Creating Comics!

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Title: Best of Manhattan

Client: New York Press, 2001

Media: Pencil, pen, and paint on paper

Creative Process

This piece was done in 2001 for New York Press.

It was the inside cover for the summer supple-

ment listing the “Best of Manhattan.” This was a

really fun piece to work on. It was warm outside,

so I went out and did a lot of street sketching on

St. Mark’s Place. I enjoyed making up the crazy

characters—based on reality, of course—and

adding funky little details. (Note the Peter Bagge

cover on the paper the man is reading in the

lower-right corner.) The final art was 11” x 14”

(27.9 x 35.6 cm) and was done on cold press

Bristol using watercolor pencils, which were then

painted and inked.

F

ly pulled her first all-nighter trying to copy comics

characters when she was about four years old.

Since the late ’80s, she has been a citizen of

the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she paints and

draws comics and illustrations, and sometimes paints

murals. Her work has been published by Juxtapoz, the

Comics Journal, the Village Voice, New York Press, the

Villager, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Ray Gun, Fan-

tagraphics’ The Bradleys, World War 3 Illustrated, PUNK,

Maximum Rocknroll, Profane Existence, Stripburger, Slug

and Lettuce, and more.

Fly has been self-publishing comics and ’zines since

the mid-’80s. A collection of these, CHRON!IC!RIOTS!PA!SM!,

was published in 1998 by Autonomedia. In June 2003,

Soft Skull published PEOPs, a collection of 196 portraits

and stories. The PEOPs DVD, produced by Killer Banshee

Studios, was released in September 2006.

Fly is currently working on a postcard book and a new

volume of PEOPs. She is also working on an illustrated

novel, Dog Dayz. Fly has taught a DIY comix and ’zine-

making workshop at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon

Art since 2003.

Fly

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Fly

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Fly

Job:05-19413 Title:Creating Comics

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[to the left]

Title: Profane Existence Issue #54 cover art

Client: Profane Existence magazine, 2007

Media: Pencil, ink, and paint on paper, Photoshop

[to the right]

Title: Goddess Garbage

Client: New York Press, 1998

Media: Pencils, pen, and paint on paper

[Below] is a full-color cover I did in 2007, for issue #54 of

Profane Existence, a long-running punk magazine based in

Minneapolis. You can also see the final layout here. The issue

included an interview with me accompanied by my art.

The art was drawn with watercolor pencils on illustration

board and then painted and inked. These days I ink most of my

illustrations by hand, then scan them into Photoshop and tweak,

with the color added last. For this cover I wanted to do it the old-

school way, which takes longer and is scarier because correct-

ing any glitches is harder to do. But once scanned, a traditional

illustration is pretty much done except for some adjustment of

the levels.

Once the illustration was scanned and looked good, I submit-

ted the huge file by FTP. Originally, I’d intended to do the layout

as well as the illustration because I’m a bit of a control freak,

but in the end I had too many other deadlines (as usual), so I

had to trust the magazine to do the job. Thankfully, it turned out

pretty well.

This comic [right] appeared as a full-page

color piece in the ten-year anniversary issue

of New York Press in the summer of 1998. The as-

signment, which had been given to several of the paper’s

regular illustrators, was to do a comic about what you had

been up to ten years previously, in 1988.

The comic is based on the true story of my first time in New

York City. It was really fun to draw but, after it was published, I

felt really bad because I had inadvertently offended Mosaic Man

Jim Power, who had helped me out with a place to crash. Jim

is an icon on the Lower East Side and you can see his beautiful

mosaic work all over the place. This was drawn with watercolor

pencils on cold press Bristol, and then painted and inked. At the

time, I didn’t have a computer, so I had to submit the original

artwork.

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Fly