Radiant Comics

I’ve been watching more TV this season than in seasons past. At least I think so. It could be that I’ve been paying more attention to TV than I have in the past. I’ve been kind of forcing myself to sit down and rest at the end of the day which I’ve never really done before. I’ve gotten older and working late into the night isn’t so good for me anymore. Of course my “Working late into the night” is really only until 10 PM but I do start my day at 8 AM so by ten it’s pretty late. I’m not working that whole time but often I’ll start working on some of my own art at around seven or eight and keep going until ten. Now I stop at 9 PM and turn on the TV. Sometime I do sit and draw in front of the TV but that’s a change from my usual standing and drawing. And it’s mellower.

I often had the TV on at night but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to it. It was there for noise as I worked. But now that I’ve been sitting down for two hours before bed I have to find things to watch. That’s a change from my past habit of however many years. I’m actually finding things to watch rather than stumbling on them. As a consequence I’ve watched a bunch of new shows this year. Not all of them good and some only okay but at least I found some to hold my interest for a little while.

I recently stumbled onto a a website called “TV by the Numbers”. It’s all about tracking how well TV shows are doing in the ratings and predicting which shows will be renewed and which shows will be cancelled. I’m not even sure how I came upon in except that since I’ve been paying more attention to TV I must have wanted to see how a new show was doing. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to a couple of TV based radio shows on Howard Stern’s channel lately. They talk TV ratings there. Either way I’ve never delved much into the world of TV ratings before. It’s an interesting world of absolute numbers, the bottom line, and hoodoo.

The hoodoo part is that no one knows why people watch one TV show and not another. It’s all guesswork. If anyone had any idea then more shows would be watched. And the often mentioned 18-49 year old demographic really does rule the advertising roost. And it turns out not because they are in any way special but because they are the hardest audience to reach. Advertisers know they can find older audiences easier so they’re not at a premium. A show that does well with 18-49 is better of than a show with more total viewers but less viewers in that age range. I’ve always known this but somehow seeing it in numbers made it more real for me.

It also reminds me of reading sales figure for comic books. That’s an industry I’m real familiar with and have been reading the numbers on for decades. Comic book sales numbers come back quickly these days and you can tell right away if a book is going to succeed. That’s mostly because the first issue of any comic usually sells the most copies. Rarely do sales go up over time on a comic book series. It happens but not often. If the numbers are no good on issue number one then don’t expect the comic to be around very long.

These days it turns out that TV is just about the same. The premiere episode of a series often has the biggest rating. It’s only down from there. If that initial rating is high enough and there are a lot of 18-49 year olds then things look good even with a drop off but if not – watch out. Some series almost start out as cancelled. One such show is the recent “Bent”. It is a half hour comedy of which they made six episodes. I saw it and it was pretty good and it got some good reviews but it was broadcast over three weeks with two back-to-back episodes each week. That is not a sign of a show the network had any confidence in. The TV ratings site had predicted it to be cancelled right after the premiere. It may have even been before the premiere.

Just a couple of weeks ago I was looking at the episode list of “Seinfeld”. I haven’t watched that show in half a decade and was thinking about giving the series a viewing again. I remembered that the first season was only six episodes long but had forgotten that the second season was only twelve episodes long. The ratings weren’t great that’s for sure. “Seinfeld” wouldn’t have stood a chance of success today. I’ve heard that before but, once again, looking at the numbers made it more real for me.

The thing about having paid attention to TV this year versus the reality of the quick cancellation of shows is that often shows get better as the year goes on but that doesn’t matter because rarely does an audience build as the year goes on. I’ve watched a few shows, Whitney, New Girl, and even Big Bang Theory (a few years ago) that I didn’t like right away but they got better and grew on me.

One show from this year, “Are You There Chelsea” had a horrible premiere episode. I only watched any more of them because I wanted something to watch and only had the attention span for a half hour comedy. Then the unexpected happened and the show got better. Not great but better. TV shows really do take time to develop. But the show’s rating didn’t go up so it looks like it’ll be cancelled. It’s probably too crass for a general audience but it became crass and funny after a while. At least to me.

I find it strange now, since I’ve been paying attention this year, when I watch a TV show that’s predicted to be cancelled. I mean a sure thing prediction. I can’t even explain why. I still like the show but it’s also tinged with the sadness of lost potential. That’s a new thing for me and my TV watching. Or maybe that’s called my TV paying attention. I’ve never looked the TV ratings meta-game before. It sure is a weird game.

