Radiant Comics

What comic to read next? That is what I’m thinking about tonight. You think it would be an easy question to answer but somehow I make it complicated. I’ll break it down into categories for you.

The first category is obvious. Get a comic from my new comic pile. Those are the latest ones I’ve purchased that I haven’t cracked open yet. That pile isn’t usually big. Tonight it has five comics in it. Sometimes I like to know I have some new comics to read so I don’t want the pile to get down to zero. I don’t buy very many of new comics so I don’t want to read them all at once. It’s a little way of having something to look forward to.

The second category is new graphic novels. Anything like the Rick Geary books or “George Sprott” by Seth that I might have lying around. They stand on their own and are not part of any series. They are new stories from a favorite author/artist. Sometimes I let these sit around for a little while too. It took me a few weeks to get to reading “George Sprott” because I enjoyed the idea of having a new book by Seth to read. They don’t come out very often. I get to graphic novels by cartoonists I’m unfamiliar with quicker because I want to see if they are good. A strange little habit.

The third category is new collections of comics. Hard bound or trade paperback they are the way I read a lot of mainstream superhero stuff from Marvel or DC these days. I buy the latest Hercules series this way plus I’ve kept up with some of the Spider-Man books as they come out in collected form. “Young Liars” and “Criminal” are two other books I buy when they bind them all together. Sometimes when I want to check out what’s been going on in a mainstream book the I don’t regularly read so I grab a collected. Sometimes they sit on my shelf for a while because I’m not in the habit of reading the series. I have a few collected things I haven’t read lined up. I could pick any one of them.

Category four is collections of old comics. Some of them I’ve read the originals before and some of them I haven’t. I’ve got Creepies. Eeries, a volume of Herbie, a couple of Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Demon. That’s just off the top of my head without looking. There always seems to be less of a rush to get to these. Maybe because, even if the printing is new, the comics are old. They’ve been around for decades. What’s one more week? They can wait. Who’s ever in a rush to read a twenty year old comic book?

The final category is, of course, all the comics that have been sitting on my shelf for years. The collection. Sure I’ve read them all before but some not for decades. I have plenty to pick and choose form. Too many some say. All sorts of genres and subject matter. I could pick for nostalgia, style, curiosity, artist, writer, character, or any other reason I can think of. I have a lot of comics. So what should I read?

“I thought this was supposed to make things easier”. That was the thought going through my head this week as I struggled to make a site for my new web comic. I already have a site for other artwork at jaredosborn.com and, though it was a lot of work, I didn’t have much of a problem with. I used a program called “Freeway” to make it and it all went pretty well. But I rarely update the site because that is a lot of work. I am looking for something a bit different this time.

For my web comic site I decided to try out something called “WordPress”. It’s blogging software that a person can install on his own site and the software manages the look and updating of your blog. It’s supposed to make things fairly simple but it hasn’t quite worked out that way for me yet.

The strength of WordPress is its open source flexibility. Lots of people write their own code that works within the WordPress software that changes the look of a blog. They are called themes and there are a lot of them to choose from. The theme am particularly interested in is called “Comicpress”. It is specifically designed for web comic sites. There is a place to put everything I would need.

One of the problems with making a web comic site it that it has to be updated all the time. If you want to do a daily strip then a new one has to be posted everyday. Yeah, that’s obvious but still has to be done. One of the good things about Comicpress is that you can automate the posting process. Upload the strip, tell it when to post, and then forget about it. You can upload all of your strips for the week at once.

Lots of web comics and blogs in general use WordPress and the Comicpress theme so it must work. Just not for me quite yet. I managed to install WordPress pretty easily. I picked the layout I want but the overall look of the page is still fairly ugly. I figured out how to change the layout around a bit but I don’t know how to change the overall look of the page. Color, font, and background are all still a bit of a mystery right now.

I’ve been digging around for more themes and plugins to help me and some of them do but I’m really not much of a code guy. But, of course, that doesn’t really matter when I can’t even do the things I know how to do. I went to change some things and kept getting error messages. Error messages are no fun.

It’s one thing to get error messages when I’m trying to change the look of the page but an entirely other level of frustration when I get error messages trying to upload the comics. I mean, that’s the whole point of the site. How could that part not be working? I can upload the comics to anywhere on my server with my FTP program but somehow that doesn’t matter. When I upload through Comicpress all I get is error messages. I have no idea why.

The worst error messages to get are ones that I know couldn’t possibly be true. That one was “File name invalid”. Now I’m no coder but I do know how to name a jpeg so it can be seen on the Web. It’s not hard. Don’t use any of the restricted keyboard symbols in the name. That’s it. So how come every time I tried to load a strip it told me the name was invalid? I don’t know but it sure was frustrating.

