Wheels

A Blazer Legend

The art…

Today’s piece is a drawing of Brian Wheeler, former Portland Trail Blazers radio announcer. He passed away at 62 recently, which is of course way, way too young. He had the hard luck of following up legendary Blazers announcer Bill Schonely, who was put out to pasture by the team. You may know Schonely as the guy who coined the term “Rip City,” that’s the level of contribution to the franchise he made. Wheels persisted, and held down that position for 21 years. To people of a certain time frame, Wheels is the voice of the Blazers.

Announcers are an important part of the presentation of a sports team - while everyone shows up to watch the amazing feats only professional athletes are capable, the announcers are voice inside your head when these things happen. Amazing moments become iconic with the right call, and are played over and over again for many years to come. Wheeler got to call Brandon Roy’s entire career, as well as Damian Lillard’s early years, and the iconic calls are his.

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I’m working on laying out the first pages of the new San Gwynn story, right now. Some big decisions have to be made, this time as early as the 2nd page. If you’re not interested in the thought process behind putting together a comic story, feel free to head out and as Skip Caray used to say in the late innings of a meaningless blow-out, “As long as you promise to patronize our sponsors, you can probably go ahead and take your dog for a walk now.”

The second page of the story looks to be a 9 panel page, which I don’t mind. I’ve read enough Keith Giffen comics over the years to see that as a viable option. However, it seems like overly dense plotting to do it that way, especially since decompressed storytelling is the norm, and has been for a while. For the vast majority of comics I’ve ever read, the 22 page comic is the standard for a single issue. But page count really only matters for print, and I had already decided I wasn’t going to publish single issues of the comic in any format except digital. So what’s the point of overloading a page to keep page count down, when it’s only going to matter when I print a collection?

Tim Sale settled into a standard on his comics where he’d draw three panels a page. Now, my work is more humor-focused than his was, and as such pacing plays a much larger role, but a basis of four panels a page seems alright. That will provide a better art to dialogue ratio on each page, and there’s still many ways to play with that grid when I want to deviate from it.

So there you go. I’m going to loosen up how much I try to jam into a page.

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The last couple of weeks have been difficult, to say the least. About a week ago would have been my mom’s 75th birthday, and I have started in earnest the process of placing her ashes in places that were meaningful to her. Letting go isn’t just hard, it’s excruciating, and I lost a week there just trying to keep my emotions from flying out of control.

So yeah. I took the standing eight count, and I’ve dusted myself off, and I’m ready to fight.

c.