This is a page from one of my Inkbooks (number 11 page 34). That’s where my images that I use in my paintings, drawings, and prints come from. It all starts with me drawing little drawing in ink just seeing what I can get out of my head.
When is a photographer not a photograph? That’s the question I have because I’ve been working on some photographs lately. By the time I get through with them they look much less like photographs than when I started.
Filters, airbrushing, and darkroom tricks have always been part of photography’s repertoire and some photographers have always pushed the boundary of “What is a photograph?” but now that we’re in the digital/Photoshop age the fence post is somewhere out in the mist.
There are certainly a lot of magazine covers that I wouldn’t call photographs. They’ve been touched up digitally so much that they bear only a resemblance to the original photo. They’re more akin to a painting than to a photo. Waists have been made outrageously thin, ribs removed, and all the skin tones have been replaced with smoothed out pixels. Those are usually referred to by detractors as “Barely a Photograph” but they’re in the photograph category none the less.
Earlier in the summer I was working on what I call my “Masked Photographs”. They are some of my photos of people in the streets except I draw masks on the subjects’ faces. They are not photo realistic masks but graphic ones. They’re not designed to make anyone think that the masks are real and actually in the photos but anyone looking at them would probably call them photographs. I call them photographs too.
What I was working on at the end of the summer is a bit different. There I was using an old Photoshop filter recipe of mine. Photoshop filters can radically alter a photograph and make it look like any number of things. They can make a photo look like a painting, a drawing, a bad photocopy, an old photograph, or any number of things. Most of the time I see Photoshop filters being used like a blunt instrument. A person takes a photo, runs it through a single filter, and it’s done. A radical change in appearance is what they were looking for and they got it.
Most old hands at Photoshop can recognize the exact filter that was used on a bluntly done photo. It’s not hard and we all tend to say, “That’s just a photo run through the Posterize filter”. That’s almost become a genre unto itself. No one questions if it’s a photo or not because we all know it is. Just a photo altered by a filter. One step away from an actual photo and easy to understand and categorize.
What I use is called a filter recipe. That’s when you use a series of filters and layer techniques to build up an image in whatever way you want. There is a lot of trial and error involved in finding exactly what you want but once it’s found it’s easily repeatable. An old hand at Photoshop will know in an instant that a filter recipe has been used to alter a photo but probably won’t know exactly how it was done. Hence it’s not in the photo altered by a filter category.
My own filter recipe that I use most often turns the photo into a graphic translation. That’s an old term for turning a shaded three dimensional image into an unshaded two dimensional one. The simplest way to do this is to make a black and white photocopy of a photograph. All of the various colors and shade in the photo are turned into two colors. Either black or white. The graphic translations I make are a little more complicated than that, I think I uses about eight shades of color, but are in that ballpark.
I also integrated type and writing into the photo. I like using words and images and have used them a lot in my art prints but now I’m also using them in my photos. If they are indeed photos. That’s the whole point of this rumination. I have no idea what to call them. For a brief time I was calling them photo mono-prints because I was only using one color to make them but then I stared making them using more than one color making the “Mono” in the name inaccurate. Plus the word mono-print is in use by another type of printmaking. So the name I’ve been using for them is completely wrong.
I don’t have any real philosophical reason to want to know what is a photo and what is not. I don’t really care because I’m not a photography purist. I just need a name to call these things I’m making. We humans name things so we can understand them and understand what each other is talking about. That’s why I need a name for them.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got no new comics nor any collections. Talk about a slow week!
And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.
“The Invincible Iron Man – Stark Disassembled” by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca
This is the latest volume of Iron Man from the most current series. I’ve liked the series but not without criticism. Though not really badly done this volume was pretty pointless. That has more to do with plot than execution. That’s because it’s a plot I’ve seen or read plenty of times on TV, in the movies, and in comics. Hackneyed if you will.
For the last two volumes of Iron Man Tony Stark/Iron Man has been slowly erasing his brain in order to keep certain information out of a villain’s hands. Yeah, it’s a dumb idea but I got over it. Now Tony is in a mindless vegetative state. But don’t worry he had a plan. Tony now needs Captain America, Thor, and a few others to reboot his brain from a backup hard drive.
