I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics plus a book.
Check them all out here:
Comment
Time, distance, and nostalgia sure can change things. It can certainly change how a photograph is viewed. In general photography, in the documentary sense, freezes its subject in a specific time and place. Especially when the photo is about a place. In the human-made world things change all the time. Buildings go up and get torn down, roads get built, and business come and go. Take a photo of a place and it may look the same the next day but what about ten years later? Or twenty? Or thirty? Change wins out in the end.
I went to college in the mid to late 1980s at a small school in Westchester NY. It was a state school so it was called SUNY Purchase. I had a fun time there and enjoyed my time as an undergrad. The campus was a bit odd compared to any other place I’ve been. It was designed in the late 1960s and is one of the last great projects of modernist architecture. It’s built with a reddish brown brick and there is a lot of it. Brick to the left of me and brick to the right. The buildings were brick and the walkways and “Mall” were all brick. The trees were even all lined up in straight lines. There were very few reminders of the natural world.
The Mall was kind of the center of campus. It was a football field sized flat area with an all brick floor that faced all the brick buildings. You crossed the mall to get from one part of campus to the other. In front of the mall was the “Great Lawn” a large rectangular piece of green grass with a big tree in the middle of it. It was at least a few football fields big. Lots of room to play frisbee. In the middle of the Mall was a large bronze Henry Moore sculpture. It was the real centerpiece of the whole campus. It was big enough that you could sit on/inside it and students often did. “Meet me by the Henry Moore” was a sentence that was repeated time after time.
I describe this all to you because a lot of it is gone now. Being that is’s been thirty years since I first saw SUNY Purchase you can imagine that things have changed. I haven’t been there to see the changes but I’ve heard about them and seen pictures. The first and most egregious thing that they did was to move the Henry Moore. They moved it off the Mall and put it a couple miles away near the entrance of campus. A place where nobody goes except in a car to enter or leave. What was once the center of campus life has disappeared from it. That makes all the students of my generation and the ones before a bit sad.
The other thing they did is to tear up the Mall almost entirely and put down grass and plants where it was. They also tore up the the brick walkways and replaced them with larger three foot by three foot paving tiles in about four different shades. I’m not saying any of those changes to the campus are bad. I haven’t been there to see them but I have to think they were improvements. We students of the old SUNY Purchase campus usually had a mixed relationship with the space we lived and studied in. The clean lines and well defined architecture were certainly a sight to behold but the brick could get relentless. One brown color everywhere. The dorms were brick. The library was brick. The performing arts center was brick. All the buildings were brick. Two, three, or four stories worth of brick everywhere you looked. The ground we walked on was that same brick. It could get tiresome and we often did get tired of it.
I bring this all up because of a Facebook group I’m in. It’s a group of former SUNY Purchase students who were all there about the same time as I was. A typical Facebook group. I’ve been in it for a few years but only recently have I posted some old campus photos there. Back in the days before digital photography I used to shoot film like everybody else. I don’t have a ton of photos of the campus because in the days of film it was way more expensive to shoot than it is today. Yet I did go out on a couple of occasions to take pictures of the campus in general.
A second reason I don’t have more campus photos is that the ones I did take are generally pretty boring. I found it tough to make something interesting out of all that brick and all those straight lines. The pictures were as monotonous as the environment. Another reason they were failures was the format. There were no thirty inch computer screens in those days. I processed my film at a normal commercial lab and got back four by six inch prints just like everyone else. A four by six inch print of giant brick buildings isn’t that impressive. Almost any time anyone looked at my photo albums they skipped right over those campus photos. So did I.
Recently I dug those old campus photos out again. I scanned them in years ago along with all my other negatives and they’ve sat there in their folder without me thinking about them very much. They look better on a large computer monitor than they ever did as a small print. That inspired me to fix them up a bit in Photoshop (lots of dust and scratches on those old negatives) and post one for my Purchase Facebook group.
That act transformed those photos. After nearly thirty years the photos were finally interesting. They were of a place that was now mostly gone except in our collective memories. The place was especially gone because most people didn’t take photos in the mid to late 1980s and if they did it was photos of friends and not of the campus in general. Most of my college photos are of people and not places. Plus many more people can relate to the photos of place than can relate to photos of people. After all if you don’t know the person what does it matter if it was taken at SUNY Purchase or the White House? But a picture of SUNY Purchase? Everyone who went there can relate to that.
