Radiant Comics

Acting versus reacting. That’s the creative conflict that’s been on my mind lately. I like acting. Acting on my own. What I mean by that is when I create things, be they stories, pictures, or anything else I like to come up with stuff on my own. I like to make stuff that no one has seen before. Of course I have influences and after all this time of human existence and people making things very little is new but I like to try. I like to create my own world and not react to somebody else’s.

By reacting I don’t mean being influenced by something or even aping a style but to make something that wouldn’t exist without another person’s creation. Usually a pop culture creation. Things such as reviews of movies or parody in general. A good example of this is the site that does thirty second recaps of popular movies reenacted with cartoon bunnies. It wouldn’t exist without it’s source material: the popular movies. It’s some pretty amusing stuff and I liked watching them but I have no interest in making something like that myself. Too much reacting for me.

I’ve been thinking about the choices involved with the things I make. Every artist wants to be able to make living from his art. That’s the dream. It only happens to the rare few and for the rest of us it’s a puzzle to be figured out. Except it’s actually not a puzzle nor is there a recipe to follow but admitting that it’s just dumb luck gives me nothing to do. It makes my choices and decisions null and void and removes free will. So I’m going to say success is neither a puzzle with a solution nor pure luck. It’s something in between. So that means that my decisions do matter (hey, I’m a dreamer).

The choice I’ve been pondering lately is the action versus reaction one. One of the short cuts to popularity is to react to something already popular. And popularity leads to financial success. The more people who know about what you are doing the more who will be interested in it and who will reward you financially. That’s why companies spend billions a year in advertising. To let people know that they exist in order to get popular and sell stuff.

I have a glass half full/half empty situation. Most of the artwork that I do is of a nature that it will probably not be popular. It’s a little too unexpected as it confronts the unknown a lot. As I’ve been influenced by comics and cartoons my art is made with a line and style that is familiar to people but the imagery is a little too odd. It’s not as comfortable as people want it to be. But that’s the way I want it. That’s what makes me happy and satisfied so that is what I do.

Yet still the influence of wanting to be popular and a financial winner rears its head. As I’m thinking about what to do next with my art I often think of projects that might somehow lead to popularity. They are usually reactive projects piggybacking on to something already proven. None of those type of projects have ever worked out for me. I get bored with them quickly and don’t do a very good job reacting to other people’s ideas. But at the beginning of them I think I can do it. I think I can divine what is popular and imitate it in my own project and create a success. Then it all falls apart. Popularity is not my strength. Being a weirdo is.

I think a lot of talented artists have this problem. What if your strength, what you do best, what you do well, isn’t appreciated by many people? That’s why most artists give up and go do something else. They played to their strengths, gave it their best shot, and nobody cared. They never figured out the puzzle that I say isn’t there. Popular culture passed them by without so much as a glance. It’s a tough world.

If I look around most people are quite willing to react rather than act. Every place I look are books, magazines, web sites, and whole TV channels dedicated to reacting to popular culture. People are quite happy to bask in the glow of and forever dissect their favorite movie or TV show. People devote their energies to them. They use their creativeness to live in a pop culture world that others create. I find this hard to do even when I want to.

So what is the point of all this? I don’t know. That’s why I’m pondering it. Should I try to be popular and make mediocre work? Should I do what my own weird self wants, do good work, and probably never be popular? My own weird self usually wins out but only when money is not too tight so my mind is not filled with Ralph Kramden get rich quick schemes. Those schemes never worked out for him either.

I’m not a big processed food fan. By processed foods I mean anything that comes in a can, bag, or wrapper that is already cooked and ready to eat. I don’t hate it all but I do read ingredients and stay away from the things that have an unrecognizable list of chemicals in them.

I enjoy a potato chip or other salty snack now and again. I don’t usually have potato chips around the house because I’ll just eat them mindlessly. That salty snack urge is powerful so I only get chips when I actually want some. I go for some sort of natural kettle cooked chip. They’re the best. I almost never get flavored chips any more. These days they don’t taste like anything but chemicals to me and I feel bad after eating them. They are hardly an invigorating snack.