The story plays out like every other tale where someone is near death and everyone gathers around to save them. Tony Stark is in some kind of dream like afterlife that makes no sense as he tries to figure out what’s going on. Meanwhile his buddies are gathered around him trying to save him and one of them (Dr. Strange) has to be his spirit guide. It’s easy to see it all coming.
Person near death – check, friends gathered around – check, person in dreamlike afterlife/limbo – check, spirit guide – check. All the clichés are there. And guess what? He lives in the end. Who would have thought? Just because he’s the star of the book. It was all a little tiresome.
Once again these were well done comics but I found them ultimately pointless. The story wasn’t interesting and it took them five issues to bring Tony Stark back to inevitable life. Five issues. When, I assume, everyone reading knew exactly how things were going to work out in the end. And the journey wasn’t very interesting. Not what I would call exciting plotting.
I was a latecomer to the comic book series “The Savage Dragon”. The first issue of it that I bought was number 71. I was not a big fan of most the original Image Comics material but I did buy some of it here and there. I still have a soft spot for “Stormwatch” of all things. I also never took much notice of Erik Larsen’s work when he was drawing “Spider-Man”. I didn’t think it was terrible or anything it just wasn’t my thing. I don’t think I even read more than an issue or two of it. I didn’t read many mainstream Marvel, DC, or Image comics in the early 90’s so it’s no wonder I wasn’t on board with Dragon when he was launched back in 1993.
What eventually got me to by “The Savage Dragon” was the fact that my friend and co-worker at the time, Chris Giarrusso (of G-Man and Marvel Bits fame), was a huge fan of the book. Over the years he gave me a couple of issues to read but they left me cold. It was tough for me to take most mainstream super hero comics seriously so I could only see Dragon’s flaws and not its strengths. Image, along with the rest of the industry, were churning out a lot of crappy comics in the early to mid 90’s and it was easy to miss the better ones.
Chris’ enthusiasm for the book never diminished over the years. Finally, at the end of 1999, I decided to start reading it regularly just to really give it a try. It took me a while but I wanted to see if I could see what made the book such a favorite of Chris’. I generally like new things anyway and probably was looking around for some new comics to read so what the heck. “Savage Dragon” lasted longer than most titles so it must have something going for it, right?
I jumped on with issue 71 and was confused right away. That was no big deal to me because I expected it. I don’t mind not being in on the ground floor because it gives me a lot to discover. After all in the 1970’s, as a kid starting to read comics, almost every series had been going for years when I jumped on board. It’s only now, when comic book stories have arcs, that I hear people say that they don’t want to start reading things in the middle. When comics didn’t have story arcs it was always the middle so everyone I knew jumped on anywhere and didn’t mind having to catch up.
I continued to figure things out but was confused for a few more issues until, at the end of issue 75, Larsen blew things up. Literally. Dragon (he’s only called “Savage Dragon” on the cover) messes things up by killing a time traveling villain. This changes time and Dragon is thrown into a different Earth than the one he knew. The Savage World Larsen called it. It’s sort of the same Earth the dragon knew but it was an Earth where things went terribly wrong.
I could tell by the letters page that it was a shock to most regular readers. Imagine if with issue 76 of “Spider-Man” the book suddenly took place in the world of “Kamandi”. That’s quite a change but it was good for me, as a new reader, because Dragon was in a whole new world and there was less for me to catch up on. Dragon had to catch up on things himself. I liked it and I’ve been reading the comic regularly ever since.
I have to say that what I missed when reading the couple of issues of “The Savage Dragon” in the early 90’s, before I started buying it regularly, was Larsen’s enthusiasm for the book and for comics in general. He likes making comics, wants to have fun making them, and want his readers to have fun reading them. He takes “The Savage Dragon” seriously but it is not a serious book. Serious things happen all the time but that’s not what the book is about. The book is about adventure. In a super hero way.
So the reason I’m writing this piece now is because last winter I decided to buy the first 70 issues of “The Savage Dragon” that I didn’t have. After a couple of Ebay purchases I was was all hooked up. I now have every issue. Number 1 through number 163. Plus the original three issue mini-series. Since I had 73 new issues to read and had only read the other issues once I decided I was going to read through the whole series. It took until the month of August until I was able to sit down and actually read them all.
