Radiant Comics

I wrote this piece shortly after the blackout on August 14, 2003. Since I didn’t have a blog then I never posted it anywhere. As a matter of fact I totally forgot it existed until today. All the talk of the 15th anniversary of the blackout jogged my memory.

So here is my story of the blackout.

I was working at Marvel Comics on 40th Street in Manhattan. The lights went out at 4:11 PM. We all trudged down the stairs blissfully unaware that anything “historic” is going on. As we were milling around on the sidewalk I first I heard that the whole block was out of power. Then I heard some one say that it goes all the way up to 57th Street. Okay, I thought, I may as well go home. So I made the decision to head off to the Port Authority bus station as soon as possible. Along the way I kept hearing things. From people on the street and from the little hand held radio I had with me. This was blacked out, that was blacked out until I finally heard that the whole eastern seaboard was blacked out.

Now, whenever you here the phrase “eastern seaboard” you should know you are in trouble because the only time it is ever used is in some kind of disaster. East Coast, West Coast, Gulf Coast, Texas Coast, North Atlantic Coast, and Pacific Coast, these I hear all the time. I can point them out on a map. I don’t even know where the eastern seaboard begins and ends. They kept saying, on the radio, that “the whole eastern seaboard all the way to Detroit is blacked out.” Detroit? That’s six hundred miles from the sea. I’ve never even heard the Northern, Southern or Western seaboards even mentioned. So do they exist?

In Bryant Park with the Marvel Crew.

Meanwhile, I get to the bus station by 4:30 and find it closed. The sidewalk is packed with people but the station is closed. I turn around and head back to Marvel. I pick up Dan Carr and Jerry Kalinowski outside of Bryant Park and tell them that the Port Authority Bus Station is closed. Not what they wanted to hear. But a bunch of people from the office were headed over to the bar in the park to kill time and sort things out. What got sorted out was that this was a big blackout and getting home was going to be difficult. The Jersey people started for the ferries and the Long Islanders started heading for Queens. I live in Rockland County (NY), the red headed step child of NY/NJ transportation on a good day so I knew neither of those options would help me. I stayed in the park by myself and started looking around for people I might know. After a couple of laps I heard a voice calling to me and it was Matt Maley. He had come to the park to look for me, yeah we were just a couple of country boys heading for the trees.

So, stranded together, (Matt had to go all the way up to New Paltz) we came up with a plan to wait and give things a little time to clarify. We did a couple more laps around the park to see if anyone else we knew was there but found no one. Then we sat and listened to my radio for news (not much except for my favorite quote from the Niagara Mohawk power station guy who said, “We have no idea what this is”) and did some sketches. People were generally having a good time in the park and it hardly seemed like a blackout. We decided that 6:30 was a good time to check out the Port Authority bus terminal.

As Matt and I arrived at the terminal things did not look good. There were more people than before and the sidewalks were full. We walked around just trying to get some information if and when buses would be running. There was no real information. They were trying to run some buses from 41st between the stations but they weren’t being loaded and where they were going was a mystery. Still, we moved to 41st Street because that’s what we were told but let me tell you there was desperation and a little panic in the air at 41st. I didn’t want to get home that badly (plus my odds were long that any of those buses were going near my stop) so Matt and I retreated to 40th. As we were retreating there was almost a bad incident as, I think, a bus was moving forward with people in front of it trapping them against the back of another bus. The bus was stopped in time and panic and injuries averted. Well, I think averted because we were leaving as this was happening but there was only shouts of “Whoa, whoa, stop” and not screams.

At 40th street we had a decision to make. It was about 7 PM and we either were going to wait for a bus or walk to John and Sue’s in Brooklyn. I estimated that, best case, we would not get a bus until ten PM. And like I said that was optimistic. So we made the decision to walk to Brooklyn.

