Radiant Comics

I got a bunch of new comic book and strip collections for Christmas. One of them is “Get Lost” by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. It’s a collection of the only three issues of that title that were published in 1954. I had never heard of it before I read about this new printing but “Get Lost” was one of the many comics that hoped to ride the wave created by “Mad”. It’s a humor comic and even looks like the early issues of “Mad”.

Last year I got “Mad Archive Volume 1” and when I read it I noticed an awkwardness to it. I couldn’t quite quantify or describe it but it was there. Good stuff but I still found it clumsy some how. When I started reading “Get Lost” I noticed the same awkwardness. It was then that I realized what it was. A totally different type of storytelling than I was used to.

Comic book storytelling is basically designed to keep you moving forward. The artists and writers try to control where your eye looks and bring you to the important points in the story as it moves forward. They can alter the pace of the story as suits them but it’s a relentless march to the last page. The epitome of this is Japanese comics that move forward so fast that sometimes it seems as if I’m just flipping pages. Like a page turning novel they are all about what happens next.

The gag-a-day comic strip has an even more simple storytelling structure. It’s set-up, pause, joke. Three panels are all you need and it’s all about getting to the gag in the last panel. I’m tired of that gag a day comic structure which explains why I don’t like many comic strips these days. Of course it could also be that there aren’t many good strips around. After all, I still love the classics: Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, and Doonesbury.

Even Mad Magazine, which I grew up reading in the 1970’s, used a combination of these structures.”Mad” had a lot of short strips that were of the set-up, pause, joke variety. It also had a lot of movie parodies. These parodies used the set-up, pause, joke structure within the context of a larger “Push you forward” story. The story of the movie it was mocking. Sometimes making fun of the plot of the movie was most important and sometimes the gags. Either way pushing you forward was paramount.

That is what makes the early “Mad” and “Get Lost” storytelling different. They are all about what is happening now. There is a story, or sometimes just general craziness, going on in the word balloons and overall main structure of the art but many panels also contains a lot of unrelated little stories i.e. gags. It is more related to single panel gag cartoons than gag-a-day comics or comic strips.

This type of storytelling is not about moving the reader relentlessly forward. It’s about the reader pausing in the here and now to try and see all the sub-stories, sight gags, and funny drawings going on in each panel. This makes the overall story less important and awkward to read because it’s interrupted so much. But it’s also what makes this type of storytelling so different. The point isn’t to keep reading until you get to the end. The point is to enjoy the humor of the “here and now” of each and every panel. The end be damned.

In the gag-a-day world of comic strips the first two panels are meaningless without the payoff of the third panel. In the world of “Get Lost” and early “Mad” nearly every panel exists on it’s own with it’s own jokes and funny drawings. Sometimes the point of a panel is just that it’s a funny drawing. It doesn’t matter what is going to happen next. What matters is that things are funny right now.

When I realized this as I was reading “Get Lost” I slowed down. I stopped paying so much attention to what was going to happen and paid more attention to what was happening. The next panel didn’t mater so much. The awkwardness that I felt before was gone as I got into what the artists were trying to do.

I like it that there are new things to discover in old things.

Some people lose things all the time, some people hardly ever lose things, and most are probably somewhere in between. I’m a person who hardly ever loses things. Umbrellas, hats, keys, or whatever I generally keep track of them. I don’t know why. It’s not like it’s a virtue or anything. Just a fact of life. So when I lose something it discombobulates me. I gotta know what went wrong.

Today I lost a pair of my gloves. If I ever lost another pair of gloves I don’t remember it. I’ve had these gloves for about five years. They weren’t expensive but I liked them. They were a pair of cloth gloves that I got from Target and I think they were marketed as “Sports Gloves”. They had a few concentric ovals of grip material on the palm. There was no insulation in them. They were like sweaters for my hands. Not the warmest gloves ever but they were very pocketable.

My process of losing them began with my eternal question as I was headed into Manhattan to meet up with friends for lunch. “Should I bring a bag or not?” If I were carrying art supplies to sit in the park and draw then of course I’d bring a bag. But even if I don’t need art supplies I do need supplies for the bus ride. My iPod and headphones. I like big over the ear headphones too. Plus I need my phone and pocket camera. That’s a lot of pockets.

So I was trying something new. I usually just wear my duster in the winter but today I wore my sports coat underneath my duster. Besides extra warmth the sports coat has plenty of pockets. I wouldn’t need to carry a bag. The headphones would occupy one of the big outside duster pockets. I had it all worked out. But having so many extra pockets can lead to extra confusion.

The first bit of confusion was as I got onto the bus. Usually when I get on the bus I put my hat and gloves in one outside pocket and my scarf in the other. The I take off my coat if the bus is warm. It was. My headphones were already in an outside pocket so there was no place to put my scarf until I removed them. Easy enough to do but habit is a strange thing and having something in a pocket that usually has nothing in it can lead to problems.

I reversed the process as I got off of the bus putting on my scarf and hat but not my gloves just yet. I had to go to the ticket window to buy some bus tickets. So I did. Here is where I’m not exactly sure what happened. After I got my tickets I moved over to put my change and the tickets into my wallet. As I was doing that my friend, Julio, came up to me to say hello. He was just passing through and saw me. We chatted for a few minutes and then moved on.

As I was walking down 8th Avenue I pulled out my phone and called the person I was going to meet. We picked a street corned to meet on (our original plans got a little skewed) and I hung up. Then I went to put my gloves on. They weren’t in my pocket. I suddenly remembered a confusing moment with my gloves as Julio said hello to me.

As I was putting my money back in my wallet I had my gloves in my hand. Since I needed to use that hand I went to put the gloves in my pocket but my big headphones were already filling up than pocket. So I put my gloves down on a little shelf next to the ticket booths in the bus station. It was at this moment that Julio said hello to me and we started talking. As I left I completely forgot that I put my gloves down. Since I normally would never put them down. I’d put them in my pocket.

I immediately checked to see if my wallet was missing. It wasn’t but in that confusing moment caused by things being in pockets they weren’t usually in I wasn’t sure what I put down. I looked in the wallet for my three dollars change and the new bus tickets and they weren’t there either. I figured I must have put them down on the counter with the gloves. Annoying.

I then had a nice lunch. Occasionally I was flustered by the fact that I lost my gloves and tickets but glad that I didn’t lose any of the more valuable items I had in my pockets. Twenty bucks worth of bus tickets and a ten dollar pair of gloves is not a great financial loss.

The strange ending to this story is as I was buying another set of bus tickets I saw three new dollars in the front of my wallet. They were my three dollars change that I thought I had lost with my gloves. I hadn’t seen them in my wallet when I looked earlier and don’t know why. I then looked for the bus tickets I thought I had lost and they were there too. My gloves were still nowhere to be found but I hadn’t lost anything with them after all.

That is the story of a person who rarely loses things losing something. And then having to analyze how the loss occurred. Now I’ve got to find a new pair of gloves.

Here are a bunch of things I’ve been watching lately. In no particular order. For no particular reason.

“The New Avengers” – This is the TV show from the 1970’s that was the sequel to the TV show “The Avengers” from the 1960’s. Though I am quite familiar with the original I’ve never seen any episodes of the 1970’s version. They were never the cult classic the original was and therefore not shown on TV as much. I remember seeing commercials for the show when I was kid but I never saw the show then and I don’t think it’s popped up on TV since then.

I’ve watched about ten episodes so far and I have to say that I like them. Patrick Macnee reprises his role as John Steed and we get Gareth Hunt as Mike Gambit and, Joanna Lumley as Purdey. There are three Avengers instead of two now. I think the two new Avengers do an excellent job. Plenty of action and double dealing in the world of British intelligence. This show is much better than I expected it to be.

“The Hollow Men” – An Australian show that I stumbled on to is a comedy about working in the office of the Prime Minister of Australia. “The Central Policy Unit”. There are two seasons of six episodes apiece all about the absurdities and crazy backwards logic of politics.

A favorite episode of mine was when there was going to be a budget surplus and that triggered a “crisis”. You see a surplus was a sign that the PM had no big plan for the country and was floundering. They had to create a huge project to spend some money so that the PM would have “Momentum”. Whether the project even got done or the money actually spent was irrelevant. Definitely my favorite new comedy.

“Mad Men” Season 2 – This is the show that is about an ad agency in NYC during the early 1960’s. The ad game was a man’s world and woman’s lib not even a notion. Men ran the place and women were secretaries and wives. But things were changing. Slowly.