I had my FTP program open uploading and downloading stuff, was on WordPress forums, my server’s FAQ page, and any place else I could think of and it helped not in the least. I got a couple of minor things to work briefly but I still can’t post my comics to the site. It’s real annoying. Especially since it works for other people just fine.

So that’s my web comic update. I’ve got plenty of the strips done. That’s not the problem right now. It’s the site build that’s driving me crazy. But that was just my first day trying to figure it all out. Maybe a light bulb will come on during day two. Whenever that is.

I’ve been completely out of the movie loop lately. I haven’t gone to the movies in ages nor have I been able to sit down and watch a movie at home. It’s weird and I don’t know why but I think it’s because TV shows have gotten so much better and just out compete movies for my attention.

TV shows now all have plots and characters that develop over hours and hours of story time yet with each individual show telling its own small story. TV shows have become novels with each episode being a chapter in the book. No matter how long the movie it’s always a short story in comparison.

The one thing movies have going for then is spectacle. The big screen and the loud sound. People love spectacle which is why so much movie time and money go into special effects. One of the first things out of my friends’ mouths when describing a film is usually, “The effects were great”. Or the opposite.

I’ve never cared about special effects. I don’t know why but they never make or break a movie for me. Maybe I can’t get into them and forget they’re effects like my friends do. They are always just well crafted or poorly crafted effects to me. I prefer well crafted but they don’t make me believe fantastical things better than poorly crafted ones. It’s the writing and acting that make me believe. Not the ray guns.

So while I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and watch any movies lately I did just sit and watch all of season three of the TV show “Dexter”. It’s a show I never thought I’d get into because I found the concept so dumb. It’s about a serial killer who’s victims are other serial killers. Sounded dumb and unbelievable to me but the writers and actors pulled it off.

Dexter works for the police as a lab tech/blood spatter expert so he has access to police expertise and can learn of killers who have escaped the reach of the law. Plus a policeman adopted him as a child, recognized the signs of a young sociopath killer and gave him a code to live by. Dexter only kills those who deserve it, covers his tracks, and tries to act normal even if he is not. All that makes the show believable to me and I never expected it to be.

Another show I just sat through was season four of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”. This was my second time around with these thirteen episodes and they are funnier than any movie I’ve seen in years. The show stars four people you’ve never heard of and Danny DeVito. They own and run a bar in Philly but that’s not what the show is about. The show is about whatever funny, absurd and tasteless hijinks the cast gets into any given week. The characters have bad judgement, limited social skills, aren’t as bright as they think they are, and don’t let common sense get in the way of hatching a plan.

If I were to go into the plots and shenanigans that go on in this show I would never be able to do them justice. Suffice it to say that they’re funny. If you don’t like absurd and tasteless humor brought to you by characters with little redeeming social value than stay away from this one. But if you like funny then this show is funny. It’s the show that makes me laugh out loud to like I was a little kid.

Those are just the two of the shows I’ve been watching lately instead of bothering with any movies. I also managed to track down some copies of an old yet to be released on DVD TV show that was a favorite of mine. “Two Guys and a Girl”. I got some grainy low res copies that were better than nothing and watched an episode or two at a time all summer long. The show held up pretty well. Better than any silly “Tranformers” movie that I will never watch. And now that football season has started who needs movies? Not me.

I’m kinda burnt out this weekend. All week I’ve been working on a photograph of a friends’ wedding plus doing a bit of paying work. I got it all done but it took a while. The photo was especially tough for some reason. Between the two things I ended up working ten to twelve hour days all week. It’s not like I haven’t done that before but somehow it’s tougher with fewer projects to work on.

I’ve worked that many hours countless times before but usually I’m switching between three or maybe more projects. I can burn out on one and move to the next. That is unless it’s paying work that has to be done. Somehow it’s less taxing working a few projects rather than on one or two things that have to be done no matter what. My brain gets in more of a rut. I don’t like brain ruts.

I think I’ve got that big photo done. I’ll have to look at it again next week because I’m too burnt out on it right now to see it clearly. That happens when I work on something intensely for a long time. I cease to see it as it is. Especially at the end of working on something. I’ll put a piece away for a week and then look at it again to see if it needs any finishing touches. Sometimes it does and sometimes not.

What to work on next is always the question I have. Shopping for a new car sure has cut into my personal art time and that task has yet to be finished but I still want to get things done. I’ve been working on my web comic strip and will continue to the best that I can but I also have to work on getting the site it’s going to appear on up. That’s no where near as interesting as working on the strip itself. But it has to be done.

I have more photos I want to work on. I recently made a masked street photo and want to do some more of them plus I have another large photo collage, like the one I just made of my friends’ wedding, to finish up but I’m a little burnt out on photography right now.

