Radiant Comics

I’ve had a summer cold for the last week and a half so I’ve barely gotten anything done. The cold hasn’t been especially bad but it comes with fatigue and a lack of concentration. As I’ve written before I can trudge through a day and get paying work done because I have no choice but any art of my own is nearly impossible.

Today (Tuesday the 20th of August 2024) was the first day I got a “Dreams of Things” cover done. It took me about twice as long to marker color it than it usually does. Yesterday it took me all morning to get a three marker ink drawing finished and that usually takes an hour. Lsat week I don’t think I got anything done except for one “Dreams of Things” cover that I inked. I must have had a bit of energy that day. Mostly I tried to rest and watched TV.

I’m not much of a binge watcher of TV but when I’m sick I don’t have anything else to do so I’ve been watching a couple of shows. I actually have been rewatching a couple of shows. Sometimes it’s easier to rest when I have something on that I’ve seen before.

The first show is one on Apple TV called “Severance.” It came out back in 2022 and it only has nine episodes. It’s a bit of a mystery show that also has a little bit of science fiction in it. It’s about a group of people who work at an office job but the job has a twist. The twist is that they have to undergo a process called severance in which their memory is cut in two. Their work selves have no memory of their outside selves and their outside selves have no memory of what they do at work. Why would anyone do this? They have their reasons and some of them are part of the plot of the show.

It’s a stylishly done show with interesting sets that have a lot of liminal spaces. Hallways galore. I like the look and feel of it. The mystery is what the heck they are doing there? They’re got some shady bosses and their actual work is on computers and is removed from whatever else is going on at the place. The office is very buttoned up but the four people who work in the department start to get curious about everything.

As I mentioned it’s a mystery show and here is a funny thing about me watching it again. After I watched it in 2022 and some of the mystery was revealed I wanted to watch it again with this new knowledge in mind to see what the show was like a second time through. The problem is that I waited two years and forgot how the season ended. So watching it again this time was almost just like the first time.

The second show that I’ve been rewatching is the show “Lost.” I watched it back in 2004-2010 and really had no interest in rewatching it again but I heard of a different version of it. A fan cut. To me “Lost” started a whole new genre of show in which the plot was, “What the heck is happening on this show?”. It was a mystery show but instead of a show in which a mystery was solved the whole show was a mystery. We didn’t know anything about the characters on the show, what they were doing on that island, and why were so many strange things happening on the island.

One of the reasons I never had much interest in rewatching the show is that they just stacked mysteries on top of mysteries and I didn’t think there were many satisfying answers to the mysteries. I enjoyed the show and never really expected satisfying answers (I know how TV shows are written) but when it was over I was done with it. But then I heard about a fan cut of the show.

I believe “Lost” just made it to one of the streaming services for the first time this summer so it must have made it into my social media algorithm. That’s how I heard about the fan cut, “Chronologically Lost.”

Since “Lost” has a lot of mysteries and we know nothing about the characters’ pasts there are a lot of flashbacks in “Lost.” That was one of the big complaints back in the day. People wanted the plot to move forward and it was forever moving backwards. There was even time travel in the show near the end. Talk about moving backwards. So some fan somewhere decided to re-edit the show so that it was in chronological order. All the flashbacks are at the beginning. Then they released it onto the internet.

I would not recommend watching “Chronologically Lost” if you’ve never watched the show before. Stick with the real thing. I’m enjoying it as a curiosity but it might be hard to follow if you’ve never seen the show before. As I said there are a lot of flashbacks in the show and it takes about twenty five episodes that are all the flashbacks before we reach the plane crash that was in episode one of the real series.

The episodes made of these flashbacks that were created for the fan edit don’t really have the same kind of dramatic structure as real episodes. The fans did their best and it’s well done but it’s not always like watching an actually TV show. It’s often just watching the events in the character’s lives in chronological order rather than a TV drama with first through third acts. I like it but I’ve seen the show before so I know what’s going on.

One final show that I’ve been watching random episodes of is a favorite of mine. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Yes, I’ve seen all the episodes multiple times but as I was resting sometimes I just needed a laugh. Sunny is always good for that.

Chris Giarrusso’s cover to Venom War #1

I wrote a few weeks ago that I’ve never been a big buyer of back issues of comic books, I generally buy new comic books, but this summer I bought a bunch of issues of early 1970s Sub-Mariner. That has turned into a little bit of a trend for me as over the last month or so I bought a few other back issues from the web.

