Radiant Comics

My reading habits are a little strange these days. I wrote a little while ago how simply using a bookmark helped change my reading habits when it came to the many collected editions of comics that I have but today I’m writing about reading regular old books and magazines. Maybe not so much about books because I’ve been in the middle of a book on the history of British camouflage since the summer but I have done my best to keep up with my magazine reading.

My magazine reading once was much more voluminous than it is today. In the 1990s I had subscriptions to at least ten if not fifteen magazines a month. I read through them all cover to cover too. Of course I was doing a lot more commuting in those days which offered a lot of down time to squeeze in some magazine reading and that was just waiting for the bus. It took me years though to be able to read on a moving bus without getting motion sick but after that I read even more books and magazines.

My count is down to two magazines these days, “The Sun”, a literary magazine, and “Archeology”, a magazine about current finds in archeology. And “Archeology” isn’t even a monthly. It’s pretty easy to get through one and a half magazines a month but sometimes I don’t even manage to do that. Sometimes it takes two months. Yet I somehow always manage never to have a magazine sitting around unread longer than that. That’s when I say to myself, “Either sit down and read this or throw it away”. I always choose to read it.

I also, on occasion, pick up a comic book related magazine called “Back Issue”. It’s a magazine that’s all about comic books from the 1970s and the 1980s and is jam packed with good articles. It’s right up my alley so I usually enjoy it but I hadn’t picked up an issue of it in a little while. Probably because I always had an issue or two of “The Sun” and “Archeology” waiting to be read so I didn’t want to add to the pile. I most often have plenty to read.

What recently slowed down my magazine reading was reading books on my iPad. I got that a little over a year ago and found that I liked reading books on the iPad. Between some good non-fiction finds (my normal reading material) and a few on-sale-for-a-dollar thrillers I’ve read quite a few things digitally in the last year. I haven’t read on the iPad in a couple of months though because it got cold out. I was really enjoying reading out in the hammock on a nice summer evening but since the weather turned to fall my iPad reading has dropped off. That’s what they mean by “Summer reading”.

That gap in reading was filled for a while by playing video games on the iPad. Especially the new type of endless running games that have proliferated. They are perfect for taking a ten minute break with and then putting down and getting back to work. Of course this means not spending my ten minute break reading. Not that I always read as I take a break but that is certainly good magazine time.

It was about a month ago that I picked up a copy of the latest “Back Issue”. There is generally quite a bit to read in one of those but I finished the whole thing in a few days and enjoyed it. I liked it so much that on my next trip the comic shop I purchased another issue that I didn’t have. And there it sat for a month. I meant to get around to reading it but I didn’t. I just plain got out of the habit of reading my magazines again.

All of my ten minute break time was being taken up by reading stuff online or playing “Subway Surfer”. I can’t even tell you what I read online. It was just the usual web surfing where one thing leads to another. I often find that type of reading to be less than fulfilling but it sure can chew up a ten minute, or even a half an hour, break.

“Subway Surfer” is a fun game but not particularly a deep one. You run, you pick up coins, and you try not to get hit by things and die. I like the game but it got to the point that I’d pick it up and play it out of habit for a few minutes. I didn’t even always enjoy playing but there I was endlessly running around and over trains while barely processing the whole experience. I needed to change my ten minute break habits.

On one of my recent trips to my local comic shop I saw the latest issue of “Back Issue” and it looked cool. It was all about the tabloid sized comics from the 1970s and it was printed tabloid size just like those old comics. I knew I still had another unread issue at home and so I passed it by. At least for a week. I finally decided to get it because I wanted to change my downtime habits. Video games and web surfing were driving me crazy with my inability to be mindful during them. The following week I picked up the issue. Plus a new issue of “The Sun” also arrived in my mailbox that week. I was set magazine-wise.

So there I had an issue of “The Sun” and two issues of “Back Issue” on my “To Read” pile. My plan was to read one of them a week for the next three weeks. Then a funny thing happened. I was enjoying reading them so much that I finished all three in about six days. It became my habit to pick one up whenever I sat down in my chair. I figured I’d pick up my web browser or video games less often but not as little as I did. It was a lot more interesting to read magazines out of habit than jump over trains out of habit.

