Radiant Comics

I can never buy as many art supplies as I want to when I put in an on-line order for my stuff. I’m just not that rich. But I do love looking around a virtual store for bargains and odd little things that might interest me. It takes me me two or three days to order from an art supply web site but that’s because I look around so much. Sometimes I look around at three or four on-line art supply places to see what each one has. It also takes two or three days because I’m not really looking around that long. I’ll check out a site for twenty minutes or half an hour while watching TV. I guess it’s the modern equivalent of window shopping.

This week I managed to get my order up to $360 before I finally put an end to looking at stuff. That’s my habit, I keep poking around until I finally have to put an stop to my shopping because I can’t afford the bill. Then I start taking things out of my virtual basket. It’s always easy at first because I usually have a few nearly useless items in my basket. Stuff I looked at and went, “Eh, that might be interesting” but upon further review I say, “Boy, that’s dumb. I’ll never use that”. I can’t even think of an example that falls into this category because I forget them right away.

I do remember an example of the “Well, I don’t REALLY need that” category. That’s when something kinda cool catches my eye but upon further reflection isn’t really that cool. This shopping trip that thing was ellipse templates. In this computerized day and age not a lot of people still use ellipse templates but I do. I’ve got a lot of them and I can’t remember the last time I bought one. It was probably the 1990s. I don’t have a need for new ellipse templates but I a saw a couple of ones that were of a slightly different style than the ones I have so I put them in my cart. It was my collector’s impulse at work. I wanted the templates more to have them in my collection than because I needed them. On top of that I don’t really even have a collection of ellipse templates. I just have ellipse templates and plenty of them. It’s a collector’s impulse to turn everything into a collection though. In the end the templates didn’t make the cut.

With this process I shrunk my basket down from $360 to $85. I put a lot of stuff on the ol’ wishlist for later and ended up mostly buying paper and markers. A roll of artist tape was thrown in there too. All the stuff I wanted most immediately though markers are something that is subject to my collector’s impulse too. There are so many different types these days and I want to get them all. Markers are fun but they can also be expensive. I pulled two sets of markers from my basket, the new Prismacolor brush markers and the new Sharpie brush markers, so I’ll have to get them some other time. I ended up adding to my Copic sketch marker collection instead. They were the ones on the top of the list.

At $5.25 a marker the Copic markers are not cheap and the price on them can add up quickly. They have sets of Copic markers but they’re not cheap either. A set of 36 is $188 and a set of 72 is $352. That’s a lot of money to lay out for a marker set. Especially since, at most, I’d probably end up using about two thirds of the set. That’s the way things are with marker sets. There are a lot of colors I’m sure I wouldn’t find useful in any large color set. These big marker sets are somebody else’s idea of a bunch of useful colors. I prefer my own idea. That’s why over the last two years I been building my own Copic sketch marker set.

I started small. I started with just one color, blue, to see if I even liked the markers. I bought a dark, a medium, and a light blue. I figured that would give me a better feel for the markers than if I bought one each of the primary colors, red, blue, and yellow. With three shades of a single color I could see how good their color was and do some tone work. Three markers is a good number for testing out a brand. After I liked them I decided to buy some more colors. I got a light and dark of red, yellow, green, purple, and orange plus a black marker. That’s another fifty bucks worth of markers and didn’t give me a huge variety but it was a good start. Keep in mind I was collecting them over time so getting everything right away wasn’t the priority. Fifty bucks every three months was easier than three hundred right now.

Eventually I added more to the set of colors. I added a medium version of each of those colors and some light and dark browns for skin tones. Over time I built up a palette of around forty colors with only two or three of the colors being clunkers. I think that’s a much better ratio than I could get in any of the sets. Now I’m at the point when in this order I was adding a fourth version of whatever color and buying some outlier colors. It’s fun creatively and it scratches that collector’s itch. A boy has got to have a hobby.

