Radiant Comics

Matthew Perry died yesterday. As a “Friends” fan and someone who writes these walkthroughs that makes me sad. I though I’d edit this to say that.

I’m in the mood for writing another “Friends” walkthrough. I’m up to Season Seven Episode One “The One With Monica’s Thunder.” In the last Episode of Season Six Chandler and Monica got engaged so this one is going to continue from there. It first ran (and I first saw it) on October 12, 2000. Let me check my calendar and see what I was doing that day twenty three years ago.

Looks like I spent all day, seven hours, working on a “Mystery in Space” painting. I remember that one well. It was one of the few paintings where I worked with someone else’s image. I painted a comic book cover on stretched canvas, it was around 30×40 inches, and after I finished painting the cover I added my own touches of paint over top. I painted boxes, circles, and shapes of color over the image of the comic book cover. It took a lot of hours to make. I painted three such paintings over the years.

Let’s start the show. We start right where we left off with Chandler and Monica being engaged. Ross walks into the apartment and he is told the good news. The rest of the friends are already there. Monica is out on the balcony yelling that she’s engaged. Yes, the joke is that she’s excited to be getting married. Here comes the theme song.

More engagement celebration as the gang drinks champagne in the apartment. Monica makes it all about her. Phoebe wants to be the band at their wedding and Joey has an audition to play a nineteen year old. I think those are two of our plots. Let’s see. The scene ends with a funny candy bar joke. Simple and amusing.

Everyone has left and Monica is admiring her engagement ring. Chandler wants some action from Monica so he plays the “You’re engaged” angle and Monica is there for it.

Meanwhile we cut to Joey with a mirror trying to look nineteen. Rachel advices him to dress younger. That sure was a quick scene.

Back to Monica and Chandler as Chandler is looking stunned. He couldn’t perform in bed and is all messed up over it. I guess that’s going to be our third plot. He walks out the apartment door and then suddenly Phoebe walks out of one of the rooms with her guitar. I didn’t even know she was still there! She sings a terrible song as an audition for Monica. And a second. The running joke of the series is that Phoebe doesn’t know she’s a terrible singer and songwriter so why would Monica want her to play at the wedding?

Chandler goes over to Joey and Rachel’s and it’s Rachel that’s a bit sad. Chandler is wrapped up in himself as Rachel leaves and meets Ross in the hall. Rachel is sad that she doesn’t have love in her life. She and Ross discuss it. Rachel lets Ross know he was good at “The Stuff” and she especially liked his hands. Of course this will go to Ross’s head but at the same time Rachel is hitting on him.

Cut to Chandler playing a video game at Joey’s. I think it’s Crash Bandicoot. There is a blast from the past. Joey walks out in his “Young” outfit and says, “S’up.” He then works some “Wack” into the conversation. By the way the whole group has been trying to get ready to go out to dinner and celebrate the engagement this whole time. I kind of lost track of that. Now Chandler is consulting Joey about his “Incident” but I don’t think Joey gets it.

Meanwhile Monica is trying to get Phoebe ready but Phoebe is busy writing songs. Monica grabs Phoebe’s guitar. Promises are made, threats are issued, and then Monica opens the door to the hall only to find Ross and Rachel kissing. Monica is not happy about her engagement thunder being stolen by Ross and Rachel getting back together. Monica is terrific in this scene. Big ups!

Next Phoebe walks in and hears that Ross and Rachel were kissing. She makes a big deal of it much to everyone’s chagrin. This episode has more plot lines than the usual three per show. Joey and Chandler walk in and Joey thinks they are all talking about Chandler’s bedroom problem and so he scolds them all for it. Of course they weren’t talking about that and now Chandler is embarrassed.

Thunder is being stolen in an amusing way. Next Joey’s playing a nineteen year old comes up and he realizes that he’s thirty one and not thirty. Always a tough realization.

Now Monica doesn’t want to celebrate.

It’s later on and Phoebe and Joey are talking. Briefly. This episode is moving fast!

