Time strange thing. We humans are always using it and are often contemplating it. As time passes we certainly wonder where it goes. We use our memories to remember time but our memories fail us. Sometimes we can’t remember a thing about one event or another that took place twenty or thirty years ago. That’s where photos and writing helps.
I have a pretty good memory. I used to think I had a great memory but that may have been because I was young and there was less to remember. Around the age of twenty five was when I thought I had a great memory. I could remember details of stuff that other people couldn’t. Or so it seemed to me. But in hindsight it may have been because I only had about a decade’ worth of adult memories. That and other people didn’t always bother to remember stuff.
We make memories from associations. Back in my youth there were more new experiences and more things for me to associate memories with. I might be able to remember something from when I was twenty because it happened in my junior year of college. Each year of college has its own name and there are only four of them. Compare that to leaving college and getting a job. Especially a job that you have for years. What happen on the job during year three might be indistinguishable in memory from what happened in year four. What about if there is a year eight? Things get even more muddled without a lot of associations.
On Facebook I’m in a couple of groups that have to do with memories. One is a group for my college and another is a group for my days in the 1990s working at Marvel Comics. I often am told in those groups that I have a good memory for stuff. That makes me point out that my memory is quite fallible but I do have a good system for writing down names and dates on photos. I can let those things remember for me.
These days almost all photos are digital and they come with automatic dates and sometimes automatic places too. But back in the 1980s and 1990s when I was taking photos I’d have to write names, dates, and places on the back of my photos in order to know where, when, and who was in them. I’m glad I did.
Once every few months (I always put it off for longer than I should have) I’d take an evening and write the date, place, and peoples’ names on the backs of the photos. I knew I’d forget a lot of that info. Some dates are only month and year as I didn’t even remember the exact day a few months after the photo was taken. I should have looked it up on a calendar back then but it was hard enough just to label them. Sure enough there are people in those photos whose names I would have forgotten by now if I hadn’t have written them down.
Just this week I had an old memory of the first semester of my junior year of college come back to me. This story takes place during my first semester of SUNY Purchase back in Fall 1986 (I was a transfer student so it was my Junior year). It was probably in September or October when a woman who I knew (not very well) stopped by my room to say hello. She may have been a bit tipsy. She spotted the big dictionary I had, walked over to it, found the word “Dipsomania,” told me it was her favorite word, and then circled and initialed it. After that she wandered off and was on her way. It was a moment.
I still have the dictionary but because it’s the digital age the big book has been in a closet for the last twenty years. When I remembered this story I pulled out the dictionary to see if the memory was real. I remembered her signing her name but it turns out it was only her initials. I can’t remember her name at all anymore but her initials were C.D. I think she was only at Purchase that one semester.
I posted this story in my college group on Facebook and only one person thought she might have known this woman. My Facebook group friend gave a good description of C.D. so I think it was her. My Facebook friend was friends with C.D. back in 1986 but she could only remember that her name was Christine. Her last name is lost to our memories. If only I had a photo of her with her name on the back.
Back in June of 1992 Marvel Comics was on the tenth floor of 387 Park Avenue South. They decided to remodel the floor so everybody had to move down to the fourth floor as the work was being done that summer. I mention this because I took no photos of us all working on the fourth floor. Usually I have photos of my time at Marvel to match my memories with but in this case, for that summer, I don’t. It’s weird but something I never thought much about. That was until a few years ago when Eliot R. Brown posted a blog about those days.
Eliot R. Brown worked in the Marvel Bullpen a little before my time. He was a freelancer at Marvel in the 1990s when I met him but in the late 1970s and 1980s he took a lot of photos at Marvel when he worked there. He started a blog about his days at Marvel (https://www.eliotrbrown.com/wp/) and that’s where I saw his post about Marvel’s time on the fourth floor. The photos fascinated me.
I wish I had been a more prolific photographer during my Marvel days. I was the guy who usually had a camera and I took more pictures than others but it was the age of film and we didn’t take photos of everything like people do today. Film and processing cost money and photographing everyday life was unusual.
Often people look at my old photos and say, “Wow, I don’t even remember that” but now it was my turn to. Memories of the fourth floor came flooding back as I looked at Eliot’s pictures. Plus there was so much in them that I didn’t remember. I was even in one of the photos. Just standing around and doing whatever.
I can get drawn into a strange memory hole just thinking about those fourth floor photos. So much happened that summer that I don’t remember. Since so many of my memories are associated with my own photos I’m used to that type of remembering but with other people’s photos it’s a different process. It’s a process of building memories from my mind and from new old photos. I remember one thing and it’s either right or wrong according to the photo plus a photo can jog a memory. It’s new information on long gone times.
