Radiant Comics

I’m in the mood for a “Friends” walkthrough. I’m writing this the week that “Friends” actor James Michael Tyler died. He played Gunter on the show and was the manager of the coffee shop. He was 59 which makes him four years older than me. Most of the cast was around my age so it’s a little strange to read that one of them has died. Death is right around the corner for all of us but it’s getting even closer for my age group.

It’s episode 20 from Season 5 that I’m watching and it’s called “The One with the Ride Along.” If memory serves that means that Chandler and Joey go on a ride along with Phoebe’s new boyfriend who is a NYC police officer. It’s first aired on April 29, 1999. I watched it as it aired. Let me check my calendar to see what I was doing that week.

Looks like I did nothing on that Thursday. “Took it easy” was my only entry for the day. I must have needed a rest. The rest of the week I was working on the second issue of my “Delia Charm” comic that I self published back then. It was my last self published issue after six comics. Red Menace Comics came to an end. The day before this episode aired I was in NYC to have lunch with my friend, Marie, and then I went to a Brooklyn bar called “The Gate” to bid farewell to another friend, Juliette, as she left for Arizona. I ended the week by working at Marvel for the day.

Let’s start the show. We start in the coffee shop. Turns out that Ross’s ex-wife Emily is getting married tomorrow. He’s a bit down so Joey tires to distract him but it just gets weird. Phoebe and her new boyfriend Gary come in and it all becomes about the ride along. Chandler gets the worst of the joke. Here comes the theme song. That song is tinged with nostalgia for me.

Now we are back at the girls’ apartment. Monica wants Rachel to help her organize some snapshots. We’re supposed to relate to Rachel here while Monica is the weirdo but I’m on Monica’s side. I like organizing things. I find it fun. I have all my photos organized. It’s one of the ways I keep track of my life and things I’ve done. Monica is funny about it though. Rachel messes things up but then we get a weird and funny moment with Monica revealing she, on occasion, steals money from her brother. These weird moments are my favorite part of the show.

Now we’re on the ride along with Gary, Ross, Chandler, and Joey. I forgot Ross was there. Some funny goofy stuff is about Joey’s sandwich happens here. Joey and sandwich jokes are always fun.

The scene cuts and we’re with Rachel in Ross’s apartment. She’s over there by herself borrowing a blender. A big plot point happens as Emily calls and leaves a message on Ross’s answering machine. She’s having cold feet about her upcoming wedding (to someone who is not Ross).

Back to the ride along. Ross goofs around.

Rachel and Monica are both now at Ross’s and listening to Emily’s message. What should they do? They don’t want Ross to get back with her. Their conversation is funny. Rachel accidentally deletes the message which makes Monica happy.

Back to the ride along again. Here is where they think they hear a gunshot and Joey leaps to protect Ross (not Chandler!). It’s a quick scene but sets up some stuff for the second half of the show.

Back, once more, to Monica and Rachel in Ross’s apartment. Rachel wants to fix things and recreate the message but it’s impossible. Monica and Rachel are particularly good in this episode. Ross calls his own machine to leave himself an inspirational message that amuses the women.

Here comes the coffee shop and Gary hailing Joey as a hero. They tell the tale to Phoebe. Chandler is bitter because he wasn’t the one to be saved. We get some Phoebe weirdness which is funny.

Now we’re at the boys’ place and Chandler is seething because Joey chose Ross instead of him. Joey tries to calm him down with some flattery but it doesn’t work so he is forced to reveal that he was really trying to save his sandwich. More sandwich jokes happen and we get a goofy and funny conclusion.

Ross comes back to his own apartment and Rachel is waiting for him. Ross’s new found appreciation for life, after his near death experience, has got him acting goofier than normal. He explains this to Rachel. Rachel is looking extra slender in this episode I notice. Rachel tells Ross about the phone call. He wants to call back. Rachel tries to talk him out of it. And she does as the show credits roll.

Our last post-credit scene is at the coffee shop. They talk war, promotions, and who would be best under fire. Phoebe steals the scene and walks off.