The last thing in my basket was a little notebook. I used to always carry a notebook with me where ever I went but as I’ve been working from home for years now I haven’t had the need to. That and I was tired of those 69¢ notebooks I used to use. They are too fragile.The Molskine ones I use now are a bit too big to be carrying around so I leave them at home but recently I’ve been wanting to write things down when I’m out walking. Ideas have started to come to me then. I saw a new smaller Moleskine notebook at the online shop and ordered a couple. I don’t know exactly why but that silly little note book got me excited about little notebooks again. Yeah, I’ll take my excitement where I can get it.

For absolutely no reason I’m going to write down the things I regularly eat. For no reason except I don’t think I ever have before. We all have regular things we eat and though we may note the special meals who pays attention to the everyday ones? I think I will for just a moment. After all, I like noting the everyday stuff that gets forgotten with time.

I’m a cereal person for breakfast. For the past couple of years my cereals have been Cheerios and Corn Flakes. For a decade and a half before that it was Wheaties instead of Corn Flakes but the quality of Wheaties declined to the point that I switched to the less expensive Corn Flakes. Why pay an extra two bucks a box if I liked the Corn Flakes just a well as the now lesser Wheaties? I buy the store brand Corn Flakes but the General Mills Cheerios. They still make the best Cheerios. The store brand Cheerios are not as good but the original Cheerios are as good as ever. I put 2% milk on my cereal.

For my after cycling snack I have a banana or a pear followed by a little chocolate. I used to have apples in the mix but I’ve gotten too many bad out-of-season apples. That and I’ve read too many times that apples are loaded with wax and pesticides. I haven’t read such things about pears so I’ll stick with them. I like pears ripened so I wait a few days after I get them home to eat them. I have to time it out right and buy pears before I’m out of them. I also like my bananas ripe. A few brown spots is better than green. Timing is everything.

My chocolate of choice is bags of Ghirardelli chocolate chips. I have one bag of milk chocolate chips and one bag of 60% cocoa chocolate chips. I get my chocolate in chip form because it’s the cheapest way to get it and I can eat a little bit of it at a time. Often I just want a taste of chocolate and a candy bar would be way too much. A dozen chips hits the spot just as well. Sometimes I end up eating more chips than I planned to but it’s still less than a Snickers bar.

My lunches and diners can be fairly interchangeable. I often have the same meal for both. I sometimes make a lot of something in the crock pot and then reheat it for the next week’s worth of lunches or diners. I make chili, stew, a sort of pasta casserole, or a beans and rice dish all in the crock pot. Lately it’s been beans and rice. I go through crock pot phases. Sometimes it sits idle for a month and sometimes it gets used every week for a month.

Yogurt in another thing I go through phases with. I can have it almost every day for months at a time and then lay off it for a month. I’ve put different things in my yogurt over the years but the main thing I always put in it is Grape Nuts cereal. That almost always goes in becasue I like the crunchiness it adds but there is often a third ingredient. I used to put cashews in but they’re a bit too expensive. Recently I started adding various flavors of a shredded wheat type cereal. I’ve bought different brands but recently I’ve been having Kashi Island Vanilla and Kashi Cinnamon. The first goes well with peach yogurt and the second with apple. They really go well with any flavor yogurt but I have my habits.

Sandwiches are on my menu too but I usually have small sandwiches. Some are just chicken on a biscuit. I buy some store baked biscuits slice one in half and put a chicken finger on it. That’s a small sandwich and sometimes I even have cheese instead of chicken. A sandwich that small sometimes calls for a cereal chaser. A little bowl of shredded wheat does the trick. Not a breakfast size bowl.

Another sandwich I eat is chicken on a Ciabatta roll. A local super market sells some really good Ciabatta rolls and they’re a favorite of mine. That sandwich is a little bigger than the biscuit one and I put mustard, lettuce, and cheese on it as well as some chicken. The rolls are usually toasted because they go stale within a couple of days and I don’t eat them that fast but they still make great toast. And the cheese is a sharp cheddar.

