept not far from his drawing table. He told me Zaffino died young, only fifty. I was worried about JP at the time, because he was going through the treatment, but he was not at all disheartened by it.

He introduced me to the other great Argentine artist, Alberto Breccia. And he introduced me to Sergio Toppi. I had seen a version of one of Breccia’s many styles on the pages of Heavy Metal. It was a quirky silent Dracula story that was painted with expressionistic globs. I quite liked it, but the work JP showed me was different from that. This was Mort Cinder. It was expressionistic too but in a completely different direction, with rough brushstrokes that magically made things look real. I suddenly saw many of our heroes blueprinted on that older artist’s work. Frank Miller never mentioned Breccia, but it was so evident that he had been looking at him when doing Sin City. I was shaking my head, because this was truly phenomenal stuff.

One day, I was getting into Bernie Krigstein. I was on the phone with JP, and I asked him what he thought about him. He described Krigstein’s work as somewhat sterile — maybe the word he used was detached. I could tell he admired Krigstein, but I found it an interesting way to describe his art. It made me reflect on it. I thought JP referred to Krigstein’s inking. Bernie Krigstein was known as the groundbreaker who would cut up pages to reorganize panels and thus receive many smaller panels that invoked a staccato pacing never before seen in comics. He influenced some of the great comics that would come decades after his short career in the field. I thought about his inking, because it had personality but no body to it. His brushwork and his pen work never fused into each other. They collided. It was almost unfriendly, and come to think of it, I should have thought about Klaus Janson’s work in the 1980s when I was looking at Krigstein’s work, because if Janson was not looking at Krigstein, I don’t know who he was looking at.

In one of these conversations, JP told me that he was talking to my stepdad and had given him my number. Just like Alex when he had done the same thing, JP was apologizing for it, because he felt he should have asked me first. And again, I said I would be glad to hear from my old stepdad. I don’t know if it occurred to me to ask JP for his number. If it did, I didn’t make a move. I guess I was following my tacit belief that we had all the time in the world in front of us. 

A year or two later, Krigstein was on my mind again, and I was reading his masterpiece, “Master Race” and other stories that used the collage technique that would come to influence so many in the comic book industry, including Frank Miller, once again. I might have read a commentary about how Krigstein never got you too close to the characters to see their reactions.

It may have been a valid assessment for the later work, but that was not always the case. Most of Krigstein’s work was actually quite conventional. It was only when he felt hampered by EC’s rigid methods that he thought about cutting and pasting the panels. And yes, those later works were definitely keeping you at arm’s length. That might have been what JP was referring to all along. We talked soon after, and I recalled our previous conversation about Krigstein and how he had described his work, and I thought I now understood what he meant by it. But when I told him how Krigstein kept us at arm’s length, he said he had never thought about that. Interesting description, he thought, but he meant the inking.

One of the last artists we talked about was Jim Holdaway. I didn’t know JP thought highly of his work, but it made sense. To me, Holdaway was a luminary that no one in the States knew about. Every time I flipped through his work, I was astonished. I loved Modesty Blaise, as if she were real and someone to be infatuated with. And it was Holdaway that made her come to life, not the stories. I had zero interest for where that strip went when he was gone.

Of course JP liked him. It was JP’s connection to that tradition of cartooning, because it had to do with the “naturalistic” school. I won’t call it cinematic, because Milton Caniff was cinematic but not too naturalistic. JP’s work is more about drawing than it is about movies. His well-rehearsed page layouts were about the page and not about the panels becoming ciphers for the screen. Holdaway and Caniff were comic strip cartoonists, by contrast, and they had no choice but to keep it within the tempo of a ubiquitous sameness. I don’t know Holdaway’s thoughts on it, but I know Caniff was trying to make his work into paper movies. Caniff was the one that brought the sensibilities of movies into comics in the first place.

Yes, JP did work in the movie industry, forming the visuals for Superman Returns and Dark Knight, but his comic book work was about comic books, and the connections between the panels — not about transforming his comic book into a poor man’s movie.

When I think about his work in Ex Machina, it surpassed the work of the regular artist, because the regular artist was about cinematic concerns. He was busy amazing the audience with his ability to convert a comic book into a movie with actors and props and backdrops. That was not what comics were about. When JP did his two issues, they were different. My original reaction to JP’s rendition of Ex Machina was how unfamiliar the characters looked under JP’s hand, even though you could readily-recognize them.

