Radiant Comics

I’m building a new book case. Some knotty pine, wood screws, and three coats of white paint. I’ve built a lot of shelves and book cases for my comic book/book collection and here comes another. It’s going into my laundry room in a spot that held my collection of Matchbox/Johnny Lightning/Hot Wheels cars. They have been moved into the garage above the work bench. I haven’t bought any 1:64 scale cars in years now.

I like collecting things but as a freelance artist don’t always have a lot of money. Therefore I certainly can’t can’t collect expensive things. Expensive doesn’t mean better or more interesting anyway. There are plenty of cheap things in this world worthy of collecting.

I started collecting Matchbox cars in the late 1990’s. They were just a dollar and there were a lot of fun makes and models. I say “Matchbox Cars” but there are plenty of different brands to buy. Plus they don’t take up a whole lot of room. At least at first.

I probably have a few hundred cars now. That’s where I stopped. I keep then in little plastic cabinets that have a lot of drawers. The kind of cabinets that are made for holding various types of screws, nails, little tools, or whatever in a workshop. They work great for little cars too. I have six of those cabinets. That’s too many.

I stopped getting any new cars around the year 2000. I remember getting some new millennium special edition ones but not much after that. What made me stop you ask? Money and space. Those two oh so important elements.

The cars were getting more and more expensive. Not huge money of course but the toy companies were making more and more “Collector” cars at $2.99 – $4.99 a pop. I liked them. Some were much better than the basic one dollar car. As nice as they were getting two or three cars for ten bucks is a lot different than getting two or three for three bucks. Cheap suddenly isn’t cheap. I could’ve be getting comic books with that money.

And space to put toy cars isn’t always easy to find. Each year Hot Wheels and Matchbox put out new cars for the year. There are forty or so cars in their dollar line. That plus another ten buck will get you a case to put them in. Only a hundred dollars a year. Not bad. But then what do you do?

I collected two years worth of cars and had four cases but said to my self, “How long can this go on?”. In five years I’d have ten cases. In Ten years twenty cases. Did I want that many? The answer was, of course, no. I don’t like toy cars that much. I much prefer to collect comic books.

I couldn’t see spending and more of my limited resources on toy cars. I’d rather spend my money on comic books and support the industry that I had worked in for many years. They are of much more use to me as a fan, a professional, and an artist.

I still like my toy cars. At least some of them. I keep a couple of them on my drawing table and rotate them for others whenever I feel like it. But I could probably get rid of about 90% of them and never know the difference. But where do you get rid of toy cars? Who wants them? A problem for another day. For now they’ll sit in the garage.

Matchbox cars are cheap but they are not the cheapest thing I’ve ever collected. Those would be little plastic football helmets. It was 1996. I remember that because in December 1995 I bought my first computer ever. It set me back about five grand and I was more broke than I had ever been before. Sure I was still getting my regular comics but I wanted something new to collect. Toys, games, cards, they were all too expensive.

I was at the toy store one day and I noticed a bubblegum machine filled with those little plastic NFL helmets. I hadn’t noticed them since I was a kid. And they were only a quarter per random helmet. I started getting a couple of them whenever I had the urge to collect something. It was fun. Until a few months later when the price raised to fifty cents a helmet. Too much dough. Plus I had most of them already. Fun while it lasted.

In the early 1990’s I used to collect action figures. I don’t have a lot of them left though. I gave them away. They also took up too much room. Most of them were crappy anyway. I never wanted to spend that much on an action figures so I used to collect the ones that were in the sale bin. Those are usually not the most desirable ones but some were okay. They eventually took up too much space and I gave them away bit by bit. Threw some out even. Those were the really crappy ones.

So that’s a story of collecting for you. Some of us just love collecting things. The key is not to let them overwhelm you. If they start to then get rid of stuff and build more shelves. Shelves are your friend.

Ahhh… collecting things. Isn’t it fun?. I just found some comic books at an online comic shop and ordered them. About thirty comics. The vast majority of them were under a buck so the whole shipment cost me under fifty dollars. A good chunk of change but not a ton.

I really didn’t need any of the comics. They aren’t ones I was dying to read. I was just filling in some holes in obscure comic series that normally I can’t find anywhere. I bought two issues of “The Masked Man” that I have been missing for decades.

“Masked Man” is a series from 1984-1988 published by Eclipse comics. It was kind of a tribute to Eisner’s “The Spirit”. I remember liking it but haven’t read it since then. I’ve been missing two of the twelve issues since the Eighties and have never seen any issues of the series anywhere. I’m sure demand for them is not high so no dealer is going to drag out his issues to bring to a comic con. Not that I’ve been to a comic con in a decade.

