Radiant Comics

Here is a bike riding update for you. I’m still out there riding my usual route to get some exercise and fresh air but my bike could use a little repair these days. My bike is ten years old this year and that’s ten years of Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter riding. The nice sunny Summer days are easy on the bike but the cold and wet ones are tough on the bike. Winter road grime gets everywhere.

I repair my own bike and am good at keeping it in riding shape. Just recently I had some chain slippage and knew I had to check my gear cassette. Chain slippage happen when either the chain gets worn out and stretched or the gears get worn down to points instead of being flat on top. Chain slippage is really not fun. It happens when you’re pedaling, especially when pedaling hard, and the chain suddenly slips forward a few inches. The chain isn’t catching on the rear gear cassette properly.

I think this is the third gear cassette I’ve bought for this bike. The original one and then three others. It’s easy enough for me to put on. It takes a couple of special tools and some effort but it’s not hard to do. It’s the adjustments afterwards that get tricky. The rear derailleur is what needs to be adjusted. That’s the part of the bike that moves the chain from gear to gear when you shift the gearshift lever.

My rear derailleur has seen better days. Its gears are wearing down and so are its setting screws. Those are the two little screws on it that adjust how far up or down the derailleur can go. The road grime has gotten to them and they’re worn down and tough to turn. I wish I could just replace those little screws but I can’t find them. Oh, well.

After I adjusted my rear derailleur my bike was working fine except I was getting some chain rub on the front derailleur of all things. I didn’t even touch that one. Chain rub is when the chain is rubbing against the metal side piece of the derailleur. That shouldn’t happen and makes for a rougher ride. I set out to adjust it but couldn’t get it to stop. I went to look on the internet to see if it had any answers. It did.

It turns out that there is a tension knob on the derailleur cable that’s used to stop chain rub. Somehow in ten years I never knew this and never really paid attention to the knob. The way cables work on a bike is that they attach on one end to the gearshift lever/brakes on the handle bars, get run along the frame where they pass though mounted holes that keep them in place, and attach at the other end to a derailleur or brake as the case may be. One of these mounted holes on the frame has a small half inch plastic knob attached to it. This is the cable tension knob.

Ideally that knob moves the whole derailleur over fractions of an inch to get rid of chain rub. Turn the knob two turns to the left and the derailleur moves over an eighth of an inch and it doesn’t rub on the side of the derailleur guide piece. Unfortunately ten years of riding have frozen that knob in place.

The knob itself is plastic. It also has a spring in it so you have to pull up on the knob and then turn it. The bolt that’s in the threaded hole is metal. So I pulled on the plastic knob, tried to turn it, but it did nothing. The metal is rusted in place. I tried using WD40 to lubricate the metal but that didn’t help.

I could also feel the plastic knob start to crumble a bit under the pressure. I decided to get the pliers out and try to use them on the knob. I figured I might as well try that before the knob crumbled entirely. It didn’t work. The knob kept crumbling and nothing turned. So then I crumbled the knob off on purpose to try and turn the metal bolt part itself. Then the metal started to crumble too. I admitted defeat and walked away.

Now I have to track down a new cable tension knob and bolt. I found something similar on the internet but still haven’t ordered it yet. The bike is still working fine and is ridable with a little bit of chain rub so I fear I’ll mess it up more if I try to replace the bolt. That thing is rusted in and I’m not even sure if I could get it out. I may make things worse rather than make things better.

The rest of the bike is okay though. The chain slippage is gone and that’s the most important thing. A bike is unrideable if there is chain slippage. I also patched a bunch of tire tubes. I’m always getting flat tires so it’s no surprise that I have to patch tubes but I somehow let them build up. I got a flat one day and when I got home to patch the punctured tube I noticed I had two more punctured tubes that I never fixed.

One of the tubes had a new hole right next to a patch and the second tube already had four patches on it. I imagine that I was frustrated with the tubes when they went flat and didn’t want to bother to fix them since they had both been fixed before. But now, months later, I wasn’t frustrated with them any more so I figured I’d patch them. I was patching one anyway so why not three? It all went okay. I must have been worried about putting one patch so close to another on that one tube but it held up just fine. And that five patch one did too. Maybe that’s one too many patches but we’ll see. It’s all fine for now.