Only a block into our walk I hear a strange voice say, “Spare change Mister. Spare change for a hotel room.” I had my New York blinders on and was paying no attention to the beggar but it struck me as odd that some one would beg for hotel room money. I looked up and there was Pat Giles, and no, he wasn’t really begging for hotel room money. Pat had come from Penn Station and happened to wind up in our path. He told us that he was thinking about getting a room for the night but didn’t think his prospects were good. We told him our plans and he said, “Hey, I got a sister in Brooklyn so I’ll walk with you.”

So the three of us were off. Not a bad walk. Two hours and twenty minutes (for Matt and I) of pleasant conversation and attempts to reach loved ones by cell phone (about half were successful). As we reached the Brooklyn side of the the bridge, Borough President, Marty Markowitz was there with a bullhorn welcoming us to Brooklyn where the real New York begins. We parted ways with Pat at Atlantic and Court as he headed to his sister’s.

On the Brooklyn Bridge with Matt and Pat.

Matt and I reached John and Sue’s only to find they hadn’t arrived home yet. No biggie, because during one of our cell phone calls we found out that Keith Karchner was over at Steve Hughes and Megan Walsh’s apartment just a few blocks away. We got on the phone to Steve and told him we were on the way over. We passed the evening sitting on the roof discussing where the hell the Eastern Seaboard was. At about 11:30 PM we called Sue and Matt and I went over to her place to spend the night. John rolled home at about midnight after the days aborted attempt to take Metro North up to Beacon.

The following morning I heard two women out on the street talking, one of them said that there was no subway service. Not a good beginning to the day. Then the power come back on in the apartment at 8 AM so there was hope. We took stock of our options: Port Authority Bus Terminal- closed, Subways- not running, Grand Central- not closed but not running trains, PATH trains- running on a Saturday schedule and some NJ Transit trains were running. We checked with a car service and there was a half hour wait for a car to Manhattan. We thought about heading for Port Authority in hopes that the busses would soon start running but then we heard that the bus station didn’t have all its power back. It also was not likely to start running busses soon. So we decided on New Jersey. Two of the NJ Transit lines ran up into Rockland, one to within a couple of miles of where my car was parked. It was the Pascack Valley line for us.

Keith came over and we were ready to go. He said that cabs were easy to catch this morning so we skipped the car service and caught one. Sue had already advised us to take the Brooklyn Battery tunnel and not the Bridge because she heard the tunnel was clear. The cab driver asked us which we wanted (the tunnel is $4 and the bridge free so I guess the tunnel is the less popular choice) and he was visibly relieved when we said the tunnel so the bridge must have been a mess. We made it to the Christopher Street PATH station in record time. There was no traffic. If we had a car we could have been home in no time. Just before we left the cab I heard, on the radio, an announcement of which NJT lines were open. They didn’t mention the Pascack Valley line. Bad news but we soldiered on. After a brief, comical interlude with the three of us trying to find exact change ($1.50) for the PATH train we were on our way to Hoboken.

At the Hoboken Terminal we found ourselves trying to get tickets for a train that wasn’t running. The Pascack Valley line wasn’t running nor was the Bergen line. There were no trains north. But, I was told, they were running busses whenever they could up to Suffern (a Rockland County town on the Bergen line). If we just sat in the waiting area they would make an announcement when a bus was ready, maybe one would be ready in an hour. Not wanting to sit down and just wait we looked around for people with more information. No one had more information so we went back to the waiting area and had a seat. I called my sister, Jennifer, to pick us up in Suffern once we got there. We just had to get there. After 45 minutes of sitting and listening to barely audible messages over the PA system a man came by to take us (and a hundred others) to where a bus was supposed to pick us up. Fifteen more minutes later we were among the lucky ones who there was room for on the bus.

Keith and I in the New Jersey train station.

The bus ride was, thankfully, uneventful except for the fact that the driver was having a little problem with the route. This, of course, was due to the fact that we weren’t on a bus route and we were stopping at train stations so it was to be expected. One last little SNAFU was that we were let off on the road outside of the Suffern train station but there was no way into the station from where we were. Jenn came and got us, though. And then it was on to Nanuet to pick up my car. We were at my house be 3 PM where Shari Lynn picked up the boys to bring them home to New Paltz.