First I’m going to check the rating I gave this show back in 2012. I like this one as I watched it tonight. Maybe I’m nostalgic because of James Michael Tyler’s death but an episode of “Friends” really hit the spot. I’d give it four out of five stars right now. Let’s see about 2012. I gave it three stars back then. That’s what I suspected. I don’t remember this being a four star one but tonight it was.

Now I’ll look up what scenes were cut out of this episode for HD and syndication. They cut out a Serpico joke on the ride along. They cut out Monica’s closing line in the answering machine scene. That was a good line. They cut out the whole scene with Rachel trying to imitate Emily’s British accent. That was funny too. They cut out a reference to Phoebe knowing when all the friends are going to die. I always like those weird references. And that seems to be it. The British accent Rachel scene was the biggest thing.

Well, there you go. Another walkthrough is written. Let’s tip our hats to Gunther and say goodbye.

My oldest piece of computer equipment is my Harman Kardon Soundsticks (and subwoofer). They are almost 20 years old. I remember buying them shortly after they first hit the market which according to the internet was back in the year 2000. I bought them when I bought my second computer in early 2002.

My very first desktop computer I got in December of 1995, the second I bought about seven years later in March of 2002, the third computer was (I think) 2008, and I didn’t get my fourth desktop until I bought my Mac Min this past summer of 2021. I’ve also had three laptops in that time. I bought the first one in 2005, the second one in 2011, and a friend gave me the third one (it’s from 2012) a couple of years ago in the end of 2019.

I mention this all because I was thinking about speakers again this morning. I do that often. For about a decade now whenever I turn on my desktop computer there is a good chance my Harman Kardon speaker won’t be working. About three days out of seven. I don’t know why. I thought it was because my computer was old but they do the same thing with my new computer. I have to plug and unplug the speakers, sometimes a dozen times, before they work again.

I usually just have to unplug the USB cable from the hub I have it plugged into but sometimes, maybe one out of ten, I have to unplug the speaker from the power cord. I don’t know why this makes a difference. With my new computer I got a new USB hub and this one has individual on and off switches for each USB plug. That little button has proven useful for my speaker problem but other than that I’ve never had a reason to use it with any other device.

The mornings that the speaker isn’t working I always think to myself that I should get new speakers so as not to have to do this all the time. But then the speakers work again and I don’t think about them. They really are nice speakers. Being that 99.9% of the time they’re working just fine I’ve never had to replace them.

They have new versions of these speakers but those ones have bad reviews. The main problem with them in the reviews is that they’re not durable and break quickly. I found that amazing since they look like the exact same design and mine have lasted so long.

I have a couple of different wireless bluetooth speaker that I used with my laptop and iPad. One goes in my bedroom to be used at night as I fall asleep. It’s a small 6x3x3 inch speaker that runs on a rechargeable battery. I usually play music, sleep sounds, or an old documentary as I fall off to sleep. It’s been only the sleep sounds in recent years but it used to be the other stuff too. This one has been working fine.

My second bluetooth speaker is similar to the first except instead of being a rectangle it’s a triangle. I used that one in my studio to hook up to my laptop whenever I’m on Zoom or Streamyard. Oddly I’ve been having trouble with that one as I’ve been getting a lot of interference with it. Instead of being able to hear the people I’m talking to they break up into static.

At first this was only happening when using Streamyard to stream my live YouTube show on Friday nights. I couldn’t hear the guys I was talking to while doing our show. I fiddled around with stuff and eventually started connecting to the internet via ethernet rather than wifi. This cleared things up briefly. Then it all happened again.

Meanwhile the wifi and speaker were working fine, most of the time, when I was using Zoom. The class I was teaching over Zoom was four hours and 20 minutes long so I ended up using the speaker as it was plugged into power. That was the next thing I changed as I was searching for a solution to my interference problem.

My YouTube show is three hours long so I usually had the speaker plugged in during that too so I unplugged it. The interference went away for a brief bit but then came back again. This very Friday night it came back with a vengeance. Only on Streamyard. On Zoom everything was fine.

