Radiant Comics

Alright. For the first time in nearly a month my bicycle is in good repair. After replacing my back rim a little while ago I’ve had a series of troubles with the thing that I’ve finally straightened out. At least for now. I don’t think this bike I have is a rugged as the last one I rode. Though I had to make repairs over the twenty years I rode my last bike I’ve had more problems in the last four years with the new one. They don’t make them like they used to. At least not for a price I could afford. Or maybe I’ve ridden it more in worse weather. Any way you slice it I still had troubles.

The first problem I had was my chain slipping. I’ve had some rear derailleur problems before that caused a little slipping but this was different. First off it only happened when I was bearing down on the pedals. Bearing down hard. Of course that’s the worst time for the chain to slip. It makes you feel like you’re going to fall off the bike. And who knows you just might. So that made me clean out the gears, clean up the derailleur, and clean out the chain. I adjusted everything on the back wheel from the gears to the axel. Nothing helped.

I finally decided to take off the gear cassette and give that a good going over. That’s when I discovered that I wore one ring of gears down to nearly nothing. Each ring of gears is made up of individual eighth of an inch wide gear spokes. One ring of gear spokes (the one I use most) was worn down to a point. Instead of an eighth of an inch of metal to grab the chain there was about a thirty second of an inch. No wonder things were slipping. I ordered a new gear cassette for the tire.

When ordering the gears I also ordered a crank remover. That’s another little specialized tool that is used for removing the crank that the pedals are attached to. My cranks started making a clicking sound as they have before. Since I couldn’t get them to stop I figured I’d take them off and try to see what was going wrong. When I got the crank remover I took off the cranks only to discover that I needed yet another tool to remove the bottom bracket (axel) that the cranks attacked to. I remember when I could take my whole bike apart with a normal set of wrenches. That was a long time ago.

Back I went to the internet and ordered the bottom bracket remover. Meanwhile I was still riding my bike. The gears were no longer slipping since I got the new gear cassette but that crank was making noise every time the pedaling got hard. It was really annoying and didn’t make me have a lot of trust in my bike. And then more trouble. Flat tires. Not just one but three in a row.

The flat tires were odd. After two flat tires in a single day I suspected a problem. Both flats came in different places on the tube but both were on the inside of the tube rather than the outside of the tube that is closest to the road. If the road wasn’t causing the flats than the rim must be. I looked at the rim tape that’s supposed to protect the tube from the rim and it looked to be failing. I tried repairing the rim tape with electrical tape (since I had no new rim tape) but that lead to the third flat the next day. Back to the internet I went to order rim tape.

When I got the rim tape I put it on and checked it out after it was placed as per the instructions. I went for a ride and didn’t get a flat. I was, of course, happy with that but then the next morning as I was getting ready to ride I saw my tire was yet again without air. At least I progressed to a slow leak. I replaced the tube and this time made extra sure that the rim tape was seated properly. As this was the only time in all my years of bike riding that I’ve had rim tape problems I was really hoping this would fix it. Luckily for me it did but I still don’t quite trust it yet.

Meanwhile my new bottom bracket remover had finally arrived. I had read on the internet that the noise from my crank probably meant that something was loose but it took a lot of force to get the cranks and bottom bracket off so I’m not sure how true that could be in my case. I didn’t see anything wrong but I cleaned things up where the bottom bracket seats. I bought some waterproof bike grease in case I had to lubricate the bottom bracket but it turns out that the thing is completely enclosed so I couldn’t grease anything in there. For some reason the screws that hold the cranks on were greased so I added some to them. After everything was back together the cranks were quiet again. It was a nice quiet. I still have no idea what was making the noise but it has stopped.

It ended up being three separate problems happening all at once. I don’t think that’s ever happened to any of my bikes before. I’ve also never seen a gear worn down like happened to mine. I rode on my old one for a decade with no problem. I guess the metal is not as strong in this one. I uses mainly the one gear in the back so it makes sense that it should wear down eventually but this seemed a bit soon.

I guess I should have gotten new rim tape when I got a new rim instead of using the old rim tape but it worked fine for a good month or so. Plus I’ve never had any rim tape problems so I didn’t know they could happen at the drop of a hat. I never even thought about rim tape before. Live and learn.

The crank problem was fairly familiar. I’ve had similar troubles with this bike that have come and gone over the past year and those seem to be related to riding in wet weather. At least now I have all the tools to deal with it. I’ve almost started trusting my bike to run right again. It’s a bit like coming off of a sports injury such as a sprained ankle. Even when the ankle gets better it takes a little while to trust that it can hold you up under the strain of running. In the end I’d rather it was my bike that I didn’t trust than my ankle. Bad ankles can really hurt.