Nostalgia. That sure played a part in making these photos more interesting but so did presentation. That’s why I never throw out or delete my photos that I don’t like. Someday I might find a way to make something better out of them.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got one new comic. Plus I got seven graphic novels for my birthday.
Check them all out here:
It’s been a long time. That’s my theme for the week. The theme comes up because I dug something out of my digital files this week that I haven’t seen in a long time. Back in about 1998 my friends and I decided to self-publish our own comic. We put out four issues of an anthology comic called “Kansas Thunder” and then I put out a two issue series called “Delia Charm: The Getaway and the Chase” to continue my story. You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of either of these comics because not many people have. 1998 was a terrible year for comics in general and an especially terrible year for indie comics. Not many comic books were selling and ours sure didn’t. Still I’m proud of it and think it was a pretty good comic.
I’ve seen (but not read) the physical comic recently since I have a ton of them lying about the place but what was new was that I actually dug out the digital files. I was going to be interviewed on a podcast about my days working in the Marvel Bullpen so I wanted to send the guys interviewing me PDFs of the six comics my friends and I made.
Nowadays hard drives are so big that I keep almost everything I’ve done on one where it’s handy. I can find things pretty easily. That was not the case in 1998. Though I was fully computerized back then and the whole comic was scanned in and published via desktop publishing I didn’t have room to keep all the files on my hard drive. So I backed them up on CD’s. That’s how we did things in the late 1990s. We didn’t even had DVDs to back things up on yet. Now I had to dig though my dusty old binder of CDs to find them. Good thing I’m organized because those were my only copies.
One of the first things I noticed about the files was that the came from the days when you didn’t have to put a file type on a document if you were using a Mac. If it was a jpg file you didn’t have to put “.jpg” on the end of the file. The OS would be fine without it. So most of my files had no identifying suffix on them. That looked odd. It was also the days before Adobe Indesign took over and Quark still dominated the publishing field. So the books had been laid out using Quark. Plus there were two books that had no layout file. That was strange. I dropped a Quark file onto the InDesign icon and hoped for the best. I was amazed when it opened up. Everything wasn’t quite where it should be but with some minor tinkering I got it up to snuff.
It really struck me that it has been since 1998 that these files have seen the light of day. I have so much stuff on my hard drive these days that it’s hard to believe that these files weren’t on there. 1998 wasn’t that long ago but it is still a different era. And I can remember thinking over the years that I should track down those files but I never did. Weird.
I kept things pretty organized back in 1998 and I was happy with my past self for making things easy for my present self. First off the comics all have multiple stories. That could easily have made a mess of things. Plus I was still hand lettering things but some of the other work was lettered digitally. It would be in trouble if things didn’t all line up properly. It seems like I was worried about this back in 1998 though and I merged the both the finished lettering and art files into a single file for printing. And I labeled that file with the books page number and then the individual story page number. It was pretty foolproof and made things move a lot faster.
The only slight problem I had was that I wanted all the files in one PDF and they were in three Quark documents to begin with. Back in those days printers insisted on a slightly larger trim size for the covers so covers had to go in a separate document. I also had a third document for the inside covers. That’s just the way things were done. Now I had to put them all in one document. That wasn’t terribly hard but I was fooled for a moment because I didn’t notice the documents were two different sizes. 1998 was a long time ago and it took me a minute to figure things out.
As I said before I haven’t sat down and read these comics in a long time. In the interview I gave I was trying my best to remember what the ideas were that I had for it, and could remember a bunch of them, but some eluded me. Why were those guys with guns chasing Delia? You’d think I could remember that part but I couldn’t.
About as much as I want to reread the comics I also want to reread the editorials that I wrote. As I remember them they were a bit like this blog. I was telling breezy stories about what was going on behind the scenes of us making the comic. It was the beginning of the kind of writing I wanted to do that I don’t think I picked up again until I started this blog back in late 2005. I remember a tale about an egg sandwich, one about French fries, and a third about a notebook. I had usually carried a sketchbook with me but those were the first days I started writing in a notebook. I have no memory of the other three editorials.
1998. A lot of time has passed since then but this week I took a little trip back there. And here is the interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVAcmfCfJRk
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got seven new comics.
Check them all out here:
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got nine new comics.
Check them all out here:
I read an interesting graphic novel this week. It’s called “Alan’s War” by Emmanuel Guibert. It’s a French comic that was first printed in France in 2000 and then translated and printed in the U.S. back in 2008. It’s the story of an American G.I. Named Alan Cope who became friends with the younger Guibert and told him stories about his life. Guibert, being a cartoonist, decided to turn those stories into comics. This is not a review of the comic itself (which I liked a lot so go read it) but a look at a couple of ideas that the comic brought to my mind.
