Radiant Comics

Writing and walking. That has been my innovation for this week. I’ve actually done it before but I tried it again for the first time in ages and it went pretty well. It helped that this time I had a point to my writing. When I did this before I was just thinking on paper. I wasn’t writing anything specific. This time I was writing some pithy sayings for the T-Shirts in my “Message-Tee” comic. Well, with some more work they might be pithy. Maybe even witty.

I’m in the habit of going for daily walks. I’m not sure how far I walk for but it takes around half an hour. It gets me out of the house for a while and I like being outside in the open air. I even go for walks in the winter. It gets dark out before six o’clock then but I just grab a flashlight and put on a warm coat, gloves, a scarf, and a hat. I like to dress warmly. The flashlight is more so the cars can always see me but it also helps when there is snow on the sidewalk. Footing can be the biggest problem when walking in the winter.

Though summertime footing is easy I hadn’t thought of doing any writing while I walked before now because of the heat. It’s been a hot summer and when it’s 85-95ºF and humid out there I have to bring a bottle full of water with me while I walk. Even for a short half an hour walk I want to stay hydrated. Heat stroke is something I’m not interested in. This week it’s been in the low 80s and comfortable so my water bottle has stayed home. That freed up my hands for a notebook and pen. My tools of choice for writing while walking.

Usually when I walk I have headphones on and am listening to some music or the Stern show. Which one depends on what I’m in the mood for and sometimes I listen to one and then switch over to the other. I’m flexible. I’ve walked a few times with no headphones on because I wasn’t in the mood for that kind of noise in my ears but even on those few occasions by the time I was halfway into my walk I wished I had brought my iPod with me. Music can make life more pleasant.

On my walk-and-writes I left both the water and the iPod at home. The actual sequence of events was to walk for a little bit while thinking up a line and then stop and write it down. It’s not easy to write in a little notebook while standing. It’s only a sentence or two at a time that I’m writing down but often it’s sloppy. I try to be neat but sometimes my brain is ahead of my hands which are bouncing up and down as I try to hold the notebook still. But in the end I can read it.

I find myself liking to write with a Papermate Flair pen these days. I’ve like them for years but like them even better since they’ve improved them. That’s because they changed the barrel of the pen. It used to have ridges on it which I always hated. It’s a marker type writing pen and I always liked the way the ink flowed onto the paper but hated those ridges. They gave me the heebie-jeebies. Sometimes I would use black electrical tape to cover over the ridges but that was never the greatest solution. Now the new Flair pens have a smooth barrel. Much better. I can dig ‘em.

The problem with having to come up with pithy sayings for my “Message-Tee” comic is that I have to come up with a lot of them. I just finished twenty five drawings and I need one for each of them. That means I need at least two if not three for each drawing. I’d say it takes about three pithy sayings to get one good pithy saying. It’s tough to do short, breezy, funny, effortless looking writing.

I can remember learning that lesson back in my art school days. I was in a drawing class that was pretty standard. We were all learning to draw from still lives and the human figure but we had a little more looseness with our homework assignments. One guy, for his homework assignment, decided to do a drawing made up of writing in a notebook. He wasn’t making a picture made out of writing but was doing pretend writing in a notebook. It looked like writing but was really gibberish. It was an odd choice but I kinda liked it.

The student went on to say that he liked the look of the random writing-like marks in the notebook. The whole “Not trying to make a specific image” aspect of it also appealed to him. Being that this was a modern art school and not some old time art academy this idea didn’t throw our teacher at all. She wasn’t against the idea and she explained to him that making drawings from randomness wasn’t new but the key to it was making a lot of drawings. Artists who explore randomness will make a hundred drawings to start and and whittle it down to the best three to make finished works from. The student only had a couple of notebook page drawings so there wasn’t much else to say about it. I think he dropped out of the class a little later and I never saw him again. But I did learn his lesson.

The pithy sayings I’m writing are nowhere near random so I don’t need to make a hundred of them to get three good ones but I still need to do a few of them to get one good one. That’s the nature of comedy and is especially the nature of the rather odd comedy that I do. I can do weird and absurd rather easily but weird, absurd, and funny is a whole different ballgame. Weird can be disconnected but with funny you have to connect with the world. Getting the two to work together takes some doing.