I also bought the last issue of “Usagi Yojimbo” that I’ve been missing. It’s “Space Usagi” Volume 2 Number 1. The one time I did this same thing, sometime last year, I ordered this comic but they sent me “Space Usagi” Volume 3 Number 1. It gets a bit confusing sometimes. Hopefully I’ll get the right comic this time and complete my Usagi Collection. Of course I still need the comics he appeared in before he had his own book.

A few recent things were in the order too. Like a couple of issues of “Fear Agent” that I missed. Most books that I buy month to month I never miss an issue but sometimes I pick up on a book a little late or maybe money is tight and it doesn’t quite make the cut for a little while. “Fear Agent” was one of those books. I started with it late, picked it up for a while, dropped it, and then picked it up again. I still am missing a couple of issues but they are cheaper then when they were new. If you can track ‘em down.

It was a little annoying ordering from this online shop. Only because I missed putting an issue in my order. I thought I did but I didn’t. I e-mailed them and got a response that since the web site used an automated ordering system they couldn’t add things to my order. That seems a little crazy to me. When a sales system is so inflexible that is loses sales I have to say that is a big flaw.

I haven’t bought any back issues of comic book in a while. There are so many collected editions of old comics being published that there is no need to hunt down back issues. I especially like the oversized hardcovers of stuff that’s been coming out. I’m not a huge trade paperback fan. I prefer the hardcovers. Often, but not always, they’re printed better and if they are bound well they are easier to read that TPBs.

I still like actual comic books though. I like their periodical nature. Waiting until next month to see the next part of the story is part of the fun of comics. I buy the individual issues of all of the small press stuff that I read regularly but nothing from Marvel or DC. If I want some mainstream super hero stuff I’ll usually by a collected edition. There are too many ads and not enough story in a regular Marvel or DC Comic for me.

I’ll often buy the collected edition of the small press stuff I like too. Not only to support my favorite cartoonists but also to lend out. For some reason I find comic book fans are more likely to read something new that they can borrow if it is in book form. I don’t know why. They’re comic book fans and read individual comic books but would rather not be bothered with something new unless it’s collected. Weird. Regular people won’t read a comic at all but might read a collected edition.

The collected editions are fairly cheap on a per issue basis. A comic costs three or even four dollars an issue now. For twenty two pages of story. That’s expensive. A two hundred page collected edition is going to run you twenty five to thirty dollars. Plus I get a thirty percent discount on collected editions at my local comic shop. A powerful incentive to get collected editions. Of course that also means buying a lot of “comics” at once. The downside of collected editions if you’re just trying stuff out.

I’ve already started digging through the database of my comic collection to see what other obscure comics I am missing. Maybe I’ll put in another order soon or maybe I won’t. Let’s face it these aren’t comics I’m dying to read right now. I’ve been missing them for a lot of years and have been in no rush to find them. Still it is fun to fill in holes in the collection after all these years. And most of the ones I need are cheap.

It has been one rainy June. As a matter of fact a lot of the spring has been wet. But the temperature has been mild and the grass has grown long. Though the rain has stopped me from getting into Manhattan and taking street pictures as I like to do but has left me with plenty of time to contemplate buying a new camera.

I usually have two cameras at any give time. A pocketable one and a bigger more sophisticated model. The first big one I ever had was the Olympus OM-G (35mm SLR) which I got back in college. The spring of 1985 I think. I used that one for many years. It’s in a closet somewhere around here now. Good camera.

I didn’t start carrying a pocketable camera for many years after I got my big camera. It was sometime in the early 90’s that I bought a 35mm Olympus Stylus pocket sized camera. I liked that camera. It was not as small as today’s pocketable cameras but it was small enough that I carried it everywhere. My first one was stolen out of my coat pocket in a NYC bar one evening. I usually didn’t carry it in my coat pocket and for sure never did after that. Damned theives. I replaced it though.

Last year I replaced my old pocketable camera (now digital) with a Nikon Coolpix S60. The only reason I wanted that one is the touch screen. I wanted to try that out. It’s been interesting for me to use a camera that meters and focuses where you touch it on screen. Good stuff.

My larger camera is the Nikon Coolpix 8800. I bought it in 2005 and it’s an eight megapixel camera. The Coolpix S60 is a ten megapixel camera. I hate it when my small camera passes my big camera in megapixels. That’s when I start thinking about a new big camera.

I’ve been looking on-line at the latest cameras. There is a lot to choose from. I have stayed away from digital SLRs because I insist on a live view LCD screen. I never want to look through a camera’s view finder again. And I like to shoot at waist level and odd angles so I like the LCD to swivel. The one thing I don’t like about my S60 is that its LCD doesn’t swivel. But that would be hard to do with a touch screen.

These days there are some SLRs (or 4/3 systems) with live view swivel LCD screens. I’ve been checking out some of these but nothing has jumped out at me. They are expensive too. And not as compact as my Coolpix 8800 and other “prosumer” digital cameras.