A failure rate of 50% is no fun. That’s my lesson for today. That was my failure rate for making my True Believers Amazing Spider-Man #1 alternate covers. I was making an edition of twenty of them and it took me thirty printouts to make those twenty copies. That’s not good.

Besides the time and talent it takes to make the art for my own alternate covers it takes a lot of time to make the physical end copies. I’m taking a comic book the already exists and am wrapping a new cover around it. It’s not a thing that many people do, and I do sometimes, but I thought I’d make an art project out of it.

When I was looking for some inkjet paper to print on I found this nice 165 pound double sided 11×17 paper on Amazon made by Koala. I decided to give it a try since it was a nice heavy paper and had 100 sheets in the box at a good price. I ended up liking it when it arrived and the fact that I could print on both sides meant that I could print the finished art on the outside cover and the pencil drawings on the inside cover. That was pretty cool.

First of all I have to set up the digital files for printing. That meant cover 1 on the right and cover 4 on the left. Of course the correct size was important. I was going to print the covers, cut them to size, and then fold them around the comic. It was important that the final digital file was the exact correct size. I measured the original comic precisely but it still took four tries at printing different size test pieces to get it exactly right.

I set up the second digital file of the inside covers (covers 3 and 4) slightly larger than the front cover file. Since I was printing on both sides of the paper I knew they weren’t going to line up exactly every time so I give myself some extra bleed on the inside front covers that I could trim off and never come up short on art. I also put a black line down the center of this file so I’d have a reference line for where to fold the paper. This came in very handy.

So I printed out the front covers on 11×17 inch paper, flipped the paper over, and printed out the inside covers on the back. When that was done I took the paper over to my drawing table to cut it down to size. I printed a back box around the front cover art so I’d be able to easily line up the edge with my metal ruler. I find this makes things easier. I run an X-Acto knife (number 11 blade) along the metal straight edge to cut off the excess paper. After I do that I fold the paper.

I recently got a bone folder (not made of bone but made of plastic) to help me fold stuff. It looks like a plastic knife that I run along a ruler to compress the paper to give me a place to make a fold. So I line up my metal ruler along the black center line I printed on the inside covers and then run the edge of the bone folder along the ruler while pressing down. I then grab my burnisher ( a flat piece of plastic) and while holding the ruler in place fold the paper along the line I just pressed in with the bone folder. It’s basically just folding a piece of paper in half but more precisely than it’s usually done. The bone folder makes things more precise than the edge of the paper clip I was using before. The bone folder was well worth the six dollars I spent on it.

I have to prepare the comic by removing its staples. I open the comic book to the center fold and use needle nose pliers to grab one end of the staple and straighten it out. Once both ends of the staple are no longer folded I flip the book over to the spine side and pull the staples out. That’s easy. Getting the staples back in is a little bit harder. But first I have to poke holes into the folded print that I made.

I separate the comic book cover from the rest of the comic and nestle it inside of my new alternate cover. That way I can take a pencil and mark where the staples should go. I put the tip of the pencil through the holes in the original cover and mark where the holes are on my new alternate cover. Then I remove the original cover and use a pushpin to make holes in my alternate cover right where the pencil marks are. First I make holes with just the tip of the pushpin but then I flip the book over and make the holes a little bigger by pushing the shaft of the pushpin through the hole from the outside in. This gives me a little more leeway to work with.

The next step is to wrap the original cover around the interior pages , wrap the new alternate cover around them, and put the staple back in place. Since everything doesn’t always want to line up again I found using a straight pin helps. I put straight pin through one of the staple holes rather than a staple. I find it’s easier to do this and then the second staple hole is lined up and ready for the staple to be replaced. So it’s straight pin, first side of a staple, remove the straight pin, put in the second side of the staple, then flip the book over and bend the staple back down. Do this twice and the book is back together.

So where did my failure rate come from? The printing process. The first day I made fifteen of the twenty book but didn’t notice that four of them were bad. They had light lines through the black areas. Scratches of some sort. Thew were perfectly straight and parallel I knew they were coming from the printing process. I’m not 100% positive but I think they were coming from when I flipped the paper over to print on the backside and there wasn’t a second sheet of paper in the printer the original print was being dragged over something in the paper holder that was scratching it. It was either that or the paper was flawed to begin with. Either way putting a second piece of paper in the printer made it not happen anymore.