I haven’t read many of my new comic books though since I read those three magazines. Somehow the habit of reading one overwrites the habit of reading the other. That happens when I read novels or non-fiction but not usually with magazines. I think I’m reading my magazines with more intensity than normal. But now I’m out of them. Good thing I have some comic books on my “To read” pile. Oh, and that book on camouflage.

I’ve been in a bit of a creative funk this week. Just not sure of what direction I want to go in. What exactly I want to do. I finished up the sixth of my large black marker drawings about a week ago and since then I haven’t been sure of what to do next. I could make another such drawing but I’m burnt out on them for now. I don’t enjoy doing the same thing over and over. I’ve even done a few small drawings that I intend to make into large ones but haven’t wanted to yet. Even though I knew I didn’t want to work on any large drawings right now I still made the small ones. They’re a lot less ambitious because of their size.

I also have a couple of sketches done for a series of 16×24 inch canvases I have lying around. I think I did those around the time of the first large drawing or two but I was so into the drawings that I never got around to doing the color sketches for the paintings. Sometimes these sketches of mine hang around a little too long and I never make them into anything. I get bored with them and start something new. The two canvases I have hanging around will eventually be painted but I have no idea if I’ll use the two sketches I already made.

I’ve been wanting to do some more writing lately but haven’t been able to. I find writing takes a different sort of concentration than drawing or painting. A concentration that doesn’t come as easily to me. Plus you really have to have a story to tell or something you want to say when writing. That’s not always easy to figure out. I’ve been working on a lot of drawings and character sketches for some sort of comic that I want to do but I still don’t know what it is. It’s tough to write something when I don’t know what it is that I’m supposed to be writing.

I did find a neat new iPad writing app that I like. It’s called Index Card and, as you’d imagine, it duplicates the experience of using index cards to organize writing. That’s an approach I’ve always liked because I often get small ideas that I like to shift around and rearrange. I’ve used physical index cards for that task but not in a while. I ended up setting up a couple of projects including my unknown comic and a collection of memories. Here is a tip for you. If you want to fall asleep at your regular time don’t start trying to remember and write down old stories from your past. Once I started one memory would lead to another and I had a hard time turning off my brain to sleep. I was having fun using the iPad app but I haven’t touched it in a week. I lost the thread of it.

One of the other things I’ve been trying to get done is a sketch comic cover. They sell these comic books that have logos on them but the rest of the cover is blank. The idea is that a fan buys one and then gets their favorite artist to draw a sketch on the cover. My local comic shop got in a few of the blank covered comics so I bought one to draw on myself. The problem is that I don’t know what to draw on it. It’s a Captain America comic so I really should draw Cap on it but I’m not really interested in drawing other people’s characters. I’ve tried coming up with something but so far it’s been a no go. Makes me wonder why I bothered with the whole thing in the first place.

Of course even when I’m creatively withdrawn I’m usually still working on something. Generally it’ll be something small rather than a big project. This week it was 5×7 inch marker drawings. They have been a little bit different than my usual marker drawings. First off they are on watercolor paper. I bought some nice pre-cut 5×7 inch watercolor paper a couple of months ago so I decided to put it to use. It’s the first time I’ve used this paper with markers. Since I’ve been doing the large black marker drawings I’ve really come to like Copic markers. The ability to refill them with more ink relieves me of the worry of the marker drying up in the middle of a drawing. Plus it makes them a lot cheaper. I always hate to throw out an empty marker and now I don’t have to. After saving my pennies for the last few months I even bought a new set of Copic markers. They just came out with a really cool 25th anniversary set of sketch markers that I had to have.

I think the marker drawings are different from my past ones just because I started doing color sketches for them. Before now I liked to keep a little spontaneity in my use of the markers because they are a fairly spontaneous tool. But I really like working out my basic colors before I start on the final drawing. It saves a lot of making mistakes. I do my color sketches in Photoshop these days so it’s easy to change things and work them out how I want them. The colors were a lot livelier in this batch of marker drawings because I worked it out that way.

I also colored these marker drawings right over the India ink line work. I don’t think I’ve done that before. When working on some marker techniques over the last couple of years I usually drew the line with a dark blue marker. That makes for a bit softer of a line than India ink. I think the hard black ink line with the lively colors make for a nice little piece. It’s okay stuff. But I still have to figure out what big thing I want to work on next. There’s got to be something.