I don’t know that I’ve ever read 166 issues of any series all in a row in such a short period of time. I’ve always meant to do that with the 200 issues of “Usagi Yojimbo” that I have on my shelf but as of yet I haven’t. And besides “The Savage Dragon”, “Usagi Yojimbo”, and “Cerebus” I can’t think of a series offhand with 166 issues all written and drawn by one guy. That’s kind of special.
That’s one of the interesting things about “The Savage Dragon”. It represents one person’s vision of what a comic book should be. All of the trends and styles that have come and gone in comics over the last 18 years are not here as they would be with a work-for-hire book where creators come and go all the while trying to keep in the public’s and their editor’s good graces. Here we only Larsen’s personal trends. It resists embarrassing fads and styles in a way that work-for-hire comics can’t.
It’s tough to sum up 166 issues of a comic but I’d say that at its core “The Savage Dragon” is about Dragon’s personal world. And kicking ass. A lot of time is spent developing the myriad of super powered and regular people who surround the Dragon and they’re always fighting. Unusually for super hero comics there are consequences to the fights. Characters die or are maimed. Plus innocent bystanders can be killed in the melee. When a villain or our hero accidentally knocks down a building the people in the building die. And it’s mentioned. That’s Larsen’s mixture of serious and fun.
I’ve complained a lot about hating time travel and alternate world stories in general but Larsen uses them to good effect. He does kill off characters and brings back alternate world versions of them but not gratuitously for “Shock value”. Plus there is no guarantee in the Dragon’s world that alternate versions of characters will even be similar. Things change.
Anything can happen in Dragon’s world including it being totally conquered by super villains. Twice. And there is no wizard to make things magically go back to the way things were before. Even after the eventual defeat the consequences of a villain’s world conquest linger. That’s what makes “The Savage Dragon” unique and interesting. It’s a world created and controlled by one person. Unlike the work-for-hire universes of Marvel and DC things don’t have to be set back to normal at the end of every story. In “The Savage Dragon” there is always a new normal on the horizon.
Larsen’s art has also changed over the years. I wasn’t too fond of it at the beginning of the series as it had to much of that early 90’s Marvel/Image pointless noodling and/or cross hatching in it. That’s a taste thing since a lot of comics fans back then seemed to love it but I never warmed to it. Larsen experimented with a style here and there for an issue of two when it interested him but really his line has evolved over the years into a sketchier drawing line. By that I mean that his cross hatching has turned into a more spontaneous energetic gestural line. He’s spending less time on pointless noodling and I, for one, like it better that way.
There is one demarcation line I really noticed having to do with storytelling. With the “Savage World” story line Larsen started basing his layout on the classic six panel grid that Jack Kirby and so many others used. He used an early 90’s Marvel/Image pin-up storytelling style for most of the issues before then but he never went back to it. Even after the “Savage World” story ended. Not that he’s only used six panel layouts since then but he’s used variations on it and other classic layout techniques. His story telling has gotten much stronger for it.
So there you have it. One hundred and sixty six issues of one person’s vision of what a monthly super hero book should be. I was a little sad when I reached the last issue, number 163, and had no more to read. It’s a good thing 164 is coming out next month.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comic plus two hard covers:
And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.
Having just read the original Wein/Wrightson run on “Swamp Thing” I got interested in reading the early part of Alan Moore’s run writing the book. These were the first comics I ever read that were written by Moore and I liked them a lot but haven’t checked them out since my college days back in the late 80’s.
They have held up well. As a matter of fact it’s easy to see that DC’s whole Vertigo line is based on the ideas in Alan Moore’s run on “Swamp Thing”. Moore not only redefines the character Swamp Thing but he redefines how DC’s mystical characters and their world is run. It’s a dangerous inhuman world that is outside the perception of normal people but it can bleed over and affect their lives in an awful way.
The artwork by Bissette and Totleben is also very interesting. It’s dark and moody like Wrighton’s work but has a totally different approach. What’s unusual about the art is that quite often things are not defined by their edges. Especially in close ups things are defined by contoured hatching. It makes things eerie. Tatjana Wood’s coloring is also very good.