They’re not for reading they’re for looking at. That’s an odd thing for me to think about a comic book but not about an art book. Being an artist it’s no surprise that I have a bunch of art books that I’ve bought over the years. From the history of art to books about individual artists to books of photographs what they all have in common is that they are looked at more than they are read. Sure they have text in them, which I have read, but the text is there to accompany and possibly explain the pictures. The pictures are the reason the book exists and not the writing. In a book that’s made for reading, the vast majority of them, it’s the text that matters. Even in an illustrated text the drawings are just there for flavor. I have an illustrated version of “Frankenstein” that would never have existed if the text didn’t exist first.

This crosses my mind because I recently got two new books that though they can certainly be read are really for looking at. They’re “Artist Edition” books of comic book work of David Mazzucchelli and Wally Wood. Artist Editions are something new in the comic book world. Y’see the way comic books are made is that first they are drawn on paper at 150% of printed size. That means that a page of original comic book art is 10×15 inches on an 11×17 inch piece of paper. It’s usually drawn first in pencil and then the pencil lines are gone over with brush and ink or pen and ink. Most comic book companies these days give the artists paper to draw on that has guidelines and company markings printed in light blue on the paper. That is to ensure proper formatting.

I mention all that to point out that a piece of comic book original art looks a lot different than the finished printed page. It’s bigger, has blue-line guides, is drawn in ink that can vary in blackness, may have correction notes from the editor on it, may have corrections and white out in places, and generally shows more of the process of making a comic on its surface. The human hand can easily be seen when looking at a piece of original comic art.

It’s fun to see a piece of comic book original art and there are plenty of collectors of original art out there. I’ve collected a few pieces myself over the years. Mostly stuff I’ve liked that has been fairly cheap. Almost all of the work by famous comic book artists is too expensive for me. A piece by a famous artist of a famous character can run into the thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. A couple of hundred dollars is probably as much as I’ve been able to afford on even my most expensive piece. So when I found out that the publisher IDW was putting out “Artist Editions” I was intrigued.

What IDW is doing with their “Artist Editions” is publishing the full size original art of certain comics. When a normal comic is made it’s scanned in such a way as the blue lines, correction notes, and corrections drop out and are not reproduced. With these editions full color scans have been made so that all of that stuff is picked up and can be printed. Even the off-white color of the paper is captured and reproduced. An “Artist Edition” book is as close to looking at the original art as possible. It’s a really nice look into the process and it makes each page an object rather than a page in a story. Plus each book runs around 150 pages. That’s a lot of art.

Oddly enough I missed IDW’s first “Artist Edition” publication entirely. I say “Oddly enough” because usually I check and see what new comic related books are coming out in the near future. Somehow I missed their Dave Stevens “Artist Edition”. I think it came out in late 2010 or early 2011. I only caught wind of it in spring 2011 when the Walt Simonson “Artist Edition” was announced. By that time the Dave Stevens one was sold out and commanding high prices on the secondary market. The book retailed for $125 but I saw it for twice that online. A friend of mine did manage to find and buy a copy for about $150. When he showed me his copy I was blown away by it. It looked really nice.

A handful more of these artist editions have been announced which always leads to a discussion amongst my collector friends about if such and such an artist is worth the purchase. Being that each book is $125 it pretty much comes down to us rationalizing that such and such an artist is not worth the purchase. None of us can afford every single “Artist Edition” that’s been announced so it’s really just sour grapes on our part. If we could afford it my friends an I would all get every single one of them and you’d never hear a rationalization. But alas such is not the way of the world and we have to pick and choose.

At $125 artists editions are really expensive books for me. But being that a single page of original art from any of these editions would run at least five times that it’s really not a bad deal. The odds of me owning a single page of original art from any of these editions is somewhere close to zero so it’s nice to be able to get facsimiles of them. I ended up getting two out of the five that have so far been published. The Wally Wood one is huge at around 13×19 inches and the Dave Mazzucchelli one is about 11×17 inches. Not easy to hold and read like a normal comic.

That brings me back to the fact that they’re really not for reading but for looking at. You can read them. They’re all from the age when a comic book’s lettering was done on the original art (lettering is done on the computer these days and digitally composited onto the art) so everything is there to be read but that’s not really what the book is for. Though I have seen attempt to turn a comic into an art book this may be the first time it’s actually happened. And it’s so simple. Amazing.

