Brush with Peril

Got to A Small List of Great Artists Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)
Got to Van Gogh’s Self Portraits

Vincent van Gogh had trouble hiring models, for monetary reasons, but also, I picture a man who was thoroughly unpleasant to be around, not “a people person” that townspeople are flocking to go up alone to his studio to spend lengthy chunks of time with him.

While Van Gogh was living in Arles from 1888-1889, he was primarily producing landscapes. But Joseph Roulin came to be a loyal and supportive friend, and not only wound up posing for multiple portraits, he also had his family – his wife as well as children ranging from four months to seventeen years – pose. Van Gogh painted every one of them at least twice, and then let them keep a painting of each family member, so that their home was a literal portrait gallery of modern art.

Joseph was 47 at the time, a working class man at the railroad station as an entreposeur des postes. (Warehouse shipping and receiving? Storage and inventory maintenence? Who can translate French??)

[Extra special thanks to www.art-vangogh.com, a fantastic website with an immense gallery of Van Gogh’s work as well as some great biographical info!]

[Also see a cool article about The Roulin Family at Wikipedia!]

The Roulin Portraits

Van Gogh’s Portraits of Roulin’s family

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Agent Ian Anger

The List of Qualities:

INSPIRATION: DOC SAVAGE

Doc Savage pulp stories of the 1930’s and 1940’s featured a seemingly super-human man, always described as the strongest and most dexterous, and also a master scientist and doctor and everything else you could coincidentally come up with that might be needed for each next adventure. His assistants were all the greatest in their respective fields of law, archaeology, electronics, and so on – but their skills paled in comparison to Doc’s, whose own skills far surpassed these experts. That cracked me up, this idea of someone with a LONG resume of skills, all of which he ranked “number one in the world,” putting experts to shame for their comparatively pathetic abilities, compared to Doc Savage.

INSPIRATION:  JAMES BOND LICENSED 1980’s ROLE PLAYING GAME

As a kid, I owned this James Bond role playing game from the 1980’s, which I loved even though I didn’t really ever have any friends to play it with me.  In this game, like Dungeons and Dragons, you created your own spy who earned skills in all manner of sports and physical activity, gambling, fighting techniques, weapons mastery, various sciences that are potentially helpful to a spy, disguise, weapon-using, and on and on.  I loved all the possibilities, and the game manual gave a list of all these skills that could become necessary or helpful on your adventure, and you chose the ones that suited you. As combined with the above Doc Savage, I decided my spy must be a master of EVERY possible skill that a spy could possibly possess, and so that’s how his list of attributes came about as an introduction to him, on this page of my comic.

The Look

THE SKI MASK AND TUXEDO

The costume element sprouted out from a project I was doing back in 2007, “The Spider Twins,” in which I drew an encyclopedia full of professional wrestler-looking high school students who went around in masks trying to right the wrongs they felt were being committed all around them.  While researching different masks and shoe wear to make each character unique, I stumbled onto a photo of someone in a tuxedo who was wearing a mask, and I thought, that’s a brilliant look.  But the imagery didn’t fit with the Spider Twins.  However, I realized now, it would fit perfectly for a spy.

James Bond wore many costumes, depending on the situaion – horse jockey, race car driver, suave dinner party goer, scuba diver, astronaut, golfer, cat burgler. It crossed my mind to do the same with my character, but I ultimately decided one costume is plenty, like a super hero might have.

That put in the back of my head this idea for a character in a tuxedo with a ski mask.  In designing the character, there was a conscious decision to make the character all black, and to make the black of his suit impenetrable to light, so that there are no visible wrinkles or folds in the cloth, no shininess in the light.  It’s just black. 

When I was around seventh grade, there was a comic by DC called Vigilante, and he was a Batman/Punisher character type, but unlike other characters with “black” costumes at this time (whose costumes were blue), his costume was all black, and the black was in this fashion where you saw no reflection of light or muscle definition as you would in the other black-costumed characters (like Black Bolt or Black Panther or Black Widow or the Punisher).  There was (other than a few stripes) no definition of the character’s form except the outline of all the black. 

Mike Mignola defines shapes by solid blacks, and even so, they are fully realized and three dimensional, and I wanted to use this same style of all-black.

I sent some preliminary pages of my comic to my best friend, Dave Gibbons, way back on 9/5/12, and he wrote back in an email, “Graphically speaking, it’s a masterstroke to have the spy in flat black and white: really “pops” him out amongst the hatching and tonal work.”