“The Anatomy Lesson” is the first story in this run and in it Moore establishes the new paradigm for Swamp Thing. And it’s a scary one. Swamp Thing is not who he thought he was and there are monsters hidden in the nooks and crannies of the world where hardly anyone bothers to look. Old mystical foes are tapping into this new found pool of horror and becoming unstable. Things are not as they once were.
As good as the fist story was it is issues 29-31 where the series really takes off for me. That’s when Swamp Things’ old nemesis, Arcane, comes back to haunt him and Arcane is more twisted and nasty than ever. Except, much to Arcane’s regret this isn’t the Swamp Thing as he used to know him.
I remembered issue 31 being an all time classic issue and great ending to a story. Upon reading it again for the first time in twenty years I’d have to say that assessment still stands. It’s well written, well drawn, and just plain exciting. It would be in my top ten singles issues of all time if I had such a list. But I’m adverse to list making.
So if you’ve never read them or haven’t read them in ages go check out Alan Moore’s run on “Swamp Thing”. They’re as good as their reputation.
To continue my story from last week about the new brush I bought I worked on a second painting with it. It was a little bit different of a challenge than last week in that I continued a painting that I had already started and intended to do in my old method. I hadn’t put down any oil paint yet but had painted the black line of the picture in acrylic as I usually do. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to shift gears an do this painting in acrylic in the new style I had done that one painting in. It ended up helping that my new style doesn’t really exist yet. It’s in development.
The problem I ran into was the broad expanse of color. How do I paint large areas of color and make them interesting? In my oil painting style I know how to. I can use the texture, direction, and size of the brush strokes to create an interesting visual surface. I can make a large area of the same color paint look nice. It’s what I’ve been doing for twenty years. But acrylic paint isn’t oil paint. It doesn’t have the same surface. In last weeks painting I was using long brush strokes of color to make the surface more interesting. But since this canvas was already started as an oil painting I didn’t have the same long strokes in the image. Hmmm…
One of the things I’ve always thought about when making a painting was impact. Near and far. I use images and I want the image to be interesting when you look at it from across the room but the painting also has to be just as interesting as you step up close to it. The image is the first thing you see but as you step closer you see the paint itself. That’s where the surface comes in. How, why, and where the paint is put on the canvas has to be as interesting as the image itself. The two things working together is what makes things work for me.
So in making a painting with acrylic paint I know I can get the image part down. It’s when you step up close that I’ve been figuring out. It this second large acrylic piece I ended up using more surface texture than in the first one. Though I didn’t want to imitate one of my oil paintings I did imitate some of the texture of oil paint with some acrylic gel medium in spots. This allowed me to hold the brush stroke in certain areas and build up the close up visual interest that I wanted.
I also worked in some brush strokes with my new brush in areas that were, at first, not obvious to me. I started seeking spots out and seeing shapes a little differently. I found that the new brush was also good at making spirals. I like spirals they are always good for visual interest in my mind. The have a life of their own as they reference their own making and continue to swirl in the imagination.
It’s still not there yet this new way of my making a painting. But I am enjoying it. I especially enjoyed stretching my thinking on this one because I didn’t know if I could do it. One of the reasons I’m trying this different way of painting is that I had my normal way down cold. I had a vision of this painting finished before I painted it. By vision I don’t mean any angels coming down from the clouds sort of thing I just mean that I knew what it was going to look like in the end. It certainly can be a good thing knowing what I want something to look like and then making it so but lately I’ve grown tired of it. I want to meander through for a while.
I’m still picking away at this one. A stroke here. Some texture there. I’m nut sure if it’s done just yet. It might need a little more something but I’m not sure. I guess that’s what meandering is.
I bought a new brush this week. A new paint brush that is. At $33 it is one of the more expensive paint brushes that I have ever bought. Not that I buy cheap ones but a $20 paint brush is usually the top of my price range. It’s the big sable watercolor brushes that are really pricey and I don’t use them. The watercolor brushes I do use are the ones smaller in size and price. Most of the brushes I use for oil painting are made from bristle and not that expensive.