We’re deep into the NFL off season now. That’s never a time to be looking for football excitement. Nothing is happening but that doesn’t stop the modern twenty four hour football media machine. Sure ESPN and other such radio and TV sports channels have other sports to cover at this time of year but these days there is a dedicated NFL channel and they have to fill up their programing day with all sorts of football nonsense.

The biggest bit of silly noise on the NFL Network is something they started last year. It’s the “Top 100 Players of 2012”. It’s allegedly the players themselves voting on who are the best players in the league based not on past performance but how well they will do in the upcoming year. NFL Network stretched the countdown out over six weeks or so. I’m not really sure how many weeks because I didn’t pay attention that closely to it all but I think they released twenty names a week for a bit and then ten names a week as they got closer to number one. Oh, the drama. Who would be number one? Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers? It made me yawn.

Talk about programing that was invented just to fill up airtime when news was slow and this is what you’re talking about. After each week’s part of the list was revealed there was a second hour long show with some commentators discussing the list. Who was too high? Who was too low? Who was missing but deserved to be there? I flipped by that show a couple of times and didn’t stay long but a least some of the commentators agreed with me and thought the list was dumb too. It didn’t stop them from talking about it but at least they didn’t take it too seriously. There was a lot of killing time going on in that show.

The NFL Network also broadcasts old football games at times. They’re doing this weird thing with some of the games. I think it’s on the show named “NFL Classic Games”. I’m one of those people who doesn’t have an HDTV and so am still watching everything in old fashioned standard definition. Lots of things are letter-boxed these days and that’s no big deal on an SDTV but for these games they’re using a different box. It’s got the old 4:3 standard TV ratio but is shrunken down. I guess it’s for broadcasting in HD but on my SDTV the picture is about 20% smaller. It’s annoying and makes the games less watchable but it’s an HD world out there now.

Oddly enough where I could use some NFL HD it’s not available. I have an iPad 2 which, while only about ten inches on the diagonal, has more resolution than my 27 inch SDTV. How’s that for nutty? Recently I bought some old New York Giants’ highlights from iTunes. They’re a couple of bucks per game and I got a few of my favorite games from 2008. The problem is that they are only in SD so they look blocky and pixelated in my iPad. Hard to believe that I can’t get a good clear picture on my old SDTV because things are formatted for HD and I can’t get a good clear picture on my HD iPad because things are formatted for SD. Strange.

I also frequent blogs and websites about the NFL. ESPN’s site is my least favorite because they want you to sign up with them before you can read the articles. Their articles aren’t good enough for me to bother especially since other sites don’t make you do that. My favorite is the CBS Sports NFL page. I think it’s because it has the simplest and easiest to navigate design. It’s more pleasurable to read than the NFL’s own site which tends to get busy and is filled with Flash video that I prefer to avoid when reading on my laptop. Flash video slows things down too much for me.

Of course this time of year there is not much on the websites of any substance to read since there is nothing going on but I still check them out. Occasionally a feel-good story like some little kid sending Brandon Jacobs his piggy bank to get him to stay with the Giants pops up and there can also be some interesting analysis of the upcoming season but all too often there is filler nonsense. Somebody said something fairly innocuous about somebody else and then others twist it into something barely controversial. There is a vacuum of NFL news that demands to be filled. And it’s filled with non-stories.

The most boring non-controversy is the constant “Who is the best quarterback in the league” talk. I mean who cares? I don’t. As a Giants’ fan I didn’t care that Eli Manning wasn’t considered elite. I don’t care now that he is considered elite. Next year if he’s not considered elite anymore I still won’t care. I care even less about if someone likes Rodgers over Brady. It’s not choice anyone will ever have to make for real and either way you pick you’ve got a good quarterback. I think I’d rather hear about choosing between Sanchez and Tebow. That’s a real choice with real ramifications. It would take some real analysis too. You can flip a coin with Brady/Rodgers and never be wrong.

I’m also tired of seeing Roger Goodell’s face this offseason. Any time we all see the football commissioner’s face this much can’t be good for the game. It’s not his fault. It’s the fault of the New Orleans Saints and the bounty scandal that’s been going on this year. I don’t care much about the scandal except to say that stuff like that shouldn’t be allowed to go on but I don’t even know what really went on since the NFL isn’t releasing a lot of their evidence. That makes the whole thing even more annoying. Read one article and it says the Saints are monsters and the next says nothing unusual happened. And two thirds of the articles come with a picture of Goodell’s face.

So there you have the doldrums of the NFL’s offseason. Lot’s of fake controversy with “Best Players” and “Best Quarterback” lists, some real controversy with the Saints and bounties, and my own little HD versus SD non-controversy. How is that for offseason thrills and excitement? It almost makes me wish I cared about baseball season.