I was able to come up with some stuff on my walk. I haven’t gone over it all yet but I think I was able to come up with about ten to twelve sayings on each of my two writing walks so far. That puts me nearly a third of the way there and I like that. I would have taken any progress since I hadn’t written any of these in half a year and that much time away from any creative endeavor always makes me wonder if I can get it started up again. It’s good to know I can.

As I write this this evening I’m a bit tired. More tired than usual. I’ve been writing these blogs in the morning for the last few months but as I sit here feeling fatigued I felt like hitting the keys on the old keyboard. Maybe it’ll perk me up. It’s been a tiring day today and I’m not even sure why. Twice I had to lie back in my chair and rest for about twenty minutes. I mean, really kick back and almost take a nap rest. That’s unusual for me. I think that thunderstorm that woke me up at 4 AM disrupted my sleep more than I realized it did. I was even so tired that I was getting wobbly-legged at the end of my bike ride this morning. That rarely happens. Yawn…

I had a hard time getting anything creative started this week but I did manage to get some things done. How’s that for a contradiction in terms? I wanted to get something done on the iPad comic I’ve been working on but it was no go. I had nothing. I also wanted to start a new painting but for whatever reason also couldn’t make any headway on that. Once again I had nothing. So I pulled out some of the character drawings I had already drawn for future “Message-Tee” comics and inked them. Sometimes the simplicity of the choice between black ink and the white of the paper is what gets my brain going.

I worked on a lot of “Message-Tee” comics last year. I have finished comics stockpiled and post one a week here on my site. So earlier this year I started making some new drawings for future strips but haven’t worked on them in a while. I had about twenty five different character drawings done in pencil. That is a pretty good amount of work but I had yet to ink any of them. I was busy with other stuff all summer and wondered if I would ever get to them. Then this week happened.

Maybe the reason I haven’t worked on “Message-Tee” in months is that I like to have a stockpile of drawings to ink. When I can’t get anything started it’s good to get some drawings finished so it’s good to have drawings laying around waiting to be finished. So far I’ve inked twenty of the twenty five drawings this week. At times I hit a cruising speed with them and the ink, paper, and I became one with each other. The ink flows off the brush without me even thinking about it. When that happens drawing in ink can be like meditating or chanting. It’s a place where I become unaware of my separation from the work. And then it stops. It’s a fleeting feeling.

Along with inking all those pieces I also had to do the production work on them. That’s rarely fun to do. It’s a necessary evil and there is no becoming one with anything to be found. It starts with scanning the art. That’s the easy part. Place the paper on the scanner, load the preset scanning parameters, preview the art to make sure it’s in the right place, hit the scan button, and wait a minute or so for the scanner to do it’s job. Repeat as many times as you have drawings. Simple.

I have a nice scanner. It’s an Epson GT-15000 and can scan 11×17 inch drawings. It’s a little old and Epson doesn’t even support it anymore but I got it refurbished for fairly cheap and with the help of some third party scanning software (Vuescan) it’s been a workhorse for years. It makes nice scans and I hope I never have to replace it.

After scanning I have to set all the pages up to be colored. This takes a bit of work and is tedious when I have a lot of drawings to set up. I color this strip in Illustrator and I’m kind of particular about how I like to work in that program. It’s kind of technical and involves how Illustrator makes shapes from bitmapped images but, years ago, I figure out some actions (automatic macros) that set up the images how I like them. It’s not quite as automatic as it would be in a perfect world and I have to pay attention to things as I set them up but it only takes three to five minutes to do. Of course that’s per drawing so multiply that by twenty drawings and you’ve got a pretty tedious hour to an hour and a half on your hands. An hour and a half of having to pay attention to repetitive and boring little details. Welcome to life.

Take a break. That’s the best advice I’ve gotten while doing this sort of work yet sometimes I forget to do it. I just want to power through and get it all done but that’s not always the best bet. I think I got about two thirds of the way done with prepping the pages when I forced myself to take a break. Powering through was failing me as the tedium was starting to drive me crazy and give me a headache. It’s hard to explain how meticulous and dull such work can be. But after a ten minute break I came back and finished up the last third of the work lickety-split. That taking a break thing really does work.

