Radiant Comics

Since I like to chronicle the everyday things in life I thought I’d write a little something about paper. Once again tonight I found myself preparing a sheet of paper. It’s something I’ve done a thousand times and barely ever think about so I thought I’d take some time and think about it. I like to examine the unexamined.

The paper I was preparing is Bristol board. I’m not sure why it has that name but I’ve always figured it has something to do with the town in England by that same name. It could be Bristol Connecticut but I’m guessing England since it was there first. It’s a heavy weight drawing paper that takes ink well and therefor has been the paper of choice for cartoonists and comic book artists for decades. Working in the world of comic books was how I was first introduced to Bristol board.

You can find Bristol board in most arts and crafts stores like AC Moore or Michaels. They’ve got the basic stuff and it’s priced pretty high so always bring a 40% off coupon when you shop at those stores. The basic stuff is the Strathmore 300 Bristol board. Strathmore also sells 400 and 500 series Bristol. The quality of the paper (which has to do with how smooth it is and how much damage the paper fibers can take) goes up as the number gets higher but I’m usually okay with the 300 series. I oder my paper from Dick Blick and sometimes I buy their house brand of Bristol. It compares well to the 300 series.

I buy pads of the paper in two sizes: 9×12 inches and 14×17 inches. I use the 9×12 inch paper as is and I also cut it in half to work on some smaller 6×9 inch drawings. I always cut the 9×12 inch paper in half with an X-Acto knife and a straight edge. Don’t go cutting paper with scissors because you won’t get a perfectly straight edge that way.

The 14×17 inch paper I cut down to 11×17 inches. This is a standard size paper for drawing comic books on and is a more standard size for getting things printed in general so I stick with that. 11×17 inches is also called “Tabloid Size” when working on a home inkjet printer.

About ten years ago I got myself a paper cutter. Not one of those big guillotine armed ones we all remember from grade school but a rotary paper cutter. That type has a circular blade mounted on a bar that gets drawn across a piece of paper. Mine is made by Dahle and is the 18 inch model. I’ve had mine for so long that I’ve had to replace the blade on it. Oddly when I got the new blade it didn’t work very well. The old blade had gotten dull and wasn’t cutting through the paper as smoothly as it once did. The new blade wasn’t dull but it seemed rough. It was hard to pull along the paper. After a month or two it smoothed out. I guess it had to be broken in a bit.

I always cut the paper the same way. First I cut three inches off the side. That’s the obvious part. But I use the leftover strip of paper too. Years ago I started doing art cards. Those are baseball card size pieces of art. A baseball card is 2.5×3.5 inches. So the first thing I do with the leftover strip of paper is to cut it down from 3 inches to 2.5 inches. Then I cut four 2.5×3.5 inch cards with a 2.5×3 inch piece leftover. The art card size ones get put in a pile and the shorter single piece gets used as scratch paper. Only that half and inch piece of left over paper gets thrown away.

In the 1990s before art cards were a thing I used to throw away the whole 3×17 inch strip. I was always looking for a use for the paper but never could find one. At the time I had plenty of scrap Bristol (5.5×11 inches if memory serves) that I got from my days working in the Marvel Bullpen. Marvel bought 11×17 inch Bristol from Strathmore and the 5.5×11 inch pieces were leftover form whatever large sheet Strathmore cut Marvel’s paper out of. Strathmore sent the scrap pieces over to Marvel whenever they got a paper order and we were free to take the scraps. Those scraps served me very well for years but they also meant I had no use for my own scraps.

I did make a few drawings on the 3×17 inch paper over the years. Mostly I used the paper on a whim. I’d do some practice stuff on them plus some thumbnails drawings. The problem was they were too unwieldy and hard to store anywhere. They’s always get in the way and be more trouble than they were worth. I’m really glad I discovered art cards somewhere around 2006 and finally had a use for those scrap strips. I’ve done over 2000 art cards since then.

