Radiant Comics

It’s a quiet late summer day and I’ve got nothing going on. I got another flat tire while out riding my bicycle today. Well, it actually didn’t go all the way flat. I’ve been having some strange flat tires like that this summer. For years and years I never once heard my tire go flat. Usually I’m riding along, the wheel goes soft, and then the wheel quickly goes flat. The whole process takes ten seconds and there is no riding on it after that.

These new type of flat tires are different in that I hear a hissing as the air escapes. But then the hissing eases and, with about three quarters of the air left in the tire, turns into a slow leak. That happened two me at least three times this summer. Each time I had enough air in the tire to make it back home. Strange.

I’ve attempted to get some new treads for my bike tires but so far I’ve had no luck. With no bike shop close by I’ve been looking on the internet for some but it turns out that it’s not easy to shop for bike treads that way. There are so many different kinds and different sizes. I got one from a bike shop that looked promising. It had some extra thickness to the tread so as to provide a bit more protection against punctures which was something I was looking for. I think the thinness of my current treads plus a bit of wear have left my tires vulnerable to punctures.

When I went to put the tread onto my tire I found that I couldn’t get it to fit. It was listed at the correct size 700/25c (I’m not even sure what that means I’m from the days when tires were measured in inches) and was the right circumference but the extra rubber in the middle of the tire made it too hard to bend and as a result was too wide. I couldn’t force both sides of the tread under the bead of the rim. It wouldn’t go no mater what I did. Much to my dismay I had to pack them up and return them. Now I’m looking around again.

The second strange thing with my bike was when it was making a clanking noise. Since I ride outside in all sorts of weather my bike doesn’t get treated delicately. The phrase, “Ridden hard and put away wet” is literal when it comes to my bicycle. I try not to ride in the rain but I sometimes get caught in it. Plus I ride after it rains which gets the bike and me wet anyway. After a rain ride is also when the bike makes strange noises. Usually a day or two after a rain ride I have to lubricate various parts again as the rain washes stuff away. The noises stop after everything is good and greasy again. But not this last time.

After a rain ride I started hearing a strange clanking sound. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from but I eventually tracked it down to the pedal crank. It was clanking or clicking as I pushed down on either pedal. It would take some force though. If I got off the bike and turned the pedals it wouldn’t make a noise. I had to be bearing down on it. “Weird”, was what went through my head. It was quite a distraction because the noise was fairly loud. After I got the bike home I got my WD40 out and lubed up the crank and everything else. It somehow didn’t do any good.

I must have cycled for two or three weeks with the bike making that noise. I lubed it up everyday for a week and that didn’t help. I got caught in the rain one time and I hoped that might help, y’know the rain giveth and the rain taketh away, but that didn’t do anything. The clanking noise was beginning to get really annoying. I’d never heard a bike make a noise like that before. I was beginning to think that I was going to have to take apart the crank to see what was in there. Then I had another rain ride and the noise went away. I have no idea why. It makes no sense to me but why would it since I never found out what was making that noise in the first place.

Despite flat tires and clacking noises I’ll have to declare this bike a success. It’s my third summer riding it and though it might not be considered a great bike by aficionados I’ll have to say that it’s done the job for me. I have no idea what it’s stats are or what it’s made out of so I can’t even tell you that. I bought it from an internet bike company (not available in stores) in the spring of 2009. It’s pretty well made as I’ve put it through a lot. I don’t think I’d want to ride a fancy $2000 bike out in the rain and snow but this one I will.

One thing I never got to finish doing was decorating the bike. It’s an awfully bland looking thing. It’s grey and not very flashy. When I first got it it looked so dull to me that I decided to spruce it up with a little electrical tape. I had a few rolls of colored half inch tape lying around and I wrapped some of the tubes with it. It was looking quite Mondrian-ish except I ran out of tape. I only got it a third of the way done and it’s remained that way ever since. It looks better that it did all monochrome grey but I always wanted to finish it. Maybe someday. Funny thing is that one of my friends thought the bike was really old. It was the tape that made him think so. I guess because usually it’s old things that get taped up and not new things. But not my things. I’ve used that tape to decorate all sorts of mundane objects. I’me going to have to get more of it. Maybe when I get that new tire tread.