So that’s what I’ve been thinking about recently. Time and memories. Where do they come from and where do they go? It’s the human condition.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eight new comics.
Check them all out here:
I need to do a little writing about writing today. Not about my non-fiction writing that I do here but some fiction writing. In the past I’ve done a bit of fiction writing. Short stuff. I’ve never written a novel nor had the desire to write one. Most of my fiction writing these days has to do with my comic strips but in the past I did a lot more comic book writing. I even self published six issues of a comic book with my friends back in the late 1990s.
The last thing I wrote and published along those lines was my “Ghost of Fifth Street” comic about five years ago. I actually wrote an art and pictures book after that but never bothered to publish it. Mostly because no one but a few friends cared about my “Ghost of Fifth Street” comic so I didn’t want to bother. It cost me more money to publish it, even with a print on demand service, than I made from it. That killed my motivation.
Now enough time has gone by that I want to make a couple of books again. I actually have a few in the pipe but I haven’t been motivated to sit down and write them. I still have the last one I wrote five years ago. It’s been unlooked at since then so I’ll have to read it again and see how it is.
I also have a second art book from that same time period that I never wrote. It’s put together visually with notes but that’s the exact time that I lost any motivation to make books. I could get back to writing that one but that doesn’t appeal to me. Of course nothing else fiction writing-wise has appealed to me either.
I have one more book in progress from eight years ago that I started but never finished. In 2012 I filled a small red Moleskine sketchbook up with drawings done in a red pen. I was going to make a book out of it that used the sketchbook as an artifact the story revolved around. I scanned in the whole book, set it up in InDesign, and started writing the story. I never finished the story. It’s still sitting there undone.
One of the pieces I’ve been wanting to work on has been a story based around my fortune telling cards. In the early 2000s I worked on a deck of forty eight fortune telling cards. I not only came up with the cards but I came up with a whole system to use them. All the cards have meanings and I can deal a few of them out and figure out the meanings of them interacting. No one can really tell the future but I like cards and found it fun to do.
I’ve always had an idea to write a story involving the cards. The cards would be artifacts in the story. Maybe a source of power and information. I see the story as a noir story where the main character finds an old set of fortune telling cards and they lead him on a path in the darkness.
My fortune telling cards aren’t old like the Tarot. They’re supposed to be modern. Most of the concepts in them, like “Sky Blue Tie” are 20th Century concepts so the guy in the story who finds them won’t think that they’re ancient. Just last night I had the idea to make them from the 1990s. In the early 1990s there was a boom in trading cards. Sports cards were especially successful but the rising tide lifted the boats of non-sports cards too. I think I can make the mysterious cards from that era. No one knows where they come from and why would they? That era was flooded with cards. No one knows them all.
The problem is that all that doesn’t make a story. That’s just the background. A lot of people mistake “Having and idea for a story” with just having some background material. A story has a beginning, middle, and end and not just an “Idea.” I have the beginning in mind but not much else. I have to actually sit down and write it. Along with some other stuff.
I continue to write my “Four Talking Boxes” comic strip in the morning. Before breakfast, as I get ready for the day, I have my laptop open and write the strip. I’ve been writing five to six strips a week for many years now. So many that I’m now over a year ahead in the writing part of the strip. At least I’m good to go with that.
The other thing I have an idea to write is “A Hundred Words About A Hundred Drawings.” All during the Covid-19 summer I was drawing six by nine inch ink drawings. At this point I have 99 of them. I got the idea of making a book of them back when I had fifty of them. It was going to be fifty words about fifty drawings but now the number is higher. Why not? Each page will have a drawing on it plus a little story to go along with the drawing. I’ve go ten little stories done so far.
I did a lot of writing last spring to get ahead on my “Drifting and Dreaming” and “Message Tee” comic strips. I wrote many cartoon art cards, Middle Stories, and pithy sayings for T-shirts. Though it was all short writing it still took a lot of time. Now maybe I can take some time and write some art books.
I’ve been writing this blog for 15 years now. A thousand words a week and I’ve never skipped a week. That’s an accomplishment that no one cares about but me but I’m glad I’ve done it. I know I can get writing done so now I’ve got to get some more book writing done. Let’s see if I can.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics.