Two other size pads of Bristol that I buy, but less frequently, are 11×14 inches and 16×20 inches. I was buying a lot of 11×14 inch pads from around 2008-2014. I don’t even remember why. I think it was because I’ve my self-bound comic book sketch covers I was doing but I think I was working on other things that size too. I have no idea what at this moment. It’s weird but I can distinctly remember thinking the 11×14 inch pad was better for what I was doing than the 11×17 inch one but I have no idea why. Memory is tricky.

I haven’t bought a 16×20 inch pad in a decade. I still have one in with my paper but I don’t use that size anymore. It used to be the paper I occasionally used when I wanted to make a big drawing but not anymore. I have always bought sheets of expensive ($12 a sheet) 22×30 inch watercolor paper and if I had a big drawing to do I ended up preferring that. If an idea was big enough to need big paper I may as well use the good stuff.

Then I discovered some cheap but big watercolor paper. That’s what I’ve been using to draw my big ink drawing on over the last five years. At two to three dollars a sheet I can go up to a 22×30 inch size anytime I want.

The other way I draw on paper is in sketch books. I’ve got a lot of different types of sketch books. But that’s a whole other blog.

Recently I’ve been commuting into NYC a couple of days a week for work. Of course the commute sucks. Who likes to spend two hours door to door to get to work? No one. And that’s when the trains line up with my schedule. When they don’t I sometimes have to wait a long time for the next train. But that has given me a lot of time to shoot street photos while I’m in the city. I like to try and keep busy and be creative even when commuting.

Most of the time I’m taking pictures along Seventh Avenue as I walk between Penn Station and 14th Street. Sometimes I move over to Sixth Avenue to mix things up. I walk along slowly, see who catches my eye, and take their photo. It takes practice, discipline, and instinct. I use a super zoom lens because I don’t want to bother anyone plus I like to shoot candids. I like to record the moments in life that don’t get noticed or recorded. Fleeting instants that are here one minute and gone in the next.

I tend to take pictures mostly of women because that’s who I’m wired to notice but it’s not always the case. Plus we are all hard wired to like beauty and as a species we tend to find woman more beautiful than men in general. At a guess I would say that about two thirds of my photos are of women and one third of men. At least of the ones that contain only one or the other. I have a series of photos of couples but those are from when I shoot in Bryant Park and not on my walks. Couples tend to congregate more in parks than on the street. So if I see a couple sitting in the park together I may take their photo from afar.

Another series of photos I have is of groups of people on the street. It’s one of my favorite subjects. I’m on one side of the street waiting for the light to turn and I take photos of the people waiting on the other side. They’re standing around in different positions, in different outfits, and all are different shapes and sizes. It’s a natural. Sometimes I can even get a good photo as all those people walk across the street. It’s a little harder to capture but can be done with the right luck and timing. The variety of walking poses is even more diverse than the standing ones. Groups of people walking can make for a good photo the same way people walking in slow motion makes for a good scene in a movie. We can read so much into it.

One of the things that always catches my eye when taking street photos is shiny pants. I imagine the pants are made of some kind of plastic leather but maybe it’s actual leather. I’m not sure. It’s always women I see in these pants. Though I wouldn’t say these pants are common. I mention them because I just posted a photo on Instagram of a woman in shiny pants. They were cool pants.

I’m amazed at how common yoga pants are these days. They’re everywhere. Ten or twelve years ago when I started taking street photos I hardly ever saw yoga pants. I don’t remember seeing them at all. But now on any given walk down Seventh Avenue at 8:30 in the morning I can see 25 women in Yoga pants in a half an hour. Mind you there are lot of people on the streets of Manhattan but that’s still a lot of yoga pants. No men ever wear them. Skinny jeans are the tightest thing I’ve seen on men and even those are rare. Yoga pants might look good but they don’t photograph particularly well. They’re almost always dark and you have to pop the shadows in Photoshop. They may be eye-catching in person but that doesn’t always translate into a good photo.