My lack of figuring out what or how to do the comic book that I was working on really had me discombobulated this week. That happens sometimes when things aren’t going too well. After all how can I do something when I don’t know what I’m doing? That may be an eternal question of life but it’s also an eternal question of making art. I find it best in such situations to fall back to something that I know I can get done. So that’s what I did and am doing. This week I made a print. Almost two at this point.

I have a lot of drawings already done. I stockpile drawings. It’s another thing I always do when I can’t figure out what project I’m going to work on or if the project that I’m working on isn’t going along as I expected. I draw. I don’t worry about if the drawing is going to turn into something finished. I find a little sketch I like in my sketchbook and then blow it up and make it into a drawing that works. That’s something I can always do so I always have a couple dozen finished drawings lying around the place. They just wait.

Making a finished print isn’t always easy but at least I know the choices I have to make. Find a sketch, make a drawing, choose how I want to make the drawing “Finished”, figure out how I want to color the print, and then usually I integrate a line of writing/type into the print. I like words and pictures together. The hardest part of this process for me is often choosing how to do and then executing the color. I love color. I’ve studied and figured out how to use it for the last twenty five years. But it’s often tedious to execute a color technique. I find that’s especially true when using a computer.

Color technique mainly involves figuring out your base color, y’know, what should be red, blue, green, yellow, or whatever color, and then adding darks, lights, and maybe some texture to make things interesting. Figuring out the base color is the part that takes thinking. That’s when I have to use my brain and act and react to the work I’m doing. The tedious part is after that because after the base color is figured out everything else is just a physical technique even if it’s digital. And it’s repetitive.

I’m not saying that technique isn’t important just that it can be boring to do. Technique is just a way of getting from point A to point B. It’s important to get from point A to point B but it can also be a long and boring walk. Technique is a way of making the print more interesting. It’s what makes the color come alive. Technique is when you add shading, dimension, or even flatness to the drawing. It’s what brings the whole piece together and finishes it. But it’s also made up of doing the same thing over and over again.

Where does the dark color go? Where does the middle color go? Where does the light color go? These are the questions I ask myself over and over. Even if I’m not doing a “Realistic” dark to light modeled figure these are still the three questions. Throw “How bright should this be?” and “How dull should this be?” in there and you’ve just about exhausted all of the color technique questions. All those questions are answered by whatever technique I choose to use and the answers aren’t hard, if it’s a familiar technique, but they are repetitive. Hence the boring part.

After I finished one print on the computer I had the desire to break out my markers. I was so tired of a computer screen that I wanted to use some physical tools. For some reason I didn’t want to paint. I wanted the instant color of a magic marker. That’s the appeal of markers for me. They deliver quick bright color neat and dry out of the end of a pen. They’re an instant gratification tool. I recently bought some 5×7 inch watercolor paper so I dipped into my library of drawings and picked out a few to draw in marker on that paper.

I made three finished marker drawings but in the end I found them unsatisfying. I was enjoying doing them but I didn’t like them much when they were finished. I think it was because I picked the wrong drawings. I was in such a rush to get started with the markers that I didn’t take the time to really choose what I wanted to draw. I picked three drawings I liked and got started. I rushed. I worked on them and it was fun to be using markers but none of them turned out to be a winner. It was all part of my discombobulation at failing to figure out how I wanted to make a comic book .

In the end it didn’t matter that I spent a few hours making the failed marker drawings as it did help straighten my head out a bit. It also lead to the print I’m currently working on. After I put my markers back on the shelf I left three new green markers on my desk to try out. Late one evening I picked up one of the markers and drew on a little piece of paper. I was just trying out the marker tip yet in the end really liked the small composition I made. I added a figure to it and had a surprise finished thumbnail layout. It seemed to come out of nowhere as the initial doodle/drawing took all of ten seconds.

The next day I blew up the small drawing and made it into a finished drawing. It took some doing since the initial thumbnail wasn’t much except a composition in silhouette but I managed to keep the same flavor in the finished drawing. I went on to ink the drawing and then scan it in so that I can color it on the computer. It has a lot of shapes in it and is rather complex so the initial color was tough to figure out. I even has to change the technique I was using early on. I started one way and said to myself, “This’ll never work” so I started again. Luckily I had just gotten started with the color so abandoning it then wasn’t hard. I got things back on track soon after that.