What boring and trivial things have been going on lately? I’m glad you asked because who doesn’t like to revel in the trivial and mundane? Well, most people don’t but I do. At least on the level of writing about such mundane things because that’s all the stuff that gets forgotten over time. Don’t get me wrong, I also like writing about larger ideas that may or may not influence our lives and thinking but the ephemeral nature of the small stuff also appeals to me. It can fill your head up one day and be forgotten the next. I’ve written blogs on subjects that I don’t even remember writing any more. It’s the only record I have of those small things I did or small thoughts that went through my head. I find records interesting.

I think that a hundred years from now historians are going to love this age we’re in. I must have heard on a dozen documentaries over the years how great it was for historians to have people’s personal letters of correspondence. It gave them insights into the minds and worlds of the letter writers. Then said historian would usually go on to say how sad it was that people no longer wrote such letters. I guess the telephone changed all that. But now we’ve got blogs. Lots and lots of blogs documenting everything from the mundane to the ridiculous. Some people even document the intimate comings and goings of their dating lives. You won’t find that in a letter from the Civil War. Future historians might think, “Holy crap after the internet was invented these people wouldn’t shut up”. I wonder if this is all a temporary thing or if people will continue to blog well into the future?

Anyway here is my first bit of mundanity for the day. At the comic shop this week I bought an action figure. The only reason that is news in any way shape or form is because it is the first action figure I’ve bought since about 2003. At first I thought that date was 2001 as I have a Spider-Man action figure that I bought when the movie came out but Then I looked at the date on my Hulk action figure’s foot and it said 2003. I must have bought that one when the Hulk movie came out. I was never an action figure collector but throughout the 1990s I was a bit of an action figure accumulator. I’d often hit the toys stores at lunch time with some of my toy collector friends. Usually I’d buy things from the sale bin while my friends purchased whatever it was they were looking for. I haven’t bought any action figures since 2003 because of room and money. It seemed like a waste of my limited budget to buy an action figure when I could be buying more hardcover comic collections. Why drop twenty bucks on some toy when that same twenty can get me the latest Conan hardcover collection? The toys were usually impulse purchases but that impulse left me less money for the comics which I generally preferred. And the toys took up room. There is never enough room for an accumulation let alone a collection.

And what action figure did I get you ask? (You’re just full of questions today.) I got a “Flashpoint” Cyborg figure. Yes that’s nearly a completely random figure to choose. I have no real reason for picking him except that he was pretty much the only character in the “Flashpoint” series that I liked and I just felt like buying an action figure. I’ve kind of wanted to buy one all summer, for whatever reason, and finally gave in to the impulse. Cyborg, also of the New Teen Titans (circa 1981), seemed like the best one to get. He looks pretty cool all tough and machine-like. Now he just stands there on my drawing table.

The next bit of mundane news is that I don’t like the funny noise my XBox 360 is making when I start it up. I already had to have it fixed a while a go when I got the red ring of death. I’m pretty sure it can’t be that again but what the heck do I know? It makes a semi-loud hard-drive-winding-up sound when I turn the thing on. That sound does not fill me with confidence. It makes me want to redo and modernize my whole TV setup but I really don’t want to do that. It’s too much bother.

The rains of hurricane (now tropical storm) Irene fall as I write this. Things has been calm for me as my home still has power and has no basement to flood but there is a lot of flooding and power outages in the wider outside world. I always find it a little bit odd when people who are not personally affected but a storm or similar act of nature are disappointed when the disaster isn’t bigger. What is that about human nature? I think people like to feel smug if the warnings and weathermen are wrong. Not that they were wrong in this case but the worst case scenario that was planned on didn’t happen. I think that’s a good thing and nothing to be smug about. But I’m a plan for the worst case kind of guy. Though I must admit that the three days of “Fear and anxiety TV” before the storm was a bit much. It will get you wound up even if you’re trying to avoid such a winding.