I’ve spent years shooting in and around Bryant Park and the Midtown Public Library but my time spent waiting for a train has brought me to a new place to take photos. Greeley Square Park (which is a triangle). Of course I’ve been there before but I’ve mostly passed through it and have never spent a lot of time there. In recent years NYC has closed some blocks of Broadway to traffic and made them into parks. Broadway runs diagonally through Manhattan’s grid of streets and it turns out that’s a bad thing for keeping traffic flowing. So Broadway between 32nd and 33rd Streets (right next to Greeley Square Park) is closed and there are table and chairs set up on it.

One day after walking up to Penn Station I still had time to kill so I started walking east towards Greeley. I wasn’t planning on stopping there but then I saw an open chair and decided to give my feet a rest for a moment. It was a seat that looked out down a stretch of Broadway that was open to traffic. I sat, looked at the excellent view, and noticed a lot of people passing by. I pulled out my camera and took some pictures. A lot of pictures. Turns out that in sitting in that seat everybody came to me rather than me looking for them. It’s a busy part of the city. It’s an easy place to walk (the actual park is next to Broadway) plus there is a subway next to the park. Crossroads photography is a new thing to me.

I post some of my photos on Instagram these days. I take way more photos than I ever post because that’s the nature of photography. I also tend to post older photos. I’m conscious of the fact that my photo subjects are unaware of my taking their photos so I like to keep them anonymous. So I either post them years later when they probably no longer look like they once did, post photos of crowds, sometimes even draw masks on my photos, or post photos of people who’s faces are generally obscured. But the truth be told it’s really my own obscurity that keeps these photos anonymous. Being that only a couple of dozen people ever see them on Instagram the odds say that no one in my photos will ever know the photos exist. Such is life.

I had fun watching TV and writing along with “Friends” the first time I did it so I thought I’d do it again. I’m writing this one about another season one episode.This time it’s episode 19 “The One Where the Monkey Gets Away.” It first aired on March 9, 1995.

In checking my calendar I see that I was in Manhattan that day working in the Marvel Bullpen. I was. Nothing much happened that week except I spent $45 on a hat at JJ Hat Center down in the city. The note on my calendar (which was from the receipt) says “Outback LF Black.” I think that’s my black Stetson cowboy hat but I remember it costing about a hundred dollars more than that so I’m not sure. Besides that I only see that I made my usual trip to the comic shop.

I hate that stupid monkey from season one so this probably won’t be one of my favorite episodes. About ten years ago I took the time to rate all of the “Friends” episodes on iTunes so I’m going to go look at what I gave this one. Turns out I gave this one two out of five stars. That’s not very good. I’ve got the feeling I’m going to be doing a lot of complaining about this episode.

It starts with a “Rachel is a bad waitress” joke. Not especially inspiring but the theme song always is. I like the dancing and the scenes from the season. Look! It’s a country club news letter. Though Rachel is often written as a bit spoiled they don’t often go into just how rich her parents are. They’ve got a lot more money than Monica and Ross’s parents despite all the kids going to high school together. Rachel’s ex-finance, Barry, is getting married.

Second scene and Marcel the monkey makes an appearance. Here is a lame monkey joke for you. Rachel is jealous of Barry and Mindy but that feels real. As does Ross getting tortured by liking Rachel and her not knowing. I was never a huge fun of the Ross and Rachel stuff in general. There was too much drama and not enough comedy in it for me. But I’ve mellowed about it over the years. Probably because I’m not watching it first run anymore so I know it’s in there in and it’s not going away.

Here comes the rest of the gang to interrupt Ross’s possible romantic moment with Rachel. There was a lot of that going on this first season. Now we get some “Men and woman are different and like different movies” scene. There was a lot of that “Men and women” are different stuff in the first season. I’m glad they got past it. I do like the Lou Grant/Hugh Grant joke. Such silliness makes me smile.