But that was the point! They could never look familiar in anybody else’s hands, and a large part of that was because you had to use the same actors/models for that to happen. Years after reading the entire run of Ex Machina, it is only JP’s work that stands out because it runs truer to comic books.

But JP was certainly into movies. He used to tell me about his love for 1970s realism. I think French Connection was one of those movies he held up as a notable work. He didn’t have much to say about current movies, and he lamented the state of the present-day movie posters, because they were nothing more than closeups of actor’s faces. The old movie posters were when you had all these diverse images of characters and situations constructed on the picture plane. You would have a large portrait of one character behind a few full-bodied views of other characters performing some action, as well as places and details in the background that displayed a few instances of what to expect in the movie.

JP’s comic book covers pursue that older tradition of the many-faceted montage in movie posters. There are large views of one or two heads over or behind or under a scene that not just exhibited what was inside; it even offered scenes of what was only suggested in the story.

It’s not like movies did not affect him at all. He was obviously influenced by them, and if you read the Winter Men, you might catch the references to 1970s cinema. But when he did a comic, it was a comic, not a pretend movie.

To JP, I feel it went beyond the comic book, even. To him, it was more about the drawing. It was always about the drawing. I think when he got to the level of work that he had attained, I think the drawing came even before the fun and the entertainment. It became about that. And that is what I guess happens when you are a working professional. JP brought the joy but never at the expense of what he probably held highest — and that was the drawing.

Art by John Paul Leon (example of JP’s montage compositions)

Art by John Paul Leon (example of JP’s montage compositions)

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Moments with John Paul Leon – Fifth

13 June 2021 by Rey Armenteros

JP Leon at his drawing table

In an earlier conversation about what were some of the qualitative elements that made some comics stand out, I remarked that I was not sure, since I had not been reading any in a long time. And he flinched, exclaiming that I was Mr. Comic Books — how could I say that?

I used to be, but I had long left it behind me. A large part of my return to comics as a loving pastime were my initial discussions with JP when we got back together to partake in this thing that drove us onward since our youth.

He reminded me that I was the one that got him into Batman Year One. He had dismissed it as a kid, because David Mazzucchelli’s art was too simple, and I brought it over one day to show him what it was all about. He said that because of me, he gave it another look and became a believer. When he was a student at SVA, he bought every issue of Mazzucchelli’s self-published magazine, Rubber Blanket. He let me borrow those rare magazines, and when I was about to move to LA, I told him that I still had his Rubber Blankets, and he told me it was okay that I could take them to California, that he would see me again one day.

In California, I would remind him I still had his Rubber Blankets. He said not to worry about it. A couple of years later, I told him I was going to Miami, and I asked him if he wanted to meet, that way I can return his Rubber Blankets, and he said, “Son-of-a-bitch! That’s where they’ve been!”

Well, I got him his Rubber Blankets back, and that time, I went with my brother, and we were talking about old times as JP kept brandishing book after book of great comic book artists, from Europe, from Argentina. He had ten copies of a super deluxe edition of his collaboration on Earth X. Each copy of the book was in a white box, along with mini-poster, DVD, and a plastic case that had what looked like an action figure fused on the cover. He gave one copy to me and one to Alex. I would flip through it soon afterward, and I found his art so beautiful in black and white. It was inked by Bill Reinhold, and I enjoyed how some of the flourishes were almost gray.

JP had always told me that his work looked best in black and white. I didn’t always agree. I think it depended on the colorist. His work had received coloring jobs at Marvel that effectively destroyed his work. Some colorists try to upstage the penciller, thinking it’s their game. A couple of times, the colorist on JP’s art had no technical experience with printing, over-saturating the color into these densely heated shapes that lost all form. I understood JP’s ideas. But I felt Winter Men, for one example among many, worked beautifully with his drawing, elaborating on what was alluded to in the original art.

I would think a lot about his thoughts about preferring black and white. I would look at the black-and-white work of other artists, and I would look at my own paintings when it had little or no color. I gave his perspective on the issue much thought. Was a line drawing better without color, and what made it so? I thought that such answers were only available on a case-by-case basis.

There was line art that screamed for the need for color, because it was in danger of remaining just a simple, flat image that would not draw in most people. But if there was a network of crosshatching, most such images needed to remain in black and white. Coloring such complex drawings was usually asking for trouble, unless it were done from a safe distance, such as with a very soft color palette.