I still have five of my “Message-Tee” drawings to ink and then I have to color them all. That’s not such a “One with the universe” thing either so I’m not sure when I’m going to get the coloring done but at least it’s more fun than doing production work on the drawings. I also could start doing some more drawings for the comic. I’ve been doing the pencil drawings in a sketchbook I bought for just that purpose and I haven’t flipped that open since the springtime.

Now that I look back on it I think it took me two years to develop my “Message Tee” strip. I may have all the steps down now to make one but it was a long time coming. I have to remember things like that when I get frustrated trying to come up with exactly how I am going to do this new iPad comic I’m working on. It’s always good to fall back to the known when the unknown gets too confusing.

I was never much of a late night person. I like to get my sleep. Sure in my youth I would stay up late with the rest of the gang but these days that’s a rarity. And that’s not such a bad thing. The whole gang is a bunch of years older. Nowadays, at age forty six, it takes me until about Thursday morning to stop being tired after staying up real late on a Saturday night. And I’m not even a drinker so there is no hangover to deal with. I bring this all up because last Saturday night was one of those times when I was up late. I had my annual backyard barbecue and was up late that night. I didn’t hit the sack until around 3 AM yet was up ay my usual time of 7 AM. Ouch.

I’m a morning person. That’s when I have the most energy. The downside of that is that I can’t sleep late no matter when I fell asleep. When the morning rolls around I’m up. Even if I’m still tired I can’t sleep. It’s annoying and the main reason why I’m not a huge fan of staying up late. Of course it’s not that first day after getting no sleep that’s the problem. It’s the second day. That’s when the fatigue really hits. And, of course, if it’s a Saturday night when I stay up late then that second day is a Monday. Talk about compounding a problem. Back to work with a yawn. Oh, well, things will get back to normal eventually.

One of the things that comes along with throwing a BBQ is leftovers. I like leftovers. I don’t understand people who won’t eat them. I used to work with a guy who hated leftovers. On occasion he would bring some leftovers in for lunch and then end up not eating them. He would start to eat them but then sigh, toss them out, and go get something else. He didn’t want to eat the same thing that he had for dinner last night. That’s something I never got. I don’t care if I had the same thing the night before. If I like something one day I’m still going to like it the next day. And I don’t have to cook it again. I’m fine with reheating stuff as long as it’s done right. And since I’m the one doing it it will be done right. By the way always reheat Chinese food in a frying pan. That’s your leftover tip for the day.

Mostly what I have leftover this year is chili that I made. I always make a lot for the party because leftover chili is a good thing. I made a chicken chili and a beef chili and there is some of each left over. I threw a bunch of it in the freezer and some of it in the fridge. That’s another good thing about leftover chili. It freezes well. I think I’ve had a bowl of it a day for the last four days. I also have been having some leftover hamburgers. They’re frozen to begin with so there is not much to do with the leftovers but keep them in the freezer. Hamburgers aren’t usually in my diet but I’ll have a few for as long as they last. They’re there after all.

One more leftover that I don’t usually eat is chips. It seems that people like to bring a bag of chips to a barbecue but then don’t really like to eat them. There is always better stuff around to eat at a special occasion. Every party I go to these days has half a dozen bag of chips left over, unopened, after the party ends. Mine was no exception. This is where you have to maintain discipline an throw most of them out. I read somewhere that it’s chips that put weight on people more than any other food. People tend to eat more of them than is suggested and they are loaded with calories. I can confirm that I eat more of them than I should if they’re around. That’s why I don’t like to keep them around.
I had a bit of the post-party letdown again this year. That’s the feeling that hits in the day or days after the party when I realize that everyday life is back and everyday life is not a party. Darn it, we were having such fun! I think my post-party letdown was dulled this year by shear fatigue. I do not do well on three hours sleep. But it was a fun time anyway.

I still don’t quite have everything back in it’s place after the party. I don’t know why it is but it takes me a while to put things back in their places. Usually it’s small things that I can’t be bothered with right away. For example I have yet to put my electric griddle away. That’s a small ten by fifteen inch grill that I uses as a warmer during the BBQ. I set it on 200º F and put metal pans of whatever food on it. It’s an easy way to keep things warm all day. The griddle only makes it out of its box once a year for this event so it’s usually just sitting there in its place. It hasn’t made its way back into the box in the four days since the party. Me having no energy doesn’t help get it back in its place. All the big stuff is back though and everything will get back to normal sooner or later. I’m almost sure of it.

