Sean Fuchs was a student of mine who passed away during a tragedy two weeks ago on Tuesday. (If you would like to help in some way the family has setup the “Sean and Kyle Fuchs Imagine Fund“, please donate to it if you are moved to.)

It is hard for me to talk about Sean – but I really felt the need to create this piece in honor of him. I worked hard on it. Sean was more than a student to me, he was a friend. Over the course of the last year Sean and I regularly had lunch together and would talk endlessly about comics. Sean was a gift to me this year, because at the beginning I wasn’t sure how I felt about teaching. I was leaning towards getting out of the whole game during the year before, and when I started the ‘10-’11 school year I was in a place of realizing I had to rebuild my enthusiasm towards my job – even though at the time I didn’t know how.Sean represented a major shift in that because when I finally started interacting with him, around the third week of school I started to realize I had found my next pupil. Sean loved comics and he loved reading and talking about comics. He wanted to be in the Graphic Novel Project so badly that I couldn’t say no, even though I had wanted to. Sean was the only freshman we let in this past school year and that was because of his enthusiasm.

The hardest part of all of this has been realizing how much we were friends and how much the concept of “student-teacher” relationship is a great rule and distinction to live by, but doesn’t really account for how you feel about a person. Sean was my student, and I really wanted to continue to teach him – and now his death is teaching me. He is teaching me about how to care for the people in my life now. He is teaching me to value what I do as a teacher in GNP. I am not the teacher that is going to create a project that every kid wants to be a part of, I am – no – I have (with my students) created a project that is for students like Sean. Students who want desperately to create something from scratch and make it breath in the universe. Someone who is a little bit weird and eccentric, who doesn’t fit the word “normal” by almost any stretch of the imagination. What I do needs to continue because for the past year, while Sean was alive, he was happy and contributed to something that we both considered to be great. And I got to be a part of that.At his memorial last week his family talked a lot about how he lived a full life. I believe that.

He helped me to realize that what I am doing as a teacher helped him with that – even though it was a part of a larger process it also was the main point of the idea of “living”. I am going to continue and grow for Sean. Sean is the GNP member that will help all of us realize that what we have right now in GNP is precious and special – and that what we are doing is amazing. It is an honor and a privilege that I get to be a part of this community, and an even bigger honor that I am continually encouraged and supported in being it’s leader.

The biggest honor is the fact that I am allowed to be connected to these students. If I had to choose again between being a part of Sean’s life before he died in a horrific tragedy and sitting behind a computer all day, virtually alone as a graphic designer or comic artist – I would choose the former. I will always choose the former.

I have spent roughly a week working on this graphic, chipping away at the overall piece as I started it on Saturday the 26th of June and finished it on July 3rd. I want to say that the piece ahs taken me over 20 hours to complete, and I think that mostly has to do with the experimenting of the process that I took to work on the piece.

I stole some techniques from Ryan A., namely the watercolor effects. I did some experimenting to get to the lighting and the mixed variants of it. I am not exactly sure I am completely pleased with all of the finished piece, but overall I am satisfied and I am ready to move on to the next work that we have – which is a 5 page Hipster Picnic submission – we’ll see what happens there.

The biggest person I that inspired the composition is John Romita Sr. This graphic from his iconic cover to Amazing Spiderman #50 directly inspired the piece (Which, if you read the description of that issue, you can see the emotions convey a lot of what I was trying to say with the graphic.) I also want to point out that I used an alternate, painted version, of the cover to guide my digital painting as well.

Before I leave you, this graphic was always supposed (from the design concept) to include a poem I had found that inspired me. I actually looked for the poem before I started working and I still think it fits. I am going to share it now:

A Clear Midnight
by Walt Whitman

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.