The first is what I think is at the heart of this book. It’s basic concept. Well into the book, on page 280, Cope tells us about a boring post-war job he has. He’s an American in Germany working as courier which basically means driving a truck/van from place to place day after day. It was neither a fun nor exciting job. To combat his unhappiness he decided to “Think on my past and make some sense out of it. Because I’ve had a strange life”. That is what I think this book is really about. Living an examined life.
Most of the book took place during World War Two but it’s not a typical soldier’s story. Cope spent two years in the army in the States before making it over to Europe for the last half year of the war. He was certainly under stress, in danger, and saw some bad things but he was never in any big battles as is usual in soldiers’ stories. His story is not about the day to day life of a soldier in combat. His stories were more about small incidents and friendships that shaped his life and the path it took. He’s remembering the good times and some of the regrets. The regrets mostly had to do with friendships lost. It’s the story of an examined life and that’s a fairly rare thing. Guibert also says in his introduction the Cope is an excellent storyteller. I think that’s partly because he tells stories that have a point. At least they have a point in Cope’s life. I found that to be interesting stuff made more interesting when I got to page 280, read that passage, and could see Cope’s intentions even more clearly than before.
The second idea that came to mind while reading this comic wasn’t really an idea in the comic but a concept that came to my mind as I read. It had to do with Cope’s friendships that he lost. It happened over and over again in this book. Cope was born in California but at the age of eighteen was drafted. He didn’t make it over to Europe until he was twenty so he had plenty of time in the army around the US. After the war he spent some time in Europe as a civilian worker but eventually went back to the States to settle down. But he never settled down. A few years later he went back to Europe to live for good. He eventually settled down there.
Being in the army in World War Two was kind of like going off to college in that you’re thrown together with a bunch of people from all over the US. Cope met and became friends with people from all over the States. He also met plenty of people in Europe. He befriended Germans, French, Poles, and any other people who crossed his path. He was a friendly guy, who though a little shy, liked people. He also didn’t like the army’s rules and often snuck out to do things and see the sights.
Eventually he either left where he was stationed or moved onto another job or opportunity. So how did a person maintain a friendship in the mid to late 1940s when the other person lived far away? The answer is letter writing. I’ve done a bit of letter writing myself. All the way up to the mid 1980’s long distance phone calls were not cheap (especially if you were a poor college student). Letter writing was the only way to maintain a friendship. The problem is that every one of Cope’s long distance friendships ended the same way. He and his friend wrote a few letters to each other but then stopped. That seemed to always be the way. It reminded me of my own letter writing days.
It seems odd now but back in 1945 if a friend or acquaintance moved away you generally never heard from them again. They disappeared from your life forever. That’s the way it was. That’s what a lot of Cope’s regrets had to do with. Never seeing people again. And during the war he didn’t even know if that person lived or died. When he was older and living a more examined life he tried to track a bunch of them down with varying degrees of success. He did it, of course, by letter writing. He’d send a bunch of letters to locations or people who he though knew where the person he was looking for was. Sometimes it would work and sometimes not. Sometimes if he found someone they’d exchange a couple of letters and then trail off again. Other times they stayed in touch. On occasion he found out the person he was looking for died years ago. That’s how it worked. Someone who was in your thoughts for years but you hadn’t talked to in a decade died and you had no idea.
I lived through the tail end of that world. The internet and social media has changed all that. More then the telephone ever did. As easy as it is to call someone people still don’t do it. It’s just plain easier not to no mater how good your intentions. Of course with today’s social media it’s no longer the norm to have no idea what happened to someone who moves away. Now I’m in touch with friends, acquaintances, and even people I only have met on-line. Even if I’m not actively communicating with them I have some idea of where they are and how they’re doing. That’s a huge change. Nowadays if you move away you’re still easily in touch. It would take a conscious decision to cut ties with your past and pay no attention to anyone from it. It would be thought of as weird too. The world has changed in that way. Now there is no reason to not know what happened to so-and-so. It’s easier than a phone call ever was.
I felt for Cope’s regrets in regards to friendships lost. It was a day and age where if you or someone else moved far away communication was difficult. But now that age is gone. Until I read this book I didn’t really even notice it.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eleven new comics.