One single magic marker without its cap. That’s what went wrong with my last order of art supplies. Nothing big. It arrived in the box with the rest of my order but it was dried out since the cap was off. I e-mailed the web site and they sent a replacement right away. So why am I pondering this now? I’m not sure. It could be that I found the whole experience absurd. The notion that the whole retail and delivery infrastructure that has developed in the world was being used to bring me a single magic marker was a little nuts.

The marker wasn’t even a “Need” purchase. It was one of the new Prismacolor brush markers that were released this year. A month or two ago I bought a handful of them to try out. I got one in each color of the rainbow (there is a selection of 100+ markers in the set) and they were pretty good. The only problem I had was that the red and the orange that I choose (from looking at a picture of them) were a little off from what I wanted. Oh, well, I was just trying them out anyway. No big deal. I moved on.

Last week I had to put in a “Need” order: paper. I was running low on 9×12 inch bristol and needed some more. I had recently tried out the new Dick Blick house brand bristol board and generally liked it. Since it is considerably cheaper than the paper I can buy at the nearest AC Moore I decided to put in an order. As with any order I put in with the Dick Blick web site I look around to see if there is anything else I might need or want. Shipping can be expensive so it’s better to put in one big order than a bunch of small ones. But money has been tight lately so that put the kibosh on me being interested on stocking up on anything but the paper I needed. Then I remembered those markers.

I hadn’t used the markers much since I had bought them. Part of the reason was that I didn’t have a good solid red or orange. Of course I had good reds and oranges in other marker sets but somehow that wasn’t enough. The old collector’s instinct kicked in and I wanted those two colors for the Prismacolr brush set. They’re only $2.50 a marker, which isn’t a whole lot of money since I was only buying two of them, so I picked out what looked like a purer red and orange than I already had and tossed them in my virtual cart along with the paper and a couple of random black markers. I’m always trying out new black drawing markers.

I’ve ordered plenty of pens, pencils, markers, and small art supply stuff from a variety of places over the years. Usually they pack things well. They put the small stuff into either small boxes or small bags. Often the pens and brushes come in small and narrow plastic bags that get stuck into a larger box. That keeps the pens and brushes from rolling or being thrown around the larger box and getting damaged. I never really even though about it before. Of course there was the one time that I ordered a bottle of ink in the winter. It froze, expanded with ice crystals, and cracked the lid off of the top. Fortunately the ink was still frozen when it arrived and didn’t get all over the place. I think that’s my only other art supply damage story.

So back to this one. My package arrived. A dozen pads of 9×12 inch bristol board and four markers. At first I though they forgot the orange one because there was a small bag with the red one and the three random black drawing markers. Weird. Then I notice the orange marker was sitting near the bottom of the box wedged between the pads of paper and the side of the box. Its cap was off. Not good. After I emptied the box I found the cap but it was too late as the marker was dried out.

What happened? There was plenty of room in the little plastic bag. The bag was folder over neatly and taped down so the marker didn’t fall out. I guess someone just threw it in the box at the last minute after someone forgot about it. Check the order sheet, whoops no orange marker, toss one in the box! That’s probably as far as the thinking went.

It wasn’t the end of the world but now I had to send off an e-mail to customer service saying that the cap came off the marker in shipping and could they send me a new one. I knew it would be no problem and they would but still the absurdity of the whole thing hit me immediately. One marker? This whole big vast operation of economic infrastructure was going to get going because of one marker? Not even a “Need” marker?

I know this isn’t really all for me. People would still be working, trucks would still be rolling, and planes would still be flying even if the cap had never fallen off of my orange Prismacolor brush marker. But somehow as I was standing there with the dried out marker in my hand it seemed crazy to start all that into motion just so I could get a working marker. I even hesitated for a couple of hours. I put the cap back on the marker as if that would help it marshal its forces and rally back to draw again. After all it wasn’t totally dried out. I could get it to make thin and halting orange marks on the paper. After a couple of hours of that denial I pulled out the computer and shot off an e-mail to customer support. No problem they were sending me out a new one. The absurd journey of my lone orange marker had begun.