I wrote a piece last year about looking through photographs and here I am writing about the same thing again. I only have one thing to say about it right now and that’s that it takes a long time. Normally when I look through photographs I don’t have a specific idea in mind and I look through them for something that sparks an idea. This time I have a specific idea and since it’s far from what I usually do it’s taking even extra time.

I’ve taken a lot of street photos over the years. On any give trip into NYC I can take four thousand photos. That’s the age of digital photography for you. Set the camera on burst mode and then keep taking pictures. What would cost me four hundred dollars to do with a film camera costs nothing when shooting digital. I easily have tens of thousands of street photos in my “Bryant Park and Street Photos” folder on my hard drive.

Most of my street photos are about casual moments. They’re taken of people on the street from far away who don’t usually know I’m there. I like to try and capture moments in time that are not usually recorded. Quiet moments here and there of people going about their ordinary lives. I often don’t even know what I’m shooting in a conscious way. I’m looking for anything or anyone that catches my eye, composing the shot, taking the burst of photos, and them moving on. It’s a fast moving process and I’m almost never thinking about the shot I just took. I’m thinking about the next one. And thinking might not even be the correct work. It’s more like I’m reacting to what is going on around me.

I’ve ended up with a few unintentional themes over the years as I shoot in and around Bryant Park in Manhattan. Since Bryant Park and the Midtown Library (which is connected to the park) are big tourist destinations there are always people taking photos there. So I’ve taken a lot of photos of people taking photos. A subcategory of “Photos of people taking photos” is one I call “I wonder what his or her selfie looks like?” Those are when I take a photo of someone taking a selfie. There are a lot of people out on the streets of NYC taking selfies.
I also have a couples theme. Couples in the park, sitting, standing, or doing whatever. The park can be a romantic attraction. One final theme is photos of tourists posing for photos. There is a lot of posing going on near the famous Midtown library and their sculptures of lions. They also have a grand building with columns and a great set of steps to take photos on. So I take photos of people posing for their tourist photos.

This time I was looking for none of my usual moments to make finished photos out of. This time I decided I wanted to try and make a photo of NYC in general. Sort of a generic photo any tourist would want to take home with them after a trip to the city. Sounds easy right? At least it sounded easy to me but then I discovered I don’t take many of those types of photos. Almost all of my photos are of people and not places. Photos of NYC are of places.

I remember taking some generic place photos because sometimes I’d find myself in a spot and think “This is an interesting spot” and take a picture. Turns out that thought didn’t occur very often. So far I’ve looked through about 10,000 photos and pulled out a dozen that I though would suit my needs. And none of them jumped out at me.

In order to break the tedium of looking through all those photos I’ve been taking breaks and drawing some faces. My “Drifting and Dreaming” comic needs some drawing done for it so that’s what I’ve been doing. It fits in well with the looking through photos. I only have to draw one face at a time so I can concentrate for a bit on that and then put it down until the next one. It’s easier than working on a big drawing that takes hours of concentration.

I used to draw when I went to Bryant Park. I would take my painting kit with me. A set of pan gouaches, paper to paint on, a container of water, and a paint rag. Bryant Park has a bunch of chairs and tables in it so it was good for painting in. I wasn’t painting the scenery or anything like that. I was painting the same weird paintings that I made at my home studio. I think that’s why I eventually stopped painting at the park at all. I never made a good painting there. Or at least a painting that was in any way distinguishable from the ones I made with much more ease and comfort in my studio. It got to be a bother.

I had been learning how to take street photos at about this time. At first I’d paint a bit and then walk around and take some street photos and then paint some more. After a couple of years the street photos took over and the painting and drawing went back to the studio. After all there was no reason to travel all the way into NYC to do the same thing I was doing at home. Taking street photos was something I couldn’t do at home so it was better to concentrate on that.

That brings us to me ten years later looking through a huge digital pile of those street photos. I’ve looked through them many times before and some stand out in my memory but most don’t.