It’s time for the airing of the grievances. My grievances against Apple. First off I’ve been using Apple computers for nearly twenty years. I like them. I have no intention of ever switching to any other platform but that doesn’t mean that Apple is perfect. Nor does it mean that I am perfect. There might be simple ways around the small problems that I have but how would I know? Sometimes little changes are made that are big changes to a particular user.

My first problem is with my iPad and my photos. I have a lot of photos. I have a lot of photos from before digital photography was around. A few years ago I scanned in all of my negatives so they could be digital too. I knew that technology is ever changing so I decided not to commit to any single program to organize my photos. I ended up organizing them on the basic operating system level. I kept it simple. I put the photos into folders that were named with the date and place that the photos were taken. Year, Month, and Day, all represented by numbers. And then place name. Everything lined up in chronological order in a simple Finder window. It worked well. I also took the time to put the name of everyone in the photo into the file name. It was no small amount of time but I could do a quick search and find every photo of Joe Shlabotnik or whoever else I had taken a picture of easily.

The first problem came in 2007 when I bought a first gen iPod touch. I liked it because I could carry all my old photos around and it also used my folder names to organize them. With a flip of my finger I could scroll through the years. Except the people’s names that I put in the files names became useless on the iPod. It doesn’t care what you named your photos and you can’t search the file names or interact with them in any way on the iPod. I could look through all my photos but not search for any of a specific person. That was less than ideal but I dealt with it.

Last year when I got an iPad 2 things were pretty much the same. I put my photos on it and it worked just like the iPod touch. There was some hope with the names though. A new bit of facial recognition technology popped up since 2007. It was made to help out but it ended up being a pain. It was supposed to recognize faces in a photo and name them accordingly but when I used it in conjunction with both iPhoto and Aperture (Apple’s photo organizing software) it performed poorly. It recognized faces maybe one out of ten times and the other nine times I had to enter the name by hand. I quickly stopped doing that. I don’t want to spend endless hours redoing a task I already did. Plus I had no faith that the info on people’s faces would ever transfer to another program if I needed it to. So I still have to stumble through all of my photos on the iPad to find someone.

But the real problem came with the latest update to either the iPad’s OS or to iTunes. I’m not even sure which one. It changed the way the iPad displays my photos from folders based on what I named them to organizing them by the photo’s metadata creation date that a digital camera embeds in each photo. Since I have all those photos that I scanned in they have the dates of when I scanned them rather than when I took them. Plus if I edited them in Photoshop they get a new creation date. Now none of my photos are in chronological order after I put them on my iPad. Everything is in order on my computer and in chaos on my iPad. Something is clearly wrong but there seems to be nothing I can do to fix it.

My next gripe is a minor one. In one of the recent updates to the Apple mail program they got rid of the “Save as draft” button. Now you have to hit the little red “Close window” button and it asks if you want to save the e-mail as a draft. That’s annoying in and of itself but then they went and put the “Send” button a quarter of an inch from the “Close Window” button. I haven’t made the mistake of hitting “Send” when I didn’t mean to but sooner or later I will. It’s like they’re encouraging mistakes.

My third and final gripe of the day is kind of expected but still real annoying. My oldest piece of computer equipment that’s still in service is my Airport Extreme from 2003. People say you can get stuff like that cheaper than Apple sells it for but I’ll gladly pay an extra hundred bucks for nine years of problem free performance. I have no complaints about the Airport Extreme but this week I discovered than I can no longer administer it. The Airport management software that’s running on my current Mac doesn’t support my Airport Extreme anymore. It’s too old a model. I know that’s the way of things in this world of technology but it’s still annoying. It’s a good thing I don’t have anything to administer with the Airport. I set it up ages ago and haven’t had to do anything other that reboot it every now and again.