I’m stuck on format. Maybe not stuck. Undecided might be a better word. I’m, once again, working on a new comic. This time I was inspired by a few new comics I read that were made for the iPad. I’ve read regular print first comics for the iPad before but they never did much for me. I prefer to read a print comic in print. The iPad is a bit too small for me to read print comics on but the made for iPad ones I saw read really well. It’s not likely I’ll be doing any comics for print so this got me thinking more about doing them for portable digital devices. That in turn got me thinking more about format as it relates to comic books.

The vast majority of print comics are vertically formatted like any other book. They’re taller than they are wide. At least until you open them and then the pages are side by side. But each individual page is still vertically formatted. I notice that a lot of digitally formatted comic books are horizontal. It could have something to do with computer screens being horizontal but with all the new e-readers and such you can format a digital comic either way since the device can be rotated in the reader’s hands. Hence a choice has to be made. Horizontal or vertical? That’s the choice I’m still undecided on.

I think the problem is that I’ve worked in the print industry since graduating from college way back in the late 1980s. It’s what I’m used to and my preferred way to read comic books. I think in “Print first” terms except that I haven’t printed any of my own comics in a decade. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how to format for both print and digital. That’s not so easy since it affects the layout of a page. It even affects what a “Page” actually is. Is a page on the iPad the same as a page in print if it’s vertical? What about if it’s horizontal? I already don’t like when a single vertical print page is seen as a single iPad page since it’s too small. So should I split the pages up if I go vertical? All of this uncertainty makes laying out a story a bit confusing.

Most web comics creators don’t make any money with their comics but some do. One of the ways those that make money pull it off is to sell print editions of their web comic. I am nowhere near doing that but it’s still in the back of my mind. That’s why I haven’t been able to stop thinking about print altogether but I think I’m going to have to for now. As a matter of fact that was my conclusion when I decided to make a test comic for the iPad which I am in the middle of. It’s slow going though.

One of the first problems I’m having in writing and sketching out the story is, “What is a page?”. I’m used to a page being literal. It’s a piece of paper of certain dimensions. With an iPad the concept of a page is a little more elusive. Sure I can think of it as the exact physical size of the screen but it’s not quite that. With a physical comic there is only so much space on a page and you have to take advantage of all of it. With an iPad you can add or take away space from a page at any time. A reader can touch the screen and just the first panel, taking up a third of the screen, appears. Touch again and the second panel shows up. Touch again and the third panel shows up and the screen is filled. Touch again and word balloons disappear and others appear. The same page can be half a dozen different pages. That can really add to a story but it’s complicated. So far I’m finding it tough to think all the way through.

That’s why for my test story I stripped things down. So far I’m going with one whole screen page at a time. Simple. The only problem is that I haven’t been able to get a lot done on it. It’s boring. Well, the boring part is still that I don’t like drawing the same thing over and over. By “Same thing” I mean the same characters. I don’t know exactly when it happened that I lost my patience for drawing characters again and again but it did happen and it’s a bad thing when you want to draw a comic. I created these three robot characters who are fairly easy to draw but I still got annoyed with having to draw them after the third page. Crap. I put the whole thing on the back burner and have been picking away at it bit by bit.

Meanwhile I came up with two other stories to tell in comic form and have worked on those a little. Neither is further along than my three robots story but they are all adding up to a jumble of confusion in my head. I’ve got a log jam at the format section. My mind still thinks in old paper storytelling terms while trying to adapt to the new digital format. I’m still not even comfortable with the format of how I’m drawing these on paper. It’s a “Page” thing again.

With a print comic you draw a bunch of panels on a piece of paper and that’s your page. That actual page becomes a page in a printed comic book. Since I’m doing this first story of mine as single page panels what size do I make the physical pages I’m drawing on? Do I draw one panel per page since that how it’s going to end up? What size should that page be? These are questions that I don’t have to ask myself with print comics since I already know the answers. With digital it’s all new.

I ended up drawing two iPad “Pages” on one piece of 9×12 inch paper. So now I have two pages per page. I’m not sure that’s working out. I’m drawing the panels with one on top and the other on the bottom. The problem is that they are never actually going to be seen that way. The reader will be moving through them as if they were side by side. I did they layout as individual pages but now that I’m drawing them two to a page it’s confusing my sense of storytelling. Or it could be that I’m not used to any of this yet. Either way I’ll continue to pick away at it and maybe one day I can figure this all out.