This week, besides the usual plethora of stuff I’ve had to do, I’ve been working on coming up with another comic strip. I’m not even sure why I’m doing it because I certainly don’t have time to make another full blown comic strip but here I am. Most of my time spent on an endeavor such as this is spent coming up with characters for the strip. Though I spend a lot of time making drawings of strange-faced people that’s a different thing than coming up with a character that I would have to draw over and over again within the context of a comic strip.

A couple of months ago I was designing characters for my comic book prints, a project I have since abandoned, and I used the usual method of drawing faces from multiple angels, putting some clothes on them, and generally figuring out what each character should look like in the round. I put my time in and came up with a couple of characters but in the end it all bored me and it went nowhere. It seemed to be going somewhere for a while but then things derailed. I think it was because I didn’t have much to say with those characters. It’s key when developing a comic strip to have something to say with it.

One of the problems I have when trying to develop a new strip is that most of my ideas are dialogue based. They’re not about plot or stories but about people talking to each other. It seems that’s how I like to say things. In conversation. I already have my “Four Talking Boxes” strip that takes care of that so what else do I have to say with the comic strip medium? That is what I’m unsure of yet I still have the drive to be heard.

What I’d like to do is come up with something zany. Something along the lines of crazy cartoon animals bashing each other with sticks and stones. That’s not much of an idea though. It might be a starting point but it’s a staring point that’s never lead me anywhere yet. I hold out hope though. I’m going for zany once again. Maybe it will lead me somewhere this time. Of course that might be the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over yet hoping for different results.

This time I’m going with a different character design approach. It’s one I used before on a different comic strip project that went nowhere but I thought I’d try it out again. It’s one where I use a small .5 mm marker and draw tiny half inch tall drawings. I find that when doing character design that small I drop away all the extraneous detail that distracts me and helps me think in a different way. I used this method last year and came up with a half a dozen different characters that I did nothing with. Oddly enough I look back on those characters now and feel no connection with them. I think they became an exercise in pioneering this method of character design for me rather than actual character design.

This time the tiny little drawing are all about zany. So far I have some wacky little robots and something that kinda reminds me of the Kool-Aid guy. At least he has a big face on his body. I’m even doing these drawing in a sketchbook that I bought last year to jam out some designs in. Turns out I haven’t used this particular sketchbook very much. I’m somewhere around page ten and as I flipped back to check the date written on the earliest page I was surprised to see that it was dated from the end of May in 2011. I wouldn’t have guessed I’ve had this particular book that long but that’s why I date them. Time flies.

I know I probably won’t get to but I’d like to make this comic strip big. I’d like to do it on a piece of 22×30 inch watercolor paper. I think that would be real cool. Unfortunately I have no real reason to make it that big and it would pretty much condemn the strip to never being seen. I wouldn’t be able to scan in a comic that large and put it on my web site so the only place anyone would ever see it would be at my house. I already have enough paintings that fit that description and don’t think I need any comic strips to fit it too. That and I don’t yet have a comic strip to draw.

I’m not sure if I ever will have another comic strip to draw. I already do “Four Talking Boxes”, “Message Tee”, and “Drifting and Dreaming” so what would I need another for? I think it’s to make one that’s popular. I’ve never been good at popular. My work is quirky and individualistic. That rarely leads to popularity but I accept that. I like my work and think it’s good. When I do work where I try to gain popular appeal it never works out for me. It ends up being mediocre and no one likes it. Not even me. That’s why I generally resist the idea of trying to please others with my work but sometimes it creeps in.

I think it’s a general human trait to want to be popular and have people like what you do even if few people are able to achieve such a thing. For the most part I don’t think about being popular but sometimes I do. I think the idea for a zany strip is linked to that underlying drive. Most people like comic strips that are less about language and more about funny drawings. The comic pages are crammed with cats and dogs all doing silly stuff.

I think I’m going to have to stop character design for a little while and actually come up with some ideas. I’m not much of a gag man but I’m good at finding comedy in basic conflict. In real life I’m a little too good at that and have had to stop myself from inappropriately laughing many a time. It could be that’s why my humor has never been too popular. I’ve never been good at appropriate laughter.

I used to have a lot of magazine subscriptions. Now I have two of them. I guess that’s the story of the whole magazine industry as it continues its decline but it’s also the story of me getting older and not being interested in a lot of stuff printed in magazines anymore. That and they’ve gotten more expensive. Back in the 1990’s I used to be able to get a magazine subscription for under ten dollars. Sometimes that was for twelve issues and sometimes only for six but either way it was fairly cheap. I’d subscribe to a magazine on a whim. I even had a couple of those “FHM” type magazines that I would skim each month because the subscription was only six dollars. There was never much to read in them but for fifty cents an issue they were okay.