INSPIRATION:  LUCHA LIBRE and SANTO

A masked character walking around amongst the population and performing everyday tasks was a mainstay of famed Mexican professional wrestler and icon, Santo (The Saint), who was as big a star in Mexico as the biggest sports or movie stars of the U.S.  He wrestled for five decades, and starred in 52 films, where he wrestled mad scientists, crooks, secret agents, and monsters like Dracula, the Werewolf, Frankenstein, and the Cyclops.  He wore a mask with holes for his eyes, nose, and mouth, and in the films, he would body slam and elbow the villains, but also just walk around fully masked, anywahere in public he needed to go – Through the airport, playing chess, driving cars – and no one seemed to notice or make a google-eyed second take, or mind or show any sign that they thought it odd that this enormous guy is walking around with this ridiculous mask on.  I loved that, and decided my spy should do the same.

The Van Gogh Brothers

Looking at Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits, I feel like he didn’t have the skill or interest to accurately convey actual proportions of his own face measurements, which creates for him a series of portraits that might have facial similarities, but to me they look less like a bunch of self-portraits of one person, and more like several portraits of several different similar-looking people, such as brothers or relatives.

It reminds me of The Simpsons Season 9, Episode 17, “Lisa the Simpson,” where we meet a bunch of Homer Simpson’s relatives, who all have a strong resemblance to Homer, but one is thinner, and one has a thicker head of hair, they’re different ages, and one has a mustache, and they have different fashion senses, and so on.

With this in mind, I thought it made for a fun joke, AND was a no-brainer that if I used Van Gogh’s self-portraits, they would need to be, not one character, but each portrait a different person – a family of brothers who were all vicious, sadistic, brutal, and slightly unhinged – a gang of violent thugs for hire.

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see A Small List of Great Artists: Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)
see Van Gogh’s Portraits of Roulin

Vincent van Gogh made over 35 self-portraits, the bulk of them (over 25) over a two year period while he was in Paris (1886-1888). He was broke at that time, and didn’t have money to hire models, so the simplest, least expensive solution was to paint himself.

[Extra special thanks to www.art-vangogh.com, a fantastic website with an immense gallery of Van Gogh’s work as well as some great biographical info!]

The Self-Portraits

How Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits Shaped my Brush with Peril Project

Looking at Van Gogh’s portraits, I feel like he didn’t have the skill or interest to accurately convey actual proportions of his face measurements, which creates a series of portraits that might have similarities, but to me they look less like a bunch of self-portraits of one person, and more like several portraits of several different similar-looking people, such as brothers or relatives.

It reminds me of The Simpsons Season 9, Episode 17, “Lisa the Simpson,” where we meet a bunch of Homer Simpson’s relatives, who all have a strong resemblance to Homer, but one is thinner, and one has a thicker head of hair, they’re different ages, and one has a mustache, and they have different fashion senses, and so on.

With this in mind, I thought it made for a fun joke, AND made much more sense to use all these portraits as if they were each a different character, and they’re a bunch of Van Gogh brothers who were all vicious, brutal thugs for hire.

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:


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VINCENT VAN GOGH (Dutch, 1853-1890) is one of the great, tragic/romantic myths of an artist of all time – the mad, misunderstood genius, never appreciated in his lifetime, who dedicated his every waking moment to his craft; whose inner demons drove him to cut off his own ear in a fury, and later shoot himself in a wheat field, dying at age 37, after years of mental illness, depression, alcoholism, and poverty. When I was in elementary school, a teacher told me how he cut off his ear with a razor when the woman he loved left him, and he gave it to her. I still hear this disturbing romance-and-tragedy-tinged story passed on, although it’s untrue; he cut a piece of his ear off in a state of manic depression following a fight with his friend Gauguin, then gave it to a prostitute at a brothel. Van Gogh is often portrayed as a simple-minded lunatic, but if you read his letters, you see a man articulate and intelligent, complicated, wholly dedicated to art and artfully self-taught in studying masters and improving his craft, who painted with a passion that we can assume was unhealthily obsessive, neglecting his physical health. In the ten years from when he decided to become an artist until his death, he created 900 paintings! He only painted from life – still lifes, self-portraits, landscapes and street scenes  – and yet nothing he painted looked like what we see in the world around us.  Is this how he saw?? His use of brush strokes and color is bizarre and intense and rhythmic and exciting and one-of-a-kind. Possibly the most influential artist of all time, but definitely the most famous of them all.

see Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits

see Van Gogh’s Portraits of Roulin

[Extra special thanks to www.art-vangogh.com, a fantastic website with an immense gallery of Van Gogh’s work as well as some great biographical info!]