If the work were like JP’s, where the naturalistic forms were delivered with elegant simplicity and punctuated with deep, inky areas, then it could go either way, I felt, but I usually wanted to see his work with some color. When colored, his work needed muted colors as opposed to intense ones. There were some independent cartoonists, like Jaime Hernandez, whose work stood strong in black and white, but which I always felt looked even better in color. 

I felt that if you had a simple color distribution, even on a fairly elaborate drawing (just short of full crosshatching) it partitioned the areas with more clarity, giving the image as a whole more impact — but of course, only on the condition that the color harmonies did not detract from the whole.

When a drawing remained in black and white, the viewer had to actually “read” them; you had to look at the drawing longer to investigate the details that were giving you the pieces of the whole. It was about taking the time to look the drawing over and perhaps finding a few surprises while clarifying where the figures were and what the spaces were doing. It brought a longer element of time, which I was starting to conclude was interesting because it compelled the viewer to stay longer.

I deviate into these thoughts here because it was something I wanted to bounce off of JP, especially in this case because it had originated with his own thoughts. But it was one of those things that I never got the chance to mention to him. Our conversations were so rare that every time we got on the phone, I had so many things I wanted to tell him — so many other ideas. No, we didn’t get to talk as often as I would have liked, but when we did, we killed off entire nights going over that thing that fueled us most. He was the professional that worked with the highest set of standards, and I was the scrutinizing aficionado whose own paintings were heavily-influenced by comics.

He told me more than once that I was the only guy he would talk about these things to. I found it so hard to believe, because he was in the middle of the industry, and I said so. But he insisted, because when he talked to his colleagues about comics, it was more about the field, about pragmatic matters. And that made sense, because such is life. That is what we might fall into with our close peers, because every industry offers so many other challenges than the ones we predicted when we were first entering those fields.

What he appreciated about our talks was that it was his outlet to talk about those things that he loved in his medium. And we got very technical because we were both versed in the minutiae of craft, recognizing it and the way it affected the reading of a comic book.

I told him I could say the same about him. There was no one I knew that could talk on such a deep level about this. I had friends that knew comics, but when I started to talk, they would lose interest if I even so much as mentioned technique. There was no one else for me. I would sometimes have conversations with JP in my head until that next time that we could carve out the time for our long telephone bouts about art.

There he was in black and white, and then when we finally get to read JP’s work, it’s in color. I am now thinking about the complete stack of Winter Men pages he had in his studio — I think it was during that time after the artwork was shipped back to him. It was during one of my rare visits to his studio, and he was showing me the stack of all the original art. That was where the black and white conversation had started, and it would continue in other talks about it, culminating with me in my years-long contemplation of such matters.

He was patting the stack and saying, “I think the art looks better in black and white.” And you know — before returning to painting, I too was solely a black and white artist for enough years to appreciate that sentiment, even though in those days when this took place, I was getting inebriated off the colors I was manifesting in my studio.

He added a throw away comment about how he felt that he never wanted to make the original pages into anything precious. They were tools that were to be handled and tossed around in front of scanners or cameras. I understand that too; it was the warm feeling of a worn book versus the stiff hardcover that cracks when you open it for the first time. That was the difference between page originals and a pastel drawing carefully preserved behind the glass of a frame.

Black and white or not, JP eventually got into coloring his own comic books. He told me once that he was looking at the way the colorist did the job on Winter Men — studying it! — because that colorist did a really good job with his work. When JP was later doing those many covers for various titles at every major comic book company, it was JP himself coloring them. Though not a great lover of working color, he was quite good, looking at colorists, sometimes mentioning names I didn’t think he knew because it was from comics I knew were outside his circle of interest. There was Kristian Donaldson, who did Supermarket, and I was taken aback a little, because that guy’s colors would get strong.

I was still wrestling with what I wanted out of color. Color could take years to work out before you arrived at something, and I was telling that to my wife during one of those times when I was going on about craft in drawing and painting. All she could say was that even though she liked my new work, she always loved my ink wash work best because it was in black and white.

John Paul Leon’s art in original black and white

John Paul Leon’s art in color

John Paul Leon’s art in original black and white

John Paul Leon’s art in color

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Moments with John Paul Leon – Fourth

06 June 2021 by Rey Armenteros

JP Leon in action

We all change, and I knew it was JP’s time at SVA that molded him and made him into a different artist. I was scouring that comic book at the resort and afterward, trying to find evidence of JP’s hand.