To bring us back to Cyborg and the “Flashpoint” series from DC Comics this summer I’ll give a quick summary of my thoughts on said series. The final issue of the actual “Flashpoint” series has yet to come out but most of the side mini-series have finished. I was looking for some new comics to try out this past summer and so read a bunch of “Flashpoint” stuff. It was generally okay but nowhere near great. The greatest flaw of the various mini-series was their lack of endings. The first two issues were decent but the third final ones were not. Since the last chapter of the story is in the fifth issue of the main “Flashpoint” series most of the other mini-series just kind of stopped. Confusingly so in the case of the Aquaman series. Most of the DC stuff I bought this summer won out over the Marvel stuff based on price. With DC “Holding the line at $2.99” and most of Marvel’s books that I saw being priced at $3.99 I bought mostly DC comics. Four bucks is too high a price to pay to try out a single issue of a comic. I’d rather pay twenty bucks and get a collection of a bunch of comics. It’s about the same price per issue but is in the format it’s meant to be read in (“Written for trade paperback” as the saying goes). Unless Marvel and DC give me a reason to buy a monthly comic why would I?

Anyway that’s the word from the stuff that’s going on in my mind right now. I think I’ve forgotten it all already but maybe someday I’ll appreciate it.

Sometimes I find it amazing that people can grow attached to meaningless inanimate objects. Me included. This thought pops into my head because of a crock pot. There is a pretty meaningless inanimate object if there ever was one. I’m not even sure how long ago I bought this crock pot. It might be ten or fifteen years ago. I’ve lost track. I originally bought it to keep my chili warm at my annual barbecue. Of course I cooked the chili in it too but I could already do that on the stove top. I now prefer to cook it in the crock pot but keeping the chili warm all day was the original motivation for purchase.

I’ve been meaning to replace that crock pot for a while now. The ceramic bowl that holds the food had developed some cracks over the years. Not surface cracks either. Some go right through to the bottom of the pot. It was still solid and didn’t leak or anything but it looked like trouble sooner or latter. I certainly didn’t want it to break in the middle of cooking something.

So this annual barbecue I decided to get a new crock pot and I did. I usually make two different types of chili and therefore have a second smaller crockpot to keep the second batch hot. I left the small crock pot in the closet and used the cracked one for the last time. I figured I may as well throw it away dirty. The crock pot did its duty well that last time. The party was over and I left it outside for the rain to clean a little before I threw it away.

I was planning all along to break the crock pot up to make it smaller to throw away. I do this all the time with stuff. I like my garbage to be compact, neat, and easy for the garbage men to handle. I find this avoids messes on garbage pick-up days. Messes that either I or the garbage men might create due to unsecured trash.

Then and odd thing happened. Well, maybe it wasn’t too odd due to human nature and our ability to get attached to things but I let the crock pot sit around for a week or so. In my defense there wasn’t any room in the garbage can that first garbage day due to all the party detritus but I also couldn’t bring myself to outright break the crock pot. After all it may have been a disaster waiting to happen but at the moment it still worked. It was the functioning crock pot that I had cooked a lot of meals in for the last decade and a half. But I got over it.

About that week later when I was finally taking down a sun shelter that was put up for the party I decided to smash up the crock pot. One hit with a piece of wood I had laying about the place and it shattered like it always wanted to. Easily. And then the spell was broken. It was just another bit of garbage. Any attachment I had to it was gone. I crumpled the metal part up a bit, put it all in a bag, and set it in the garbage can. Boom. Over. Can’t even figure out why I was attached to it in the first place. Such is the world of objects.