My third type of regular sandwich is the classic egg sandwich. I’ve been having them on toasted Portuguese rolls lately. I season the pan with a little butter, oregano, thyme, basil, and garlic powder and then drop the eggs in. I cook the eggs over hard. That means I break the yokes so things don’t get all runny when I bite into my sandwich. I throw some cheddar cheese on top of the eggs too. I put a little hot sauce on the toasted roll to give the thing some zing. I use mild hot sauce because I’m not a “The hotter the better” guy.

For an afternoon snack I’ve been getting back into granola bars lately. I used to always have them but then kinda gave them up for a couple of years. I stay away from the really sweet ones but, annoyingly, the more natural ones tend to be the more expensive ones. I’m not a coffee fan but a few weeks ago I decided to try a chocolate mocha granola bar. I actually liked it and so bought a couple of boxes and ate them over a few weeks time. Now for some reason I don’t like them as much. I have a box that’s been sitting on my shelf for over a week. I just can’t hang with that coffee flavor.

I sometimes get chips to satisfy that craving for something salty and crunchy but I stay away from potato chips and the more fattening types. I’ve had rice and popcorn chips lately. I like them but I don’t love them. Of course it’s a good thing that I don’t love them. I love potato chips and therefor would over-indulge in them if I actually bought them. I’ll stick to the ones that are a little more like cardboard, thank you. They do the job.

The last thing to make it into my current rotation are cookies. I’m a huge cookie fan. Mostly types of chocolate chip cookies but I’ve stayed away from them for a long while because I usually just want one cookie and you can’t buy just one. I like to buy the store baked cookies but you have to buy them in packs of twenty and either they’ll go stale if I don’t eat them or I’ll eat too many of them just because they’re hanging around. A few weeks ago I bought some of my old favorite Pepperidge Farm cookies. I put them on a high shelf and forget about them until I felt like having a cookie. Since they don’t go stale so fast there is no ticking clock making me eat them and I don’t over-indulge.

So those are my current eating habits. They’ve changed over the years but I’m not exactly sure in what way. Less pasta is definite but probably in other ways too. If only I wrote a blog about it ten years ago. Oh well, I can look back on this one ten years from now.

I’ve been a teetotaler all my life. The kids these day call it “Straight Edge” but I prefer teetotaler because it’s old fashioned and sounds funny. Straight Edge might even be old fashioned by now. I first heard that as a term for someone who doesn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs back in the early 1990s but I’m told it was around in the 1980s too. I’m not sure how I missed it then since the late 80s were my college years and with all the partying going on in college I would think it should have come up. But it could have been more of a music scene phrase back then and only creeped more into the mainstream in the early 90s when it caught my ear.

As a consequence of not being in the mainstream of the world of drinking I don’t have any stories of being so drunk out of my mind that such-and-such happened. I may be out of my mind in an everyday sort of way but can’t start any tales with the phrase, “I was so wasted that…”. I certainly understand drinking and getting high in that it allows people to relax and have some fun or it allows some people to just plain escape the relentless drone of everyday life but it’s never been something I’ve enjoyed. For whatever reason I enjoy the way my mind works in its natural state.

I’ve been to plenty of parties in my lifetime and am perfectly capable of hanging out with the drinkers and having a good time but on occasion things elude me. There are sometimes I have to have certain things about the getting high world explained to me. One of them was huffing. That’s when a person inhales paint fumes or some such. I mean, seriously, paint fumes? I guess it’s mostly kids who do it since they don’t have access to alcohol or drugs but it’s not always kids. Sometimes full grown adults get addicted to huffing. That I did not get. Inhaling toxic fumes can make you die.

Huffing always seemed like a really bizarre way to get high to me but a friend of mine explained it to me once as, “There can sometimes be a really fine line between being sick and being high”. I must say that I found that explanation strange and could never quite understand it until now. No, I haven’t started huffing or getting high but I did just get over being sick.