I eventually found something in his new style that was JP’s. When I got back to Miami, I told everybody he had made it. For me, it was big news.

I wanted to contact him, but he was in New York, and I was still in Miami. I don’t remember really trying. I was all about night clubs in those days and meeting more and more girls, and this was happening as I started to lose interest in getting into the comic book field. About a year later, I firmly decided I was not going to do the comic book thing. I was going to go back to school and get a Master of Fine Arts in painting.

When I went to San Francisco, my life changed again, further getting me even farther from my past, which is the way I wanted it at the time. I was, at times, cynical. These were traits I had gotten from my step-dad — almost unconsciously — and they were still with me, even though I had not seen him in all this time. Even so, I would think about him. During my comic book-making days in Miami, I had made a five-page story devoted to him and his own dream of making it in music. I had always wanted to show JP my tiny story titled “Soul’s Sojourn,” especially since he knew the man, but I never even brought it up with him.

In San Francisco, I would check out comics for inspiration. I was making artist books, and my pages were quite naturally littered with crazy comic book sequences and word balloons. Those were the days when I discovered Charles Burns and David Sala at Virgin Records.

It was at Virgin Records when I found JP’s latest accomplishments. He had done a maxi-series called Earth X, and it was celebrated in those days. I noticed that his style had changed once again, and again I found myself scouring it to find signs of the old JP art. I think I read somewhere that he was still in New York. He had never left, just like I didn’t leave San Francisco when I was done with grad school.

A strange thing happened to me during my time in San Francisco. My brother wanted to talk to me. He was in Miami, teaching middle school, and he had gotten to this point in the school year where he had to call the parents of certain students who were not doing too well. When he called this one father, they spoke about his son, and then the man asked Alex if he knew who he was talking to. Alex told me he suddenly got a weird feeling, because the clue was evident in the kid’s last name and now in this man’s voice. It was our stepdad. By some crazy coincidence, my brother was teaching our stepdad’s son.

A little later, Alex was on the phone again, and he told me that our stepdad had asked for my telephone number in San Francisco. He gave it to him, but he told me he should have asked me first. I told him there was nothing to worry about, that I would love to hear from him again. But I never did get that phone call. I wondered later if I should have asked Alex for his number.

But my time in San Francisco would come to an end when I made the decision and left the country to teach English in Asia, where I spent almost five years. When I was finally returning to the US where my fiance and I were planning to get married, I was thinking about JP one night when we were visiting a PC Room in Korea. I was wondering how he was doing. I was looking him up and found his newest accomplishments. He was working on a personal project called the Winter Men. He had a website, and it had an email contact box. So, I finally contacted him after losing more than twelve years of just letting the time go. He was excited to hear from me and was happy I was returning to Miami. He had moved back in recent times and was married himself.

My wife and I were not long in Miami. But I got to see JP a few times. We were like two kids, not talking much about serious life matters like mortgages and the downsides of day-to-day responsibilities. It was all just comic books. It was punctuated with a side topic of a book or artist not necessarily related to comics, but we were going into it deep. The first time, our talk went from Alex Toth to Chris Ware. He was lamenting the problems he was running into in finishing his own project, Winter Men.

In our talks, we went over so much. I was getting back into comics — but this time, into the indie comics. JP’s interests had not really changed, but though we had different tastes, we still had the old points of connection. He knew some of the creators I was talking about, and he let me know which ones he admired, and which ones he didn’t really like.

Of the Hernandez Brothers, he liked Jaime, but I could never get him to like Gilbert, for example. He couldn’t read a Daniel Clowes story because he simply could not get into the art. I used to dislike Clowes’s style too, I admitted to him, but I had grown to like it. I never got to change his mind about him, but I did get him to read the four-page story, “Art School Confidential,” and he thought it was very good, very funny. Naturally, because we had both been to art school, and we were thoroughly familiar with the art school shortcomings that Clowes lambasted in that short piece.

When I moved back to California, he was still going through his first bout with cancer. He would go to conventions in uncomfortable conditions. He eventually went into remission! He was working more. Making a lot of commissions, drawing stories here and there. He told me once about a Sgt. Fury thing he was working on, but he was admitting how he couldn’t get into it. He was not feeling it. A few years later, he told me he was doing a story in Detective Comics. And he was excited about this one, because he was doing Batman! JP was still a DC guy after all these years, and I think Batman was as high as it could ever get for him. He would complain about how Marvel always called at the last minute, giving you little time or freedom to get an assignment done right.