Across the hall Ross approaches Rachel to get the romance going again but Rachel is caught up in her dispute with Monica over thunder stealing. Rachel wants to know why Ross isn’t getting his share of the thunder stealing blame.

Back in Monica and Chandler’s bedroom they’re getting changed as Monica is venting about Rachel. Chandler tries to distract her with romance. His bedroom problems are ending but he’s interrupted by an upset Phoebe who wants a deposit to hold the date so she can play the wedding. Chandler says no so she walks away angry.

Here is Joey eating a sandwich! Plus he’s encouraging Phoebe to sing at their wedding no matter what as she is encouraging him to try for the nineteen part.

In the bedroom again and Monica and Chandler are interrupted. This time by Rachel and Ross. Rachel is looking particularly annoyed. Monica just as much. Rachel wants an explanation as to why she was singled out. Monica explains other times that Rachel stole her thunder. Rachel is clueless about them all. All this as Phoebe screams an angry song.

Rachel calls off her fling with Ross as she and Monica continue to work out the thunder stealing. The argument ends with Rachel saying that now she is going to have sex with Ross and so he follows her out the door only to go across the hall and find out that it was all a ploy and he wasn’t going to get any. Poor Roos is such a sucker for Rachel.

Monica and Chandler enter Rachel’s bedroom and it all works out in a funny scene that comes at Ross’s expense.

Here come the credits and the credit scene is Phoebe playing guitar outside of Monica and Chandler’s bedroom. Finally Chandler comes out and gives her a dollar deposit so she’ll stop. Full stop!

Now to check the internet to see what scenes were cut out for syndication. They cut one line from the opening scene. No big deal. They cut the whole scene with Joey looking in the mirror and Rachel telling him to dress young. That was a good scene. They cut one of Phoebe’s songs. I don’t like that cut. They cut a couple of Ross’s flirting lines. No big deal there. They cut Chandler playing Crash Bandicoot. So much for my nostalgia. They cut a Chandler joke in the same scene. They cut the Joey and Phoebe “Wood Cheese” joke. It was a strange joke anyway. They cut the final hug between Monica and Rachel. This is why I always watch the extended cut DVDs. They may not be in hi-def but they have all the material in them.

I liked this episode. Right now I’d rate it a four out of five stars. It was above average. Let’s see what I rated it ten years ago when I watched and rated all the episodes. I only gave it three stars back then. That’s average and I definitely had a better than average time watching it this time around. Sometimes it’s all about my mood. Until next time.

Pencil Drawing Of Cape Art

Last week I wrote about the new coat I was getting and I’m going to continue writing about that because that coat arrived in the mail on Friday (it’s Sunday as I write this). Seeing that new coat was a blast from the past. My old coat is thirty years old and is a completely different color black than the new one. Both coats are made of canvas and the old one looks a lot grayer than the new one. The years of wearing it have worn the color off the fabric so that there are flecks of a lighter color among the black. The new coat is a solid black.None of the color has been work off the fabric.

The new coat even feels heavier than the old one. A lot of the lining of the old one has worn away over the years and there are small pieces of the fabric missing from the cuffs and pockets too. The new one is also a lot stiffer so that may be why I’m perceiving it as heavier. Either way it’s weirdly nostalgic to see a brand new version of a coat that I first wore over thirty years ago.

The same company makes the coat. Outback Trading Company. The lining is a black fabric rather than the hatched flannel shirt looking lining of the old one plus it’s missing the old leather colar but otherwise they look identical. The new one even came with a separate fleece lining that I never bought with the old one. It was an extra $40 or so back in the early 1990s. On eBay it came with the purchase of the coat.

Ebay Photo Front of Coat

The first thing I did when I got the coat was to take off the cape (it snaps on and off) so that I could scan it in. It’s a big piece of fabric so I had to scan it in about eight pieces on my 11×17 inch scanner. I then put all those pieces together in photoshop so that I could have a same size digital file of the cape to work with.

Last week I made a drawing of what I wanted to put on the cape. I scanned in the drawing and put it together with the scan of the cape. I wanted to get the exact placement of the drawing digitally so that it would be easily to play in the physical world.