Oh no, Rachel is going to watch the monkey for a day. This won’t end well. It won’t end well for me because I have to watch more scenes with that monkey in them. They boys are eating a pizza. It doesn’t look like a fresh, hot, NYC pizza though. It’s too thick. It should be thinner and crispier. The boys are raining on Ross’s enthusiasm. They think he should give up on Rachel all together. They’re realistic. More monkey jokes. Ross wants to make his move. What will ruin it? The monkey. We all know it.

New scene. Rachel and the monkey are watching soap operas and she’s talking to the monkey as if it were a person. That’s the main joke with the monkey this whole season. “Isn’t it funny that we talk about the monkey as if it were a person?.” It wasn’t funny. The monkey poops in a shoe. At least poop jokes always liven up a scene. Uh-oh, the monkey is escaping as Rachel leaves the door open. Oh, the drama.

Everyone but Ross is back to deal with monkey problem. Of course Ross is part of the monkey problem. We get more poop in the shoe jokes which I appreciate. Joey and Chandler are not helpful but they’re funny. I have to admit I like Rachel’s skirt and tube socks look. That’s a positive in this scene. They all go out monkey hunting.

Mr. Heckles shows up in the next scene. I always liked him as their crazy, anti-social, neighbor. They didn’t give him a ton to do but he was a scene stealer. Ross is back and Rachel is making things worse as she reports the monkey missing to authorities. Ross gets pissed at her because he’s not supposed to have the monkey as a pet. Rachel’s irresponsibility threatens Ross’s crush on her. That’s the theme for this episode and it’s not very funny.

Newark, New Jersey jokes. Will they ever go out of style? Rachel tells Ross she lost Marcel and it goes quiet as Ross yells and we get a pull back shot to the monkey out on the balcony just a few feet from them. I like the direction and camera move on that shot. It’s cool. The Ross being disappointed scenes are so not funny. Animal Control shows up and the Marcel stakes get higher. The animal control woman is suitably dour and relentless. Phoebe scores with a good monkey in jail joke.

Turns out the Animal Control woman went to school with Monica and Rachel. That doesn’t help them. Rachel was mean to a lot of people in High School. Phoebe is the light of laughter in this episode. Joey and Chandler go door to door looking for the monkey and find a couple of women to hit on. It’s Joey who’s the voice of reason. That’s a surprise. But then he isn’t. Funny.

The girls are in the basement, find Marcel, and the Animal Control lady shows up. Here comes the action music and goofy slo-mo as Phoebe (who loves animals) throws herself in front of the tranquilizer dart. That was a fun scene. More Ross and Rachel to bore us. Then Mr. Heckles is back. He’s welcome. The TV screen magnifying glass making Monica’s crotch look giant is a gag I never tire of. It amuses me to no end. Joey does it too later on.

The final scene that resolves everything is okay. Semi-funny. Then we get back to Ross and Rachel making up and we get to see some of Ross’s moves. Of course he gets interrupted and the moment is ruined. That’s the way the show went that first season. The last scene is a little wrap up with the gang reminiscing about high school. It’s pleasant enough.

So there you go. We took a little trip back to 1995 to spend some time with “Friends.” Maybe it wasn’t the funniest episode but it had some moments. I have to say it was fun to write about as I watched it. I might do even more of these.

Holy crap! I just checked with the website that tells you what is cut out of the broadcast and streaming episodes and the whole bit with the TV magnifier was cut. That’s why I still watch these standard definition DVD ones. That’s one of my favorite bits in the whole show. I don’t want it cut out.

For most of my adult life I’ve been a non-fiction reader. Besides comic books that is. In my childhood I read a lot of historical biographies for kids but as I got older, around high school age, I started reading a lot of novels. That lasted through college but sometime in my twenties I switched to reading mostly non-fiction books. I’d read a novel every now and then but I probably read ten non-fiction books for every fiction one. That’s just how my taste ran.

