Radiant Comics

Ahhh… the struggle of the modern comic book reader. Whether to spend money on monthly comic books or wait until they are collected in trade paperback form. Some thoughts have gone through my head on that subject lately and I’d like to get them down in pixels.

I have always liked and still do like monthly comics but my taste tends to run to the more obscure non-mainstream comics. Since I like a lot of stuff that doesn’t come out very often I pick up the comics as they appear in the shop. A lot of times I’ll even pick up the collected version of a comic I’ve been buying as it came out. I recently bought “Short Comings” by Adrian Tomine. A story I originally bought as it was being serialized in his comic “Optic Nerve”. Only an issue a year (at best) was released so it took a long time to finish the story. I don’t mind buying it twice because I want books like that to succeed and I like reading them in both forms. And let’s face it buying six comics over six years and then a collected edition isn’t really that much dough.

I can still be seen picking up an occasional Marvel or DC book but I rarely would buy both forms of their comics. Mainstream super hero books usually come out on a regular monthly schedule. If I were to buy the comics and the trade of the same story that would take up a lot of shelf space. Plus since mainstream collected trades come out so quickly after a series ends I wouldn’t want the trade as I probably just finished reading the same story. No, it’s one or the other with Marvel and DC. But which one?

For the past year or so it’s been, “Wait for the collected edition”. It was the space that ads take up that first made me decide that. A monthly Marvel or DC comic has twenty two pages of story and ten pages of ads not counting covers (one cover three ads). Some months Marvel puts eight extra ad pages in. That’s crazy. That means on the shelf that used to fit four hundred comics only three hundred fit. All for ads I don’t care about. Collected editions have no ads.

Another reason I’ve abandoned monthly mainstream books is “writing for the trade” syndrome. Marvel and DC comics used to be: open with a splash page, tell the story, and end with a cliff hanger. The reader was left wanting more. That month wait between issues was part of the comic reading experience. Their periodic nature made them exciting. Now since almost every mainstream comic is collected into a larger edition most writers don’t bother with cliff hangers and trying to keep readers comic back from month to month. They’d rather have the reader of the trade not notice the seams between issues. That’s easier with no cliffhangers. Nowadays monthly stories often just end abruptly. I may as well be a collected edition reader.

One comic that has been doing an exceptional job of getting me excited to come back month after month is “The Walking Dead”. It executes the classic splash page, story, and cliff hanger structure beautifully. It even uses a preview of the next month’s cover as a story teaser. That is something that really hasn’t been done this well before and leaves the reader with a sort of double cliff hanger as you try to suss out what is going to happen by examining next month’s cover. They are sometimes purposefully obscure or misleading. In a good way. If mainstream books were more like “The Walking Dead” I’d certainly be buying more monthlies.

The third reason that I’ve noticed affecting me lately is that comic book covers don’t matter any more. I’ve always said that a good comic book cover has three elements: good design, good drawing, and it tells a story. That last part “it tells a story” is what has always given comic books covers cachet in our society. Show anyone a comic book cover that tells a story, even a goofy 1960’s one, and they respond positively to it. That was the comic book cover’s place in our culture for decades. They told you a story with a single image. Book covers didn’t do that, nor movie posters, nor TV ads.

Comic book covers gave you a story with a single page of words and images. They communicated in a instant. They tried to hook you in. Now comic book covers just sit there. Since Marvel and DC want to now use the cover art for licensing purposes they want it to be more generic. No stories are told and often the characters are just standing there. That doesn’t really entice me to by the book. Let’s face it, if the company doesn’t care enough to put the effort into its covers why am I going to care out them. They don’t care. I don’t care. That’s one of the reasons I like the more expensive (though not really when you add up the prices of the individual comics) hard cover collection. Time and care have gone into making them look good. Sure you don’t get a classic comic book cover on it but the paper and binding is nicer and sometimes you’ll even get some good design.

Yep, it’s been only the collected editions of Marvel and DC for me. Those are the ones they seem to put the most care into so those are the ones I get. I can only count on the smaller publishers to care about actual comic books so those are the only monthlies I buy. That’s how it’s shaken out for me.

Lately, once again, I’ve been working on some comics. I haven’t completed anything in the area of comics that I would consider successful in a long time. I’ve worked on comics in fits and starts and completed a little thing here and there but nothing good enough to work on any further. Nothing has turned into anything real.

I’ve been working on paintings and prints but have been wanting to make a book of some sort. I like books. Sure I could fill a book with reproductions of my prints and paintings but that doesn’t really interest me. I need the book to say something more than, “Here is a bunch of stuff”. Hence I am lead to a favorite medium of mine: comics.

That is when I face the next problem. The same one I’ve faced for years: comics are a lot of work. Paintings, prints, and photos are also a lot of work but each takes less time to explore an idea that making comics does. A single painting can take me as much as 120 hours of work or I can do one in one in six hours. I can choose to explore many ideas quickly or one for a while. There can be variety in size and execution depending on what I decide I want the painting to be about. There is no such freedom with comics.

If I were to do a comic book by myself it would take me about ten to fifteen hours to complete one page. That is a long time. When you multiply that by the number of pages it would take to tell a story you can see why comics are a commercial art medium and very few artists do “art for art’s sake” choose comics as their means of expression. A standard twenty two page comic, which is a small amount of space in which to express ones self, would take a person (at my speed which I consider about average) every weekend for half a year to complete. That’s a lot of time and work. It’s also why I haven’t been interested in making comics for years now. Nobody is going to pay me to do it and it’s not worth my “art for art’s sake” time.

Writing-wise I can cover more topics and ideas in this blog than I can in a comic. That doesn’t mean I like blogs better than comics it just means that a comic is a whole lot of work and there are easier ways of expressing myself since this is not a commercial venture. Hell, over the years, a lot of cartoonists have discovered that it’s way easier to write a cartoon that to draw one so they hire out the drawing work and make more money with their time. Once again, it is a lot of work to draw a comic. There is a reason that the vast majority of amateur web comics are poorly drawn or cut and paste jobs. It cuts down on time and lots of web comics are all about the joke. Not the drawing.

But still I get ideas for comics that pass through my mind. I’ve been working some of them out on paper but I’m not there yet. The problem is that I am not interested in creating a narrative story that is standard for comics. Act one, act two, act three. It’s just too much work and I only have the narration to express myself. I find that too limiting. I want something new.

So I’ve been working on more of a “unified art theory” approach to the thing. Sounds good but I’m not quite sure what that means. And it’s my idea. I have been taking some of my drawings, paintings, and prints and tying them together into a single expression. Ha. Like that’s easy. Still, it allows me to try and make a book like I want and still not be tied to always drawing panels on a page with one directly following the next like unrelenting little soldiers. I have no idea how it will turn out or if I will ever finish it beyond a few pages in the concept stage but I’ll give it a try for a while. I like unified things. If only I knew what I was doing. Such is life.

I watched the movie “Vanilla Sky” the other night. I had seen it before (years ago) and was ambivalent about it. I didn’t remember the movie much except that it had some good stuff in it but I was disappointed by it. Not overly so but just a little. In watching it a second time all these years later I liked it much better. I think it falls into a category of movies that work better with the second viewing.

I believe the problem lies, with this particular movie, in the fact that halfway through a “mystery” is introduced. I put the word mystery in quotes because it is not a real mystery. In a real mystery you have a chance at solving it. A classic whodunnit story introduces a whole bunch of characters, reveals a crime, shows clues and red herrings, and then challenges the reader (or watcher) to figure out who done it. You have a chance to figure it out if you want to. I prefer to watch the mystery unfold than to try figure it out but in the bad ones I figure it out without even trying.

The problem with “Vanilla Sky” is that the mystery format is not really followed. Sure there are a couple of “clues” but those are not nearly enough to figure things out and the storytelling gets purposefully weird in the middle. All of this creates confusion. A good quarter of the film, near the end, is confusing and caused me to no longer be into the world of the film. At the end it is all explained and everything makes sense but it’s too late because my head is already elsewhere.

I liked it more this second time through. I remembered the reveal so everything that happened made sense. Even though the character (Tom Cruise) was confused I wasn’t anymore. It made for a better movie watching experience. I’m not sure what the movie makers could have done differently to make the first time viewing better. If this is the kind of story they wanted to tell it’s tough to do conventionally. I think some movies are just better the second time through. Knowing the reveal helps the viewer understand everything that is happening in the world. The problem is that most people will never watch a second time. It’s a movie making conundrum.

The second thought I have about a movie is, “Whatever happened to the movie ‘Diner’ (1982)”? All through the Eighties I couldn’t escape that film. It was on every critics “Top Films of Whatever” list and was always being referred to. It was “The Film That Defined a Generation” and the soundtrack was ubiquitous. I only realized recently that I haven’t heard it mentioned or read about it in maybe a decade. I just checked and it only rates a 7.1 (not bad, really) on the Internet Movie Database. What happened for that movie to fall so out of favor? I haven’t seen it since about 1984 or so and barely remember it but I remember being annoyed by its omnipresence for years. It was as culturally relevant, both critically and popularly, as “Pulp Fiction” (1994) was but “Pulp Fiction” shows no signs of going away. The world is a mystery.

One final thing. The movie “Reign of Fire” is really bad. Everything that is wrong with big Hollywood movies is in that film. It’s not even entertainingly bad. Stay away!

Being a computer user and my preference being an Apple computer I often check in with a website called Mac Daily News. It gathers all of the Apple related news into one place. A lot of the news is about those big old music companies trying to get some leverage on Apple’s iTunes music store so they can dictate to Apple how they want to do business. Like they do with brick and mortar CD stores.

The iTunes music store is set up so that the buyer doesn’t have to shell out for a whole album. Every song is sold for a dollar whether it’s good or bad. You can buy the whole album too for about ten bucks. This is a good deal if there are more than ten songs on the album. But the record companies hate it.

Record companies are used to charging a premium for a hit song. Let’s say you heard a great song on the radio. You used to have two choices to purchase it. Buy the album for $17.99 (before the internet and lawmakers made them lower their illegally inflated prices) or buy the CD single for 4.99 or so. Now you have the choice to buy that song for one dollar. Record companies hate that and I can see why. Clearly they make less money. But I can also see why people would love to pay one dollar for just the song they want.

Most music, according to the charts, is bought by kids and young adults. There are a lot of reasons for this, including the fact that most of the marketing dollars are aimed at them, but one of the reasons that I really hadn’t though about (before the notion popped into my head) was album fatigue.

On the Mac Daily News website it is always pointed out (by whoever is commenting on the news for that website) that the album is an artificial construct invented by the record companies to make more money. As I pointed out if you like a song you have to buy an album of songs to get it. The illusion of value exists because there are many songs on an album and per song it is cheaper than buying them all as $4.99 singles. But you’re buying them without ever hearing them. Maybe you’ll like them maybe you wont. Some musicians have embraced the concept of the album as a whole work (Pink Floyd) but for the vast majority they are a collection of nearly random songs.

I noticed as I grew older that when I would mention a new album by so and so more and more of my friends would turn their noses up and say something like, “Eh, I’m done with albums”. Often they would mention whole albums they bought where they only liked one song. I often put this down to them getting older and not as into music anymore. As a consequence they weren’t a choosy as they should have been and got some stinkers for albums. But now I’m rethinking that conclusion.

I did the math and stumbled onto the concept of “album fatigue”. Let’s run some numbers. For the sake of argument I’ll say that every album has ten songs. By the time a person reaches their twenty fourth year or so they probably have a hundred albums. That’s a thousand songs. Now I’ll break down how much someone likes their music collection. Ten percent great albums. They like eight out of ten songs the other two are just okay. Ten percent lousy albums. They like one song, four are just okay, and five suck. Forty percent good albums. They like four songs, four are just okay, and two suck. Forty percent mediocre albums. They like two songs, five are just okay, and three suck.

Those are just guesses based on my own experience but they leave us with this: out of a thousand songs: 330 songs they like, 420 songs that are just okay, 250 songs that suck. That is an overwhelming amount of mediocrity in a music collection. As a person gets older and has less time to listen to music that person has a one in three chance of hearing a song that they like when listening to their own record collection. It’s no wonder people stop buying albums and listening to music. You get to the point where so much dreck is accumulated that it’s not worth it to ever buy another album. I think this is what happens to people and why they are embracing the age of MP3s and buying just the songs they like. Why not just add the songs you like into the mix. It’s easy with MP3s.

I think the age of the record album is definitely over. The musicians and big music companies may not know it yet but it is. Album fatigue is almost everybody’s destiny.

Damn, my hands are burning. I must have little microscopic cuts or something on them that soap has gotten into. I was putting the plow blade on my John Deere riding mower since winter is coming and that involves tools and mucking around under the machine. I have a couple of obvious scrapped knuckles but I must have some unobvious abrasions too. It’s not really very painful. I just noticed it as I began to type. I don’t work too often with tools in such as manner so I have no idea how to avoid such burning hands.

But anyway… there are lot of things that I don’t know how to do. An air freshener almost outsmarted me this week. I’ve never used much air freshener and am not wise to their ways but I decided to try one out since I never liked the stale air of a closed up house in winter. I got one of those cheap cone shaped ones. I figured I’d start out with the dollar model and see if I liked it. It has a long cone of plastic on top and a short base. I sussed out to spin the cone but then nothing. It didn’t seem to open. There is a small hole on top and if you squeeze it some scent comes out but that hardly seemed to do much. I put it down, came back latter and managed to figure out to pull the cone upwards with quite a bit of force. I had tried this earlier but it didn’t budge. The stickiness of the gelatinous stuff inside keeps the cone in place and you have to break its seal before you can pull it up to open it. Now plenty of scent comes out and the room smells like a chemical toilet. I might go with the stale smell of winter.

I still have to do a bit more work with my hands tomorrow. I have to put the wheel weights and chains on the tires of my riding mower. Without them I won’t get much traction as I try and clear my driveway of snow. The wheel weights are cumbersome but not much of a problem to put on. The chains on the other hand… With the advent of snow tires and then all weather tires I don’t think most people have anything to do with tire chains anymore. That’s a good thing. They are a pain in the ass to put on. Maybe a pro working in a garage snaps them on real easily but I don’t. They have to be wrapped around the tire and then hooked on just right. There is no give in chain and if they’re too loose they’ll fall off with the first plow. That’s what happened to me last year. In the middle of clearing the driveway both tires had their chains fell off on me. I was so aggravated. Luckily my aggravation was relieved when I was able to put the chains back on quickly and easily. To this day that baffles me because they’ve never gone on quickly and easily before. I have no idea what I did right. Life is a mystery.

Computers are a mystery too. A few week ago I installed the new operating system, Leopard, on my laptop. About a week later my trackpad stopped working. I had no idea why and I tried everything I could think of to get it going. I restarted multiple times, ran disc utilities, repaired permissions, did a safe boot, booted it off of the original install disk, and even tried some trackpad software that is supposed to add extra functionality to it. Nothing worked. All my computer would tell me was that there was no trackpad installed. I tossed out the preference pane from the third party trackpad software but that didn’t deinstall the program. I know this because every time I emptied the trash it told me it couldn’t throw out the preference pain because it was still attached to something. This annoyed me for a couple of days before I tracked down the deinstaller and got rid of the program. Next restart the trackpad worked fine. Why? Who knows? Computers are a mystery.

It’s all a mystery. Isn’t it?