Oh yeah, one other little thing. The scroll ball in my mouse never works right. I hardly ever use that mouse but it still should work. I’ve even cleaned the ball with a cotton swab and alcohol but that only got it working again for a little while. It used to only scroll up but not down but these days it’s down but not up. The last two times I attempted to clean it didn’t change that at all. I’d rather have one of those multi-touch pads for my desktop than the mouse but there is no way I’m going to spend the seventy bucks to get one. I use my Wacom tablet ninety five percent of the time anyway. And my expensive Wacom Cintiq that I don’t use much isn’t working right either. But I don’t think that’s Apple’s fault so that’ll end the grievances here.

Bookmarks. Believe it or not they have been the key to my comic book reading lately. Now your average comic book is about twenty two pages long and I don’t need a bookmark for one of them but I do often use them for some of the larger hardcover collections of comic books that I own. Those hardcover book can collect anywhere from six to fifteen issues of any given comic. They are at least a couple of hundred pages long and I have a few big ones that are a thousand pages. They are the gigantic ones. Except I rarely sit down and read an entire collection of comics in one sitting. So for most of my collected editions I use a bookmark as if they were any other book. But my comic book reading habits have changed over the last year and I’ve moved away from collected editions.

In that last eight months or so I’ve gone back to buying more monthly comics and fewer collected editions. I got bored with reading a single title in one big chunk. Wanting to read some Conan meant reading six issues of Conan back to back. I wanted to return to the variety of reading comics as periodicals. The wait between issues is okay because I didn’t want to read more than one issue of any given title. I didn’t want to read six issues in a row of whatever comic no matter how good it was. I wanted to read one issue of this and then one issue of that and finally one issue of the other thing. I’ve been finding new books to buy and enjoying their variety. If I want to go back and read a few issues of something I will. But I was tired of the norm being reading a few issues of something.

I’ve even changed the way I review comics for this blog. For a long while there I was only reviewing stories that were finished and that I had just finished reading all the parts of. That basically meant only collected editions or something older that I dug out my issues of to reread. It even started to effect my enjoyment of reading them. I would look at some big book of comics on my shelf and then not want to read and review it because it meant not reading my monthly comics. Since I was still reading my monthly comics one issue at a time, and there weren’t a lot of them, most of the monthly comics I bought never got a review. Now that I’m buying more monthly comics and a lot of new titles I review them whenever I feel like it. Usually after I’ve read a few issue of them but anytime I feel like it is good. Issue three, issue five, issue seven, or whenever. It doesn’t matter. The story arc may be over or it may not be. I’ll just write my thoughts on what has happened so far if I have some.

As an aside I must say that I’ve find it odd when I read that some comic book fans write that they don’t think people should review something if all the parts aren’t finished and they haven’t read the whole thing. I don’t understand that. If I read a book and don’t like the first couple of chapters I’m not going to keep going. Just as if I didn’t like the first couple of issues of a comic I’m not going to keep buying it. So what if the story isn’t done yet? I’ve decided I don’t care to read the rest of it. Also comic book companies sell the stories as individual issues so it’s perfectly fair to judge them that way. It’s kind of a moot point anyway since I usually don’t review comics that I don’t like. I just find it odd when I read that. Not continuing to read something is the ultimate bad review in any case.

This new found enjoyment of reading monthly comics lead me to a bit of a problem. I still have a whole bunch of unread hardcover and trade paperback collections on my shelves. I wanted to read them but the idea of sitting down with a whole bunch of collected issues of one title held no joy for me. It especially didn’t help that a lot of those comics are the Atlas Era Masterworks that I bought earlier this year. They are all from the early 1950s and though I do like them they tend to be simpler stories that don’t lend themselves to hours in a row of reading. I want to read some issues of “Menace” but I don’t want to read ten issues in a row of it. That’s what the collected editions became to me. Ten issues in a row of the same thing. I’ve had the last “Starman” volume to read for some time now but haven’t wanted to. It’s a big book and I don’t want to read that many issues of “Starman” in a row even if it’s a good comic that I enjoy. And that book is not from the 1950s. I’m sure plenty of people have sat down an enjoyed reading many issues in a row of “Starman”. I can’t right now for whatever reason of temperament.