First off most of the comic books that I buy are new comics. I have a pull list at my local comic book store which means that they order and hold the new issue of certain comics each month for me. That makes life easy for the store and for me.

My shop (Comics Warehouse in Pearl River NY) also sends me an email each week with the “Final order cutoff” for the comics that will be out in a month. That means that it’s the last time I can order a given comic (that’s not already on my pull list) and be guaranteed of getting it. All I had to do is click on a button in the email and they’ll order and hold the comic for me.

I like getting that email each week and seeing the comics I can order. It helps me find new comics to read and to order specific things that I might not usually get.

When it comes to comic books I’m mostly an indie comic book reader. That means I’m not usually interested in Marvel or DC comics. I have none on my pull list. But an artist that I know (Scott Koblish) was doing some alternate covers on some X-Men books. I thought they were cool and wanted them. The only problem was that the first one slipped by me. I didn’t see it in the email and so didn’t get to order it. My comic shop tried to reorder it for me but it was sold out and they couldn’t get it. I had to turn to eBay.

It’s easy to get recent back issues off of Ebay but the problem is the price. Really it’s the cost of shipping. As I found out when buying those issues of Sub-Mariner this summer if I’m buying just a single comic book the shipping cost is going to be about $5. Most sellers are willing to place multiple comics in the same order for about that same shipping price but I wasn’t buying multiple issues.

In the end I paid around $15 for that X-Men #35 with the Scott Koblish cover and that was the cheapest price I found it for. I thought maybe that the price was so high (I bought others in the series for about $5-$6) because it was the first of the covers and it slipped by a lot of people. When I got the book I saw the retail price on it was $10 so that plus the $5 shipping made up the $15 price so I really didn’t pay any kind of premium for it.

After that happened the same thing happened to me again. Another artist that I know (Chris Giarrusso) is doing some alternate covers for a Venom comic. I wanted to get those but, again, the first issue slipped by me. There were so many Venom comics and so many alternate covers that I didn’t see #1. I got my preorder in for issue one in time but the Wednesday (new comic day) that Venom War #1 came out my comic shop had none of the alternate cover I wanted. So I went to eBay and ordered it for about $10.

A big order for back issues that I bought was from Lone Star Comics which has a website called mycomicshop.com. I’ve ordered from them a bit over the years because they have a lot of indie comics for cheap. I’ve filled in a bunch of series that I was missing issues of since I discovered them a lot of years ago. I keep a want list of comics on their site and decided to buy some stuff of off it. Mostly cheap stuff but it adds up and in the end I spent about $100, tax and shipping included, on 29 comics. I ended up finishing three series.

I bought the nine issues of Jeff Smith’s “Bone” that I was missing. Though this classic series is available in a few different collected editions I don’t have any of them. I haven’t liked any of the physical books they’ve put it out in so I wanted to complete my collection of the individual issues. I reread the whole series in its digital version on my iPad last year (as I commuted) and that made me want to get the rest of the comics even more.

The second series that I finished up was “Route 666” from Crossgen Comics in the early 2000s. It was back in September of 2023 that I decided to try and buy this whole series. I bought issues 1-19 for just $22 tax and shipping included on eBay. That was the cheapest I could find them but the last three issues of the series were missing. So I put them on my want list and there they sat until I finally decided to buy them about a year later.

Terry Moore’s “Strangers in Paradise” was the third series I finished off. Almost. I only bought four issues of it but that was all I needed. There are four volumes of SIP and the first one is the most expensive. There are only three issues in that volume and I already have a third printing of #1 but don’t have 2 and 3. I do have a collected edition with them in it though. These four issues completed volume two and I already had volumes three and four. I’m going to reread the whole thing one day.

The final series that I filled in were eleven issues of David Lapham’s “Stray Bullets.” That was another series from the 1990s that I was late to and missed the first 12 or so issues but I had them in collected editions. I finally decided that I wanted the original issues too.

Though I like collected editions of comics a lot I also like individual issues. Comics as periodicals are fun to read. There is only one chance to read them when they initially are printed and I like that experience. It’s also fun to thumb through a pile of old comics because they’re like a time machine. You can look into the past and watch the months roll buy as you go form issue to issue. That’s good stuff.

I haven’t done this in a while so this week I’m going to take a look at a single piece of art that I’ve done recently. I’m going to go with one that’s on my easel at this moment so it’s a bit of a random pick. As a matter of fact I just cleaned off my easel of a bunch of things. I don’t always use my easel for painting so when I’m not in the middle of a painting I stack up the art on paper that I’ve made. That way I can get a look at my current stuff.

My easel was getting full of pieces on paper and some were begging to fall of it so just this week I grabbed a bunch of older pieces from the stack and put them away into portfolio books for storage. That way I can still easily get to them if I want to. I moved a lot of my paper work from boxes in a cabinet to portfolio books on a shelf just last year. But on to the piece that’s in the front.

“Dreams of Things” #239 is another in my “Covers to Comic Book That Don’t Exist” series. It’s hard to believe that I’m closing in on having made 250 of these covers. When I look back at them (such as when I put them all in portfolio books) I can see patterns in them. Themes that I had, mostly in my subconscious mind, that would come and go in them. That makes sense since I come up with these images using a Surrealist Automatic Drawing method that mines the subconscious for ideas.

Recently I noticed myself doing a lot of “Dreams of Things” with two faces on the page. Often one was above the other in a two headed monster look. I don’t know why I was on that two headed kick but this one ups the ante with four heads in one piece.

The bottom head is the foundation on which the other three heads sit. There are even a couple of inverted triangles that support the composition. The first is that wide rainbow triangle behind the bottom head. It supports everything on top of it. Then there is the yellow triangle of hair that the bottom face has. That hair anchors the two faces above it to the bottom face. These triangles of support are important to the piece because they ground everything. Without them the heads would look like they’re floating and I don’t want that.

The background of the piece is all shapes and textures. There is very little deep space back there. It’s more of a modernist flat art space. I kept the space in back easy to understand because the space around the heads isn’t easy to understand. The scene makes no three dimensional sense but it makes compositional sense. At least that was what I was going for.

One of the first things I notice about this piece is the eyes. All four characters are looking at us a little bit differently. Often I have my characters staring directly out at the viewer. But in this case only the bottom one is doing that. The one on the left is almost but not quite looking at us. The one on the right is looking at us but softly and nearly out of the corner of his eyes. The one on top is squinting off into the distance. Four characters and four looks. I don’t often do that.

I just referred to one of the characters as “He” but as often happens in my drawings the faces are androgynous. In my head they are male or female but then they can switch on me. You can see them as whatever gender you like. It’s okay to call them he, she, or they. I do all the time.

I also like to vary the skin color of my characters a lot. If I don’t pay attention to that I’ll make everybody a similar skin color to my own. That’s just how the human unconscious mind works so I try to make conscious choices to keep things varied.

In a fantastical drawing like this one it’s easy to vary the colors of the faces since I’m not tethering it to reality. The brown and peach color faces are close to reality but the hot pink and blue/orange faces are from a dreamworld.

I think the first face color I put down was the blue/orange one. I started far out there. Sometimes when I have a face that’s facing forward I like to split it in half with color. I’m not 100% sure why but I think it’s because a face like that can be a wide expanse of the same color and that can get boring. If I split it up with wild colors it’s more interesting. I went for some monochrome two tone speckles on the face too.

The next two faces are the more realistic ones. They bring some regularness to the craziness of the rest of the piece. The brown face has stripes on one side and blue hair so it’s not too grounded in reality. The peach face also has a grey hat over its orange hair so the grey sits back in a neutral space and lets the colors pop out in front of it. Otherwise all that orange would be fighting for attention with the hot pink face.

The top face is the most colorful one in the piece. Hot pink with darker pink rugged stripes, a purple shirt, and yellow hair with its own stripes running opposite of the face stripes. I think it makes a nice cake topper.

Overall I like the way this one came out. Part of that is that I broke my own two face mold that I had been doing lately and made something similar but also wildly different. I wasn’t sure if I could even pull off four faces piled onto a cover like that but I think I did. It may not be my favorite piece ever but I like it.

I haven’t written a “Friends” walkthrough I’m months but I’m feeling nostalgic tonight so I thought I’d write one. Let me check what episode I’m up to. I’m on Season Seven Episode Seventeen “The One With the Cheap Wedding Dress.” That means I’ve watched ten episodes since I last wrote one of these. I don’t write one for every episode I watch. Just when I’m in the mood.

The episode originally aired on March 15, 2001. Let me check my calendar and see what I was doing that day. Looks like I was working at Marvel Comics that day doing the production work on some of their covers. I was commuting to Manhattan so I also bought a ten trip bus ticket for $105 on that day. There is a note that on the following Saturday I was doing some character design stuff. I wonder what characters I was designing? They were obviously for my own work but I have no idea what characters they were. Plus I bought some old Iron Man (issues 97-100) and Hulk (Issue 200) comics off of eBay that week.