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:


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I did not make a note of the date that I drew this image, however the other “first” Agent Anger image I made (Page 00a – Cover – Drafts) was done on 4/18/09. I don’t remember which I did first, although this one seems like a good candidate.

That said, however, a more likely bet is that this is the third image I ever drew of Ian Anger, with the second being a brainstorm sketch that I shared on The Global Agency of Protection – Drafts! ($7 Patrons). The reason I surmise this order is that in that sketch, Anger has a white bowtie, unbuttoned shirt revealing a cumberbun, and spats on his shoes. This below images’ more streamlined, less busy, blacker-and-whiter composition is the model for how he appears in the rest of the series. So regardless of order, this is the first “useable” full-body model for the character, and it wound up as the unequivocable first full-body publishable image.

I specifically remember having a really huge – maybe 3×4′ – heavy, wood-framed mirror, and putting it up precariously balanced and high – like leaned up crazily on top of my file cabinets – putting myself in potential physical danger under it, so that I could look at myself from more of a bird’s eye view to draw this. That might be a mis-remembered memory – it may have been a flimsy much smaller and lighter mirror. But it’s more full of suspense and spy-type excitement if it were the way I remember it.

I often draw Agent Anger while looking at myself in the mirror, in an attempt to get my anotomy a little better proportioned.

That said, I felt this image was still slightly mis-proportioned, and not dynamic enough. It’s subtle, but if you look at the published version, I made my left hand smaller, and spread the legs and arms a little wider, and put him at a slight angle with his body curved back compared to this one. It was all done in Photoshop, and not too much work since his suit is all black.

NOTE You may notice that my original Page 017  – Published composition includesVan Gogh self-portrait images, which were not drawn above as part of my original page composition. This idea to include them came later. The Van Gogh images were actually panels on page 19 – Published, drawn on 7/15/-8/5/09 (about three months later, as I worked my way through the story, up through to that page). I came back later to this splash image, and added them backward to this previous page – a literal flash-forward to the upcoming action, a teaser that the Van Gogh menace could be expected to appear later in this “novel.”. I felt this fit with the idea of this comic book being in the style of an action-packed, semi-retro novel of intrigue. )

In 2015, my best friend, Gerry Chow, began digitally coloring the comic for me. Here’s what he did for this page:

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I mentioned in my previous commentary for Page 14 – Drafts that I had enough material in that original page, I wound up deciding to “widen” it into three pages. Below you can see (again) that original page’s scan and first draft, and how this current page only contains one small panel from it – Agent Anger winking and giving the A-OK sign. Basically, panel one became Page 14 – Published, panels 2 and 3 became Page 15 – Published, and the bottom half became the basic theme of this page, but I decided on a different vehicle!                           

As I explained in Page 14 – Drafts, I realized I wanted to have a full battle sequence in Book Two, in which it would be necessary for Agent Anger to be flying his bi-plane, so it gave me the opportunity to swap it out for later, and use the helicopter below, instead, for this sequence. I drew the below additions on 8/6-8/8/14, basically five years after the first draft above.

At this early stage, I had envisioned additional scenes where Agent Anger would operate the same vehicles.  So for example, he’s flying from the U.S. to Europe now, and then he would fly back in the same helicopter. As the project progressed, I decided he should only be allowed to use each vehicle once, and then he’d need a new vehicle. This would showcase as many vehicles as possible.

After drawing the above, I followed the original template of having a map underneath, since they did something similar in Indiana Jones.

You can see above, in addition to the vehicle and a map (as I discussed in Page 14 – Drafts), I had an agent wish him good luck. This is taken from a photo of Igor Sikorski, the inventor of the Vought Sikorski VS-300. I thought this made for a fun in-joke (that no one would ever get).

Below, my best friend, Gerry Chow colored this draft of the page in 2015.

Later (MUCH later – October 2020, when I had nearly completed the project!), I thought, why am I including Sikorsky as a spy? That doesn’t really go with the theme of what I had by then begun trying to establish. And he doesn’t even have a mask! I decided I should use this early opportunity to showcase a bunch of spies, to give a glimpse of exactly what this agency is!  And that’s when I swapped out Mr. Sikorsky for four spies.  And making room for them meant swapping the map out with one of a different shape, for space.

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The Global Agency of Protection (Free!)
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The Vehicles of Brush with Peril ($4 Patrons

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This page might come as a bit of shock, compared to what the cover wound up being. In the beginning, it hadn’t occurred to me to use an art reference for the cover image.  I assumed I’d use an image of my character, Agent Ian Anger.