So what is the solution to this weird little problem I find myself with? Bookmarks. Yes, something as simple as that somehow eluded me for these last few months that I’ve been ignoring my collected editions. I started reading them as if they were any other comics. Now all of my Atlas Era Masterworks have their own bookmarks in them. If I feel like reading some old 1950s Pre-Comics Code comics I grab one off the shelf. It doesn’t matter which one. I can read any one that I want since I’m only going to read an issue or maybe two and then put it back on the shelf. Not ten issues in a row. Something as simple as a bookmark has saved me from the tyranny of my own habit which had failed me. You always have to be on the lookout for ways to break out of your own habits than no longer serve you. See that. I ended with a lesson.

This week I’ve been thinking about writing. Nothing too new there as I’m often thinking about writing because I write this blog and a few comic strips. Plus I’m always trying to come up with some new comic book concept that I’d actually have the time to draw but that never works out. No, this week I was thinking about writing in a different way than normal. This week I’m thinking about writing a book about my art. Why you ask? Because nobody else is going to so I may as well. I’ve got a couple of decades worth of stuff to present to the world so I’m going to have to organize it in some digestible form one of these days if I want people to look at it. In these post-paper publishing times it’s fairly easy to put a book out there as a digital file. Making money from such a book isn’t easy but at least it will be in a form that people could get their hands or electronic devices on. Distributing a physical book is a lot harder to do and costs a lot more money. This week I was thinking of writing though and not distribution.

One of the hardest things in writing a book about art is the pictures of the art. Y’see the picture of the thing is not the thing. That’s especially true of art. A lot of my painting depends upon surface. A lot of painting in general is like that. How the paint is put onto the canvas is important. You can see if the paint was put on fast or slow. You can see what areas are built up with paint and what areas are thin or flat. Those are choices an artist makes when making a painting. Those are also the things that are lost in a photo of a painting. A photo has no surface. Or at least its surface is always smooth. That’s why going to a museum to see an actual work of art rather than a picture of it is often a revelation. It’s rare that the real painting is not a whole lot better than the little picture of it. That’s why we have museums and that’s why some people like to buy original art. Even original comic book art that doesn’t have much surface and is in black and white but still has a lot more signs of the artist’s hand than the printed page is most often for more beautiful than the printed page.

The second part of photos of artwork where something gets lost is size. When you see a photo it’s rarely the same size as the art itself. It’s almost always much smaller. A six inch picture of a painting that is three feet tall is never going to have the same impact of seeing the original. Size matters. That’s always a problem. I think it’s even more of a problem as I have done paintings at a lot of different sizes. From three by four inches to three by four feet. How do I differentiate them? If they both look the same in a book then I’ve failed in my attempt to show you what my work is. To help with this problem I think I’m going to have to take advantage of the interactive nature of the digital format.

One of the big things that a digital book has over a physical book is a lesser restriction on the size of the page count. Sure you don’t want your book to get too big for someone to download but that’s a lot easier to deal with than the price of adding pages to a physical book. I can almost add as many pictures as I want to the digital book but a physical book would have very real space constrictions on how many pictures could be in it. That I don’t need as I’m searching for ways to make people experience my art in a way that’s closer to reality. Not to mention that printing a real book, especially in color, is very expensive. Color costs nothing extra for a digital book. It all comes down to the fact that I can add more photos to a digital book and that’ll help me out.

On my website I’ve already used the technique of zooming in on the detail of a painting. You can see a piece of the work at actual size where the brush strokes and textures are clearer. I think I’ll use that technique again. I was messing around a bit with the new version of Apple’s iBook Author and it seems pretty easy to that do with that program. Preparing all the photos is what takes forever. That and the writing.

I have some ideas for putting the paintings in size context too because that’s going to be a big problem. Lately I’ve been doing some 20×28 inch black and white drawings. Their size is an important part of their impact. But when seen on a computer screen they’re the same small size as the screen and have the same impact as a 11×17 inch drawing. That’s trouble. I’m toying with the idea of putting some of my paintings into a real world contexts to better show them as objects as well as images.

I already show some of my larger paintings on my website sitting on my easel. I keep the easel and background in there so viewers can get a sense of the scale of the paintings. I think it looks okay that way but I want to take the painting off the easel and put them out in the world. Only I don’t quite know what that means just yet. I think I might take a couple of painting and photograph them in unusual places for paintings. It the streets, in a car, in the woods, up a tree, and I’m not really sure where. It’s all just an idea right now.

It’s all just ideas right now.