That’s when I ran into a problem. I made the drawing based on a scan of the old coat’s cape. I’ve had that sitting in my files for years. It turns out that the new cape is a slightly different shape than the old one. I placed the drawing the best I could but it didn’t have enough art on the left and right. I’d have to put some there.

When making the drawing for the cape a leveraged a few drawing that I already had done. I went through a whole bunch of scans of my drawings from over the years, picked out some that I liked, mashed them together digitally, and then made a new drawing out of them. This is what I would have to do on the left and right of the drawing now.

Ebay Photo Back of Coat

I ended up not redrawing anything though. I have plenty of scans of finished drawings so I decided to add them in digitally. The right side went rather quickly. I found a couple of drawings that fit well and so fit them in. The left side took some time. A couple of hours. I looked through lots of drawings but every time I worked one into the drawing I didn’t like it. I tried a lot of stuff before I finally got it. It was weird that the right and the left went so differently.

The next step was to print out the drawing and see if I can use graphite paper to transfer the drawing to the cape. I had to prime the back of the cape with white fabric paint first though.

I’ve got some ideas for the rest of the coat too. I’m going with eyes again on the front of the cape on the shoulders but the new idea I had was for the bottom of the cape. The coat goes almost to the ground and on the bottom six inches or so of the cape I’m going to do some drip painting. That’s the abstract painting that Jackson Pollock did where you drip paint off a brush or a stick and paint with it. I think I can make a cool design that way and maybe on the cuffs of the sleeves too.

I bought some fabric paint for painting on this jacket but I may have to buy more for the drip painting part. I haven’t done any drip painting in a long time but if memory serves it takes a bit of paint to make a drip painting. There is even fabric paint that puffs up a little bit (that’s why it’s called “Puff Paint”) and I was thinking about using some of that but maybe a flat look would be better. I’m flying by the seat of my pants here.

I also saw some fabric paint markers. I’m tempted to buy some of those just to try them out but I don’t think they can be any better than using a brush with the fabric paint. The markers look like they’re really aimed at crafters and even children but I still want to try them out. I might end up spending more money on fabric paint than I did on the coat.

It’s September 10 as I write this and we’re still officially in summer. It’s a rainy 74ºF outside today and we had 90ºF weather just last week. I’m not going to be wearing this coat anytime soon so I’ve got plenty of time to get it done. Yet, still I want to get it done soon just so I can see how it comes out. Part of me wants to be moving into the future to see how this coat will look in all its glory and part of me is feeling nostalgic for the past when my old coat was new. Time is funny thing.

My first duster cape. 1993

I’m doing it. I finally pulled the trigger on buying a new coat. Though I should put the word “New” in quotation marks.

Back in the early 1990’s I bought myself a coat. An Australian duster. That’s a western style cowboy coat. It’s long, black, and made of canvas. It also has a removable short cape on it that goes halfway down my back and wraps around my shoulders. The cape is also the part that I painted way back then. I put a scene on it of four members of a family, plus a monster, that was painted as if it was a piece of ancient art from Central or South America.

Sometime in the mid to late 1990’s I made a new cape for it. I cut a piece of canvas to size, sewed it, and put snaps on it to connect it to the snaps on the coat. I painted this new cape with a scene that had a person on a precipice reaching out for an orb with Mount Fuji in the background. This one was influenced by Japanese prints. I also painted eyes on the front of each shoulder.

In the early 2000s some of my fellow Marvel Bullpenners used to call it a “Cowboy Wizard” coat. More than once as I stepped onto a subway train the other passengers would move out of my way.

I liked that coat but I wore it less and less after I stopped working at Marvel and didn’t have to commute into NYC. It’s less practical to wear when I’m just driving the car to the store. Plus it really had seen better days. The canvas was coming apart at the seams and even tearing where there were folds such as down near the end of the sleeves. I tried fixing it up but it was never the same.

For the last few years I’ve been wanting to buy a new duster to replace that one. I thought could even attach the old capes. The problem was that the cost. It was around $200 for a new one. I had one on my Amazon wish list but I never ordered one.

