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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