I take camera reviews with a grain of salt. Whether by amateurs on sites like Amazon or professionals on camera web sites I have no idea what a person’s picture making skill might be. That is an important piece of information that’s missing. Both of my current cameras got mediocre reviews but I like them both. As a matter of fact I like every camera I’ve ever used. I’m sure they exist but I’ve never had a bad camera.

That is because my picture making skills are pretty well developed. After all I draw and paint most of the time so making a picture with a camera is easy compared to making one out of thin air. No insult to the photographic profession but it’s true. That is why there are a lot more photographers than artists.

My background as an artist effects the way I make photos too. I’m less demanding of my camera because my skill is not in taking the picture but in what I make out of it after the picture is taken. A real photographer’s photographer takes total control of his camera and the picture is made in his planning plus knowledge of what his camera can do. There might be some post production work or there might not be. That’s not the kind of photographer I am. To me the photo is raw material for making something interesting.

So advice in a photo review doesn’t always ring true to me. There are some good ones but only about one in three I’d say. And some people just expect their camera to do everything. And do it instantly. One of the criticisms of the Coolpix 8800 was that the zoom was slow. Compared to what? Who knows. And it had one of the biggest zooms in its class at the time so of course it was slower than cameras with zooms half its size. Lots of critics don’t make sense to me.

I’m still not even sure if I really want to replace my Coolpix 8800 yet. Sure there are bigger zooms out there today and more megapixels but I haven’t decided if it’s really worth it. Money is tight these days and even though the cameras I’ve been looking at are cheaper than my Coolpix 8800 was they are still not cheap. It always comes down to money, doesn’t it?

Things that will make you go blind: Making chain mail.

Once upon a time I got it into my head to make chain mail. My cousin George had made small piece and it looked cool. One day soon after I was bored and decided I wanted to figure out how to make it and I had the internet to tell me that it’s really not hard.

What you need is some 16 gauge steel wire, a quarter inch dowel, and wire cutters. First you wrap the steel wire tightly around the dowel. When you are done with this the wire looks like a spring. You pull the wire off the dowel and snip it with the cutters at the top of each loop. This is how you make all the little metal rings that you need to weave together. You’ll need a lot of them.

Weaving it all together is the hardest part. You have to follow a pattern where each ring is looped through four others on each side of it. That can be a little tricky but you can get the hang of it. It’s almost like knitting. Or weaving.

But what drives you blind is that it is all close up work. I’m used to close up work being that I draw and paint but there is a difference. When drawing or painting I move in and out of the work. I have to step back every now and again to get an overall look and then move in close to work on details. The key to avoiding eye strain in not to concentrate on the details for too long. I stare off into the distance as a matter of habit. It’s good to have a window to work by.

The problem with making chain mail is that there is no moving in and out of it. It’s pure detail work. Up close and making sure that every ring attaches correctly. Make a mistake and you have to go back. Plus they are little quarter inch across rings. Not easy to work with.

With chain mail you also can’t work by feel. My mother knits and crochets but doesn’t have to be looking at all the little loops she’s making. When the needles are flying along it’s all done by feel. You can move your vision in and out. Looking sometimes to make sure things are going as they should and then not looking as you make a bunch of loops of yarn. With chain mail you have to watch every ring go into place. Up close and personal.

I ended up making two pieces of chain mail. Both were about three inch wide bracelets. Not very big in the grand scheme of things. The first was an all steel model but with the second I got fancy and used brass to make some of the rings. This way I had two colors to work with. I just gotta have color. That was a mistake.

Since brass is considerably softer than steel the brass rings pulled apart. Soon after I finished the bracelet some of the brass rings bent open a little and the rings connected to them slipped out of place. Rings started shifting everywhere and the thing became a mess. So if you want to make your own my advice is to stick with steel.

But I gave up making chain mail after those two small bracelets. It was too demanding on my eyes. They hurt right now just thinking about it. And though I have all the patience in the world when making art I have no such patience for making craft. That and I had no real reason to make anything out of chain mail. I was satisfied with figuring out how to make those small bits of chain mail.

About a year after I made this chain mail a coworker of mine expressed an interest in learning to make chain mail. He wanted a chain shirt to wear to a Renaissance festival he frequented, was a hands on crafty guy, and so was looking to make his own. I warned him off telling of my chain mail experience and of how long it would take to make and entire shirt. After all it took me a few hours to make each bracelet.

He ended up abandoning his quest to make chain mail and found a nice chain mail shirt on Ebay for a very reasonable price. Neither of us even knew that such chain mail shirts could be found so easily. Or so cheaply. I think he paid about eighty bucks for the thing in 2002 or so. He was quite happy not to have spent many hours figuring out how to make a chain mail shirt. Or to make himself go blind. I like not going blind.