It wasn’t a dread disease or any long illness but it was some sort of cold, flu, or sinus infection that knocked me off my feet for a few days. It took me over a full week to recover and I rarely get sick like that so it was significant to me. Oddly enough the last time I was that sick was the week after the Giants won the Super Bowl back in February 2008. I think the game made me so tense and nervous that something snuck in under my immune system. With the memory of that I tried to stay calmer as the Giants won the Super Bowl this past February and managed not to repeat the events of 2008 but something got me anyway these couple of months later.

My main symptoms were fatigue and dizziness. My head was stuffy and my throat a bit sore but I’ve had worse in both those areas. It was when I stood up that things spun around and I just plain wanted to sit down again. Lay down again would be more accurate. Thursday I was still up and working a little bit but Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I was flat on my back. I was mostly on my couch sleeping the day away. Sometimes I’d have the TV on. For some reason I like to nap to documentaries and even though I wasn’t technically napping since I was sick I put the docs on anyway. They soothe me somehow. I had seen them all before and was barely awake for them but they added a small bit of something pleasant to my sick days.

For some reason I also got up at my regular 7 AM wake up time every morning. Despite fatigue being my main symptom and my not setting my alarm I still woke up at my regular time, got out of bed, and showered after which I immediately lay down on the couch for the day. A couple of those mornings I questioned my sanity for being up and showering as normal but in the end it did make me feel better. The thought of not getting up and showering brought me down.

So here is the part where I tie this all in to getting high and it wasn’t because of any cold medicine I was on. That stuff can make me sleepy or wired but not high. At least the over-the-counter stuff that I get. This part of the story takes place on Saturday morning. That was my second out of three days flat on my back. I had just gotten out of the shower, dressed, and had eaten breakfast. After that I lay down on the couch at about 7:30 AM. I didn’t turn the TV on and was lying there in the quiet of the morning.

As the time passed I drifted in and out of a dream-like state. I wasn’t really asleep but I wasn’t awake either. Being that I was sick I had a water bottle next to me to drink from to keep hydrated. I knew I was thirsty because I would dream/imagine I was drinking from the bottle. That’s when I’d reach down and drink from it for real. It was weird to see myself drink once in my mind and then in reality. I stayed on the couch until about 10 AM when I sat up to watch TV.

The dream-like time from 7:30-10 AM passed fairly quickly. The next hour of TV time seemed to drag on for twice as long. I looked back on my morning on the couch as pleasant. That’s when I realized I was experiencing the fine line that, “There can sometimes be a really fine line between being sick and being high” was describing. I’m not saying I was high but for the first time ever I could see the fine line.

Of course that was two hours out of a week of being sick the rest of which was in no way pleasant or like being high but it is the first time I can actually understand that statement. Now I wonder the percentage of time that huffing actually makes a person sick as compared to high. I gotta figure at best it’s 50/50. I mean they’re poisonous fumes! Alright, I still don’t get huffing. It’s seems crazy to me.

I’m feeling like a historian today. Sure it might only be the history of me but that still counts as history. Y’see I keep a calendar on my computer. It’s not really a calendar as others keep one because rather than write down things that I have to do I write down things that I’ve done. Well, I do write down things that I have to do but I don’t have a very busy schedule so my calendar would be pretty empty if I took only that route.

I started keeping it a few years ago when I first worked solely from home. The problem was that I’d work on a lot of art of my own that the rest of the world has yet to see. That is the plight of the unknown artist and one of its pitfalls is feeling like you’ve done nothing. I’m usually thinking about whatever I’m doing or what I’m going to do next rather than what I’ve done. So I’ll finish a print, it’ll go into a drawer, and I’ll forget about it. Since I forget about what I’ve done that leads me to sit around and think that I’ve gotten nothing done. Not a good feeling.

My solution to that problem was to start writing down in my calendar what I accomplished that day. I might write what paying work I did, what of my own work I got done, if I went somewhere, or if I went for a bike ride. These are some of the things I note in my calendar. It’s not like I consult it all the time but if I fell like I’ve accomplished nothing then I can at least look back at it and think to myself that I got some things done.