I recently started a cover recreation but didn’t finish it. For some reason I wanted to recreate an old golden age cover by Alex Schomburg. I was doing a pretty good job of it. I remade all of the logos and trade dress on the computer and traced/re-penciled the cover art. I printed the rebuilt cover out in blue line to ink it but got bored with the whole shebang about halfway through inking it. It’s still sitting there undone. Maybe I’ll finish it and maybe I won’t. I don’t know yet.

I also have handful of “Covers to comics that have never existed” that I have yet to finish. Those are the pieces I do that look like old comic book covers. They are all originals and not recreations of anything but I haven’t mustered up the interest to actually finish one of them all summer. Weird.

Another thing I want to start is a t-shirt store. One of those online ones where I would post designs and the web site would make the shirts if anyone actually orders one. I started one of these stores years ago but barely did anything with it. The money to be made on such a site is miniscule and wasn’t worth the time spent but for some reason I want to give it a go again. I’ll have to crunch the numbers and prove to myself all over again that it’s a waste of time. We’ll see. It could be fun to make t-shirt designs.

I have to do some drawings for a group of paintings I’ve been meaning to start. I stretched many canvases early in the year and never quite started what I wanted to paint on them. I painted and finished other things but somehow never these particular ones. I’ll have to see if I can get them going.

I could also start some more of my new dark charcoal drawings. They only take a few hours to do and maybe would fit better into my shopping for a car time frame but I still don’t have a real handle on them yet. They are a work in progress as far as a genre of work for me.

So that’s it. Once again I am wrestling with the eternal question of what to do next. Isn’t everyone?

Some nights I wish I had something to say but I just don’t. I’ve got nothing but nothing. No insight and not even it’s lesser cousin observation. That’s been one of my criticisms of some comics about “real life” that I’ve read lately, “Lots of observation but little insight”.

There is nothing wrong with observation. Seeing the things that people do in a clear way can be quite interesting. Observation isn’t always easy either. A person’s own prejudices and perspective can distort his vision of things and make his observations reflect inward instead of outward. It’s not an easy thing to see clearly. My criticism may slight observation more than I mean to.

Still the “clear sight” part of things is the lead up for me. It’s what gets me pondering on why things are the way they are and why people act or behave as they do. I find it fun to try and figure such things out. Sometimes things can be figured out and sometimes not. Most time not I would say. But it’s still fun to try.

That is why I got nothing. When I write I like it to be about something. I like it to be about ideas. I generally don’t like to write much about my personal life because I find it boring. It’s pretty much the same as everybody else’s personal life. I have no greet insights into love, life, family, or money. Occasionally I’ll have some small insight into one of the above topics and might write something about it but in general if I’m broke, flush with cash, heart broken, happy, directionless, embarrassed, pleased, or melancholy I’m feeling or thinking the exact same things that any other human being would in those states.

The idealess state I’m in now is certainly not unique but is the realm of fewer people. You have to be a person who comes up with ideas in the first place in order to experience an idealess state. Or maybe this is the natural state for people who don’t come up with ideas? I’m not sure.

I’ve always hated the “Writer with writer’s block” clichéd stories that get written when a writer allegedly has writer’s block. They are always the same, “Oh no, I have writer’s block and can’t write anything how terrible; oh look I’ve written a whole story about having writer’s block; aren’t I clever”. Beside I don’t have writer’s block I just have no interesting insights to write about.

I don’t think I’ve ever had writer’s block. Maybe because I’ve never been a professional writer of any sort. There are sometimes I can write and sometimes that I can’t but it doesn’t matter if I have nothing at any given time. If I can’t write than I don’t. If I give it a day or two I’ll be able to come up with something.

I’m an artist more than a writer anyway. That’s what I spend most of my time doing. And there is no such thing as artist’s block. An artist can always make a bad piece of art. It’s easy. That’s the difference. When writers say they have writer’s block no words come at all. The blank piece of paper never gets filled. The tap is turned off. As an artist the tap is never turned off. You might make bad drawing after bad drawing but that’s something.

In making a drawing, which is how a lot of art gets started, you can just make a line on a piece of paper. That line changes the context of the whole piece of paper. The next line can be in response to the first which changes the context again. It’s easy to start a drawing. Not so easy to make it interesting and finish it but easy to start. Hence no artist’s block

Writing is different. Words really exist in a space in our heads. Writing words on a piece of paper doesn’t always help. They can look out of context and meaningless on the page if they’re not right in that space in our head. A paragraph isn’t like a drawing. Each new word might not put the ones before it into some new context but obscure them and make them meaningless. Or the words might not be there at all. Hence the writer’s block.

Both are marks on paper and a person would look almost the same doing each activity but there are totally different things going on inside the head of the person who’s doing them. Two different forms of abstract thought. I wonder where each comes from? I’m not sure and wish I had some insight into it. But that’s life. Can’t always get what you want.

Anyway I got nothing tonight. No insight into the world. It’s all a blank. Yawn.