Once again I decided to pull a painting off my shelf to look at and write about. It’s been sitting on my shelf among my other 8×10 acrylic on canvas paintings for quite a while. I’ve got a lot of them on those shelves and they’re in various envelopes, bags, and boxes to keep the dust and light off them so I don’t often get to see them often. This one in named “Annie Enigma” and had the date I finished it on the back. October 3, 2006. Wow, this painting is going to be twelve years old this Fall. Time sure flies.

The first thing I notice about this painting is that I nailed the simplicity. It’s made up of only eleven colors, five of which are shades of blue, and only a few visible brush strokes. The color has a very flat and even surface. My acrylic painting has gone in a busier direction in the last five years so seeing a painting that captures a face and hair with such simplicity looks novel to me right now. I think I managed to capture something nice in this one.

The main color in the painting is blue. At first glance I thought there were only three blues in the hair but there are five. In the hair in front of her face I used two shades of blue and in the hair behind her face I used three other shades of blue. That is a lot of shades but they work well together. They remind me that I used to have a lot of different shades of paint mixed and at my disposal.

One of my habits I developed when I first started to paint in acrylics in the early 2000s was to save my paints in small plastic containers called cubbies. I would buy tubes or jars of acrylic paint but even though I bought many varieties of colors that wasn’t enough. I would usually need a slightly redder version of a purple, a lighter version of blue, a greener yellow, or some such. Color right out the tube is great but mixing my own colors from them was essential.

I was always searching for the perfect shade of a color to make my painting with. As a consequence I mixed a lot of paints. After I’d mix the color I wanted I’d save the extra in a cubby and place it in my box of paints. I’d even put a sticker on the cubby with what paints were used for the mixture for when I needed more. I ended up with about ten different shades of blue to chose from and the five I picked for this painting work well.

Alas, I haven’t been doing a ton of acrylic painting in recent years so much of the paint in those cubbies has dried out and is useless now. When I made an acrylic painting a month ago I had to start all over again with my color mixing. As a consequence I don’t think that new painting has the same subtlety of color as this one does. That doesn’t make the new one worse but it is different.

The black line on this painting also looks good. It’s a really dark and rich black. When I first started painting with a black line, way back when I was in college, I learned about Ad Reinhardt and how he mixed his black paint for his all black paintings. He would start with color paint and then keep adding more colors into the mix until there was so much pigment it made black.

I tried this technique to mix the black for the black line of my painting and it worked out pretty well. I kept at it over the years because I liked it but every now and then I mixed a black that was extra special. I never kept a recipe for it because it was too complicated to keep track of but every time I mixed one of these extra dark special blacks I wished I had. I think this painting has one of these blacks. Or at least the black line sure seems to be extra dark and shiny to me. It could be that I’ve been using a more subtle purple line for the last five years or so but the black line really pops for me.

Her face is a straight-from-the-tube color. It’s portrait pink. I like it. I had a lot of different pinks mixed that I used for faces but this color worked best when I was looking for a vibrant pink that bordered on the unrealistic. I also notice that I didn’t draw a nostril on her nose as I often do in a side view of a face. That allows the pink color not to be interrupted by a black shape and makes the pink work as an object a little bit better.

The lips stand out not only because they are the main red in the painting but because the red paint has been applied thicker than the rest of the painting. That gives the lips a little more literal and figurative volume as compared to the rest of the face. They’re in a spotlight.

I think the orange headbands are from a tube of orange paint that I liked a lot but they stopped making it. It was a Windsor Newton paint and I can’t remember the name of it. I was sad when I read they stopped making it. They replaced it with another orange but I liked this orange better. Oh, well.

The final thing to comment on are the green lines and colored dots. They are at a minimum in this painting compared to others I’ve made but they serve a function beyond the decorative. The green lines hem in the composition and keep the eye from wandering off the top and bottom of the canvas and the blue and red dots add the sweep of a line without interfering visually with the other lines in the piece. The green lines also help balance the eye color.