As a comic book collector I have a lot of comic books lying about the place. They can take up a lot of room. As a consequence I decided not to be a book collector. So I would read a book and then pass it on to someone else. I wouldn’t keep it. That way I wasn’t filling up the place with even more stuff.

As a consequence of getting rid of the books I read I took to digital reading as early as I could. Not for my comic books, I still like to read those as physical copies, but for all the prose stuff I would read digitally. I really enjoy reading digitally. Digital books take up a lot less room, I can more easily keep track of my reading, and I can “Collect” books without ever reading them and never feel guilty about it. A physical “To be read” pile of books comes with regrets. I’d to look at the pile and and sigh that I didn’t have enough time to read them all. A digital pile is just some images of book covers on a screen. They’re hardly real at all and so don’t bring up feelings of regret.

Before this summer I hadn’t gotten much reading done at all. Especially novels. For years now I’ve been a member of Amazon Prime and they offer two free digital novels a month for their members. They send you an e-mail with about eight books to choose from and you can download two of them. Despite not reading any of them I’ve been downloading two every month for a couple of years. I figured I might get around to them someday. Someday finally came.

When I work at home on my art I’m usually by myself. I go at my own pace and get done what I can. Part of working is taking breaks. I stand and work so usually I sit down when I want a break. The question is always “What do I do now?” Since I’m by myself I don’t have break room to hang out in and chat with fellow workers so my answers is usually the internet, a quick video game (this is why I like games I can play for ten minutes at a time), or social media. The same stuff as everyone else.

This summer I found my break habit was wearing me down a little. Not physically but mentally. I found I could sit down and putter away with the computer or iPad on the internet, kill ten to twenty minutes, and then not even remember what I was doing. I was mostly reading but what I was reading were short articles and pieces on whatever caught my eye. Nothing I was reading stuck with me. It was all empty reading and it was bringing me down. Plus sometimes it would take five minutes of surfing around to even find something that might be interesting to read. I felt like I was wasting a lot of time on nothing. It wasn’t much of a break.

That’s when I decided to starting reading some of those novels I had been downloading for years. Why not? On my iPad I could read a novel for fifteen minutes as easily as I could read Twitter or Instagram?
So I picked one out from the pile and started reading it. I think I read four novels in about ten days. I was really enjoying myself. They were mostly thrillers with a fantasy or a horror novel thrown in there too. Fun stuff.

One of the things I found myself doing after reading a novel was rating and reviewing it. Amazon has a five star system and I gave out three and four stars for the ones I read plus I wrote a short paragraph about the book. I figure any book I can make it through gets at least three out of five stars but it takes a classic to get five stars from me. If it’s a one or two star book I’m not even going to finish it and therefor I’ll never rate it. That’s my system.

I found I really liked writing a short paragraph about each book. I’m not sure if anyone else will find them helpful but I like them because they remind me what the book was about. I’m sure all of us who are readers have picked up a book and thought to ourselves, “Have I read this one before?” It’s not always easy to remember. Now I can go back and read my own notes about the book to refresh my memory. I find that satisfying.

The one book I gave five stars to was “This Side of Paradise” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. That one is generally considered a classic and I first read it back in my mid-20s but haven’t read it since. I think I may have even liked it more now that I’m in my early 50s so it’s a well deserved classic. It’s funny because I was reading the collected Conan by Robert E. Howard as I also read other things (that Conan book is long!) so that switching between Conan and “Paradise” was quite the roller coaster of reading.

One part of digital reading that I haven’t found a use for yet is the highlighting feature. At any point when reading you can highlight some text and it will save it for you. I’ve highlighted some particular passages that I’ve liked but haven’t found a use for them after that. It’s probably a better feature for a book group or student but hope to someday find something to do with it.

I got some stuff done this week. I made some art. Intellectually I know that and I know it’s a good thing to get stuff done but emotionally I’m not feeling it. I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything. That’s because I haven’t gotten the one thing done that I feel I should. What is that one thing? I don’t know. That’s the problem.