Check them all out here:
I decided to pull a random 8×10 inch acrylic on canvas painting off my shelf where I have them stored in a paper envelopes in order to write about it. A writing and art exercise. I pulled down “Sun Sign #4.” I think it’s from before I was in the habit of putting a date on everything. I signed the back of the canvas and wrote the name on it but somehow not a date. I checked my digital calendar and it looks like I do have a date for it on there. I finished painting this on October 27, 2003 along with Sun Signs #5 and #6 too.
First of all I can tell this is one of my earliest 8×10 inch acrylic on canvas paintings because of the canvas it’s painted on. It’s a pre-stretched canvas. That means I bought it from the store this way. It’s the cheapest canvas possible and I can tell that because the staples that hold the canvas to the wooden stretchers are on the side of the stretchers. The more expensive canvases have the staples on the back. Though these days I think even most store brands (as this one is probably a Dick Blick canvas) have the staples on the back. So side staples are a thing of the past.
Back in the early 2000s I was just starting out painting with acrylics on these small canvases. The idea was that I would be able to work out more ideas and images faster than doing large oil paintings. I love large oil painting but if I’m not selling them, and I wasn’t, they take up a lot of time and room.
As you can tell by the fact that I got two other small painting done that day I liked to do these small paintings in groups. Usually groups of four. I don’t know why I only had three in this group but it was the beginning of my habit. Working on four at a time meant that I could always put one aside, give it time to dry, and have another ready to work on. It sped things up.
I like images. Though I occasionally make abstract art for the most part my work all has a subject matter. A person, a place, or a thing. Mostly people. I enjoy drawing things that no one has ever seen before. I like mining my imagination for stuff that I’m not even sure where it comes from. I like to walk the edges of the dreamworld and see what I see. This painting is not like that. Or maybe it’s just kind of like that a little.
“Sun Sign #4” is an abstract or symbolic painting. It’s the sun but not the literal sun. It’s a circle of yellow with rays of color coming out from the center of it. It is not painted to be realistic but anyone who looks at it will probably think it’s the sun. Since the circle of yellow bleeds off the bottom of the painting it would be either a rising or setting sun.
I painted this in my “Black line filled with color” style that I first started developing way back when I was an undergrad ay SUNY Purchase. First I draw a sketch on the canvas, then I paint on the black line, and then I fill in the color using brush strokes that follow the form. Or at least the shape. Sometimes the painting doesn’t have a form. This one really doesn’t because the design is basically flat.
This painting also owes a lot to Mondrian. He’s the one who pioneered this type of painting with black lines and colors. Mine may not be exactly like his but it’s from the same school of thought. Color, line, surface, and the way paint is applied to the canvas can make a painting.
I only have the one Sun Sign painting in front of me so I’m not sure what distinguishes this one from the others. Beside that they all have different colors and designs is one really different from the others? Is it really that if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all? That might be true if you were to only see one at a time as I’m doing now. But I know that numbers impress people.
If I were to put twenty of these on a wall a viewer would be much more impressed by them than if they were only to see one. If a viewer saw twenty of these he or she would automatically compare and contrast them and pick out their favorite one. That’s how the human mind works and is another reason I did three of these in a day to make eight total. Eight is more impressive than one.
For this particular one I only used five colors. Black, the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), and green. But the blues aren’t even real primary colors. They’re tints of a primary. That means I added white to blue to make a lighter blue. They’re subdued and not as visually strong as if they were pure color. This allows the strong red of the background to move forward in space and the eye starts confusing the positive and negative space as you stare at it. It makes the painting more active.
The yellow is the most dominant color in the painting as there is a large and continuous arc of it but the red still give it a run for its money. The blue sits back a little bit but there is a lot of it fighting for influence. The blue also has an ally. The two blocks of green. They are across the color wheel from red which makes them complimentary colors that want nothing to do with each other. Compliments fight each other. The color has a precarious balance.
The brush strokes follow the forms of the rays of the sun. The brush strokes in the sun itself are straight up and down but the others are all at diagonals. They emphasize the radiating rays of the sun. I like that.
All things considered I don’t have a ton to say about this one painting. It doesn’t have an image of a person or place for me to contemplate. But it does have a familiarity. It’s the sun. We all know what that is and it means something to all of us. I’m good with that.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eight new comics.
Check them all out here:
I had to buy new bike parts this week. Summer has been pretty smooth as far as my bike rides have been going but that changed in the second week of September. I was out riding and I got a flat tire. Not so unusual and I was able to change out the tube on the side of the road. My new portable air pump that is strapped to my bike frame worked really well and pumped up the tire so I could ride home. It was then I noticed how thin the rubber on my tire tread had gotten.