I liked the first season of “Mad Men” better than the second. Only because the first season dealt more with the drama of the ad business. In the second season they got more into the drama of the characters personal lives. I wasn’t as interested in that. A solid show though. It does it’s best to capture a time period.

“The Mentalist” – This is a new show this year and it’s a cop drama. The lead character is a former fake “ESP guy” who now consults for the California state cops. His schtick is that he’s really good at noticing things and reading people. It’s also kind of an anti- “The Medium” and “Ghost Whisperer” show.

There is nothing really special about “The Mentalist” but it’s okay. The characters are likable and do their jobs well as we watch them track down criminals. It’s a good show to accompany me on the stationary bike.

“Burn Notice” – I’ve watched a bunch of episodes of season one from this show. It’s about a spy who worked for the US government until he got a “Burn Notice” put out on him. This means all his spy privileges have been revoked and he can’t be trusted. All his old government contacts have to turn their backs on him. Bank accounts frozen and all that.

So now he is stuck in Miami trying to earn a living and helping people out with his spy skills. All while trying to figure out who put the burn notice on him so he can get it removed. It’s a pretty cool show with lots of violence and style. You get to see all sorts of neat spy tricks that we all wish we could pull off. As if we have a reason to. I’m going to have to watch some more of this show. It’s in season two now.

“Big Apple” – Here’s a show from 2001 that I didn’t even know existed. Probably because there were only eight episodes and who can hear about every new TV show? It stars Ed O’Neil as the quintessential New York City cop. He doesn’t trust anyone. Not the criminals and not the feds he has to work with.

“Big Apple” is basically an eight part miniseries about local cops and federal cops working together to bring in a big case. Another cop show that walked on familiar ground but did it pretty well. Who are the good guys? Who are they bad guys? Can all the good guys work together well? You know the drill. But still it was okay if you like that sort of thing.

So there has been some of my TV watching of recent days. Most of the time I’m doing something as I watch TV. A lot of the time I’m working so I’m just listening to the TV. That’s why I like dialogue based shows. So your milage may vary.

It’s getting near the end of the year which means it’s time for everybody’s top ten list about everything under the sun. I’ve never been a fan of top ten lists. I find it tells you more about the person writing the list than what the list is allegedly about.

I’m the type of person who is always looking for something new. A book, a comic, a movie, a TV show, a magazine, or whatever. Something I might have missed that I may enjoy. And I miss a lot of things. I’m not plugged in anywhere and don’t have my finger on the pulse of anything. But I look around. One place I know not to look is an end of the year top ten list.

First of all people rarely put a lot of thought into an end of the year top ten list. It’s not like they keep a running tally all year with the list in mind. I’m sure some people do but most just jot down what comes to mind as their deadline looms. This means most of the list is from the last few months of the year. A great thing from last February is harder to recall than a great thing from last week. So most top ten lists are inaccurate.

There is also a lot of group think going on in end of the year lists. Especially movie lists. I would guess that any random end of the year movie list has at least five movies in common with any other random list. And if I were to look at any random movie list there would be two movies on it that baffle me how they got there. People are willing to believe in the “greatness” of a movie quicker than any other medium. As long as others believe it too.

And top ten music lists? I have heard more crap on top ten music lists then I can believe. Music is so fragmented and genre driven that one person’s top ten of the year is another’s worst of the year. Or more probably the second person doesn’t even know the first person’s music exists. I’ve never found a song I’ve liked from a person’s top ten list. We associate music with personal events so sometimes a personal event can make a song “Top Ten” for someone and the rest of us don’t care.

The only thing more useless than a top ten list is a top one hundred of all time list. Do you know what a top one hundred of all time list really tells you? The age of the person or people making the list. You can tell their age by the time period the things on the list came out.

For example I once saw a top one hundred comic book covers of all time list. If the list were somehow made by an objective standard then the comic book covers should have been spread out evenly over time. Good comic book covers were being made throughout every decade but the list ended up something like this:1940’s- five covers,1950’s- ten covers, 1960’s- ten covers, 1970’s- fifteen covers, 1980’s- thirty covers, 1990’s- twenty covers, 2000’s- ten covers.

The decade with the most “great” covers was the decade where the people making the list were probably ages 12-22 or so. That’s when any comic book cover would have the most impact on a person. There is no way by any objective standard the 1980’s had six times the amount of great covers than did the 1940’s. It’s just that the people making the list weren’t around for the 1940’s and so couldn’t see all the great covers.