When I was reading Ex Machina in trade paperbacks from the library, I found two issues drawn by JP. It was interesting catching his interpretation of the characters. A different artist on a regular series usually jars, and I have to admit it did feel different. It wasn’t like the regular characters drawn by the regular artist. But I studied those pages. JP was an artist that placed an extraordinary amount of work into every panel. He researched office interiors and cityscapes, as well as fashion and hairstyles. He went over page design and layout. I would call it composition, and I was enamored with those ideas about placing all the pieces of a picture in a certain place for the greatest effect. It was what drew me to Alex Toth, after JP had told me about his love for Toth’s work. But JP used to call that design. It was drawing. It was about the line. And it was about the page.

I had heard of Toth before JP enlightened me about his mastery. It was one of those names in the background that had caused a bit of curiosity in me when I found the name in comics of the 1980s, but not enough to pursue it. JP put me on my own Toth quest, and I slowly started to get it. For me, Toth was always about composition. His forms were solid, but his compositions were stellar. I would tell that to JP, as I asked him if he knew about this story or that one. JP loved the classic “Crushed Gardenia” story. I told him my favorites were the airplane stories from the 1950s, along with some of the later work when Toth was working with a marker and not a dip pen or brush.

During one of our early conversations, I told him what I now thought about Steve Ditko, and he couldn’t believe it. I could sense the broad smile on the other end of the line as he said, “I’m really shocked. I remember when you wanted to kill that guy. You said how could this guy ever work for comics?” I didn’t know how else to respond at the time, giving my only defense: “I now have my eyes open, and Ditko was that idiosyncratic genius!” Eventually, I would get into the Charlton Comics crew of greats, along with Ditko. I wanted to ask JP what he thought about Pat Boyette or Pete Morisi. I think I did mention Tom Sutton to him once, because we both hated his work on Grimjack. Sutton, for me, was another turnaround.

Toward the end, I was expressing my renewed interest in Joe Kubert, focusing on the warmth of his line work. There was a story that the first class at the Kubert School had told of witnessing Kubert inking with both hands, with extra brushes and pens between fingers, behind ears. JP wanted to know how that was even possible. I told him I was chalking that story up to Kubert probably showing off in front of the kids. JP had met Kubert at least once, when Kubert came up to him at a convention and said he really dug JP’s work in Winter Men. He told him to keep it up. JP stood straight up and said, “Yes sir!”

Cover of Winter Men by John Paul Leon

Winter Men page by John Paul Leon

Winter Men panel by John Paul Leon

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Moments with John Paul Leon – Third

30 May 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Art by John Paul Leon

We would hang out every once in a while. If we weren’t talking about comics or playing tabletop games, we were talking about the other things that interested us. I was a metalhead in those days, and JP was not. We would share our musical interests anyway. The only album I can recall discussing as seriously as if it were a comic book was Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust.

JP introduced us to action movies that we didn’t have access to, like Lethal Weapon. After playing a game, we’d watch something and talk about comics. His dad would give him money for us to order some food.

The great times were there. But I don’t want this to sound like this happened all the time. Hanging out with that side of the family was an uncommon event. And maybe that uncommon quality made such moments more timeless for us.

My brother, I, and other cousins were getting into paintball. We invited JP to these war games. JP got into it like any of us. There was that time my brother popped him in the forehead with a paintball after demanding him to surrender and JP declaring, “Surrender is not in my creed!”

We were foolish, playing in swampy water on the border of the Everglades after some long rains, with potential coral snakes and alligators lurking under the surface. A lot of our equipment was ruined after that skirmish. JP was my partner in that fight, and after he got shot, I spent 45 minutes hiding in the water to ambush my brother and his friend. That friend of my brother’s had a submachine gun that actually unloaded the paintballs in full auto fire, and it looked like a MAC-10. The fight ended with my being shot up with a burst of rounds.

The four of us went to a 7-11 drenched in swamp water, and a couple of construction laborers hanging out outside asked us what the hell we were doing to get so wet? We recounted the story about my getting out of the water and how I was zapped, and the guy told his non-English-speaking friends a much more colorful version of me getting out of the water like Rambo and how one of the other guys simply shot me in the head and told me, “Sit back down!” We laughed at those embellishments and at how easily someone could take someone else’s story and make it their own.