I’ve never been one who has a hard time getting rid of stuff. Sure I have a lot of stuff and generally only throw stuff out when it’s useless or I need the room but I’m in no way a hoarder. After watching TV shows about hoarders I’ve heard friends wonder if they themselves were hoarders. Not that they were but it put the fear of getting like that into them. That thought hasn’t crossed my mind because I have a process for getting rid of things. If I need it.

I’ve found that tucking things away doesn’t help me if I want to get rid of stuff. When I tuck something away and forget about it and then find it latter it’s like a buried treasure. It’s finding something forgotten in an obscure box or drawer. Re-birthing and magnifying whatever little attachment I had to the thing. Tucking things away can make the unimportant seem more important.

Instead of tucking things away I’ll leave them out. Most of the stuff I get rid of I chuck right into the garbage can. There is no problem. But some things I can’t think up a reason to get rid of but also don’t have a good reason to keep. These are the items that can be tricky if there is a small emotional attachment to them. So I leave them out. And they usually get in the way of things. After a few days I generally get tired of the item and just want it gone. The small emotional attachment I had to it gets overwhelmed by the annoyance of keeping it. It’s then thrown away never to be though of again.

One last thought about that sun shelter. Often the last thing I take down after my party makes me a little wistful. It means it’s all over. Another year has come and gone. I put up a volleyball net in the back yard every year and often that is the last thing to come down. Occasionally I let it linger for a few days. I don’t want time to pass but it always does. In recent years I’ve been taking the volleyball net down right away to see if I can head off the wistfulness and sometimes that even works.

As a matter of fact I took down the net the next day but for various reasons left the sun shelter up. Then in rained a lot the following week. I sure couldn’t pack the sun shelter up wet and so it stayed there. It lingered. I wasn’t thinking at all about my after the barbecue wistfulness until the thing was down and my backyard got back to normal. Then I was like, “Oh, look at that. Another year’s barbecue is over.” Yeah, I’m a sentimental old softie.

“Realism”. That’s a tricky word. Way back in art school I learned that there were three different types of realism. The first type was when someone was trying to control the the viewer’s perceptions as much as possible and make them think that the painting they were looking at was a three dimensional living thing. High Renaissance art that makes you say, “Wow, they look like they’re alive”.

The second type of realism is encapsulated by the Courbet quote, “Show me a angel and I’ll paint it”. It’s not real if it doesn’t exist in the real world. Painting an angel to make it look as if it were alive is not realism but fantasy by this definition.

The third type of realism has an even more modern take. It doesn’t treat a canvas as a window into another world but as a flat two dimensional picture plane. That’s what it is so that’s how they’ll treat it. Most modern abstract art comes out of this notion of realism.

I bring this up because lately I’ve been pondering the notion of how realism in super hero comics has changed over the years. Plenty of super hero comics want nothing to do with realism but those that do seem to follow similar patterns at similar times. And the notion of realism changes over time.

I’m not overly familiar with comics before the 1960s so realism in comics for me starts with Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko in the early 1960s. Spider-Man is the perfect example of that. Peter Parker was an ordinary teenager who got super powers and still had the problems of a normal teenager. That was realism in super hero comics and things stayed there for decades. Super heroes on the same team bickered with each other, had love triangles, and couldn’t express themselves properly all the time. Always misunderstandings and confusion as in real life.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s or so that I noticed a new type of realism creeping into super hero comics. That is super heroes as belonging to a corporate structure. Some were recruited by corporations, some were hunted by them, and some joined up for the paycheck. I read Valiant Comic’s “Harbinger” for the first time recently and it seemed like a good example of this type of realism. The bottom line is that you can’t become a super hero without catching the gaze of some corporation or other that wants to exploit your powers for good or evil.

It was sometime in the late 1990s, mostly in Wildstorm comics, that I noticed a new and now prevalent type of realism. The militarization of super heroes. It took until the 2000s to take hold at Marvel and DC but now it’s the norm. Instead of not being able to escape the gaze of corporations new super heroes can’t escape the gaze of the military. The military wants them as weapons. I think that most of the super heroes in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe work for the military. A lot of the old guard comics, Spider-Man, Batman, and Superman for example, escape these trends because their realities are so well established but a lot of new super heroes are militarized.