Now, of course, I’m at the tedious part. The technique. I’m putting darks, lights, and textures all over the many little shapes I made in the drawing. Man, it’s boring. But it has to be done if I want a finished piece. And at least it’s something I know how to finish. That counts for a lot right now.

I’m not a big dream person. Most nights I don’t remember my dreams. I’ve read that means I wake up during the wrong sleep cycle for remembering dreams. I do wake up at about the same time every morning so that could be true but it’s not a topic I’ve delved into much. And like a lot of people I usually don’t like to hear about other people’s dreams. Though they may be interesting to the dreamer they are often boring to the listener. I think this mostly has to do with story telling.

When telling someone a story or anecdote structure is very important. A story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end and the listener has to recognize that the story is progressing as you tell it. Otherwise “Get to the point” will be heard a lot if anyone even bothers to keep listening. We all know bad storytellers who bore us with their pointless ramblings. Dreams rarely have storytelling structure. They are not really stories in the same sense that we usually mean. Dreams often have no linear beginning, middle, and end. Things change on their own and reset buttons are hit in the middle of the action. In a dream it’s usually tough to follow the thread of it all.

When I dream I often have some control over what I dream. Not total lucid dreaming where I can do whatever I want. It’s more like I’m the director of a movie and I’m making creative choices. Part of last night’s dream was that I was riding in a car with other people and I couldn’t continue on with them so I had the car pull over and I got out. It was nighttime in the pouring rain on a suburban street that I didn’t even recognize. As my dream self was standing there not knowing what to do next my dream director self said, “This is stupid. No one would ever do that” and the dream reset itself.

Or at least I think the dream reset itself. That’s another problem with telling the story of a dream. You are not only relying on memory but memory from when you’re asleep. People often remember new aspects of the dream as they are telling the story of it. Then they have to backtrack to make it all fit. That’s a storytelling technique that’s sure to frustrate the listener. It’s frustrating when people do that when telling a real life story and it happens even more often when telling dream stories.

Due to my dream directors influence the story I was in shifted from that dark and rainy street to me riding my bicycle home on a sunny afternoon after having left the car. At least I think it was the same car. There were at least three drivers during the car sequence and once it was even a yellow cab. Making any kind of linear story out of the memory of a constantly changing dream sure is a challenge.

I’ve noticed over the years that I’ve left most of the old dream archetypes behind. I haven’t dreamt about being naked in public, falling, not getting an assignment done, flying, and whatever other dreams we have in common in a long time. But I have developed some of my own dream types. I guess me being the director of the dream and saying “This isn’t working for me” would count as a dream type and the second from this dream would be getting lost.

As I was an my dream bike making my way home my sunny day turned into one filled with snow and ice. As with all my “Getting lost” dreams familiar territory turned into unfamiliar territory and I no longer knew where I was going. For some reason my “Getting lost” dreams are often paired with a third dream type. An “Inability to stay awake” theme. As I was riding my bike in the cold and snow and trying to get home my eyes were closing. I was suddenly tired and could not stay awake.

This portion of the dream is always accompanied by a cheesy special effect. It’s the one we’ve seen in movies where someone is trying to stay awake while driving or some such and suddenly the camera sees his eyelids closing as if from the inside of his eyes. The screen goes black as the eyes close and we see a picture again as the eyes open. It’s a really annoying effect in the movies and also in my dreams. I don’t know what it means when I’m fighting to stay awake in a dream so I can get something done but it’s usually one of the least pleasant aspects of a dream. Even in a dream when I’m tired I just like to go to sleep.

Often the thread of the dream narrative ends with the “Inability to stay awake” part. What can come next if I can’t stay awake in my own dream? It ties in with the whole “Getting lost” dream and brings things to a screeching halt because if I can’t stay awake I can’t get un-lost. That’s what happened last night because at this point the dream shifted to a completely different one. This is another thing that makes listening to dream stories so boring. Though they share some common elements the next part of the dream has nothing to do with the first part. It can’t really be tied in coherently.

The last part is a typical “Helplessness” dream. Suddenly it was not me on the bike but a friend who was out on a bike the night before during a storm and some friends and I were out looking for him. Of course everything stopped me from being able to look for him. From having to pull over and have brunch to people arguing over where to sit in the car. And there was a constantly changing cast of characters. There was no narrative to speak of except not being able to even look for what I wanted to find. And the lack of narrative makes it impossible to tie into the narrative driven first part of the dream. That’s what makes the telling of it so tough.