One of the only canned foods that I enjoy is Stagg brand chili. They have a good list of ingredients and a nice flavor. All other brands of canned chili that I’ve tried, Bush’s, Hormell, Cambell’s Chunky, and whatever store’s house brand are all bland and tasteless. The supermarket house brand I tried once (I can’t remember which) was so bad as to be inedible. Seriously, that stuff was foul. I can’t believe they sold it as food. Stagg is the only canned chili I will eat. They have a variety of flavors but unfortunately one of my local supermarkets only caries two of the flavors and the other store doesn’t carry that brand at all. And those are the “Super” supermarkets.

Another thing I never have anymore is a snack cake. You know, all that Hostess and Drake stuff. Ring Dings, Ding Dongs, cup cakes, Devil Dogs, or whatever. I was never a big fan of them but now I never buy them at all. If I buy them I’ll just eat them and they’ll make me feel bad. A snack should give you some “get up and go” and not make you want to take a nap. The only snack cake I still get is the Little Debbie coffee cakes. I still like them for whatever reason.

I am a chocolate fan but I don’t go crazy with the stuff. I usually have a bag of 60% cocoa chocolate chips lying about the place. It’s cheaper than buying a bar and I only have a little at a time. I can’t remember the last time I had a full size candy bar. I never want that much candy at once. I’ll get a bag of mini candy bars every now and then. That way I can have a variety of types of candy and only have a small amount. If I’m hungry I’ll go grab something real, like a piece of fruit, bread, veggies, or even a piece of chicken and then some chocolate afterwords. Eating candy to fill yourself up is just a bad idea that gets worse and worse as I get older.

In my youth, which ended around 25 or so, I could eat anything and it didn’t matter. Junk food never used to make me feel bad. It was just food like everything else. I never ate a lot of fast food, even then, but I noticed it was McDonalds food that first made me feel bad after eating it. Not all of it. But I never get any of their specialty sandwiches. If I ever eat at Mickey D’s it’s a basic hamburger and small fries. I’m cool with that.

I eat granola bars as snacks. I’m not quite sure where they fall on the junk/processed food scale but I like a lot of different types. The crunchy ones, the chewy ones (as long as they’re not too sweet), and lately some organic ones. I’ve been trying out some organic snack crackers too. I still like a taste of a salty snack but all those flavored cracker are loaded with chemicals and, once again, make me feel listless after I’ve eaten them. The organic snack crackers have a list of ingredients that I recognize. Pretty tasty too.

I’m also a breakfast cereal eater. Love the stuff. Another thing where I’m not sure where it falls on the junk/processed food scale. I don’t eat the really junky sugar cereals. I mostly like Cheerios, Wheaties, Shredded Wheat, Rice Chex, and the like. I might have a small bowl of Apple Jacks or some such as a dessert but I couldn’t imagine having it for my breakfast. And my imagination is strong, Grasshopper.

I’d been doing some drawing today. I was working on yet another not quite fully formed idea for my web comic. In the morning it was some figures for my “Question of the Day” strip. I completed one of those last year but have yet to develop it any more. Like I said they’re all in progress. In the afternoon I thumbed through one of my sketchbooks (number five) and decided to work up a drawing that was based on a complex series of shapes and faces. I figured I could finish it in an afternoon. It’s after diner and I’m only halfway there.

Boy did I underestimate the time this would take. The drawing is sort of collage like in that it’s a series of interlocking heads and faces tied together with lines and shapes. It’s un-collage like in that it has to make sense spatially in a way that collages normally don’t. That is the tricky part. In the sketch I had most of the faces figured out, there were about thirty of them, but I didn’t have the way they relate to each other nailed down. That’s taking a lot of nailing. Plus about twenty more faces.

This drawing is also different for me in that it will be finished in pencil. Usually I finish drawing off in ink but I’m not looking for that type of hard line for this. I want something softer. Usually when a piece of art is being printed, such as a poster or an ad in a magazine, the art is done much bigger than the final printed piece. That way the art tightens up and flaws can be minimized as it gets smaller. I was looking at a poster by Jim Steranko where he did just the opposite. He made a small but very tight and hard lined pencil illustration and then had it blown up to be printer as a poster. That gave him the soft edge he was looking for. I’m looking for a similar soft edge. That’s why I’m finishing it in pencil.