On top of that realism through militarization I notice another trend. A sub trend I’d call it. I call it micro-realism. Applying realism to a small part of something that is otherwise not realistic. It usually has to do with science. Fantasy realism and science have gone hand in hand for decades. We now think it’s quaint that all through the 1950s and 1960s science, in the form of radiation, gave so many heroes and villains their powers. Back then atomic power was going to cure all of our ills. It never worked out that way but fantasy science used that hope to tell stories.

Sometime in the 1980s atomic energy gave way to “Genetic Engineering”. At least in fantasy science and super hero stories. All through the 1990s and continuing on today lots of super heroes were given powers by genetically engineering them. Genes are the new atomic energy. Nowadays new super heroes are built and not made by radioactive accidents.

But both of those science fantasy ideas are big ideas. In today’s world of super hero realism it’s all about the little ideas. People come up with small takes on things. Micro-realism. Like Spider-Man’s organic web shooters from the first Spidey movie. No longer did Peter Parker invent mechanical web shooters but they were part of the super powers her gained by being bitten by the radioactive spider. Why this change you ask? Because a person making the movie liked the idea. He thought it was more “Realistic”. Sorry it’s not. I don’t care either way but I don’t buy a realism argument in something that is clearly fantasy.

That’s what I find strange about this new micro-realism. It’s a little oil slick of realism in a huge ocean of fantasy. Others find it cool but I find it distracting. I find stories with micro-realism in them to often be train wrecks. And it’s the micro-realism that derails things for me. The micro-realism works if you only look at it in a small box where it can easily define itself but as soon as you take it out of its box and relate it to the rest of the world its realism disappears.

A perfect example of this for me was in reading the comic “Ultimate Nightmare”. The story takes place in the highly militarized “Ultimate Universe” of Marvel’s and I was enjoying it until I was baffled by a bit of micro-realism. Colossus is a super hero whose body turns into “Living Organic Steel”. I assume it’s his whole body since he gets taller when he transforms but it may be just his skin. Who knows? I’ve heard different things at different times. Anyway, the Falcon, who is a military guy in the Ultimate Universe, has to take Colossus on with only a hand gun. Colossus is bullet proof but the Falcon deduces that Colossus’ eyes must not be organic steel because if they were then they wouldn’t be able to work properly. So the Falcon puts his gun up to Colossus’ eye and threatens to pull the trigger unless he surrenders. Colossus surrenders.

That is a bit of micro-realism that makes me go, “Huh?”. Eyes won’t work if they’re made out of organic steel but kidneys will? Why is that? Even if just his skin was organic steel how does that function? You’ll die in minutes without your skin doing its job. If a brain made out of organic steel works why can’t an eye? It doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Outside the box of “Organic steel can’t be light sensitive” everything falls apart.

This is micro-realism to me. Take a small idea that you think is cool but don’t think it through too much. “How does Colossus see if his eyes are steel and can’t respond to light? They can’t so his eyes must still be normal”. I can’t stop there though. I can’t stop at one question if it leads to another. “If his eyes can’t respond to light because they’re steel then how does his steel skin sweat, absorb oxogen, fell anything, or perform its other functions?”. Micro-realism takes me right out of the story. It’s often dumb trying to masquerade as clever. Drives me crazy.

So how do I like my new laptop, a thirteen inch Macbook Air, after using it for a couple of weeks you ask? Well it turns out that I like it just fine. As a matter of fact it’s really nice. Keep in mind that my old one was six and a half years old. That made it a bit slow. It was completely unable to play or stream HD video. The old processor just couldn’t handle it. Playing video isn’t the first thing I do on my laptop but having one that actually plays today’s videos is a good thing.