Check them all out here:
This last Fourth of July I did something I hadn’t done in a long time. I read a bunch of comics all in one day. Not a lot of different types of comics but a single series. I always think to myself “I want to go back and re-read that whole comic book series” but I hardly ever do. This time I did. I picked “Stray Bullets” by David Lapham and it has forty one issues in volume one. This isn’t a review of “Stray Bullets” because the review should be obvious. I like it. I bought the series in the past and continue to buy the new issues as they come out. If I buy it then I like it. That’s my review. Now go check out the comic for yourself.
I’m writing more about the experience of sitting down and reading forty one issues of a comic. I didn’t read them all in a row without getting up. Instead I read a few, did something else for a bit, and then read few more. I read the first one around 8 AM and finished the forty first one about 11 PM.
“Stray Bullets” made it’s debut with a first issues that is cover dated March 1995. I wasn’t on board with it then but I began to hear some rumblings that it was a good book. I think I hesitated on it even after hearing good things about it. The first “Stray Bullets” issue I have is number twelve that’s dated January 1997. I though I bought an issue of it that was in the single digits but I must be misremembering. Either way I didn’t like the first issue of it that I read. It didn’t click with me.
The next issue I bought was number fifteen and that one is dated July 1998. I guess I wanted to give the series another try. It had been a year and a half since I read an issue and this issue was the beginning of a new story arc. I liked it and “Stray Bullets” has been on my pull list ever since. I even bought the oversized hardcovers of the first two story arcs that I missed. I liked them too. I have no idea why I didn’t like issue twelve the first time around.
By the time the third story arc was done I bought the oversized hardcover version of that one too. That was in 2001 and I read all three hardcovers in a row at around that time. That was the last time I read a bunch of “Stray Bullets” all at once. Twenty one issues. Fifteen years ago. Time sure does fly doesn’t it?
I like monthly comics. I enjoy their periodical nature. Some people complain that they don’t like monthly comics because they want the whole story right now, and I understand that, but that misses the point to me. Everyone has only one chance to read a comic as it comes out. And it’s a completely different reading experience. A new issue comes out, you read it, maybe reread it, talk about it, maybe talk or read about it online, and then the next issue comes out giving the previous issue new context. As each piece of the story is released new excitement is built. I find that fun. I also find it fun to read four or five different comic series each week. I enjoy the variety.
Of course I also like reading collected editions and back issues of comics but that’s a different reading experience. There is a finished product in front of me and I won’t be talking about it or pondering it with anyone until I finish reading it. And cliffhangers don’t work if you just have to turn the page to see what happens. That’s a little bit of a drawback. But with comics I bought off the shelf I have the memory of that cliffhanger. A little bit of that adrenaline can come back. Not so much with comics I’m reading for the first time in their collected form.
“Stray Bullets” number forty is dated October 2005 and then Lapham left us hanging until March 2014 when he wrapped up volume one with issue forty one and then launched a new volume of “Stray Bullets”. That means it’s been over a decade since I read issue forty. That’s a long time and one of the main things I noticed upon rereading this is that I had forgotten nearly all of the details of the story. Volumes two and three have been coming out steady since 2014 and they must have colored my memories of the original run.
The other thing that’s interesting is that “Stray Bullets” jumps around in time a bit. Most of the stories are from the early 1980s but some cam jump forward and back a bit. The stories that are fresh in my mind from volume 3 actually take place before the very first volume one stories. That was strange. But it was even stranger that it all seemed new to me. It had been fifteen years since I read those first twenty one issues and it felt like it. I would estimate that only about ten to twenty percent of the story felt familiar to me. I found that a little amazing.
Another thing I noticed is that the pace of the stories sped up a bit at the end. Maybe by issue thirty. I wouldn’t call the early issues dense or wordy by any stretch of the imagination but I found myself getting through the latter ones at a quicker pace. Hmmm… I just checked and that could have been because the issues were actually smaller at the end. Issue fifteen has twenty nine pages and issue forty has only nineteen. No wonder I was getting through them faster.
Overall it was quite a treat to get to read all forty one issues of “Stray Bullets” in one day. It’s a good series. In case you’re not familiar with it “Stray Bullets” is a crime series. There are recurring characters, one shot characters, and characters who get killed off. It’s all about how random crazy violence can affect a person’s life. This series is often about the bad guys. More often than not I’d say. Sometimes they get their just desserts and sometimes they don’t. Either way it’s a good comic. Give it a read.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics.
Check them all out here: