I am a huge fan of Ruben Bolling. (And by "huge fan", I mean, if I were to meet him or speak to him, I'd probably come off like an dweeby weirdo and he'd quickly leave me alone, babbling to myself. Since this will never happen, the world will be a less awkward place for all of us.) He draws/writes the comic strip "Tom the Dancing Bug" and I've been reading it since around 1998. He possesses the wit and skill that the rest of us doodlers can only hope to emulate. He's been a great influence on my sense of humor, political outlook and the way I draw. I really can't say enough.

He recently sent out a missive via his website kindly asking if any of his regular readers would join him in a side venture called the "Inner Hive" in which we would pay a very modest sum ($10 per 6 months) for access to a super-secret email distribution list through which he would send us his comics before anyone else got to see them, get some background on how he formulated the comic and give us any other geeky goodies that super-fans (such as myself) would get a kick out of.

His most recent email had a picture of the comic he finished before it was inked or colored in. Needless to say, I was enthralled by it. It showed me a way to draw that I never really tried.

You see, I've always been the type of doodler that does one take of a drawing, with a pen (and sometimes a pencil). If I mess up, I crinkle up the paper, throw it away and start over. Naturally, this can lead to frustration and many ideas I have had have never come to fruition because of it.

But the way Ruben does it is he takes a first pass with a pencil and gets the basic outline of the comic out there. He overlaps parts of the comic in this rough form and basically layers everything on top of each other. Finally, he goes over it with the ink and erases the pencil leaving a great, inked drawing behind.

If an experienced artist were here, they would be slapping me in the face and saying, "DUH-UUHHH!" But, hey, the way I operate is that things need to come to me organically. I'm too stubborn to actually research how to best draw comics.

The comic I drew today was done using, what I believe to be, the same style that Ruben Bolling uses to create his comics. And I can immediately see the value of the technique. I produced this on the my first try and I didn't need to crinkle anything up. Typically, I would have drawn this multiple times, with ink, until I got it right.

And, given the Ruben Bolling connection to the technique used to create this drawing, the subject is a nod to his style, as well. He has taken many a long tale and squeezed it into three panels or less (look up "Super-Fun-Pak Comix").  I decided to give a super-hero comic a try and do it one panel at time.

Of course, you can see I have a long ways to go to get good at this new (to me) technique but I plan on sticking with it. If it's good enough for the rest of the comic world, then it's good enough for me!