On Monday I decided to do some inking. I picked out one of my “Dreams of Things” covers that I have penciled and was ready to ink and I worked on it until I got it done. It was issue number 76. I’ve inked that many of them. 76 cover is a lot. I’ve done them all myself. It’s an accomplishment but I didn’t feel it after I finished it. I still wanted to work on some unnamed thing that I can’t even picture.

Sometimes I get it in my head that I want to do something big and important. That’s understandable. A lot of people want to do something big and important. But the eternal question is what is big and important? Most of us have no answer to that. Neither do I. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting to have the answer.

On Tuesday I still had no idea what the big thing was so I continued on with my usual fare. I noticed that I had never inked “Dreams of Things” #74 so I put that one on my drawing board. I worked on that one until it was done. I should have had a sense of accomplishment but there was none. It’s not like I didn’t like the work I was doing. It’s that I know it will lead nowhere. At least nowhere in terms of the external world. Fame and fortune do not await me for finishing the 74th “Drifting and Dreaming” piece of art after the world didn’t care about the first 73.

I think that’s what the “Big and important” thing is about. It’s about getting the world to notice and like my art. There is no path to follow to make that happen so I stumble along making what I can and hoping to find the right road to go down. If you want to listen people have endless advice on which road to take but it’s rarely a road that’s well lit, they’ve never travelled it, and don’t even have proof of it’s existence. Making art is a tough gig.

On Wednesday I couldn’t take inking anymore and decided to use ink and watercolor to make some of my sci-fi fantasy landscapes. I pulled out three 5×7 inch sheets of paper. Except it wasn’t actually paper. It was left over matte board that I cut down to size. That meant it was extra thick and could take water without warping.

First I put down some pencil lines where I wanted the buildings to go, then I drew the buildings in ink, next I used some gouache/watercolor to put in some color, and then for the final step I went in with some more black ink. I worked on three of these small paintings at the same time so that I could switch between them when the one I just worked on needed drying time.

Y’know what gave me a sense of accomplishment the most this week? Playing a trivia game. That’s what video games have evolved to be quite good at. Giving a player a sense that they’ve done something. I downloaded the “Friends” 25th anniversary app onto my iPad. It’s fairly useless except it has a trivia game in it.

Each of the ten seasons of the TV show are divided in half and ten multiple choice questions are asked about each half a season. Over the week I played the game until I answered all the questions correctly. I got about 80% of them right on the first try but it took a few tries to get the ones I didn’t know. Eventually I cleared the whole game and felt like I accomplished something. Weird.

As I write this it’s Thursday and what I got done today was another “Dreams of Things” cover. This time it was cover number 75 and I colored it with markers. I had inked it weeks ago and so it was ready for the next stage. It took a while as the color was complex on this one but I liked the way it came out. It’s amazing how I can be happy with the way a piece of art turns out but I still have no feeling of accomplishment after it’s done.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s good when I like the way a piece turns out. I’ve known some artists who were never happy with their work and it made them miserable. I’ve heard some people say that an artist being unhappy with their own work makes their work better but I don’t think this is true. I expect young artists to be unhappy with their work but after making art for a long time you’d better learn to please yourself or you won’t be making much art.

One of my habits to help myself feel like I’ve accomplished something is to put a whole bunch of my work in front of me and look at it. I usually have my latest stuff up on my easel and I can see a bunch of pieces all at once but sometimes I have to go beyond that.
I think I’m going to pull out all of my “Dreams of Things” covers and look at them. I have 75 of them so I can’t even look at them all at once since I don’t have that much space (they’re 11×17 inches each) but I’ll manage something.

Meanwhile I’m also going to still be contemplating my something big and important. It’s mostly thinking that comes to nothing but I still want to think it. Maybe someday I’ll come up with an idea for something that will really catch on but until then I hope I can at least think of some art to make.