Another time, we got back to my house and talked about the bout we just had. Our side was killed so fast, I didn’t even get the chance to shoot my gun. So, I pressed the trigger almost as if to illustrate, and the thing went off. I was not surprised because these airguns were powered by CO2 cartridges that fired regardless if you had a chambered round or not. JP had sardonically said, “Thanks,” because some of the air hit him in the face. No one noticed that the gun in fact did have a round chambered that had flown past JP’s head point blank. Though it was just paintballs, they could cause serious eye injury, especially at that range. We looked up and saw the tremendous splat on my wall. My brother and JP were laughing to tears, and I was smiling, but I knew I was going to get into trouble if that thing didn’t come off. And it didn’t!

And I did get in trouble. It was what we called a reality check. Our reality had the real world reality mixed with all these other realities that interested us. Sometimes, it was hard to confront reality.

For example, we had not seen my stepdad since 1986. I didn’t feel good about it, but it was a new life. I couldn’t find doing it any other way. We hardly ever mentioned him, as if the adult world from before were another dimension that we had no real need to revisit. It wasn’t like we met JP on a regular basis anyway. The times to spend had to be capitalized on for optimal fun.

So, we’d see JP now and again. We’d always ask him about how Alex was doing. I remember one time going to see a movie, maybe Die Hard, with JP and maybe a friend of my brother’s, and JP had driven us there. But he had just started driving. When he was driving us out of the parking lot, he slammed on the breaks as a car cut in front of him. He protested that there was no damn stop sign, which was true. But I guess when driving enough parking lots, you just stop, sign or no sign, when you need to get out of a column of parking spaces and into an actual thoroughfare. Reality check.

I think it was in those days that JP started working for TSR, doing spot illustrations for Dungeon Magazine. He had come full-circle. Tim Truman had started with TSR, and we had some of his work in D&D adventure modules, as well as Grimjack and other comics.

I was speechless. How could a high school kid get illustration work with the most famous RPG company? It was a hell of a start. And it was a sign for greater things in his future. I knew it. His dad moved closer to our new neighborhood, but we didn’t see him anymore than what was usual. I guess that made things special, always special, because hanging out with JP was always an uncommon occasion.

One time, my brother and I picked him up from his new house, and we were just going to hang out, maybe have something to eat somewhere. He needed to make an errand for his dad, and I told him I’d take him. We went to a large house in a nearby neighborhood. He had to drop something off, but we had to use the backdoor because the guy did not answer the front. There was an intercom by the doorknob, and the three of us noticed a video camera lens pointed at us. A tall, heavily-built man opened the door. He was black but not African-American; he was Cuban. He was dressed all in white. We were led into a room that might have been a family room in a normal house, if this house were at all normal. In Spanish, he told us to wait there. There were all kinds of religious statues and paintings all over, and the three of us being Cuban, we were aware that this was a Santero’s house.

Santeria is the hybrid religion that stems from Catholicism and Nigerian roots. Many Cubans felt it was a superstitious belief maybe not unlike Voodoo from Haiti. And most of us held it in fear.

A small, Afro-Cuban man with a head of white hair entered the room and gave something to JP for him to give to his father. He excused himself for having us go through the backdoor, but he used to make good luck charms for cocaine cowboys during the 1980s (who required the charms because of their short lifespans), and that was what the video camera was for. The three of us were soon back in our car, but when we went somewhere to get something to eat, we were talking about it as if it were an adventure. We busted out the D&D terms and dreamt up a situation where we were plunging into the depths of a Santero’s house like a dungeon, and how the short brother was probably a high-level cleric and the larger brother was an 18 strength mid-level fighter.

Almost everything was a joke to us. When that first Batman movie was out, and Michael Keaton’s Batman is holding up the thug and hissing, “I’m Batman,” JP translated it into Spanish, “Soy el Hombre Murcielago!” The exchange rate between the two languages was eight syllables for three.

But times were changing. When I went from college to university, I got into a serious relationship and forgot about the rest of the world. JP was still around for the occasional war game with the splat guns. He was applying to schools then. He got into School of Visual Arts in New York. He told me about it before he was on his way. I don’t know if I saw him before he left. I don’t have a memory of it.

Months passed. When the school break was coming, I called to see if he were in town, and he was!