So off my edition of twenty I got fifteen done the first day (they take about 20 minutes a piece to print and bind) only to have to redo four of them the next day. I got the final five plus the four redos all done the second day. Things would go wrong though. Sometimes I’d print something out, it would be fine, and then somehow I’d scratch it in the folding and binding process. I ended up with ten printouts that I couldn’t use. Plus test printouts from earlier on. But they were necessary and not part of the failure rate. It’s that 50% failure rate that bothers me. I’ve got to get that down or time will not be on my side.

“The Walking Dead” comic book is over. It was a complete surprise to us readers but the day before issue 193 come out Robert Kirkman announced that number 193 would be the last issue. I did not see that coming. It has been on my pull list (the comics I subscribe to at my local comic shop) for 16 years so I’ve gotten used to it being there every month, year after year. It being gone has put it in my head to write down exactly what is on my pull list these days. Though I pick up and make a video of what comics I get every week I still wasn’t sure exactly what was on my list. So I went back over my “Comics I Bought This Week” posts to make a complete list.
What is on my Pull List?

The Savage Dragon – Another comic that’s been on my list for a long time. I was actually late to the Savage Dragon and the first issue I put on my pull list was around issue 71. According to the internet that one came out in the year 2000. Eric Larsen has been writing and drawing The Savage Dragon since 1993 (I went and bought the back issues eventually) so I’ve been around for 20 of its 27 years. That’s a long time. The Savage Dragon is a super hero and he does super heroic stuff. That’s my recap of the series.

Criminal – I buy whatever series Sean Phillips and Ed Brubaker are doing and this is the current one. Fatale, Sleeper, Incognito, The Fade Out, and Kill or Be Killed I bought them all. They are one of my favorite teams in comics so I’m on board. This comic is about criminals committing crimes.

The Wicked + The Divine – I’ve been buying this one since it started back in 2014 and it’s about to end with issue 45 (I think issue 42 was the last one to come out). It’s about a bunch of gods who live again every 90 years or so. The catch is that they only live for two years and then die again. Drama ensues. It’s been a fun book with a slick fashion and music influenced look.

Monstress – This one is a fantasy book filled with strange not quite human creatures. There are some human ones in there too but we mostly stick with the more magical types. A talking cat, a little fox girl, and an angry teenager with a monster stuck in her. There is lots of intrigue and politics too as some people work towards war and some try to prevent it. The art is very lush and filled with little fantasy decorative bits. Good stuff.

Outcast – The second book on this list that’s coming to an end soon. I think it’s ending at issue 44 and issue 41 was the last one out. It’s a horror story about demon-like creatures slowly invading a small town. The art is dark and moody.

The Beauty – This book is all over the place in terms of content. The concept is that there is an STD going that makes people beautiful so some people were even catching it on purpose. Now its’ about four years later and people are starting to die from it. It’s had many story arcs since it began (issue 27 just came out) and they’re all a bit different from each outer. We’ve had a conspiracy story, a slice of life story, a tale of criminals, police stories, and a cops and robbers team up story. I find the art only so-so but I enjoy the variety of approaches.

Cerebus in Hell – A collection of Dave Sim’s “Cerebus in Hell” web comic strips. Each month we get a new first issue concept and number of Cerebus. He’s literally in hell after he died and there are jokes about it. Sim can’t draw anymore due to pain in his wrist so he cuts and pastes Cerebus drawings and old prints from the 1800s. I find it amusing.

The Actual Roger – An all ages comic about a kid superhero sidekick from Alterna Comics. They’re the company that puts out $1.50 comics. I picked up the first issue on a whim and enjoyed it. It’s a five issue mini-series.

East of West – This one has been going since 2013 and they’re up to issue 41. It’s all about the end of the world happening. It takes place in the USA on a world with an alternate history so it’s not really the USA. Politics, violence, and monster abound. I’ve also read that they are making it into a TV show.