I couldn’t figure out what kind of image I wanted for the cover for this project, for a long time. One of the first images I drew for this project was this one (below), dated 4/18/09, which was probably the same month BUT A WEEK BEFORE I began brainstorming for story ideas (my earliest dated note lists what paintings would make good villains for the story, and it is dated 4/23/09, followed by a half page of additional brainstorms on 5/27/09), two months before my earliest dated script brainstorms (6/15/09), and three months before I drew the first page of this comic,  and which I scanned into my computer on 8/9/09 (On that same day, I scanned in the image of Agent Anger standing and pointing his gun from Page 17 – Published.)

So once I began thinking about this project, it came together quickly, and I became obsessed and eager to begin working on it quickly, and I began pounding it out as I went, without regard for where it was headed or what needed to be done to get there.

To sum up, this page (BELOW), was the first Agent Ian Anger drawing I ever did – no prelims or sketches, JUST THIS – on 4/18/09. Then I began prepping for and then scripting around 4/23-6/15/09. THEN I made the The Global Agency of Protection – Drafts! ($7 Patrons) full-body sketch on 6/15/09 (THE ONLY prelim sketch I ever did for this project – EVERYTHING ELSE was just straight onto the page, directly, and ready to publish), and after drawing that one sketch, basically straight into producing pages of this project in earnest before 8/9/09.

So getting back to the below image. Notice I had in mind to use some texture lines, and also some solid bars of gold. But I wasn’t thinking of this as my composition, I was just drawing elements that I knew I’d be shuffing around for a composition, in Photohop. I think  I may have drawn Ian Anger first, and then added those additional  elements onto the page later, since I had all that extra space. But I don’t remember for sure.

I then took that image and those additional elements, I put in those lines and stretched them longer in Photoshop to create some borders for a series of images which I felt would help sum up this first story arc: The Arneson character making a deal with the Pope character for some gold.

I had tried coming up with a font. Notice the wonky one below. I already more or less had my bi-line!

The Arneson image with his tongue out I pulled directly from Page 12 – Published, and the Pope was an unused panel from Page 12 – Drafts.  I liked using that Pope image, because I thought it was a nice image, even though it didn’t work out to include on the final cut of Page 12. But as a result, I didn’t like that the Arneson had been used in the comic. It made me want to design a different (new) Arneson for the cover.

This next image is interesting, because it makes me wonder if perhaps, early on, I didn’t know I should use this image as a cover, or as Page 17 – Published. Notice the font is even simpler (and wonkier) than above, which makes me wonder if it were done earlier. Notice also I hadn’t yet super-imposed the Van Goghs onto the page.  If this is the case, then I had just drawn two images of Agent Anger, and didn’t know yet how I planned to use them, and was trying them out in different places to see what worked best where.

I was clearly never totally pleased with this as a cover, if I was experimenting with using it as a title page. In 2011, my best friend Steve Buell started coloring some of my work, and he designed and colored this below poster/cover.

As for the Francis Bacon Pope image (001 Splash) that I wound up with, it was drawn between 8/18 and 8/23/14 – FIVE AND A HALF YEARS LATER! I’ll discuss how I came upon this idea as a cover theme, on Brush with Peril, page 003 – Commentary ($7 Patrons).

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If you read Page 014 – Drafts, you’ll see how elements of this page began there, until I decided it was too crowded and needed some breathing room. I drew this on July 7, 2011, two years after first designing the original page 14, and the same day I drew the Hopper Lighthouse “spy base” addition on Page 14 – Drafts.

I then took the panels from page 14 and added them to the above image:

I later decided it was more dramatic to make it black-bordered. Below, my best friend Gerry Chow colored the entire first issue and a few pages of issue two, in 2015:

Notice in panel 2, it’s only a man who could maybe look a little like Lucian Freud or his self-portraits (and this was a tough one for me, because he was making self-portraits for decades, so how to choose what age he should be for this story??), but it isn’t from an actual painting or particular photo of him. Well in March 2016, seven years after beginning this project, I decided this would not stand!  I digitally went in and re-drew that panel’s figure to look like Lucian Freud, Portrait of Frank Auerbach (1975-76), private collection. I think this is interesting that it’s NOT a self-portrait of Freud’s, or even a portrait of Lucian Freud by someone else; but to me, the fact that Freud painted it, it just FEELS so Lucian Freud. I altered the proportions of the face and hair slightly so that it would look more like Freud, and then cut and pasted that digital image into the published page:

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