I came over to show him some new Wolverine stories by Barry Windsor-Smith in the pages of Marvel Comics Presents. JP’s hair was a little longer, looking stylish. He was showing me an art project he did in one of his classes. In acrylics, he painted WWII imagery in a wooden box he had constructed. The outside was all in black and white, but the inside was in muted warm colors, and it had the main image of a clock denoting a certain time — the time that the first atom bomb detonated. We talked a little bit about art school, but he was not talking as much about comics as before. It could be he didn’t think much about Barry Windsor-Smith. I don’t know. I thought that a part of him was turning away from comics. He might even have been mentioning the future realities of pursuing illustration instead of comics.

And that was the last time I saw him for years and years. I soon graduated from university, after the big breakup with the girl, and I began to pursue a disreputable lifestyle. My priorities had changed, and I was trying to catch up with all the things I had thought I was missing out on. Sometimes, I would think about JP and Alex, wondering what both were doing, assuming Alex was still in town and also assuming that JP would come back to Miami after school. I never called to find out. I had other types of friends. It was a self-proclaimed cool crowd that came from art fields, and they were all about living the lives of artists and nothing about making actual art.

I was still into comics, and I had it in my mind that I would still make it in that field, finishing this 8-page story or that one, and submitting these short things and then collecting my rejection notices inside the wall of my closet. I had time enough to write and draw my stories, but not much more than that. The weekends were devoted to having fun and to subsequently recuperating.

On one small road trip, we were two couples going to Marathon in the Florida Keys. We checked in and hung out. That night, we were picking up booze to make things really interesting. We were at a convenience store to do just that, but I had a sudden memory of going to the Keys with my stepdad and mom almost every Saturday when I was a kid, and sometimes they would buy me a comic book or Mad Magazine. I was looking at the comic book rack. It was during the Image Comics days when everyone drew the same, with a million pointless lines. Sickened by the herd mentality that had befallen comics, I was looking for something different. I was able to find a couple of comics on the rack that looked like none of the others. One was Batman Adventures, based on the animated series. The other was something new I had never heard of. I was flipping through it and felt refreshed to see not everybody was following the Image nonsense. This particular artist was simplifying things and coming up with fun poses and angles, and he had a strong sense of form. I flipped to the first page to see who it was, and I stood there reading the name over and over, taking a moment to truly let it sink in. John Paul Leon. It was the second issue of Static, and out here in this rural place on a trip with friends, I exclaimed, “Son of a bitch! He made it!”

Art by John Paul Leon (the cover of Static #2 that I found in Marathon)

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Moments with John Paul Leon – Second

23 May 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Art by John Paul Leon

Not long after that, their mom died, and we had no words for that kind of thing. Both brothers were weathering it pretty well, but I could only imagine what was going on inside. We would go there and hang out, talk about the grittier comics coming out, and the new “graphic novels” that made everything sound more serious. This was the time of Frank Miller’s Ronin and of comics like Grimjack. We were getting into the more adult-oriented comics with the occasional nudity and the cranked up violence.

From Grimjack, JP enjoyed Timothy Truman’s art as much as I did. It was a moody patchwork of good days and bad. Not everything Truman did was good. Some of it was clumsy. But I could always forgive that because it was just too cool. There was an edge to the way he made guns and heroes that seemed to come from the badass late 1970s. Truman depicted people that were not to be screwed with. JP had the 9th issue of Grimjack before I did. We were going over that one, looking at the art and talking about what was working about it. JP and Alex always had tons of great comics.

JP’s room was peculiar, because it was like a grotto you pass before reaching the front door. It was contained inside the wall and iron gate, so it was not like it was out in the front yard. But it was a strange design to have a bedroom outside the actual house. And it had a sliding glass door, which I thought was awesome, but I now wonder what it could have done for privacy.

We’d horse around, as always, making fun of characters from old TV shows and movies, impersonating Captain Kirk. When I see Kirk perform his fighting stance, I see JP doing the same thing. The two brothers were just naturally funny.

I was always saying the stupidest things. I would act like a drunk with absolutely zero stage presence, but they would laugh anyway. There was that time when the four of us were talking about art in general, and JP or Alex were talking about Michelangelo and about how incredible an artist he was, and I was declaring that comic book artists were better. Both JP and Alex reacted, asking me if I was crazy. I shrugged and said, “Well, I like Michael Golden better than Michelangelo.”

At some point, Alex would stop hanging out as much. Now in high school, he was driving, and his priorities were dating and growing up, and soon getting a job. Their dad was a real estate agent, and eventually Alex would follow in his footsteps. He had no more time for comics or art. Alex was no longer there for the games and the good times. He was always out somewhere.