So there you have it. Not the telling of a dream but the telling of the telling of a dream. One more layer of observation to try to make things into a coherent narrative. I think that’s what makes dream interpretation more interesting than the dreams themselves. Not that I’ve ever been into dream interpretation but as I think about it now it takes the incoherent unconnected aspects of a dream and tries to make them into a narrative that a person can connect to. And we all want to connect.

Here I go again. I was working on a comic this week. Well, maybe it was more like I was working on working on a comic because I still have no idea what I’m doing with it. As an artist I like to do a lot of things. I like to paint, draw, make prints, take photos, make comics, and even do a little bit of writing. The problem with making comics, especially comic books, is that they take too much time. I’ve said it before, if you’re getting paid to make comics then the time it takes is okay because it’s your job. Jobs take up most of our time. But making a comic book without it being my job takes too much time away from other artistic endeavors I want to pursue. It’s a conundrum because I do want to make some comics. I’ve get ‘em in my blood.

It took me two years before I got my “Four Talking Boxes” web comic up and running. It was not for lack of ideas but for lack of ideas that I could actually execute in the time I had to work on it. A daily comic strip takes a long time to draw. Even the most basic and badly drawn comic strips will take a couple of hours. I didn’t have three or four hours a day to devote to a comic strip. But over a period of a couple of years and many false starts I found a way to make a strip I could be happy with and be able to complete. It was an uphill battle.

So here I am in sort of the same position trying to figure out how I can make a comic book that I not only have the time to do but will actually be able to do. It’s not a downhill battle. The first thing I did was spend some time doing a bit of character design. I drew lots of little faces. I’m not a huge fan of character design but I am a fan of drawing faces so I kept it to that. I eventually settled on a couple of faces that I like but I really don’t like drawing the same thing over and over again so I’m not sure how I’m going to work this whole character design thing out.

I even found a fashion app for my iPad that I was using. My characters are not super heroes and therefor wear regular clothing. One of the problems with drawing people in regular clothing is that artists often don’t research such clothes. They end up drawing generic clothing that doesn’t ring true. I find that I do this too unless I look up what current clothes actually look like.

Like others I have a default generic type of t-shirt and jeans that I draw if I’m not thinking about it. And don’t even ask me about women’s clothes. No woman would ever wear the generic ones that I unthinkingly come up with. They’re boring. So I found an app that’s trying to be a fashion social networking app. It basically means that people can upload photos of clothes they like. It’s mostly women who are on it but I mostly need help with women’s clothes so it works out for me. My idea of what a pair of women’s jeans looks like didn’t hold up to what the wide variety of women’s jeans actually look like. And accessories. I never even thought about bracelets and bags as I was doing my initial character design. That app came in handy. It’s name is “Style Tag” by the way.

Another thing I’ve been trying to do with this attempt at making some sort of comic is to integrate my other art with it. I’m taking some of my other images and using them as panels. This makes for a less than literal story at times but I don’t seem to be too interested in a literal story anyway. I’ve grown completely bored with just illustrating a story. I want to draw things that I find interesting not things that will just show something. I have no interest in drawing people sitting around a diner, coffee shop, park, apartment, or whatever. But these are where my stories take place. At least if I’m making my usual, or used to be usual, literal story. I can only make a dull perfunctory drawing when I’m not interested in what I’m drawing. That’s no way to get a comic done.

I think I did a nice job with the first page. It was when I was thinking about interactivity within the comic, before iBook Author failed me, and I used images from that first page to make a couple of prints. It was an introductory page though so flights of fancy were called for. But now I’ve got to start the meat of the story and figure out not only what the story is but figure out how to execute it. I have to decide how to write it too. That’s where all the conceptual work is.

Even though I have five pages in an almost done state none of them have any words on them yet. I have an idea of what I want to write but that is a long way from actually having any of the writing done. In this division of labor world of making comics that would be a strange idea to some but as I’m the writer and artist of this comic no one has to be able to see what I have in mind for it but me. I can even move forward without knowing totally what I have in mind for it. To a point at least. I think I’m getting to that point.

I may be a long way from nailing this thing down but the process has given me some other ideas for prints and paintings. I’m not sure if those ideas are going to work their way back into the comic though. Things might be fracturing a bit. The whole character design and drawing faces thing has made me want to draw more faces. Weird strange faces from the edges of my mind. I like that so much more than drawing the same face over and over again. And that’s one of the parts of comics I’m not too fond of. Drawing the same thing over and over again. I’ll just have to find a way.