I’m not finding it easy to finish in pencil. I think better in ink. With ink I get a hard edge and it’s binary. It’s either black or white. There are no shades of grey. With a brush and ink I can also quickly and easily create lines of different or varying widths. Add just a little more pressure to the brush tip and the line gets thicker. Take away that pressure and the line gets thinner. A quarter inch line or a hair line is a flick of the wrist away. With a pencil the thickness of the line is whatever the thickness of the pencil point is. If I want a thicker line than the point I have to go over the line again drawing a line next to my original line. Sometimes it takes three or four strokes to get to the right thickness. No simple flick of the wrist.

Pencil can also get messy. I use a soft dark graphite. Usually a 4B or 6B. That means that if I rub my hand against my drawing I can smear it. I don’t want that. I always draw with a piece of paper between my hand and my drawing. That way I’m resting my hand not on the paper I’m drawing on but on another clean piece of paper. The paper I rest my hand on is always a brown piece of paper. I find the contrast in color with the white paper reminds me to be careful and not rest my hand on the drawing. As I turn the drawing to get a better angle I have to adjust the brown paper too. I found that if I used white paper instead of brown I’d forget about it and not adjust it as I moved the drawing. Then my hand would end up smearing the pencil line. That’s why it’s brown for me. It serves me well.

So I’m not done with that drawing yet. Despite my best estimates since it’s something new to me it will take way longer than I though. It will take yet another day. Two full days is a lot longer than an afternoon. Time sure can slip away.

Some short stuff for you.

I watched the latest “Die Hard” movie last week. The one that came out in 2007 that a lot of people liked. I found it alternately pretty good and a train wreck. There was the usual “Die Hard” type action that was well done but then it turned into “Spider-Man” at the drop of the hat. Certain action sequences made me laugh out loud and they weren’t supposed to. Bruce Willis hit one of the characters with the SUV he was driving and it didn’t even slow her down. She must have had super powers in that scene. A bunch of the characters seemed to develop super powers that came and went. There wasn’t much consistency to the stunts.

To continue the action movie thing I also watched 2007’s “Shooter” staring Mark Wahlberg. It wasn’t great and had a bit of a cheesy ending but I liked it better that Willis’s outing. Wahlberg is a military sniper (I don’t remember which branch) and he gets caught up in a conspiracy with some bad people. There is not much more to it than that but the action scenes were good and the acting was adequate. The plot may have been far fetched but what do you expect from a Mark Wahlberg action flick?

I generally like the American version of “The Office” that’s been running for a few seasons now. Not my favorite show of all time but one of the few sitcoms that I watch. I watched the original UK version of “The Office” recently and all I have to say is: boy was that depressing. It’s not bad but it’s no comedy. It’s starts as a bit of a dark comedy and then gets just dark. I actually got depressed watching it. I’m not sure if that was the creator’s intention but I found few laughs. Especially in the later episodes.

A TV show that I’m not sure if I like is “Big Bang Theory”. I’ve watched it all season so there must be something about it that I like but it has a lot of flaws. It is a show about four brainiac geeks (there are plenty of non-braniac geeks, believe me) and their hot chick neighbor. Of course the lead geek has a crush on the hot chick but can’t ask her out. Lots of anti social geek jokes and references. Some funny and some not. What bothers me is that these are all hard core scientist geeks with good scientist jobs. These aren’t the geeks who can’t get women. These are the geeks who, in their twenties, sleep with tons of women to get back at the ones who ignored them in high school. They have money, prestige, and success. It’s geeks working at the local coffee shop who are undesirable to women. That’s the flaw in the basic premise.

I’m still in the middle of reading Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”. I’m not sure if I like it or not. The writing is pretty good as it’s written like a page turning novel but sometimes I just don’t get it. The best way I can describe the book is that it’s “Lord of the Rings” for business people. First off it’s about 1200 pages. It’s also heroic fiction except the heroes are business people. It’s black and white good versus evil like LOTR and it gets a little goofy like it too. I keep expecting the book to make a point besides “business people are noble heroes and the world is stacked against them” but it doesn’t. I’m not sure if I’ll finish it or not.