Let’s start the show. It starts out in Central Perk and it looks like Monica and Chandler are planning their wedding and are choosing appetizers and a band. Chandler wants the “Swing Kings” to play the wedding. I think we get Joey’s “Peanut Butter Fingers” joke here. Ahh… there it is. I always liked that joke. Joey really sells it. Here comes the theme song.

The scene changes and now we have Chandler and Ross outside on the street checking out the new woman moving into the neighborhood. It’s a woman named Kristen who Ross takes a liking to so he and Chandler chat her up. Ross hits her with some awkward sewage history. Good stuff. Chandler is a terrible wingman but she accepts Ross’s offer to take her to dinner.

New scene and the three women are shopping for Monica’s dress. It’s the whole try on wedding dresses as you drink champagne thing that I’ve only ever seen (or even heard of) on TV and the movies. Monica finds the dress she wants but then makes the mistake of telling a stranger (Megan, another bride to be) that she is going to get the same one at a huge discount sale in a couple of days. You know that won’t end well.

Back to a street scene and Joey stumbles on the same woman (Kristen) moving in. Joey is a bit more charming. Of course he asks her out too and gets a dinner date for the night after Ross’s. A quick but amusing scene setting ups the Ross and Joey conflict..

Now we cut to a couple of days later at the big wedding dress sale at Kleinman’s. It’s a mob scene. There are women everywhere lined up to get in the store. Monica is psyching Rachel and Phoebe up to help her find the dress. She’s even got whistles for them! She finds the dress but guess who else grabs it at the same time. Of course it’s the woman she told about the sale. Some whistle humor ensues as Rachel can’t take the bargain shoppers. Then Monica pins the other woman and wins the dress! Victory!

Meanwhile back in Central Perk Ross and Chandler are discussing Ross’s date from the other night. It went well enough that there will be a second date. Ross leaves and Joey shows up. Chandler figures out they are dating the same woman and is gleeful. Ross walks back in and Chandler sets them up in funny fashion to know the truth. The joy Chandler takes in this is great.

We get a scene cut but we’re still in the coffee shop but now Joey and Ross are on the couch next to each other trying to figure things out. They will each go out on one more date with her and let her decide. Some funny stuff here.

Back at Monica’s apartment all three women are admiring the wedding dress as the phone rings. It’s Megan on the phone who lets Monica know that Megan booked the Swings Kings on the day of Monica and Chandler’s wedding. If Monica gives her the wedding dress she can have the Swing Kings. Monica is in a bind and Rachel makes some solid whistle jokes.

Night falls and as Ross gets ready for his date Joey stops by. A little competitive jockeying by the boys. Ahh.. This is also where the face cream “T-Zone” jokes are from. That’s a memorable part of the series for me.

Now back to the apartment as Chandler gets home and Monica has to break the Swing Kings news to him. But first the three women are trying to talk him out of the band. He wins Monica over with sentimentality but the problem isn’t solved just yet as we cut to a NYC skyline shot.

Ross is out on his date with Kristen but guess who shows up. It’s Joey to sabotage him. Of course they get competitive trying to embarrass each other. Some good stuff here but Kristen had enough and disappears on them. Since these are the extended edition DVD copies that I watch Joey actually says, “Does a bear shit in the woods?” at one point. I had forgotten that. That line didn’t make it onto the air.

Chandler walks into his apartment and greets Monica but she won’t come out of their room because she’s wearing the wedding dress. He promises not to like it so she can return it. Of course he loves it but she’s booked the Swing Kings so off the dress goes. After he’s banged her in it of course!

Here come the credits and the episode ends with Monica walking in as all three guys who are watching TV on the couch. Then we get that memorable turnaround shot of all three of them with grey face cream on their noses and foreheads. Their T-zones. This shot gets shown all the time on highlight reels of the show.

Now I’m going to check what was cut out of this episode for syndication. Looks like nothing was cut out. Except of course for the “Shit” line. I guess there was no extra stuff to put into the extended episode.

Now let’s see what I rated this one back a decade ago when I rated them all. As of right now I’d give it a four out of five stars. It was an extra funny episode. I only gave it three stars back then. That means I thought it was an average episode. Maybe it was because I was feeling extra nostalgic today but it really did earn that fourth star from me. Good stuff.