I’ve got a lot of comic books. That’s no surprise to anyone who knows me. After all I am a comic book collector. I’ve been a bit of a comic book accumulator at times and over the last few weeks it has been time to clean some things out. Contrary to popular belief the vast majority of comic books are worth almost nothing. In fact so close to nothing that they are, in fact, worth nothing. Just like people mostly want baseball cards that are of famous players or are rare people only want comic books of famous characters or ones that are rare. The other 99.9% isn’t in very high demand.

I’ve noticed the comics I’ve been cleaning out break down into a handful of different categories. The first category is where I learned just how little demand there is for most comics. About six years ago I was out of work. At about the same time a friend of mine was getting rid of a bunch of his comics so he gave them to me. I took them for the express purpose of selling them on Ebay and making a little cash. That turned out to be a big pain in the ass and there wasn’t a whole lot of cash to be made.

It was easy enough to post the comics that were in a long run. If I had twenty issues in a row of Batman that was easy to write up, post, and it would get looks. But if there were three or four issues of some random comic they would take just as much time as a long run to write up, take a photo of, post, pack up, and ship. And no one would care about them. If I was lucky I could get a dollar and issue for the long run of Batman comics. The others would sell for, maybe, four for a dollar. That’s a lot of work to make a single dollar and eventually I found more lucrative work and quit bothering with Ebay. But I still had a bunch of random comics laying around.

The second category is comics I dragged home from work back when I used to work in the production department at Marvel Comics. Sometimes I’d be a bit bored at work so I started collecting comics that I’d find around the office. Not any old comic but a few series that I had a minor interest in that weren’t part of whatever comics I was already collecting. It turns out that I did this a couple of different times over the years. I notice I have some issues of Iron Man, Thor, and the Avengers from around the year 1999. They were stuck away in a box in my closet. I don’t even remember them but there they are. The next batch is from around 2004. Dragging random comics home wasn’t something I did all the time since I have plenty already but on these two occasions I sure did.

As a subset of those two “Around the office” collections I found a bunch of early 1990s specialty covers comics. Hologram covers, foil covers, die cut covers, extra shiny covers and the like that were all the rage in the 1990s. I hated all of those gimmicky covers when them came out and so I had none. Ten years later when I saw them abandoned at the office I decided to take some home and add them to my collection out of pure nostalgia. I figured why not have a few examples of these fancy useless covers? I think I’m going to keep these ones. I only have about twenty of them and that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number of ones I’m getting rid of.

Yet another subset of this set is a bunch ow “Wizard 1/2 Editions”. Those are comics that were specially printed by Wizard magazine.They were promotional giveaways that fans would have to buy Wizard magazine and send in coupons for. They would also send a bunch of copies to the Marvel offices where they’d just lay around. One day I decided to see how many of them I could collect from about the place. I have ten or so of them. Not a huge collection.

The third category is comics that a friend sent me. He was working for DC comics and would, on occasion, drop a bunch of comics into a box and mail them to me. It was always fun having a box of comics show up in the mail and seeing what was in there. Of course most of the comics were dreck but that was okay. I got a chance to see and read comics that I never would have bothered to even glance at on my own. Over a year’s time he must have sent me half a dozen boxes which added up to, at least, a few hundred comics. I don’t really need all those piling up around the place anymore.

The last category is old stuff that’s been in my closet for a long time now. I have yet to go through that batch so I’m not exactly sure what’s in there. There are only about six or eight short boxes of comics there but I haven’t looked at them in a decade. The last time I had a big purge of my collection was in the late 1990s and that’s when these boxes were put in the closet. They were the comics that I cared least about in my collection but didn’t want to get rid of. They’re still sitting there.

Most of them are from my high school years. They’re comics that a friend of mine collected by then he quit collecting comics and gave them to me. I’m not saying they have much value but out of all the ones I want to clean out they have the best chance of being worth a little something. I think there are some copies of 1980s X-Men stuff and some Frank Miller Wolverine and Daredevil comics. Beyond that I’m not positive. There are probably a bunch of mediocre 1980 series that I was unsure if I wanted to get rid of them back in the late 1990s so I stuck them in the closet. Well, the closet is full now so it’s time to clear stuff out. Ain’t that the way of life.