The early to mid 1990s was not only the heyday of my own video game playing but it was also the heyday of video game magazines. A new one seemed to debut every six months. I had subscriptions to at least four different video game magazines. They were fun for a while. A bunch of my friends and co-workers were also into video games so we used to pour over the issues and have fun looking a what games were going to come out. And the reviews of games always helped. We’d pass around the magazine when a new one would come out.

Somewhere along the way the way I reached a saturation point with the video game magazines. So did my friends. The magazines became filled with less and less actual information and more and more press release hype from video game companies. I guess that as video game companies got more sophisticated about their marketing the magazines were happy to become just another part of that marketing. After all it was the ads for games that paid the magazine’s bills. Things got boring for us readers. A friend of mine used to refer to the magazine “Electronic Gaming Monthly” as “Press Release Monthly”. Even before the rise of the internet my friends and I stopped reading video game magazines. Now I haven’t picked one up in ten years.

I had a few subscriptions to history magazines too. That’s still an interest of mine. I remember a couple of them being good but not good enough to keep around forever. There was even one that I can’t recall the name of that was was just an accumulation of articles from other magazine. That one was a little weird. It seemed thrown together and without much focus. As you can imagine I didn’t keep reading it for very long.

One of the magazines I still get is a history mag. “Archeology” is its name and it’s a good one. It obviously covers what is happening in archeology and that is a lot of historical ground. One issue may have an article about ancient Greece followed by another on a Civil War battlefield. I can always count on some interesting reading to be found in its pages. It’s good stuff and has some nice photos to go along with things.

Oddly enough I never had many subscriptions to magazines about comic books. That was probably because I worked in the comic book biz at the time and so didn’t need to read about it but there were also not many comic book magazines that I liked. “Wizard” magazine was the most famous one about comics and there were usually issues of it lying around the office but I barely ever read it. It was a little too mainstream for me.

I did have a subscription to the “Comics Buyers Guide” for a few years. At the time it was a weekly newspaper about comics and I enjoyed it in that format. Then, in the early 2000’s if memory serves, CBG changed its format to become a monthly magazine. That’s when they lost me. They modeled themselves more on “Wizard” then they had before and that wasn’t up my alley. That and the weekly columns I enjoyed were now monthly while the subscription was still around the same price. I dropped it and I’m no longer even sure if it’s still around. “Wizard” magazine sure isn’t around anymore. That’s too bad because even if it wasn’t to my taste a lot of people once liked it. It ruled the comic book magazine world for a while.

I’ve tried reading magazines on my iPad but really haven’t gotten into it. The iPad is smaller than a magazine and that takes away a lot from the reading experience. In order for the type to be big enough to read I can’t view the whole page at once. That makes things tough to follow. It ruins the layout. And magazines aren’t cheap on the iPad. A subscription for ten dollars is hard to find. Most are around thirty dollars. Not cheap. None of the samples I’ve downloaded have motivated me to pay for any issues just yet. I did get one subscription through the Kindle app though. TV Guide. Not that it’s the greatest magazine but it’s only a dollar a month for four issues a month. Twelve dollars a year beats the hell out of thirty.

I used to have subscriptions to about three art magazines. They were among the more expensive ones. There is nothing cheap about art magazines. I’m guessing that’s why I stopped getting them. I always enjoyed a good art mag but I remember the bill reaching sixty dollars for one magazine I used to get. And that was half off the cover price. Probably one year I didn’t have the sixty dollars and that was that. We humans are all about habit. Stop one and it doesn’t start again easily.

My other remaining subscription besides “Archeology” is one called “The Sun”. It’s a literary magazine. That means it’s filled with stories. Each issue starts with an interview with some interesting person that I’ve never heard of. Usually someone out to change the world for the better in some way. Each issue also includes short pieces on a prearranged topic sent in by readers. It’s called, “Readers Write” and can always be counted on for good reading. The rest of the magazine is filled out with short stories that tend towards the introspective and depressing. They’re usually hope mixed in there too so it’s not all gloomy. They don’t shy away from darkness though.

I think my subscriptions topped out at around twelve magazines a month back in the mid 1990’s. Some were bi-monthly so it was probably about 15 actual subscriptions. Now I’m down to two paper ones and a recently added digital subscription. It has to do with both them and me. Things rarely stay the same.