My solution to the Streamyard speaker problem was to go wired. Y’see I have one other computer speaker. In 2008 I bought a small USB speaker. Back then I used to ride a stationary bike and I would set up my laptop in front of it and watch episodes of the X-FIles. But the computer’s speakers were so crappy that I could barely hear the show. So I bought these wired USB speakers. They cost less than $20 and are about two steps above the crappy laptop ones.

They’re two little speakers on a hinge that fold up to be “Portable.” The USB cord also retracts inside of them. I used them for a couple of years but not much since then. They’ve spent a decade inside a drawer. They’re still a step up form my current laptop speaker though.

Those are the speakers that saved me from the interference while broadcasting on YouTube over Streamyard. I plugged them into my laptop and moved them over to the side away from my microphone. As I wrote they are not the greatest speaker but I could hear everything just fine because of them. Availability is the greatest ability is what the sports guys say.

As I struggle with my Harman Kardon Sound Sticks in the morning or my bluetooth speakers with my laptop I often contemplate getting newer and better speakers. Usually the though ends right there as I have no idea which ones would be better but now Apple has come out with their own portable wireless speaker. It’s about $100 and I’m sure it would connect with all my Apple stuff no problem. Maybe there won’t even be any Streamyard interference. Maybe I’ll find out some day. Just not today. My speakers are all working today.

The creative drive in us humans is a mysterious thing. Not everyone has it and of those of us who do not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to indulge it. I have a strong creative drive and do get to express it but it can still be a mystery to me. What I mean by that is often the hardest questions to answer as a creative person is “What should I do and why should I do it?”

Often people are stumped by that question. Unless you’re lucky enough to have a creative job where the answer to why is “because I get paid to” and the answer to what is “Whatever the bosses need me to create” then you have to find your own answers. A lot of people can’t do that as life often gets in the way. They end up doing nothing creative even though they want to.

There are creative things that are more important to me than others. I like painting better than making sculpture. I like photography better than film. I like drawing better than making music. These are usually what drive my choices in what art I should make with my free time but occasionally I get into some sort of project that fascinates me for a while but then seems pointless. I’m compelled to express my creativity through it for a brief period but I can’t see any long term value to it.

This week that project was making what I have named Paste-Up Mash-Ups. I’ve been making altered art Magic the Gathering cards for years. I would take a MTG card, strip off the ink of the illustration, prep the card ground, print a new illustration on the card with my inkjet printer, then varnish the card. I’d sell my altered art cards on eBay for about ten bucks a piece. I did that for about five years until I gave it up this past summer (2021).

I wrote last month “Art Writing ‘Magic the Gathering Comic Book Cards’” and those are the cards that I’ve renamed Paste-Up Mash-Ups (PUMUs). A week ago I only had made fifteen of them but now I have 75 finished cards. That’s a lot of cards. Why did I make so many? I’m not sure except that it seemed to make me happy to make them.

I’ve actually gotten better at making them since last month. That makes sense since I’ve made a lot more of them. Them being easier to make makes it easier to make them. There is more frustration involved as I’m trying to figure out how to make something new and failing from time to time than in making the tried and true. Once I’ve got things down the frustration disappears. I think that’s a big factor in learning anything new.

Nostalgia has a lot to do with why I like these PUMU cards. Even though I haven’t played MTG much since the 1990s I had a good time with the game back then so I look at it with fondness. Plus I love and still actively buy and read comic books so looking at these images from 1970s comics brings me back. The nostalgia is easy to see there.

The first comic book I was using is Conan #40 from 1974. I made about 40 cards from its panels and I’m still not done with it. Though I got bored with it and switched over to Star Wars #12 from 1978. I made another 35 cards from that comic. Those are both comics from my childhood (not these exact copies) so of course there is a bit of nostalgia there too. But there was one unexpected are of nostalgia. The tools.