I haven’t been into video games for a few months now. Sure I don’t play near as much as I did in my youth but that’s to be expected. I was playing the latest Zelda game on my Nintendo DS for a while but then I hit one part that was really repetitious. That’s what always kills a game for me. It killed “Call of Duty 3” for me on the X-Box 360 too. I like a game that a can play for ten or fifteen minutes and then put down. I like to take a break with a game. Not play for hours straight. In most console games you can’t save anywhere and come back to that exact spot later. Or you can for a while but not everywhere. Inevitably in a game I reach a spot where I die easily and then it take me fifteen minutes to get back to that spot to die again. It takes multiple times to figure out how to get past the spot but the repetition of getting there bores me and I put the game down. I have the latest version of “Advance Wars” (one of my all time favorite games) ready to play on my DS but haven’t even mustered the interest to try it out. I haven’t tried my “Marvel Trading Card” game for the PSP either. At least I got them both cheap. Expensive video games are not for me.

Well that’s it for the small things that have been running around my brain lately. They are less bothersome than the big things. And more entertaining.

I had to have some dental work done last week. It was the first time I had been to the dentist in a lot of years. It got me thinking about my general health and how I’ve been pretty lucky in that area. I’ve had no major health crises or broken bones across my adulthood. I don’t have allergies, catch many colds, or many flu-like whatevers. There was one strange sickness years ago that stands above the rest though for it’s sheer weirdness. At least to me.

It was the morning and I was heading in to work. I was riding in the car with my friend Bill on my way to the Tarrytown train station. It was a day like any other except I was feeling a little run down as if I was getting a cold. You know that feeling. You’re just trucking along and hoping it won’t get any worse and you can make it through the day and then get some rest.

As we reached the parking lot I was a little worn out and wistful not wanting to go into Manhattan to start my work day. I stepped out of the car and, oh boy, the world wouldn’t stop moving. I’ve been dizzy before but it usually consisted of being unable to focus as the world moved around a bit. This was a whole different ball game. It was like if you move your head an inch and instead it moves a foot all on its own. And then moves back and forth with no end in sight. I’d look one place and my eyes would be in another. I had to take a knee.

Of course my buddy Bill was concerned as I was kneeling with my eyes closed. Having my eyes closed made it all better. I wasn’t going to make Bill turn around and drive me home so I knew I had to make it to the train platform. There was a covered staircase that went over the tracks and to the platform. I slowly made my way up and across and took a knee again as I waited for the train. I wasn’t feeling any worse than I did in the car but the crazy way the world was spinning was intense.

I was glad to get on the train and grab a seat. That is when the second scary symptom happened. As I was sitting there began a burning sensation in my chest. I can only describe it as a little ball of heat that started growing. It grew in intensity until it seemed to burst and then the heat expanded all through my body until it hit my skin. As the heat hit my skin I broke into a complete cold sweat that was a relief. This whole incident probably lasted thirty seconds. It was not fun.

As we pulled into Grand Central Station I knew I wasn’t going to be able to work that day but I figured it was just as easy to stop by and let them know I was heading home as not. I was still crazy dizzy but discovered if I focused on something way ahead of me then the dizziness was alleviated and I could walk fairly well. It was the same technique as looking at one of those “Magic Eye” photos that you can only see when you don’t focus on it.

I took the 6 train down to Park Avenue South and told my boss that I was heading home. I then took the N train up to the Port Authority bus station and got on a bus home. They are locals at that time of day so it took nearly two hours to get to my stop and then I had a twenty minute walk to reach home. Still it was a relief to get on the bus and know I was on my way home.

That’s it. Nothing else weird about that illness. I was in bed for a while. I probably missed the rest of the week at work but it was a standard fever, stuffed head, runny nose, flu-like symptoms good time. Thankfully it was not a dread disease and didn’t have any lasting effect. Except for the fact that sometimes when I’m under stress my body will replicate symptoms of that illness. Nothing special about that it’s just the same thing that happens to everybody else. You’re under stress so you get a headache, stomachache, or whatever. It’s just that for a few years instead of felling bad in the pit of my stomach or some such I would start to feel a burning in my chest. I’d have to calm down and tell myself I wasn’t really getting sick like that again. Weird.

It’s not much of a health crisis story, and once again I’m glad for that, but that is what I was thinking about this week as my imagination was running wild with worry for my teeth. There is no telling what is going to run through my head. And as a post script to that story I once had someone tell me that what I experienced were symptoms of the London Flu. I have no idea if that is true or not but it’s the only explanation I’ve ever heard.