Cut to this year and I’ve been using eBay a lot to buy 1990s Tommy Hilfiger shirts. Yeah, I’ve been updating my wardrobe with old stuff. I decided to look for some dusters. Preferably the same model coat that I already have. There were some there but I only looked at them. I started looking at them in the Spring and was checking in the Summer too but there was no hurry to buy a winter coat when it’s warm out.

It’s still summer as I write this but it’s the beginning of September. I started looking for the coat again because winter is going to be here before I know it and I want a chance to paint a new painting on this new cape of the new coat. So I found one on Ebay that was in good shape. I made an offer on it that was accepted and with shipping and tax it cost me around $75. It may be used but that’s way cheaper than $200.

After ordering the coat I then had to order some fabric paint. That’s paint that’s specifically made with a flexible binder so that the fabric doesn’t stiffen when the paint is applied to it. I bought a basic set of eight paints plus a colorless extender and an extra jar of white paint. That’s because on black fabric it’s best to prime the fabric with white paint so that the colors go on bright. The paint ran me around $40.

Now I have to decide what to paint on the coat. I want to paint eyes on the shoulders but I’m wide open about what to paint on the back. For the last five years or so I’ve been doing a lot of 6×9 inch ink drawings so I have a stockpile of images that I can work with. I think I’ll look through them and see if anything jumps out at me. I can take pieces of different ones and compose a new image from them. I have to start making some sketches.

I only started commuting again into NYC about five years ago and it’s only for a couple of days a week. In all that time I’ve never worn the old duster. One of the reasons for that being that the coat isn’t very warm anymore. There are a lot of holes in it (even with me having patched them) and the lining is worn away to about 50% of what it once was.

Instead I’ve been wearing a big and puffy coat that’s really well made and warm but is boring looking. It’s nice on those bitter cold Manhattan mornings but it often makes me feel blah. I appreciate its practicality but my old duster felt a lot more fun. So I decided I want a little more fun back in my commute.

I’m going to have to go back to layering under my duster too. I used to wear a small thin coat under it on especially cold days. Being that a duster is a big overcoat it was easy to layer under it. I think the one I ordered also comes with an extra liner vest that I never had with my old one. If memory serves it was an add on that I didn’t think was worth the price at the time. But I guess whoever bought this one thought it was and passed it on with the coat when he was done with it.

I think I’m going to go modern with the new cape painting. I don’t know what that really means to me right now but I already have the two others that were influenced by ancient art. I might go with a lot of faces on it. I have some drawings that have a whole bunch of figures and faces mashed together and that might be what I go with. I’ll have to see.

Reading “Peepshow” on the train

I’m writing this about one of my favorite cartoonists who died just a week ago. His name was Joe Matt and he did a comic called “Peep Show.” The series ran from the late 1980s (in various places), got a first issue of its own in the early 1990s, and ran 14 issues through the early 2000s.

The first “Peep Show” comics from late 1980s ran in anthology series like “Drawn and Quarterly” magazine. He only had a page or two per issue to work with so this led him to do comics jam packed with small panels and lots of story in only one page. Some pages had thirty panels or more per page. It really was something different.

“Peep Show” is named because the comics were autobiographical and we, the audience, were peeping in on Joe Matt’s life. It was a “Warts and All” presentation of his life as he showed himself as especially neurotic with all sorts of hangups. He was notably cheap, had a porn addiction, wasn’t always nice to his girlfriends, and blamed the world at large for a lot of his personal problems. Maybe not exactly the way he really was but it made for a good comic book character.

I’ve read a lot of tributes to Joe Matt since he died and most of them mention how funny “Peep Show” was and though I agree with that I’d also like to mention that it was also very insightful and full of excellent cartooning and story telling. Whether in the single page format or the later regular comic format there was an inventiveness and clarity to the layouts and drawing. Plus he had some interesting ideas and observations about life in general. It wasn’t a strip that was just about gags.