Back when I was working at Marvel Comics in the early 1990s we did everything the old fashioned way. They era of desktop publishing had not yet taken hold so we had to do paste-ups to get stuff ready to print. Paste-ups are just what they sound like. We used paste (really rubber cement) to glue pieces of paper in place so they could be made into a comic book or magazine. What is now done on the computer had to be done in the physical world.

Our main tools were an X-Acto knife for cutting, a metal ruler to cut straight lines against, a pair of tweezers to hold little bits of paper so we could place them, and some sort of glue. These are the exact tools I used to make these PUMU cards. As a matter of fact the tweezers and metal ruler are the exact ones I used at Marvel. After they went digital I took my old tools home. My X-Acto knife actually predates my Marvel days so it’s even older.

The glue I was using, which I learned about at Marvel, is what we used to call “3M” paper. It’s named Repositioning Mounting Adhesive on the box but 3M makes it so that’s how it got it’s name for us. It’s a roll of plastic paper 12 inches wide that has sticky stuff on one side of it. You cut off a piece of it, place it on the back of what you want to glue down, and burnish (rub) the back of it to transfer the sticky stuff onto the paper to be glued. It’s a little tricky to work with since that sticky stuff can get everywhere but it’s not too bad.

Besides using my old paste-up tools and skills to make these cards there was also an unexpected area of nostalgic contemplation. I started thinking to myself, “Who, besides me, even has the basic skills to make these cards?” I’ve seen other people make altered art MTG cards by printing stickers and sticking them on the MTG cards but this is a different beast. I’m pasting actual paper from 1970s comic books onto cards. That has a feel all of its own

Unless you work with it you’ll have no idea how delicate newsprint from the 1970s is. It is really thin and tears easily. If you don’t cut it with a sharp blade it tears easily along the edge you’re trying to cut. That’s one specific paste-up skill you’ll need. Working with glue is another.

I don’t think a person can use just any glue to do this. Especially if the glue is wet. The dry 3M paper is the perfect glue to be using but how many people even know that stuff exists? I’m the only artist I know who still uses the stuff. Plus I only know about it because of my Marvel days. If you were to try this with Elmers Glue, Rubber cement, or a glue stick it wouldn’t work at all.

So there I was making all these cards for no reason I can comprehend as I contemplate my drive to be creative, the nostalgia of the cards I was making, the nostalgia of the process I was making them with, and wondering if anything like these even exist beyond my drawing table. Paste-up Mash-ups have kept my hands and mind busy. At least for a short while.

This week I’ve read three graphic novels. Or maybe they’re collected editions. Whichever they are two of them were old and one was new. At least it was new to me. It came out five years ago in 2016.

The first is “Black Hole” by Charles Burns. This was originally published in single issue form over a nine year period from 1996-2004 (350 pages). It’s a book I always meant to check out back then but somehow never did. It’s an indie book published by Fantagraphics and I’m an indie comic reader who has bought a lot of books published by them over the years. I’m not sure why this one slipped by me.

I bought the hardcover collected edition back in 2006 and that’s the one I still have. I only remember that I read it back then and was disappointed by it. But I also remember thinking that it may have been me and not the book. Sometimes I read things and they hit me wrong but it’s me and my mood and not the book. I usually know when this happens (it’s actually rare) and give it some time until I reread the book. Somehow fifteen years slipped by with me thinking, “I really should reread “Black Hole.” So I finally did.

“Black Hole” is considered a classic by many comic book fans and I can see why. The art is clean lined, well drawn, and precise. It’s a tour de force of lush ink work. There is a prettiness to the horror of the art. Yes, this is a horror comic.

“Black Hole” is a story that takes place in a world where a STD gives you horrifying disfigurements. The lucky few only get small disfigurements. It stars teenagers and their lives as they live with and without the disease. If you catch it you’re generally cast out of society. But the story doesn’t involve the ones doing the casting out very much. It’s almost all about the cast out teens.

The horror has not only to do with being turned into a monster but also with being cut adrift from friends and family. None of these kids have a strong support system and they easily cut themselves off from their families and live in the woods. They still have the hopes and dreams of teenagers though and have to cope with those.

“Black Hole” is certainly not your average horror comic. It has some sad and horrific moments, especially in the third act, but a lot of the scariness come from these teens having their world change in an instant and not being able to cope with it. It’s a very emotional book filled with dreams and nightmares. Good stuff.

The second book I read this week is the one that was new to me. “Garden of the Flesh” by Gilbert Hernandez. It’s a small book at only 4.5×6 inches. It has 96 pages with only two panels on a page. I didn’t even know this book existed until this week. I read it described as blurring the line between erotica and porn. I like Gilbert and I like blurred lines so I was in.

The book is about Adam and Eve. It tells theire story plus the story of their two sons Cain and Abel and it throws Noah in for good measure. And everybody is having sex. First we get Adam and Eve having sex then Eve and the Devil. After Cain murders Abel he goes off to find a wife to have sex with. Finally we get Noah out finding a wife to have sex with and then it flashes forward to his children and their spouses having sex as the arc is being built.

I enjoyed the book and there were plenty of drawings of people having sex but I found it to be neither erotica nor porn. Having just read (a few weeks ago) the erotic comic “Birdland” that Gilbert made in the early 1990s this one seemed less concerned with being erotic. It was more matter of fact. It was more like “Here are the chaste stories you’ve heard all your life with sex, that they all obviously had to be having, thrown in.” I liked it.

The third book I’ve been reading this week is the collected “Puma Blues.” It runs 545 pages and I bought the original issues of this series when it was coming out back in the mid 1980s. They came out with this collected hardcover back in 2015 and it’s been on my wishlist ever since then. I finally decided to buy it this week as the price dropped down to $20.

A note on the binding of this book. It was terrible in that the spine was glued solid. The book would barely open. It looked to me like it had a sewn binding so the book should open and the sewn part should bend off the spine itself. It didn’t. So I took a hacksaw blade and worked it between the spine and the sewn binding until I released all the glue. Now I can open the book and everything seems fine. I’ve never had to do that to a book before.

“Puma Blues” itself is about nuclear and environmental anxiety. It was made from 1985-1989 but takes place in the near future of the year 2000. Though there are many characters the main one is a man who is working at an isolated lake measuring the ph balance of the lake as the government works to counteract the effects of acid rain. He spends a lot of his time watching old videos his deceased father made and contemplating what he believes in and what he should do with his life. He is also ex-military and I think he suffers from PTS.

A lot of this book is about wildlife and the environment. There is more wildlife drawing in this book than in any other I know of. Sometimes you get pages in a row of the animals living near the lake. It’s a type of visual storytelling only found here. It’s really nice.

There are other characters and events going on in the story and they all seem to illustrate the general anxiety of our lead. Everybody is trying to deal with how life is in the year 2000. It’s not post apocalyptic in any way but there are challenges.

It’s written by Steven Murphy and drawn by Michael Zulli. The writing style is interesting in that sometimes it comes to the front with a lot of words but often it moves to the back as the drawings take center stage. Zulli’s black and white art is filled with lots of lines that are kind of disordered in the beginning but by the middle come together with some of the most detailed drawings of animals I’ve ever seen in a comic book.

“Puma Blues” is also interesting in that sometimes the words and pictures tell a parallel story. They words are telling you one thing while the pictures show you another. Then they join up in the literal again. The story moves smoothly from the symbolic to the real very well.

“Puma Blues” was a favorite of mine back in the 1980s and I think I last read my single issues about ten years ago. It’s still a favorite and I’m enjoying reading it in this new form. I miss the color covers though. They’re not in the book.

As I write this it’s the new year. January 4, 2022. I’ve got a bit of a January malaise right now as I try to figure out what to do, creatively, in the next year. It’s a question I ask myself all through the year as I decide what I want to work on but somehow in January the question seems bigger and more formidable. Last year it actually lead to me deciding to buy some color inks and trying to figure out a style of drawing with them but most years I usually putter around a bit before deciding to just get working on any old thing to get me going.

Yesterday I finished a big ink drawing (22×30 inches) by the name of “Pasture Ready.” I had a lot of it done before Christmas but then it sat around for ten days until I finally got back to it. That doesn’t usually happen but between the holidays and some back pain I didn’t feel like working on a piece that large.

In looking at some of my previous Big Ink Drawings I checked the dates and saw that I haven’t finished a Big Ink Drawing since the middle of June. I know why I haven’t. I worked on a series of five 24×36 inch paintings all summer and into the fall and they take a lot of time. The paintings take about two weeks to complete as compared to about three days for a big ink drawing. But it did make me a little bit sad to see it had been so long between Big Ink Drawings. I felt like I was like I was neglecting them somehow.

I saw a meme that said between Christmas and New Year’s Eve you should strive to be your least productive self. To take it easy and give yourself a break and some time off. I thought that sounded like a good idea but I like to be creative so I got a few things done. Yet I stayed away from pushing myself to get stuff done. That is my least productive self.

One of the things I worked on during that week was some art cards. Not a lot of them. I was only doing two of them a day for about five days. I got some new markers for Christmas. They are knock-off Sharpie markers that are branded by Amazon. I already have a ton of markers to begin with so they were a bit of an indulgence.

I have about a hundred Copic markers and their corresponding refills, about 30 Sharpies, about 30 Bic markers, a Shin-Han 72 marker set, a couple of Pitt Brush pen sets, and various other markers that I bought over the years in order to sample. There was no real reason for me to want a new set except that I like to try new art supplies and the marker were cheap. Only $10 for a set of 24.

Each day I thought I was going to get more marker drawings done than I did. Each art card size (2.5×3.5 inches) marker drawing takes about 20-30 minutes to make. But each day I only got two of them done. Maybe it was the back pain (which wasn’t terrible but back pain is never good), maybe it was the time of year, or maybe I was embracing that meme but I couldn’t get more than those two art cards done a day.

Whenever I get a new set of markers the first thing I do with them is make color swatches. I have a file I print out on Bristol board for the swatches. It’s a whole bunch of small rectangles with room under each for the name of the marker color. So I fill in the box with a marker and then write the name underneath.

The problem with this is that neither Sharpies or their Amazon knockoffs have names on then. There is no sky blue or flame red. And one of the things a Sharpie won’t be permanent on is itself. If you write on the barrel of a Sharpie with a Sharpie it will rub off. It’s the same with the Amazon ones.

After some trial and error I finally found out that a Sharpie paint marker will work for this task. Write on the barrel of a Sharpie with a paint marker and it will stay. I lined up all of my new Amazon markers and wrote the name of each one on the barrel. I went with Red 1, Red 2, Red 3, and so on. No fancy names just a number. Red 1 is the lightest red and Red 4 is the darkest.

The Amazon markers are fine markers that are nearly identical to Sharpies. They have nowhere near the versatility of an art marker (Copic, Shin-Han, Prismacolor, etc.) does but they can lay down some solid color over the small area of an art cart. Nice bright pleasing color.

One more thing that I was working on in December, and now in early January too, are my aforementioned color ink drawings. I’ve been working on one today and will get back to it after I finish writing this. I put in an order for some art supplies last week and among them were some new color inks. A dark blue, a dark red, and a few oranges. Now I’m trying to work those new colors into the style.

One other thing that happened recently was that the side tray on my drawing table broke. That’s the plastic piece that runs along the side of my drawing table and has lots of little cubbies and pen holders to keep all my supplies close at hand. I had to take all my art supplies out of their various places, unscrew the side tray, fill the wood that had broken with wood filler, screw in the side tray again, and put all the supplies back in place. Usually this would be a very annoying task. But at this time of year it gave me something tangible to do. Something I could accomplish and be satisfied with. And I built it back stronger than before. That’s a good feeling.

Big Ink Drawings, art cards, and color ink drawings. I’m getting creative things done. But my brain still looks at the new year and asks, “What does it all mean? What will the future bring and how will it affect me?” These are big questions that have no real answers but a lot of us seem to ask them anyway. Give me a few more days and I’ll be sure to figure it out!