Little Bird – A five issue mini-series that has one more issue left. It’s the art that drew me to this one. It’s a semi-real fantasy story with art that has a lot of bulging shapes and texture to it. The story has a lot of dream-like elements and I’ve enjoyed that. The single issues have a higher page count than normal and that’s cool too.

Paper Girls – This too just got a TV show to be made about it. It’s about 1980s paper girls and time travel. I don’t think I could explain it more than that. It only has one issue left. It’s been a solid series.

The Life and Death of Toyo Harada – A mini-series from Valiant comics that continues (or maybe ends?) the story of the villain Toyo Harada that began in “Harbinger” and continued in “The Imperium.” I’ve enjoyed the story of the man who thinks he’s a hero and just might be but the world will have none of it. Writer Joshua Dysart has been the constant with this story.

Kaijumax – This one has been a series of mini-series about giant monsters who are in prison. They stomped on too many towns and got locked up for it. Each six issue series is called a “Season” and season four just wrapped up. I’m not sure when or if there is going to be a Season Five but if there is it’ll be on my pull list.

Snotgirl – This is the book I never thought I’d like. It’s the story of a fashion blogger. It’s full of romance and drama that’s all a bit weird. I think it’s the “Bit weird” part that appeals to me.

The Goon – Eric Powell is back to his signature creation and we get more stories about the Goon. He’s a big guy who rights wrongs in his strange 1930s-esque world. He usually rights them with his fists. It’s a world filled with magic, monsters, and gangsters.

Gogor – A new series from Ken Garing. He’s put out a couple of mini-series that I’ve liked so I gave this one a try. I was hooked after the first issue. It’s a fantasy story that takes place on a series of islands in the sky. Some bad guys are trying to take over and a kid at a school has to run away and wake the monster Gogor. He does and now he and Gogor are on a quest. I’m there with them.

Five Years – Terry Moore unites all of his various series from over the years in this one. The protagonists from “Rachel Rising,” “Strangers in Paradise,” “Echo,” and “Motorgirl” join forces to prevent the end of the world. They have five years to get it done hence the name of the book. I’m down with any Terry Moore comic.

Birthright – This fantasy comic has been going since 2014 and it’s on issue 37. A family from Earth has to fight magical people and creatures from another world. Lots of action and well drawn art.

Hashtag: Danger – A new series drawn by Chris Giarusso about a team of adventurers out to save the world. It’s a tongue-in-cheek comic with lots of adventure and jokes in it. Chris Giarusso has been doing all-ages comics for years but this one is more adult. It’s got curse words in it!

Stray Bullets – This one has been on my pull list since about 1998. It’s a black and white crime comic by David Lapham. There have been a few different volumes and subtitles but they’re all really good. I think the current series “Stray Bullets: Sunshine and Roses” is coming to an end soon but hopefully they’ll be another after that one.

Usagi Yojimbo – What can I say about Stan Sakai’s “Rabbit Bodyguard” that hasn’t been said before? It’s been on my pull list since 1986. It just relaunched with a new publisher and a new first issue. It’s also in color for the first time so jump on and enjoy a master cartoonist at his craft.

Ghost Tree – A four issue mini-series about a Japanese man who sees ghosts. I find it very poignant and moving. It has very nice art too. Only one issue left of it.

Uber: Invasion – This is the second “Uber” series and the first I’ve picked up. It takes place in a world where super heroes were invented at the end of World War Two. Thus the war is prolonged and it delves into how exactly super people would be used in a war situation. Politics, war, and super powers make for some good drama.

Reaver – I just bought issue one of this and then put it on my pull list. It’s a fantasy story that reads like a Dungeon and Dragons adventure. A party of fantasy types has to go on a quest.

This week I finished the pencils and inks on the “A Little Struggle” Spider-Man covers that I wrote about last week. Yes, that’s plural. I ended up drawing two different covers. I seem to always be making more work for myself. I was working on the first one, which was based on one of my spontaneous marker drawing compositions, when I decided I would need a second one too. A more conventional cover of Spider-Man hanging out in a typical Spider-Man pose. I’ll use one of them for the back cover.

My Ebay page to buy one of these

The first cover has a lot of elements to it. It reflects the contents of the very first issue of the Amazing Spider-Man. We have the Fantastic Four, J. Jonah Jameson, the Chameleon, Spider-Man, and Peter Parker. Not to mention the Baxter Building an some extra Spider-Man symbols. That’s a lot of elements. It was a real chore to juggle them all but that’s a chore that I’m used to.

It’s going to take color to really hold this composition together. When using established characters a lot of their appeal is in their costumes which are in color. Reed and Sue Richards are in blue, the Human Torch is red, the Thing is orange, and Spider-Man is in red and blue. Those colors define those characters and they’re absent in the ink drawings so it looks a little bit incomplete to me.

The backgrounds were tricky in this piece too. I used some of my usual background motifs such as cloud-like lines, a circle pattern, wavy lines, and some concentric circles, but I also wanted to work some Spider-Man #1 specific backgrounds in there. So I drew part of a city with the Baxter Building (the Fantastic Four’s headquarters) in there too. One part even ended up being a rocket ship that looks nothing like the Fantastic Four’s rocket ship but I put a “4” on it anyway.

I put a bunch of little spider symbols in one area and that drove me a little bit crazy. I only drew one of them and then duplicated that one digitally but when it came to inking them I had to do that all by hand. I was cursing myself a little when I came to the inking stage. The last thing I did was take the fence that’s behind Peter Parker and add some webs to it. It went from looking like a wooden fence to looking like a web fence. I thought that was more appropriate.

Of course the weirdest thing about the picture is that Peter Parker is wearing Spider-Man on his head like a hat. You don’t see that everyday on a Spider-Man comic. I was working from a composition taken from one of my spontaneous ink drawings and in that one a person is wearing a lizard head on his head. For some reason that was the one that appealed to me to turn into a Spider cover. I like the weirdness of it. Those early Steve Ditko Spider-Man comics can be really odd and I think this fits in with them. Plus it goes along with the non-literal nature of the cover. There is a lot of symbology in it.

While doing this cover I decided I wanted to do a more traditional cover too. A pin-up type cover that is popular today. I wanted something to put on the back cover since I didn’t want that space to be blank. I had a really hard time with it. Despite the composition being much less complicated the pin-up cover took me longer than the first cover. I’m not used to doing things the conventional way and I have a hard time finding a creative way to do mainstream stuff.

The first thing I did was a lot of thumbnails. Small rough drawings. Spider-Man has his own visual language that is all about him crouching and twisting into poses. He can also stick to walls so I imagine his sense of gravity would be different than a regular person’s. He also has super strength so he can reach out, touch a wall, and stop himself from falling in an instant and with little effort. So finding a pose I liked was tough.

After a whole bunch to thumbnail drawings done in ink I had one I liked. I blew it up and tried to redraw it in pencil but I somehow failed and lost the character of it. Sometimes I find using a pencil inhibiting because I get too concerned about fixing my mistakes. That and a pencil only makes a thin line. So I switched back over to ink and made a bigger drawing of the figure that was more to my liking.

It was at this point I decided to take it to the digital realm. I scanned in the drawing and transferred it to my iPad where I could make a more refined drawing with the iPen and Procreate. It worked out fine. I then took that drawing, transferred it to my computer and put it together with the logo and trade dress to print out and further refine the figure and draw the background.

It took some doing to figure out the background. So many people have done so many good city backgrounds for Spider-Man covers that I didn’t even want to go down that route. I’ve seen covers with fully detailed cities in twisting perspectives with Spider-Man swinging through them. They always look pretty good but something about them also leaves me cold. So I decided to go for something a little more up my alley.

The first thing I put in were the shapes around Spidey’s head. They’re reminiscent of his spider senses but they’re really decorative elements. That’s what I’m good at. I can organize shape, line, and color into a pleasing arrangement. After that I put in the simple city shapes at the bottom and a curved line atop the bottom third. That curved line came out as some kind of wall but not really a solid wall. The next element I added to the piece was the round piece in the back that might be some kind of moon of planet That comes from my “Deep Space” covers that often had planets behind a space suited figure. I thought it would work here too. The last element I added were the circles that are all around Spider-Man. I wanted the give the background one more element. One more bit of texture.

In the end I like the way both of the covers have come out so far. It was a long way to get there but I think I got there. Now I have to finish them off with some color.