So what does this have to do with me feeling like a historian? One word: receipts. I’ve been a freelancer since I graduated college back in December of 1988. As a consequence I kept receipts for tax purposes for almost everything I buy. I’m no tax accountant so I mostly kept them all. No one like to think about taxes. They mean you owe the government money and there is the threat of jail if you make a mistake. Sure no one with my tiny little income is going to jail but it’s still in the back of everyone’s mind. So I collect my receipts, pay my taxes, and then stick the paperwork in a closet. Years ago they were moved from the closet to the garage.

I’ve alway meant to throw it all out. I’m pretty sure I don’t need tax data from the early 1990s. But it wasn’t tucked away and the threat of identity theft always made me wonder how I properly throw it away without it being a danger. So there it sat; unthought of except to occasionally annoy me with its mere presence. Tax time this year brought them, once again, to mind. Then it struck me that maybe I could look at some old receipts and see where I was on certain days.

I’ve been cataloging my snapshots and photographs since I stared taking them sometime back in college but back in the days of film I wasn’t so good at writing down exact dates for everything. I carried a pocket camera and might take a photo one day and not for another week. As a consequence any given roll of film might have a few weeks or even months worth of film on them. A lot of my photos from the 1990s have a month but no day. A passing thought went through my head that maybe the receipts might give me a clue about the exact dates of some of my photos. So I decided to look through my old tax stuff.

It was weird. I started to feel like a historian going through someone else’s old papers. I didn’t remember anything that was in there so it was like it was new to me. The first thing I noticed it that I kept all my old pay stubs. I used to work in the Marvel Comics production bullpen as a freelancer. I wasn’t on staff so I got paid a day rate. The old check stubs had the date of every day that I worked there on them. I only worked there about half the year but there was not always a rhyme or reason to exactly which days I was there. As with anyone else who would be in that situation without these stubs I would have no idea if I was at Marvel on May 14, 1994 or not. But now I do. How strange it is to regain that information?

I haven’t gone through the receipts much just yet but it was interesting to see some of them. I now know that I bought my Atari Lynx hand held video game system in 1993. I still have it tucked away somewhere but I couldn’t have told you when I got it. I have receipts from Koenig’s Art Emporium that are from the mid-1990s. I had forgotten that store existed yet it was my local art supply store for years. I have no idea when it finally closed.

I saw some receipts for gouache paints from 1996. I’m not sure when I first started painting in gouache. I know it was a few years after college but throughout a lot of the 1990s I wasn’t too strict on putting dates on my work. Who thinks about that stuff when you’re young? Fifteen years later 1993 to 1996 can blur together. Maybe I can piece together some dates from the receipts. That would be cool.

I don’t know how much I’ll ever get done on this project of digging through the past but I think I’ll try and put some of the information into my computer’s calendar. I have some old paper calendars from the early 2000s that I wrote some events on back in the days when I used paper calendars so I’ll have to dig those things out too. The good thing about a computer calendar is that it goes back into infinity. At least I think it does. I moved mine back to the early 1990s just to see if it would go there and it did. I don’t think I’ll need it to go all the way back to 1492. Well, Unless I discover things in my garage from a previous life.

This week I decided to try out Marvel’s new digital comic book format. Normally I don’t by many Marvel comics nor do I buy digital comics but since I had read about this new comic, “Avengers vs. X-Men #1 Infinite”, I was curious to see it. It was designed to be a digital comic from day one and as such has some interesting features. It wasn’t supposed to be just a regular comic with some add-ons or limited animation added to it. That and it was just 99¢.

The comic is actually the introductory chapter in the new Marvel company wide crossover event. There is one of these events every year because as much as I hear people complain about them people also buy them. Crossover events from both Marvel and DC are usually among the strongest selling comics in any given year. I’m not bothering to review the content of “Avengers vs. X-Men #1 Infinite” because I don’t care about it. This analysis is about the format rather than the content.