The first thing I need my laptop for is writing. That was also the first problem I had. Up until I bought this new laptop I used a little known writing program called “Idea Knot”. It was simple and free. I took to it years ago and whoever makes it hasn’t updated it in ages. Turns out that my new laptop won’t run Idea Knot. It has something to do with the program being made for the old Power PC processors and those are no longer supported in Apple’s new “Lion” operating system. That was a major inconvenience.

I demoed another writing program years ago called “Scrivener”. I kind of liked it but it was shareware and I never liked it enough to shell out $45 for it. It’s much more powerful than Idea Knot but most of it’s power is wasted on me. But I decided that Scrivener was my best bet for a writing program that suited my taste. I downloaded the demo again on my new computer.

Now I faced a real problem. I had to get my Idea Knot files into Scrivener. Not an easy task. I had six years worth of blogs and comic reviews in Idea Knot and since the program organizes things by a hierarchical tree view saved as a single file it wasn’t a matter of just opening that file with the new program. Scrivener also has a tree view but with one less branch and it couldn’t open Idea Knot files and have the same formatting. I certainly didn’t want to cut and paste hundreds of blogs into hundreds of new Scrivener folders.

As a long time computer user I have a lot of experience trying to open files in various different programs so I put that experience to the test. If a program doesn’t want to open a file straight up it’s best to look for an Import/Export function in the program’s menu. That can give you a lot more options. I quickly found a menu item in Scrivener named “Import and Split”. It turns out that will take a single text file and split it into Scrivener folders based on when it runs into whatever symbol, such as %, that you choose.

I already knew that I could export an Idea Knot folder containing it’s subfolders as a single plain text file so now all I had to do was figure out how to get that to open correctly in Scrivener. Luckily I’m familiar with InDesign and it’s “Find and Replace” feature. Since Idea Knot’s subfolder names were saved in plain text with <<<’s above them and >>>’s below them I was able to delete all the arrow symbols I didn’t need and turn the ones before the title into a single symbol. The rest was using “Import and Split”. I was so happy that worked because it saved me a lot of time. It still took me a couple of hours but it would have taken me twenty times as long to cut and paste. After that was done I could get back to using my new laptop like normal.

The first thing I noticed was how thin and light the Macbook Air is. I’ll pick it up and move it a lot more than the old one. The battery in my old Macbook Pro only held about an hour’s charge so it was tethered to it’s power cord almost all of the time. The new one has a battery life rated at about seven hours so I don’t keep it plugged in all the time as I did the old one. It being unplugged and light leads me to pick it up and move it around the room more than I ever did the old one. I move it to the couch or my drawing table on a whim. I don’t even think about it. That’s a big difference in my habit.

Also for the first time I use my laptop on my lap! The old one ran too hot to do that. I always had it on a drawing board that went across the arms of my chair. It was also a bit noisy with the fan going a lot of the time and the hard drive spinning. Those weren’t really major problems but I’m amazed at how much more pleasant it is with them gone. The solid state flash based drive in the Macbook Air might not have as much room to store stuff on but it sure is quieter.

I’m surprised at how little the glossy screen bothers me. Under the store lights I really didn’t like it but being that I don’t have endless rows of ceiling lights at my house there isn’t much for the glossy screen to reflect. Since a computer screen emits light there is no need for an over the shoulder light as if it were a book. So far the extra reflectiveness hasn’t mattered. That’s a good thing.

It’s taking a bit to get used to the multi touch gesture support on the track pad. My old computer didn’t have that. It had a little track pad and a button bar. In this new on the whole track pad is a button and you can use two fingers to make different gestures that makes the computer do different things. I’m not even sure what they all are yet but I do know that moving two fingers makes a page scroll. That’s pretty cool. I used a mouse with my old laptop but so far I’ve been using just the track pad with the new one. It really is an improvement.

After buying the Macbook Air I got chance to use a friends MacbookPro. It was the same thirteen inch model I would have purchased. It seemed so loud and heavy. I’m really glad I went with the Macbook Air. Overall there is not much new that I can do with my new laptop that I couldn’t do with my old one but it does everything better. And in the end that is more than enough.