I kept the thin tread on my bike since it was my only good one but then I remembered a friend had given me a tread. But that tread needed a patch. I’ve patched plenty of tire tubes before but never a tread. This tread had a small hole in it so I tried patching the hole on the outside with rubber and on the inside with a fabric tape. It held just fine but when I put the tread on the bike the air pressure in the tube made the tread bulge. That was no good so I tossed out the tread and put the thin one back on.
As I was out riding on another day I stopped at a traffic light. As I started up again by putting pressure on the pedal I heard a twang. It was the sound of a spoke breaking. I have an old bike rim at home that I keep around because the spokes match my current back rim and I use those spokes when one on my rim breaks. So that’s what I did. I replaced the broken spoke.
After a spoke is replaced on a bike rim the wheel has to be trued. That means tightening and loosening spokes so that the wheel doesn’t wobble. This spring I bought a truing stand that makes the job easier but it still isn’t an easy thing to do. In that process I also discovered another spoke that need to be replaced. It was frozen in place and couldn’t be tightened to loosened. That’s a bad spoke.
It took me way longer to fix those spokes then it should have. Things kept going wrong. But that was only the beginning. The next day as I took the bike out for a ride the first thing I heard was the spokes groaning. They readjusted themselves as all the weight and pressure of my body is put on them. And it wasn’t a good readjustment.
As I was riding I could feel the wheel rubbing against something. This sometimes happens when changing out a wheel. Usually it’s the brakes rubbing against the rim. I got off the bike, adjusted the brakes, and went on riding. Then I felt more rubbing. It turned out that the rubber of the wheel was rubbing against the frame of the bike. That’s not good. I reset the wheel in the frame the best I could and kept on riding.
When I got home I put my bike upside down (wheels in the air) on my bike stand and tried adjusting the spokes to pull the wheel a little bit straighter. I managed to get it to stop rubbing against the frame but there wasn’t much clearance. When I went out for my next ride there wasn’t any rubbing but there was a weird hitch in the wheel. I needed a new rim. There was no way around it.
New rims are expensive. I went on the internet to look up what it would cost me to get a new one. After a bit of searching I found one for about $85. Yes, that’s a cheap rim. I bought a new gear cassette this past Spring so I could pull that off my old rim and put it on the new one. Otherwise that would be another $35.
I was also going to have to get a new tread for the rim since the old one was worn down and I failed to patch my extra one. I searched around for a new tread and found a cheap one for $20. The next cheapest one was $40. I’ve bought these $20 treads before and they aren’t made of the thickest rubber. They last me about a year. That’s good enough for now.
I also had to buy a couple of new inner tubes too. I patch my tubes four or five times before they’re not useable anymore but sometimes it’s the stem that goes wrong. That’s what happened with my last flat. When the rubber around the stem goes the tube can’t be patched and can only be thrown out. That meant I was down to only one spare tube and none without patches. I like at least one brand new tube among my spares. The tubes cost me $10 a piece.
The last think I had to get was some new rim tape. This is tape that wraps around the rim and keeps all the metal edges of the rim from cutting into the tube. Without it the tire will go flat. I bought some rim tape recently for about $6 for a set of two. It doesn’t actually have any adhesive on it but usually comes rolled up like a roll of tape. This time I saw a set of ten rim tapes for about $10. I ordered that. They came in a bag not rolled up at all. I found that a little bit weird.
My new rim is supposed to arrive today. I’ve got the other parts already so when it finally comes I’ll be able to put together my new back wheel. I’m writing this early in the morning so that means I still have one more bike ride on my old back tire. If you want to know what a bike ride is like on a tire that can’t be trued I’ll tell you. It’s weird. There isn’t the right amount of smoothness to the ride. You can feel the hitch in the giddy-up. It makes you conscious of the back wheel and doesn’t fill you with trust. I can’t wait to get the new wheel on and not have to think about or notice any of those things.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics and a book.
Check them all out here:
I’ve been thinking about comic books again. Specifically about Marvel and DC comic books and why I don’t read them. I go to my local comic shop every week and buy new comics but I never buy Marvel and DC comics anymore. My tastes have always run towards indie comics but I used to check in with some Marvel and DC comics every so often. Sometime around the year 2012 I stopped checking in.
The general reason I give for not liking Marvel and DC comics is their reliance on knock off characters. There is not one Spider-Man anymore. There are a dozen. Same with Batman, Wolverine, Superman, Hulk, and every other popular super hero out there. I find this tedious rather than entertaining.