All time music lists are just as telling. That is they tell you the age of the person making the list. Once some friends of mine participated in an e-mail conversation about the best albums of all time. Everybody wrote up their top ten albums of all time. You know what? Everyone had albums on their list that came out during their high school and college years. That’s when music has the biggest impact on the average person.

Someone born ten years later would have a completely different list. And it would in no way be based on the quality of the music it would just be based on when the music was released. Just like everyone else’s list.

So there you go. That’s why I’m not bothering with looking at top ten of the year lists. There are probably some out there that are useful. But someone would have to done an exhaustive examination of a lot of books, movies, or music. I’m sure someone has. But most top ten lists are just the top ten things that the author happened to stumble onto that he can still remember as his deadline approaches. That’s far less useful.

I’ve had my Wacom Cintiq 12WX for about two months now so it’s time to write down some of my thoughts about it. For those of you who don’t know the Cintiq is a graphics tablet that is an LCD screen. You interact with a computer and draw right on the flat screen of the Cintiq.

I bought the twelve inch model (measured diagonally like every TV and computer screen) rather than the twenty two inch one because I wanted to use it on my drawing table as I would a piece of paper. The twenty two inch one was too big for that task. That and too expensive.

The first problem I had with it was that the Cintiq was not made to work very well with my old school CRT computer monitor. The aspect ratio of my old monitor is 4:3 and the Cintiq is somewhere around a letter boxed movie. Since both screens have to have the same resolution one or the other is going to be distorted.

Like I said I wanted to use the Cintiq on my drawing table so I wouldn’t be looking at my monitor much anyway so I thought this wouldn’t be much of a problem. I’d set my preferences for the Cintiq resolution when I was going to use it and change them back after.

Surprisingly this turned out to be more of a pain in the ass then I thought it would be. My monitor can be set to a zillion different resolutions and Mhz and I never remember which one I use. Even writing it down was a pain since every time I want to use the Cintiq I have to find where I wrote the info down. That is just a small irritating thing but it usually made me think, “Eh, it’s faster to do this without the Cintiq”.

As a matter of fact for the last couple of days I’ve been using the Cintiq without bothering to change the resolution. It was easier to deal with the distorted image. None of this is really the tablet’s fault and I hope to get a new monitor sometime soon and eliminate this problem but it is a problem.

I use the Cintiq for a few specific tasks. When I’m using photo reference for something it makes it real easy to draw on top of a photo. That is where I knew it would excel and it does. I can still draw on paper and scan in a lot faster and easier than using a tablet but for that specific type of drawing (photo reference) I prefer the Cintiq over drawing on paper or with my regular graphics tablet.

The other type of work I’ve been using it for is my vector based artwork in Adobe Illustrator. I’ll draw on paper, scan it in, and then color the drawing with the computer. I draw shapes of color on top of all that. That is where I’m using the Cintiq. To draw those shapes of color.

Because I’m new to the Cintiq I’m a little slow at the drawing vector shapes part. I’m not using it in conjunction with my keyboard or CRT so all the key command shortcuts I’m used to aren’t there. I’ve been setting up the function buttons on the Cintiq to substitute for the key commands but it takes practice to use them effortlessly. There is a learning curve.

My fingers automatically hit the key commands when I’m using my keyboard and regular graphics tablet. I’ve been doing it so long I don’t have to think about it. I’m nowhere near that level on the Cintiq and it’s a little frustrating sometimes. Learning a new working method is usually not easy.

I do like the three little bumps they put on some of the function keys to differentiate them by feel. I call them the “Pain Lands” (an old Magic the Gathering term that popped into my head) and know that the buttons I have to think about, undo and save, are under the bumps. Learning is all about association.

One funny thing about when I first got the Cintiq is that I couldn’t find the on switch. It’s on the upper left narrow edge side of the tablet. It’s recessed and marked in a subtle fashion. I really couldn’t find it. I had to look up in the instruction booklet where it was. I can’t remember ever having to do that before.

Overall I’m happy with the Cintiq even though I haven’t used it enough to be efficient with it. Hopefully when I get a new monitor it will be more effortless to use. I expected it to a complement to my existing computer tools, including my regular graphics tablet, not replace them and that is what it’s done. It does a few things well and that’s what I’ll do on it but the Cintiq not the be all end all of drawing on the computer. At least not for me.