Not once did I ever talk to them about their mom and how they felt, because we were too busy pursuing our boyish interests, but I always wondered if Alex’s quest into an early adulthood were his way of coping with everything. I missed hanging out with him, but we at least still had JP.

My brother and I had moved on to other games, and we eventually started playing Middle-Earth Role Playing, which we felt was the ultimate role-playing experience, because not only were we playing in the official world of The Lord of the Rings, the game came with an elaborate set of rules to resolve critical damage on heroes and foes. One hit had the potential of annihilating anyone, which was different from AD&D, since in that game, you accumulated hit points that served as a cushion from impending death.

We introduced JP to the game, hoping to get him excited about it too. In that first adventure with him, orcs came out of a tower, and in the pell-mell that resulted, the excellent elf archer lost his hand to a scimitar swipe from an orc. These details were actually rolled on a chart that gave us the conclusions. JP was dazzled by that level of detail, but though he really liked MERP, he never did get into it, still preferring AD&D.

Around this time, JP and I came up with the idea of making a comic book together. I could never finish any of my stories when working alone, and he claimed that he couldn’t either. It may be true that JP hadn’t really finished an actual comic book story, but when Alex was still drawing, the two brothers were so prolific, they came a lot closer than I ever did. On my part, I had no discipline. They might have had more discipline, but what really drove them was the simple love for drawing.

In their work, JP and Alex didn’t just draw covers and pinups; they drew actual comic book pages. Doing the actual stories was always the hardest part. But they were so into their heroes and stories, they even drew full-page commercials about their comics that were made to show up in their other comics — like in-house ads you’d find in DC and Marvel comics. There was Criterion, which looked like a movie poster, a montage of characters at various distances, all staring at the viewer or looking forlorn. They would come up with compelling titles, sometimes for characters and stories that never went beyond those titles. I remember JP telling me of a story called “From Alpha to Omega,” and he said that he didn’t really have a clear idea about where it would go, but that was okay because a title like that could fit any story. It was always a laugh. For JP and Alex, their brand of creativity was laced with humor, and to my way of looking at things, it was uncommon. Humor was one part of creativity that I enjoyed but could not replicate.

Anyway, JP and I were set on doing a comic book together about how violent hockey was going to get in the future, where death was an expected part of the game’s entertainment. I went to his house, and we did some drawings together to get the ideas out. We were trying to determine how we were going to parcel the drawing chores. We both made examples of pencils, and then we would trade pencil drawings and each would ink over the other’s work. Hands down, JP was the better penciller, and I was the more accomplished inker, mostly because JP had not done any inking at the time. We would write the story together. It was supposed to be a three-part miniseries. We plotted the whole story, and by the end of that first day, the first issue had been scripted with everything but the dialogue. It was a project we would never continue. I don’t remember why. I think I lost interest. The thing about JP is that he was enthused about it, even if it were not his favorite thing. He would have kept going with it if I had maintained my course.

When I finally finished a 32-page comic called MoonGoddess during my first year of college, I showed it to him. He was complimentary, as always, pointing out what he liked about it. There was a moment when the strong, silent antihero said, “Death entices me,” and JP was pointing at it and repeating the quote. He liked my lettering because I was using a technical pen to make a double line for every letter stroke. All the art, I did with a brush. It was clunky work, but I have such a fond memory of it. Before that, I only ever finished an 8-page war story called “Tunnel Rat.” I knew the great difficulty of ever finishing anything in comics, because making comics was hard work. It involved wearing many hats.

Around the time I was finishing these shorter works, JP was working on Circle of Iron. This story became a 200-page epic. It was based on his AD&D characters in the World of Greyhawk, where his barbarian fighter set about to conquer that world. JP was in high school when he accomplished this incredible feat. He did what so very few of us could do, as teenagers or at any age! He actually finished something. The book clearly showed that his drawing ability had sharpened over the years. He didn’t skimp on anything. All his free time was devoted to that 200-page book. So many Saturdays could have been spent playing or going out to meet his friends. But he stayed at home to do the work. He let me borrow that incredible accomplishment in the bound photocopies that his dad had made for him, and I was engrossed with his story, carefully studying the panels. It was all done in pencil, and that belief that finishing such a large book was impossible had been debunked by JP.

Art by John Paul Leon (a rare fantasy drawing from JP’s professional work)

Art by John Paul Leon (another professional work reminiscent of D&D)

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