There is a terrific video that shows Steve Jobs (https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4) talking about leadership and what happens when marketing people start having more influence on a company than creative people. I think that’s what has happened at Marvel and DC.
It’s easy to sell stuff that’s related to something that’s already popular compared to having to create something and then make it popular. If you want to sell backpacks to little girls then put something popular with little girls on the backpack. A Wonder Woman backpack is easier to sell than a blank backpack. This effects how comics get made.
Spider-Man is popular. Put him on a backpack and a lot of little boys will buy it. But what about little girls? They might like Spider-Man or they might not. But if there was a Spider-Girl that would increase the chances of being able to sell that backpack to little girls. The freelancers who actually create the comics aren’t stupid (nor are their editors). They know that creating a Spider-Girl character will get them in good with the people who run the place. Mostly those people come from areas of the mother company that sells backpacks and such. Not comic books.
Then there is the basic way that popularity works. The easiest way to make something popular is to associate it with something that is already popular. Hence if one Spider-Man is good than two Spider-Men is even better. In the 1970s that used to apply, at least at Marvel, to the number of titles that Spider-Man starred in. But over at DC, which was a more mature company, their main heroes already had “Families.” There was Superman, Supergirl, Superboy, Superhorse, Superdog, and even more Super Family members.
Part of the reason for this “Super Family” thinking was legal. DC may as well make a Supergirl and get the copyright and trademark on it before someone else does. The other part of it was, of course, financial. Being that a character is popular a customer is more likely to buy a comic relating to that character than a new comic with no ties to anything popular.
That thinking has lead to a lot of different Wolverines, Hulks, and Spider-People. It’s hard to argue with the logic from a short term financial perspective for all involved but I don’t think it leads anywhere good in the long run. It’s kept me away from Marvel and DC comics for sure and I bet I’m not alone.
I think the problem lies in creativity. It’s tough to keep coming up with new Spider-Man stories. First they have to adhere to what the customer thinks a Spider-man story is, after all that’s what he’s here for, but they also have to be fresh and interesting. I think having a dozen different Spider-People makes that even harder. Spider-Man can get staler even faster when there are nine copies of him.
Having all those different versions of a character ruins my being interested in the character’s fate. I realized that while reading a Fantastic Four comic that involved the”Legion of Reed Richards.” He’s Mr. Fantastic from the Fantastic Four and in this story he teamed up with versions of himself from across the multiverse. There were essentially an endless supply of Reed Richards. When one died there was always another to take his place. That made me not care about his fate. The same with everyone else. Wolverine died. I didn’t care. He was just replaced with four other Wolverines.
I also think there is a long term math problem with these knock off characters. Short term it’s all fine. If your choice is between a new character and a knock off character then the knock off will make you more money right now. The problem is down the line. Knock off characters never reach the popularity of the character they copy. Batman junior will never be as popular as Batman. Think about that for the future of a company.
A lot of people point out that there haven’t been any popular characters created at Marvel and DC for decades. Off the top of my head I can think of Deadpool in the 1990s and maybe Harley Quinn also of the 1990s. I’m not even really sure how popular Harley Quinn is but at least she’s been in two movies.
My thesis is that one of the reasons there have been so few break out characters has been the focus on knock off characters. The freelance creators know what the bosses want and give them that. So if they want knock off characters to sell more backpacks that’s what gets created. Meanwhile any new character gets put on the back burner.
It’s really hard for even the big publishers, Marvel and DC, to make a character popular. That’s the nature of creativity. Any given character that is created has probably a 2% chance of ever reaching the level of Wolverine. Maybe less since I just made up that number. So in order to create the next Wolverine a publisher has to shepherd the creation of a hundred characters.
The problem is that a knock off character has a zero percent chance of being as popular as Wolverine. So every knock off character that is created doesn’t get Marvel or DC closer to the hundred characters they need to create to find the next Wolverine. And knock offs are mostly what they’re creating because of the short term financial rewards.
To make the problem even harder to deal with is that the knock offs have a better chance or reaching 50% of Wolverine’s popularity than a new character does. So do you create a character that has a better chance of reaching that 50% ceiling or one that has a shot at 100% popularity but will in all reality probably top out at 20%? It’s tough to argue for the 20% character but arguing for it is what leadership is.
In my opinion history has shown us that Marvel and DC had better start shooting for that 100% popularity. Not only have they lost a lot of fans, like me, who don’t like all the knock offs but their knock offs have reached the point of diminishing returns. They’re created just about all the knock offs that they can. It’s time to take more chances on new characters or they might run out of chances all together.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics.
Check them all out here: