Radiant Comics

Chris Giarrusso’s cover to Venom War #1

I wrote a few weeks ago that I’ve never been a big buyer of back issues of comic books, I generally buy new comic books, but this summer I bought a bunch of issues of early 1970s Sub-Mariner. That has turned into a little bit of a trend for me as over the last month or so I bought a few other back issues from the web.

First off most of the comic books that I buy are new comics. I have a pull list at my local comic book store which means that they order and hold the new issue of certain comics each month for me. That makes life easy for the store and for me.

My shop (Comics Warehouse in Pearl River NY) also sends me an email each week with the “Final order cutoff” for the comics that will be out in a month. That means that it’s the last time I can order a given comic (that’s not already on my pull list) and be guaranteed of getting it. All I had to do is click on a button in the email and they’ll order and hold the comic for me.

I like getting that email each week and seeing the comics I can order. It helps me find new comics to read and to order specific things that I might not usually get.

When it comes to comic books I’m mostly an indie comic book reader. That means I’m not usually interested in Marvel or DC comics. I have none on my pull list. But an artist that I know (Scott Koblish) was doing some alternate covers on some X-Men books. I thought they were cool and wanted them. The only problem was that the first one slipped by me. I didn’t see it in the email and so didn’t get to order it. My comic shop tried to reorder it for me but it was sold out and they couldn’t get it. I had to turn to eBay.

It’s easy to get recent back issues off of Ebay but the problem is the price. Really it’s the cost of shipping. As I found out when buying those issues of Sub-Mariner this summer if I’m buying just a single comic book the shipping cost is going to be about $5. Most sellers are willing to place multiple comics in the same order for about that same shipping price but I wasn’t buying multiple issues.

In the end I paid around $15 for that X-Men #35 with the Scott Koblish cover and that was the cheapest price I found it for. I thought maybe that the price was so high (I bought others in the series for about $5-$6) because it was the first of the covers and it slipped by a lot of people. When I got the book I saw the retail price on it was $10 so that plus the $5 shipping made up the $15 price so I really didn’t pay any kind of premium for it.

After that happened the same thing happened to me again. Another artist that I know (Chris Giarrusso) is doing some alternate covers for a Venom comic. I wanted to get those but, again, the first issue slipped by me. There were so many Venom comics and so many alternate covers that I didn’t see #1. I got my preorder in for issue one in time but the Wednesday (new comic day) that Venom War #1 came out my comic shop had none of the alternate cover I wanted. So I went to eBay and ordered it for about $10.

A big order for back issues that I bought was from Lone Star Comics which has a website called mycomicshop.com. I’ve ordered from them a bit over the years because they have a lot of indie comics for cheap. I’ve filled in a bunch of series that I was missing issues of since I discovered them a lot of years ago. I keep a want list of comics on their site and decided to buy some stuff of off it. Mostly cheap stuff but it adds up and in the end I spent about $100, tax and shipping included, on 29 comics. I ended up finishing three series.

I bought the nine issues of Jeff Smith’s “Bone” that I was missing. Though this classic series is available in a few different collected editions I don’t have any of them. I haven’t liked any of the physical books they’ve put it out in so I wanted to complete my collection of the individual issues. I reread the whole series in its digital version on my iPad last year (as I commuted) and that made me want to get the rest of the comics even more.

The second series that I finished up was “Route 666” from Crossgen Comics in the early 2000s. It was back in September of 2023 that I decided to try and buy this whole series. I bought issues 1-19 for just $22 tax and shipping included on eBay. That was the cheapest I could find them but the last three issues of the series were missing. So I put them on my want list and there they sat until I finally decided to buy them about a year later.

Terry Moore’s “Strangers in Paradise” was the third series I finished off. Almost. I only bought four issues of it but that was all I needed. There are four volumes of SIP and the first one is the most expensive. There are only three issues in that volume and I already have a third printing of #1 but don’t have 2 and 3. I do have a collected edition with them in it though. These four issues completed volume two and I already had volumes three and four. I’m going to reread the whole thing one day.

The final series that I filled in were eleven issues of David Lapham’s “Stray Bullets.” That was another series from the 1990s that I was late to and missed the first 12 or so issues but I had them in collected editions. I finally decided that I wanted the original issues too.

Though I like collected editions of comics a lot I also like individual issues. Comics as periodicals are fun to read. There is only one chance to read them when they initially are printed and I like that experience. It’s also fun to thumb through a pile of old comics because they’re like a time machine. You can look into the past and watch the months roll buy as you go form issue to issue. That’s good stuff.

I haven’t done this in a while so this week I’m going to take a look at a single piece of art that I’ve done recently. I’m going to go with one that’s on my easel at this moment so it’s a bit of a random pick. As a matter of fact I just cleaned off my easel of a bunch of things. I don’t always use my easel for painting so when I’m not in the middle of a painting I stack up the art on paper that I’ve made. That way I can get a look at my current stuff.

My easel was getting full of pieces on paper and some were begging to fall of it so just this week I grabbed a bunch of older pieces from the stack and put them away into portfolio books for storage. That way I can still easily get to them if I want to. I moved a lot of my paper work from boxes in a cabinet to portfolio books on a shelf just last year. But on to the piece that’s in the front.

“Dreams of Things” #239 is another in my “Covers to Comic Book That Don’t Exist” series. It’s hard to believe that I’m closing in on having made 250 of these covers. When I look back at them (such as when I put them all in portfolio books) I can see patterns in them. Themes that I had, mostly in my subconscious mind, that would come and go in them. That makes sense since I come up with these images using a Surrealist Automatic Drawing method that mines the subconscious for ideas.

Recently I noticed myself doing a lot of “Dreams of Things” with two faces on the page. Often one was above the other in a two headed monster look. I don’t know why I was on that two headed kick but this one ups the ante with four heads in one piece.

The bottom head is the foundation on which the other three heads sit. There are even a couple of inverted triangles that support the composition. The first is that wide rainbow triangle behind the bottom head. It supports everything on top of it. Then there is the yellow triangle of hair that the bottom face has. That hair anchors the two faces above it to the bottom face. These triangles of support are important to the piece because they ground everything. Without them the heads would look like they’re floating and I don’t want that.

The background of the piece is all shapes and textures. There is very little deep space back there. It’s more of a modernist flat art space. I kept the space in back easy to understand because the space around the heads isn’t easy to understand. The scene makes no three dimensional sense but it makes compositional sense. At least that was what I was going for.

One of the first things I notice about this piece is the eyes. All four characters are looking at us a little bit differently. Often I have my characters staring directly out at the viewer. But in this case only the bottom one is doing that. The one on the left is almost but not quite looking at us. The one on the right is looking at us but softly and nearly out of the corner of his eyes. The one on top is squinting off into the distance. Four characters and four looks. I don’t often do that.

I just referred to one of the characters as “He” but as often happens in my drawings the faces are androgynous. In my head they are male or female but then they can switch on me. You can see them as whatever gender you like. It’s okay to call them he, she, or they. I do all the time.

I also like to vary the skin color of my characters a lot. If I don’t pay attention to that I’ll make everybody a similar skin color to my own. That’s just how the human unconscious mind works so I try to make conscious choices to keep things varied.

In a fantastical drawing like this one it’s easy to vary the colors of the faces since I’m not tethering it to reality. The brown and peach color faces are close to reality but the hot pink and blue/orange faces are from a dreamworld.

I think the first face color I put down was the blue/orange one. I started far out there. Sometimes when I have a face that’s facing forward I like to split it in half with color. I’m not 100% sure why but I think it’s because a face like that can be a wide expanse of the same color and that can get boring. If I split it up with wild colors it’s more interesting. I went for some monochrome two tone speckles on the face too.

The next two faces are the more realistic ones. They bring some regularness to the craziness of the rest of the piece. The brown face has stripes on one side and blue hair so it’s not too grounded in reality. The peach face also has a grey hat over its orange hair so the grey sits back in a neutral space and lets the colors pop out in front of it. Otherwise all that orange would be fighting for attention with the hot pink face.

The top face is the most colorful one in the piece. Hot pink with darker pink rugged stripes, a purple shirt, and yellow hair with its own stripes running opposite of the face stripes. I think it makes a nice cake topper.

Overall I like the way this one came out. Part of that is that I broke my own two face mold that I had been doing lately and made something similar but also wildly different. I wasn’t sure if I could even pull off four faces piled onto a cover like that but I think I did. It may not be my favorite piece ever but I like it.

I haven’t written a “Friends” walkthrough I’m months but I’m feeling nostalgic tonight so I thought I’d write one. Let me check what episode I’m up to. I’m on Season Seven Episode Seventeen “The One With the Cheap Wedding Dress.” That means I’ve watched ten episodes since I last wrote one of these. I don’t write one for every episode I watch. Just when I’m in the mood.

The episode originally aired on March 15, 2001. Let me check my calendar and see what I was doing that day. Looks like I was working at Marvel Comics that day doing the production work on some of their covers. I was commuting to Manhattan so I also bought a ten trip bus ticket for $105 on that day. There is a note that on the following Saturday I was doing some character design stuff. I wonder what characters I was designing? They were obviously for my own work but I have no idea what characters they were. Plus I bought some old Iron Man (issues 97-100) and Hulk (Issue 200) comics off of eBay that week.

Let’s start the show. It starts out in Central Perk and it looks like Monica and Chandler are planning their wedding and are choosing appetizers and a band. Chandler wants the “Swing Kings” to play the wedding. I think we get Joey’s “Peanut Butter Fingers” joke here. Ahh… there it is. I always liked that joke. Joey really sells it. Here comes the theme song.

The scene changes and now we have Chandler and Ross outside on the street checking out the new woman moving into the neighborhood. It’s a woman named Kristen who Ross takes a liking to so he and Chandler chat her up. Ross hits her with some awkward sewage history. Good stuff. Chandler is a terrible wingman but she accepts Ross’s offer to take her to dinner.

New scene and the three women are shopping for Monica’s dress. It’s the whole try on wedding dresses as you drink champagne thing that I’ve only ever seen (or even heard of) on TV and the movies. Monica finds the dress she wants but then makes the mistake of telling a stranger (Megan, another bride to be) that she is going to get the same one at a huge discount sale in a couple of days. You know that won’t end well.

Back to a street scene and Joey stumbles on the same woman (Kristen) moving in. Joey is a bit more charming. Of course he asks her out too and gets a dinner date for the night after Ross’s. A quick but amusing scene setting ups the Ross and Joey conflict..

Now we cut to a couple of days later at the big wedding dress sale at Kleinman’s. It’s a mob scene. There are women everywhere lined up to get in the store. Monica is psyching Rachel and Phoebe up to help her find the dress. She’s even got whistles for them! She finds the dress but guess who else grabs it at the same time. Of course it’s the woman she told about the sale. Some whistle humor ensues as Rachel can’t take the bargain shoppers. Then Monica pins the other woman and wins the dress! Victory!

Meanwhile back in Central Perk Ross and Chandler are discussing Ross’s date from the other night. It went well enough that there will be a second date. Ross leaves and Joey shows up. Chandler figures out they are dating the same woman and is gleeful. Ross walks back in and Chandler sets them up in funny fashion to know the truth. The joy Chandler takes in this is great.

We get a scene cut but we’re still in the coffee shop but now Joey and Ross are on the couch next to each other trying to figure things out. They will each go out on one more date with her and let her decide. Some funny stuff here.

Back at Monica’s apartment all three women are admiring the wedding dress as the phone rings. It’s Megan on the phone who lets Monica know that Megan booked the Swings Kings on the day of Monica and Chandler’s wedding. If Monica gives her the wedding dress she can have the Swing Kings. Monica is in a bind and Rachel makes some solid whistle jokes.

Night falls and as Ross gets ready for his date Joey stops by. A little competitive jockeying by the boys. Ahh.. This is also where the face cream “T-Zone” jokes are from. That’s a memorable part of the series for me.

Now back to the apartment as Chandler gets home and Monica has to break the Swing Kings news to him. But first the three women are trying to talk him out of the band. He wins Monica over with sentimentality but the problem isn’t solved just yet as we cut to a NYC skyline shot.

Ross is out on his date with Kristen but guess who shows up. It’s Joey to sabotage him. Of course they get competitive trying to embarrass each other. Some good stuff here but Kristen had enough and disappears on them. Since these are the extended edition DVD copies that I watch Joey actually says, “Does a bear shit in the woods?” at one point. I had forgotten that. That line didn’t make it onto the air.

Chandler walks into his apartment and greets Monica but she won’t come out of their room because she’s wearing the wedding dress. He promises not to like it so she can return it. Of course he loves it but she’s booked the Swing Kings so off the dress goes. After he’s banged her in it of course!

Here come the credits and the episode ends with Monica walking in as all three guys who are watching TV on the couch. Then we get that memorable turnaround shot of all three of them with grey face cream on their noses and foreheads. Their T-zones. This shot gets shown all the time on highlight reels of the show.

Now I’m going to check what was cut out of this episode for syndication. Looks like nothing was cut out. Except of course for the “Shit” line. I guess there was no extra stuff to put into the extended episode.

Now let’s see what I rated this one back a decade ago when I rated them all. As of right now I’d give it a four out of five stars. It was an extra funny episode. I only gave it three stars back then. That means I thought it was an average episode. Maybe it was because I was feeling extra nostalgic today but it really did earn that fourth star from me. Good stuff.

Let’s add some faces to the iPad!

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years scanning and organizing photos and I was back at it again this week. It was sometime in the early 2000s when I first scanned in all of the negatives from the photos I took. I shot on film from about 1984 until around 2001. It took me forever but I scanned in all those negatives and then organized them.

Over the years I mostly took photos of my family and friends. After scanning them in I put the digital photo files into folders on my computer with the date, event, and place as the name of the folder. Then I named each photo file with the names of who was in the photo. This took forever but I’m glad I did it. For me it is the best way to organize things.

I’ve been working on Apple Macs since around 1994 but I never took to their photo organizing program or anyone else’s. I don’t find them of much use. They want to organize things their way which isn’t my way. I also have a dedicated hard drive for all my photos and any photo organizing program I’ve tried wants to create its own version of my photos even if it’s only in “Cache.” This takes up a ton of hard drive space on my main drive and slows things down. No thank you.

My iPad has become my default photo album but it has some problems too. The main problem being getting the photos onto the iPad. I found the easiest way was to duplicate all my folders of photos into their own “Save to the iPad” folder plus save all the photo files as jpegs. I generally save my photo scans as tifs but those files were too big for the iPad software to deal with.

Then I tell the iPad to sync all the photos in my “Save to the iPad” folder with my iPad. You would think that the iPad would look at both sets of folders, determine what’s not on the iPad, and copy the new folders of photos over. That’s exactly what my photo backup software does. But no. The iPad deletes all the phots off the iPad and puts them all back plus the new ones. I’ve got 28,000 photos synced so it takes three or four hours to sync. That’s crazy. My photo backup software takes minutes to copy new photos onto the backup drive.

One thing the iPad has is facial recognition software. It can find all the faces of my friends and family and label them. Years ago I thought that was pretty cool and spent some time labelling all the faces. Then all that work was wiped out with an iOS software update that re-synced my photos and got rid of all that facial data. That was frustrating.

I usually only sync my photos with my iPad once a year since it’s such a pain. It’s been over a year so I decided to give it a go. But first I would try naming some faces to see if they would stick. I spent some time naming a bunch of people and then synced. The names stayed this time. Mostly. Though the photos are the same files it has to re-find all the faces. I think. It’s all pretty confusing.

I even had to sync the photos with the iPad twice. I put a bunch of new photos on and then realized there were some old photos that were new to me that I wanted on too. So even with the six hours of syncing most of the faces stuck. Even so it says that it will take time to find all the faces again. But at least I didn’t lose everything as I did with that upgrade years ago.

For the last few days I’ve been spending some time going back into my old photos and labelling the faces. I started in the 1980s and have almost finished with the 1990s. It starts out slow because the software doesn’t know many of the faces but as people begin to repeat over and over it learns the faces fairly well.

What is extremely weird about the software is when it doesn’t notice faces. It can pick up partially obscured faces but often won’t pick up obvious faces. There can be three people with clear faces and it only notices two of them. Plus there is no way to tell the software that a face is there. I can’t even select a piece of the photo and type a name. If the software doesn’t find a face where there is one then you’re out of luck. That’s strange.

Another photo based thing that I was doing today was scanning. I have a bunch of old family photos that have sitting around for a while that I’ve been meaning to scan. Today was finally the day that I would do them.

Back in December 2022 I got a new Epson v600 scanner. It can do transparencies so I’ve mostly used it for scanning old 120 negatives. It does a good job with those but I got to try it out with photos on the flatbed for the first time.

It’s an 8.5×11 inch scanner and most of the photos that I was scanning were 3.5×5 inches or smaller. I could load about six of them onto the scanner bed at a time and batch scan them. All I had to do was turn on “Auto Cropping” and the software would detect each photo and set it up for its own scan. So I load on the photos, hit the “Preview” button, made sure the preview of where it is going to scan looks good (or adjust things, and then hit the “scan” button. The rest it does automatically. It is a lot easier than the old way I had to do it. I used to have to scan each photo one by one. Or scan them all as one file and then cut them up in Photoshop. That was way more tedious.

Way back in 2006 I wrote a short blog about the emotional toll that scanning old photos takes (Dancing in the Footsteps of the Past) and that is still in effect. As I name all these faces I see everyone I know growing older. Same have even died. It can be a tough thing but I still enjoy putting all those photos in order and making them easy to find, use to make art, or just look at. If only making things easy wasn’t so hard.