Radiant Comics

I’d like to announce that I’m officially abandoning Nikon cameras. Done. I wont be buying another Nikon. “Why is that?”, you may ask. Well let me tell you why. I just inventoried all the digital Nikon equipment that I have bought over the years and each generation of equipment is incompatible with the generation before it. Sure I knew that when I bought it but looking back over it all makes me a little annoyed because much of it didn’t have to be that way. I feel taken advantage of.

I was into digital photography fairly early. In 1999 I bought my first digital camera (not counting the Gameboy camera). It was a 2.1 megapixel Nikon Coolpix 950. I think it cost me about a thousand dollars. That is a considerable amount of money for a camera. Especially one that is considered useless just ten years later.

I don’t regret getting into digital photography early. I’ve enjoyed it a lot and like being a pioneer when it comes to using new tools and equipment to make art. What is annoying me now is how Nikon treated the pioneers such as myself. We weren’t the professionals who mostly waited on the sidelines until Nikon came out with cameras that could use their already purchased and expensive lenses, We were the so called “Pro-sumers” who liked professional and or cutting edge equipment but didn’t make our livings using them.

After I bought that first digital camera I bought add ons for it too. I wanted and external flash but the Coolpix 950 had no hot shoe mount. Instead I spent about hundred dollars on a special Nikon flash bracket that had a hot shoe on it and attached to the camera via a special cable. Plus I bought a Nikon Speedlight flash unit. At least that could be used with other model cameras.

The next camera I bought was in 2002, It was the Nikon Coolpix 5000. I spent about nine hundred dollars for that one. It was a 5 megapixel camera and it had a hot shoe so it didn’t need the bracket for the external flash. The following year I dropped another two hundred dollars on a teleconverter lens and adaptor for it.

In 2005 I bought an eight megapixel Nikon Coolpix 8800. Once again I dropped about nine hundred dollars on it. It has a hot shoe and I can still use the same flash but the teleconverter lens and the flash bracket are useless. It really doesn’t need the lens since it has a much bigger built in lens than the 5000 but it would be nice to have the option. It’s the bracket I’ve really wanted to use though. It would be nice to get my flash a little off camera and change my lighting but the 8800 lacks the special cable plug that the earlier 950 had. Why? I don’t know.

What’s been consistent with these Coolpix cameras has been the swivel LCD. That is a feature I don’t want to do without and which not a lot of cameras have. When I was checking out the latest “Pro-sumer” Coolpix model I was disappointed to find that they’ve nearly abandoned the swivel LCD. It still moves up and down but not side to side. Plus they’ve taken the hot shoe off again. Over all the pro-sumer Coolpix models are a thing of the past and now they are consumer models. The cheaper SLR models are the new pro-sumer ones and I’m not interested in them. No swivel LCD. At least they have a live view LCD now.

So in looking back over my equipment as I look for a new camera to possibly buy I came to the conclusion that Nikon made me abandon a lot of old equipment. That is, to an extent, understandable. It was the beginning of the digital age of photography. But now I look and see that they have also abandoned me. Digital has caught up and they’re back to selling to their pro buyers. Once again understandable. But I’ve never been a huge fan of their pro line. And I refuse to ever look through a viewfinder again. I like shooting from the hip. So I’m out. I’ll be looking for something that better suits me.

I’m a fan of magic markers. As a habit I like to draw my concept sketches in ink. If I draw them in pencil I’ll spend too much time trying to get the drawing right and spend too little time getting the concept right. With ink I know there is no erasing and the drawing will never be perfect so I don’t worry about it being perfect. I work out visual ideas rather than drawing ideas. That comes later.

As a consequence of liking to draw in ink I’m always trying out new magic markers. Especially black ones. I do have a few color marker sets and used to draw with them all the time but for years now I’ve done my preliminary color work, once the realm of the markers, on the computer. So it’s mainly black markers I’m always trying out.

I’ve worked with Sharpie markers before but they had never been a favorite of mine. A Sharpie marker lays down a lot of ink and there is usually a lot of bleed to the line. These are qualities I never was interested in. But when they came out with a refillable stainless steel barreled black Sharpie marker I had to get one. It’s just a cool object.

I’ve had it for a little while but didn’t get to use it too much before now. I’m really liking it. It’s the balance of the marker that I appreciate most. A steel barreled marker is, obviously, heavier than a plastic barreled one. And when I uncap the marker and put the cap onto the other end it becomes weighted so that I don’t have to press down as hard to make a line. I can use a lighter touch and make a wider variety of marks than I can make with a regular Sharpie.

After working on a few pages of concept sketches I was really liking the new steel Sharpie. So much so that I decided to make a few art cards with it. Those are baseball card sized drawings that I usually do on bristol board. I often do those in color so the next time I was at the art supply store I saw a set of 24 color Sharpies and decided to buy them. A 50% off coupon and $15 later I was the proud owner of the markers.

I’ve been having fun using then. The amount of ink they lay down and the small bleed it makes creates a soft quality to the drawings that isn’t present in drawings made with my other marker sets. I lay down areas of ink in parallel lines that follow the shape of the form I am drawing. With other markers these lines have hard edges as stroke meets stroke. With the Sharpies these edges are softer and less apparent. That’s not necessarily better but different. I like different.

I even went to the local office store and got a few more color Sharpies that I didn’t have. I didn’t know it but Sharpie makes “Limited Edition” colors. The ones I bought were all named after coffees. I have no idea why there are special edition colors but I bet they are testing the market to see which ones are popular.

Oddly enough, amongst all of the various color of Sharpies there is only one yellow. Bright yellow. No dull yellows or yellow browns. Sharpies were never made to be art markers and have only recently started to make a lot of colors but it’s still weird that there is only one yellow.

But one yellow is enough for me right now as long as I’m enjoying the soft line of the Sharpie. I’ve even done some little stained color field drawings with them. Fun stuff.

I sure am glad to finally be getting my new web comic site up and running. It has literally taken me years to get to this point. I just checked my files and my first attempt to create a web comic was in December 2005. I’ve started a half dozen more web comics since then all doomed to frustration and failure. That was due to many reasons but the main one being that it takes a whole lot of time to draw a comic strip.

Sure there are plenty of badly drawn comic strips out there that take no time at all to draw. The comic strip world is filled with stories of famous comic strips in which the creator and his assistant(s) whip up a month’s worth of comics in a week and then spend the rest of the month drinking. But in the days when strips were well drawn it would take a full day to make one. At least.

A full day to create a comic strip is fine when you are getting paid a full day’s wage for it but this is a web comic I am making. No payments in sight.

A couple of years ago I made a handful of really nice strips that I liked very much. They were more like Sunday strips. Each was fancy, full color, and bigger than four panels. It took me a week to do each strip. By a week I mean forty hours. That’s a little too much time for a web comic. I turned them into comic strip art prints. I’m going to have to revisit them and maybe post them here sometime.

The other strips I had started were on various subjects. Adventure, sci-fi, magic, and strange surrealist creatures. Some I developed for quite a while and some for only a couple of weeks. What they all had in common was that they were dead ends. I could always see where they were going and I was always frustrated. You know what it came down to? I was bored of drawing comics.

For a guy who has always had to draw comics on his own, I’ve never gotten paid to do them, I’ve drawn a remarkable amount of comics. I estimate that I’ve written, drawn, inked, and lettered at least three hundred pages of comics over a twelve year period. At a page a day, a pace I rarely met, that ends up to be a lot of time over the years dedicated to drawing comics. Without pay I just couldn’t do it any more. I don’t think I’ve drawn a comic page in the last eight years.

I’ve spent the last decade drawing a lot but for my prints and paintings. Not for comics. When I tired to draw a web comic I found my interest in that type of drawing had waned to the point of disinterest.

Comics are a craft. You have to draw things in a certain way to get your point across. There are rules to follow. And there is a lot of repetition. The characters all have to look like the characters from panel to panel. They can’t suddenly look different because I want to draw something different.

In the drawing I have been doing for the last ten years the rules are broader. The drawing is the only thing that exists. There is no following panels where things have to look continuous. I can change everything from drawing to drawing as it suits me. I find that a lot more interesting than drawing one character’s face over and over. That was a problem when trying to make a web comic.

I finally solved the problem with this latest web comic. “Four Talking Boxes” is about conversation. I am more interested in that conversation than I am in drawing people talking over and over so I drew everything in advance. I front loaded it. I drew all of the characters in multiple poses from multiple angles and now manipulate those images to make the strip. It’s not quite cartooning but it will do for now.

All that drawing took a lot of time. It took about eighty hours to finish each character. I started with four characters and then moved to six because it seemed more comfortable. I did all that work last winter and spring and boy did I think it would never be done. But I got it done. And I went on to make many strips from those drawings which will be presented here. I can hardly believe I finally have something presentable. Feels good.

Last week I wrote about a new collection of pre-comics code Steve Ditko comic that I had been reading. “Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1” was it’s name and it got me thinking about how censorship had effected the U.S. comics industry. I’ve been pondering that a bit more this week.

Less is more. Or is it? I have always heard, mostly in the also censored world of movies, that not showing something can be a more effective storytelling device than showing it. You know, first a gun is shown, than a shot is heard, and then a person falls to the ground. We never actually see a person shot. Or stabbed, punched, kicked, or whatever.

The viewer’s imagination is supposed to fill in the blanks with its own horrible vision of the violent act that is somehow more effective than anything the filmmaker could come up with. I always, sort off, bought into this idea because I’m not much of a gore hound so, I guess, it played to my taste.

Now I see that idea is a total crock. First off is the fact that not everyone’s imagination is particularly good. Half the audience may wince at the unshown act while it doesn’t affect the other half at all because their imaginations don’t scare them. Not showing something can’t be relied on as an effective technique because it depends on the individual viewer.

Then there the basic fact is that we are visual animals. When we see things they can affect us and stick with us. When something horrible happens we tell children to look away. Often times people exclaim, “I wish I didn’t see that”. Our eyes are our main reality.

When the Allies in WW2 liberated the death camps they marched all the Germans they could find through them so they could see what they’d done. They didn’t throw a curtain in front of the camps and describe what happened in them. They made people look. No one in their right mind would think not showing them was a more effective method.

I came to the conclusion that the “Not showing” method of story telling is purely because of a censorship. That idea is not invented except in a censored world. It’s exists to help creators make the best of a censored creative environment.

I can see this in the Ditko book. He was doing things that would be censored a couple of years later but now they were just nonchalant ideas. They weren’t exploitive or sensational; they just were. If a guy got stabbed then he ended up with a knife in him. If demons ate people than they might be seen eating people parts.

The violence was all “matter of fact” though. It was done with whatever emphasis the story demanded of it. They bloody, gory special effect of today, are partially at least, a response to being censored and not being able to show that stuff in the past. A lot of people find it fun to show what shouldn’t be shown. But that also only exists in a censored environment.

I write all this because I wonder how many more ways of doing things, both in comics and movies, would have been invented without such censorship. Books which for the most part haven’t been censored in this country have a million ways to deal with all sorts of story elements. It’s no wonder books are usually respected more than movies or comics. They’re not just stuck with gore or no gore.

For the last couple of days I’ve been reading a book I bought this week, “Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1”. It’s a collection of Ditko’s early comic book work from 1953 to 1955. It’s a collection of “Pre-Code” comics.

For those who don’t know, the term “Pre-Code” means before the implementation of, in the late 1950’s, the “The Comics Code Authority”. The CCA was the industry’s way of self-censoring before the government put them out of business.

Just like today when do-gooders crusade against video games, television, music, or movies that they think are ruining the children of America in the 50’s the crusade was against comic books. And it was a very powerful and successful crusade that went all the way to congressional hearings. It nearly killed American comics.

A book I read this year, “Ten Cent Plague”, chronicles the history of the war on comics and lays out it’s human toll. People lost their jobs and never worked in the industry again. It’s not a happy tale.

I bring this all up because I’ve never had a chance to read many of the pre-code horror and crime comics that lead to people being up in arms. I’ve read many EC Comics which are the most famous pre-code horror and crime offerings but they are actually well done, generally tasteful, and mainstream. They stick to the same general rules as any mainstream horror novel of the time. I never quite saw how people could be so against them. But it was a different era and there were plenty of other comics to be against.

I can see how these “Strange Suspense” stories could get people riled up. These comics aren’t made for kids and there is some real grown up physically and psychologically scary stuff in there. It can be as simple as an innocent person trying to do right but suffering a horrible fate anyway to a guy getting stabbed and ending up laying there with a knife sticking out of him.

It’s interesting to read these Ditko stories because everyone involved was making up their own rules on the fly. People had been reading comics since the late Thirties and comics had started growing up as kids grew into adults. New things were starting to happen. You can tell that the creators expected adults to be reading these stories. Or at least eighteen year olds. The CCA put an end to that.

The Comics Code basically said that good must always triumph and in a bloodless way. And that’s how comics were made for decades. Those were the rules that everyone had to play by and though some good comics, even for grown-ups, can be made within those rules they narrow the scope of story telling and squelch creativity and growth.

That’s what censorship does. Stifles things. In reading these comics I can see pre-censorship minds at work. They are using stuff to scare us that wasn’t done post-censorship. Simple stuff but not kids stuff; ideas of hell, suffering, and monsters outside of any notion of human justice. Imagine how comics books could have grown, as the have in other parts of the world, if this censorship never happened.

Even today when the Comic’s Code isn’t much paid attention to it’s effect lingers. Not in what isn’t allowed but in the fact that creators may have rebelled against the code but they are not beyond it yet.

What I mean is that most of today’s comics that are aimed at adults don’t explore pre-code themes that were developing, as seen in these Ditko stories, but are still directly rebelling against what was not allowed for decades.

“Good must always triumph and in a bloodless way” has become “Good doesn’t always triumph and it’s bloody out there”. That is how I’d describe most of the adult aimed superhero/adventure comics I read today. They can be bloody and sometimes the bad guys win. I never realized how much the comics code influenced even today’s non-code books before reading this Ditko book. There was another sensibility starting to develop in the early Fifties that I didn’t know existed. It made me see the sensibilities of today’s creators in a new light.

It’s not that today’s comic books are on the wrong or bad path it’s just that the path is a lot more narrow than it could have been. That’s the effect of censorship even when it’s less than what it used to be. It defined good and bad and those definitions are still with us. Even those who like “bad” are still basically using the same definition as the Comics Code. Comics would do well to get off that narrow path. If only others were allowed of it back in the 1950’s.