Overall I’d say this is one of my better 8×10 acrylic on canvas paintings.

I’ve been working in video a bit lately. Nothing big but I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to present my artwork on video do I can post it on YouTube, Instagram, and wherever else I can. So far it hasn’t been an easy nut to crack. The main problem is that my art is static and video moves. How do I marry those two concepts? People have been trying to film art and artists for a long time and it’s not easy because art really has to be seen in person and at size to be appreciated. That and it generally takes a long time to make a piece of art and there isn’t a lot of action to it.

More often than not artists have faked making art for the camera to make it more interesting. Big sweeping gestures and fast motion look good on film but making art is mostly small gestures and slow build up. I’ve made lots of videos of me drawing but when I do I draw small, 5×7 inches, and in my automatic drawing style. That way I can finish a piece in about 15 minutes of non-stop action.

I even made a couple of videos showing me drawing large drawings. I uses the same automatic drawing method only on a larger scale. The drawings were 20×30 inches and drawn in a thick black marker. The videos came out okay but I don’t think the increase in scale helped at all. After all the final video is the same size no matter what the size of the drawing. So a 5×7 inch drawing looks about the same on screen as a 20×30 inch drawing does.

Nether of those approaches helped my because I was thinking more about presenting a drawing than filming one. At least the marker moved when I was drawing so there was something going on. With the art already made what was there to do besides hold it up? That was my question and I had no answer. It held me up for a long time.

I finally started shooting some video over the last two days. I’ve been pondering this problem for ages and came up with no solutions so I finally decided to just start. I actually did some other stuff along these lines a couple of years ago. I wanted to do a pop-up art show so I brought some small pieces with me to Bryant Park, showed them off on camera, and then posted them on YouTube. It wasn’t very successful by any measure. I didn’t like it very much and neither did anyone else. It wasn’t terrible but it had no hook. No idea behind it to grab anyone.

I shoot my regular YouTube comic book haul videos very simply. I use my iPad to recored the video in pieces. I point the camera at the comic with me off-screen and talking. Each comic gets it’s own little one or two minute video and then I put them all together in iMovie on the iPad. I do it that way in case I get interrupted or hem and haw too much as I’m speaking. It’s an easy way to do it. There is no real video editing as I’m just adding one video onto the end of another. It’s nothing special but it works and I like the results.

When I’m making a heads-up video for YouTube (that’s one where I’m facing the camera and talking rather than aiming the camera at comic books) I use my digital camera rather than my iPad. I started doing that back when I had an iPad 2. That devices’s forward facing camera is of lower resolution than its rear one. So I couldn’t see the screen if I was recording myself on the iPad 2. I got a new iPad last Christmas so that’s not a concern anymore but I still use my digital camera for the heads-up work. It’s just habit at this point.

I’ve taken to making Instagram videos in recent months to show off my artwork. They’re also simple though. For years I’ve showed photos of my art on Instagram but with video I decided to show my face on because I think it helps humanize my art. It helps people understand that a person makes this stuff. It’s mostly just me holding top some art. Not the most exciting thing there is but the videos are short. With the last few videos I’ve taken to changing the angles around and moving the art a bit. It’s not the most spectacular video but I’m trying.

So far most of the shots I’ve made are me and the art. I made a video about some Batman sketch covers I’ve drawn. I took some video of me standing and holding the comic and sitting and holding the comic. In order to get some movement I put the comics on the easel behind me and would turn around, grab them, and show them to the camera. I’d even move them across the camera.

I’ve also taken some shots of the art by itself. I placed the comics on my drawing table and panned across them. I came up with a little drop for some of my art card stuff too. I set up the camera on my drawing table, held an art card in front of it, and then let the art card fall flat onto the desk. I still haven’t perfected that drop but I’m working on it.

I did cut the video of me holding the comics, moving them off the easel, and the still shots into a final video. I tried to cut it pretty sharply but not quite in that YouTube remove all the air from in-between the words staccato style that’s so popular on YouTube. I may try something in that stye eventually but until then this is all I have.