So far I don’t like my new drafting chair. It may be a lemon. I wish I could have fixed my old drafting chair but alas in this disposable world of ours that was not to be. My old chair was really good. I bought it sometime in the early Nineties and it lasted me about fifteen years. I paid a lot of money for it. Four hundred dollars as I remember. An especially big sum for me back then.

The chair was by Martin Universal Designs and was solid and reliable. I usually work standing and only sit about ten to twenty percent of the time. That means I need a drafting chair for its height. A regular desk chair is way too short. That chair could adjust the seat height and pitch, the chair back height and angle. I even paid the extra money for adjustable arms. It was a good chair. Too bad it’s gone.

What finally broke on it was a weight bearing bolt under the seat. The seat pitched back and forth freely without that bolt to steady it. If it was a regular bolt I could have replaced it easily but it was a specialty bolt. It had a hole in the middle of it for a lever to pass through and was threaded in a couple of places to secure it. Not a common item.

I searched the internet in vain for drafting chair parts. I only found a couple of places that had exorbitantly priced parts for chairs. And none of them were even the part I needed. I remembered the art supply store Sam Flax used to fix drafting chairs but that was in the Nineties. And that was also in Manhattan. Plus the store closed. Not much help to me.

So I made the decision to get a new chair. I bought the last one at Pearl Paint in Paramus NJ all those years ago but I didn’t want to go over there to get one this time. The internet offers a wider variety of things these days and competitive pricing. Art supplies are notoriously over priced. I’ve been trying to save some money and didn’t want to spend a lot on a new chair. But my aching back said I better get one fast.

I searched high and low on the internet and discovered that drafting chairs are in pretty short supply these days. I guess that not a lot of drafting at an old fashioned drafting table gets done these days. Everything is done on computer and in a lower computer chair. The height is not necessary.

I also discovered that the quality of drafting chairs, much like other pieces of drafting equipment, had diminished over the years. I could tell just by the pictures. Sure you can buy a $1000 high end drafting chair but the quality $300-$400 dollar ones, like my old one, were no where to be seen. Plenty of places has $200 chairs for $400 dollars but I’m no dummy. I can comparison shop. It’s easy on the internet.

My back was hurting from standing too much and I was in dismay from not being able to find a good chair. I checked a few local office supply stores but they had nothing good. So I hit the internet again. This time I was able to find a couple of places that sold chairs by Martin Universal Designs. They made my old chair that I liked so much so I decided to get one of these new ones. I could tell it wasn’t as good as my old one because the seat didn’t have tilt control. But few I saw did. As a matter of fact I don’t remember any.

One site had the chair priced lowest at about $140 with a small amount for shipping. Since it was the same manufacturer as my old chair I decided to order it. Even if it was of lesser quality. After all, most of the drafting chairs these days were of lesser quality.

The chair arrived a couple of days later and I easily assembled it. I was clearly of lesser quality than my old one (and didn’t have the same part I needed to repair the old one) but I hoped it would do. Unfortunately as soon as I put it together and went to adjust the angle of the back a lever came right off in my hand. A bad weld that didn’t hold.

A vice-grip wrench used instead of the lever made a suitable replacement and I was able to adjust the back to my liking. Still I was perturbed. A brand new chair should not have bad welds like that. I paid good money for it.

I went back on the web site and wend through their “broken product complaint” section and sent them a message about the problem. I did as I was told and described the part that was broken including the part number. And then didn’t hear back for three weeks.

I was annoyed but my aching back needed the chair, which was perfectly sit-able despite the broken lever, and I was also anxious about how I would return the whole chair. You see once those pneumatic tubes snap into place they don’t came apart. I couldn’t disassemble the chair to put it in the box to return it.

I finally heard from the returns department and they wanted pictures of what was broken. Being an artist/graphics guy/photographer this was easy for me. I worked up a photo with text and arrows describing my problem. And then I didn’t hear back. Annoying but the chair was still sit-able. My back liked it.

This week a new problem with the chair emerged. The pneumatic tube which sits in the middle of the base of the chair is not supposed to go all the way to the ground. But guess what. Now it does. It, in fact, dropped lower than the wheels. I had to pound on the base of the chair with great force to get it to move a bit so that the tube wasn’t dragging the floor. Now after sitting in it for a few days it’s back to the floor.

So today I called the place about this lemon of a chair. I spoke to a very nice woman about my problem and she ended up passing everything on to the returns department which she said was in a bit of disarray since they just expanded (nice to hear of new hirings though). That’s why I may have fallen through the cracks. I’m supposed to hear back from them soon. We’ll have to see. The chair is still sit-able but I don’t know for how long. I sure miss my old reliable chair.