The format is different from a regular digital comic in that the creator is controlling aspects of the comic that are not usually under the creator’s control in a printed comic. As the reader opens up the digital comic (I’m reading it on my iPad) there is a field of stars. As you swipe your hand across the screen a caption appears. Swipe again and a few more captions appear for you to read. With this method the comic’s creator can control when words or pictures show up on screen (as long as the reader swipes his hand). That’s basically what “Infinite” comics are about.

Sometimes as I swiped to turn a page only one panel of that page would appear. Swipe again and the second panel shows up. Or maybe some more captions. This method was also used for special effects. At one point there is a drawing of the superhero Nova flying through space. He is in focus but there is an out of focus flaming explosion behind him. Swipe the screen and Nova moves out of focus and the background snaps into focus revealing that the fiery explosion is in the shape of a giant bird – the symbol of the out of control super-villain, the Phoenix. A solid example of using a special effect for story telling purposes.

Changing focus was used a couple of time in the story. That plus blur, color changes, and the moving of figure across a static background as I swiped added a few more arrows to the storytelling quiver that aren’t found in printed comics. The comic was also presented in a horizontal format rather than the usual comic book vertical. I must say that I was pretty impressed with the storytelling overall. They were really trying to do something new with the digital format. I could tell there was thinking going on and that is always welcome.

Overall I’m not sure if I liked it though. The format might just be too new for me to have a real grasp on just yet. I like the fact that I’m still in control and nothing moves until I want it to by swiping it but it’s all a bit weird right now. I’ve said before that comic books create a special space in the reader’s mind. When you read a regular book the words create an images in your head as you read. That’s one type of “Head space”. With comics a different type of head space is created. The words and pictures together create a space in your head where you go for the story to come alive.

I contrast these two types of reading with watching a movie. Reading is internal and watching is external. Reading creates an internal space in the reader’s mind where the story happens. Even with a comic where there are pictures to look at we still “Read” those pictures with our minds. When watching a movie the mind enters the world of the movie. All the action takes place on screen and not in our heads. We go into the movie’s world rather than in manifesting in our minds. It’s a different experience from reading.

That’s why I’m unsure of if I like this new format or not. My mind could quite get comfortable with it. When the words and pictures were all there it was just like reading a regular comic book. It brought me to than same space in my mind. But as I swiped across the screen I never knew what would appear. Would it be a single caption? Another panel? Two more panels? A whole bunch of writing? A whole new page? Would the page remain the same and the focus change? All these unanswered questions before I swiped meant that I went from reading the comic to watching it. That made the whole thing a little strange for me.

Read, watch to see what happens next, and then read again was how things went. It was kind of like reading subtitles at a movie. I’ve heard plenty of people complain about subtitles and not want to watch any movie that had them and I can understand that. Having to read subtitles takes you out of the world of the movie. It’s tough to get into a movie when you have to read what the actors are saying at the same time there is other stuff happening on screen.

This Infinite comics format wasn’t quite like that since I wasn’t watching and reading at the same time but the watching did, at times, interfere with my reading. It was a strange experience but it could be that I’m just not used to it. I’m reminded of a story I learned in art history class. Back when the Impressionists first got started people weren’t used to seeing images the way they painted them. People didn’t get it. Since they weren’t the three dimensional modeled images they were used to people couldn’t see them as the artist’s did. One famous critic in describing Monet’s famous “Haystacks” paintings said he loved the painting but couldn’t quite make out the haystacks. Not everybody in that day could but nowadays we wonder how they couldn’t. The Impressionists changed our way of seeing.

I wonder if my ambivalence towards this new comic book format is because I can’t see the haystack. Maybe my mind isn’t used to the space the format creates in my head. Like I said it was well done and I could see that a lot of thought had gone into it but it still annoyed me a little. I liked it but didn’t love it. Maybe next time it will be easier for me to see the haystacks.