Back in 2020 I reread all of “Peep Show” for the first time in 20 years. I mentioned it here: http://radiantcomics.com/comic-binging-time/. I enjoyed reading it all over again.

Joe Matt’s work has a special place in my heart. If you were a mainstream comic book fan back in the late 1980s to early 1990s then comics were probably defined for you by the likes of Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen, and the rest of the guys who eventually went on to form Image Comics. But I was an indie comics guy. Comics of that time period were defined, for me, by Joe Matt, Seth, Chester Brown, Peter Bagge, and Daniel Clowes. There were others too from before and after but those were my late 80s to early 90s guys.

Peter Bagge’s “Hate” started in 1990, Daniel Clowes “Eightball” in 1989, Chester Brown’s “Yummy Fur” in 1986, Seth’s “Palookaville” in 1991, and Joe Matt’s “Peepshow” collection came out in 1991 but I was probably reading him in Drawn and Quarterly Magazine before that. To read that one of them died (Joe Matt was 60) was sad and also (of course) makes me contemplate at my own mortality.

One of the things that “Peep Show” was about was making comics. That’s why Joe Matt, the cartoon character, and Joe Matt, the real person, wanted to do. I could relate to that. I was three years younger than Joe Matt and at the time I was reading his comics I was trying to make comics too. Joe Matt was always complaining about having to work for a living and how that was interfering with his ability to make comics. That was something I could really relate to.

One of Joe Matt, the cartoon character’s, defining characteristics is that he was super cheap. That made sense to me though. He was cheap because that allowed him to make comics rather than spend all his time working a regular job. When you’re an artist and life does not allow you the time to be creative that’s hell on earth. That might be one of the reasons there are so many angry and miserable people in the world. Joe Matt just found a different solution to the problem. Cheapness.

It was the morning of the 19th of September 2023 that read that Joe Matt had died. His friend since their college days, Matt Wagner, announced it on social media. That’s another thing I could relate to about Joe Matt. At the time I was reading “Peep Show” I was working in the Marvel Comics Bullpen doing production work. I was there working with a bunch of friends from college. One of us got a job there and he eventually got a bunch of us in. That’s how life works. A lot of it is about connections and who you know. So to read In “Peepshow”that Joe Matt knew Matt Wagner from art school made sense to me.

I had to commute into NYC that Tuesday morning that I read of Joe Matt’s death. I have about an hour on the train when I usually read a novel on my iPad. It’s easier for me to read digitally on the train and I don’t have to carry an extra book with me. But that day I just had to read the originally collected edition of the “Peep Show” strips. I hunted through my shelves for it and stuck it in my bag.

It’s amazing how many panels of comics are in that book. Amazon tells me that there are 96 pages in the book but it takes a lot longer to read than a regular 96 page graphic novel. Over the two hours of my train riding that day I only made it through about three quarters of the book. There is so much in there. So much good stuff.

I remember back when the first issue of the regular “Peep Show” comic book came out that some people complained that it was too much like a regular comic. They liked his jam packed strips so when confronted with a six panels a page Joe Matt strip they were disappointed. I could understand this but I liked the new format too.

If memory serves most of the issues of “Peep Show” come out in the early 1990s. By the mid to late 1990s it was comic out only once in a blue moon until the final issue came out sometime in the early 2000s. It was on my pull list so I got all of them but it became an event for me when an issue came out. I loved it but wished it came out more often.

The fourteen issues of “Peep Show” were collected in three 6×9 inch graphic novels. Those, plus the original magazine size collection of strips, make it four books. Unfortunately they are all out of print. You may be able to get them second hand on Amazon but that’s about it. The morning I read of Joe Matt’s death I actually went on eBay to check is his stuff was available and there was nothing. Not a single comic for sale. I checked again yesterday, a week later, and there is some stuff available but not much.

Joe Matt’s work is highly regarded among those of us in the know but unfortunately he had faded from view over the last couple of decades. He hadn’t had anything new out in a long time and that means that a lot of current comic book fans don’t know who he was. The passage of time will do that to us all. Goodbye Joe Matt.