I bought the new brush out of a catalogue in an inspirational moment. That is I was looking for inspiration while thumbing through the art supply catalogue and stumbled upon this brush. I’ve been thinking about painting in some sort of new way and thought that changing tools might be one way to accomplish that. So I ordered a Da Vinci Cosmotop Spin Quill number five. It looked cool and it looked like I could do something different with it. It gave me ideas.
A couple of days later the brush arrived, I started working with it, and I was disappointed. Not with the quality of the brush or anything like that but with the fact that the brush wasn’t a magic instrument. That’s the problem with getting inspiration from a tool that you see in a catalogue. In my mind I already knew how to use it but in reality I didn’t. New and different images didn’t dance effortlessly off the tip of my new brush. So much for the magic of inspiration. It was time for some perspiration.
What I did was make a painting. It’s different from my others in that it is a large acrylic painting and usually when I work large I work in oil paint. It was also painted in a different way than my oil paintings but not in so different a way than my smaller acrylic paintings. Overall it’s different, yes, but I’m not so sure what those differences mean just yet and where they will lead me. There is a lot of work to be done after inspiration leaves.
It’s difficult working in a new way after all these years. I’m used to things going a certain way. Of course the whole idea of doing things a new way is because I was bored with doing things the old way but the old ways still have their pull. It’s the pull of the reliable. I know I can make a good painting that way. I’ve done it many times before and I can do it again. Figuring out a new way is a lot of work. Things aren’t necessarily reliable on a new path.
As I was working I had to keep telling myself not to panic and quit. That’s not easy to do when you’re making a bad painting. I kept telling myself that the painting was not about being good, at the moment, but about finding a path. It’s too bad paths aren’t found in just one painting. I stumbled along with my new brush, used some old brushes too, and somehow managed to finish the painting.
I’m not sure if the painting is good or bad but at least the process interested me more than my regular one did. Maybe that’s because I didn’t have any real process worked out yet. There was a lot more improvisation throughout this painting than in my usual ones where almost all of the improvisation comes at the end. That was part of what I am looking for.
One of the things I did succeed at that I wanted to do was to finish the painting a little faster. My usual method, being so meticulous about every square inch of paint, is quite time consuming. I was looking for more speed and spontaneity and got some of that. But I was also surprised at how much longer it took than I thought it would. Maybe that was because I spent more time thinking about how to do things than I usually do but it could have just been because things always take longer than I think.
I haven’t even gotten the new brush to do what I want it to do just yet. I’m not sure if I ever will but I do know there is room for improvement. I can see places where I had it working as I want it to but I’m not all the way there yet. It’s confusing and I’m not used to being confused while painting. I’m used to being sure of myself. Strange path I’ve picked.
Being a comic book collector I’ve been contemplating rarity lately. A lot of comics are considered valuable because they are rare. But that’s really only one consideration out of two. The second consideration is that a bunch of people want to own it. That is an even more important consideration.
I have a lot of comic books in my collection. I even have a lot of rare comics in my collection. But I don’t have many, if any, comics that anyone would consider valuable. I do have the first issue of the new X-Men plus the first appearance of Wolverine and these books would be considered valuable except for their condition. They are my copies from when I was a kid and they’re pretty well beat up.
Condition is everything when it comes to the value of comic books. Well, since I mentioned rarity and demand it’s maybe not everything but a blemish or two could be the difference between a $100 copy of the first appearance of Wolverine and a $1000 copy. My copy has so many blemishes it’s probably worth around $10. Nobody wants to pay a whole lot of money for a beaten up old comic unless it’s really really rare.
I do have a lot of comics that, by numbers alone, should be considered rare. At a guess I’d say that the Hulk issue from the 1970’s that had Wolverine’s first appearance sold around 250,000 copies. Of those how many could still be around? 100,000? 50,000? I really have no idea but I’m betting there are still a lot of them in existence. It’s not that rare. But when Wolverine stars in a couple of Hollywood blockbuster movies that gets a lot of people interested in him then demand drives up the price of his first appearance. And that’s exactly what happened.
Due to my peculiar taste in comics I buy a lot of what is referred to as “Small Press” comics. That means the print runs are no where near 250,000 copies. A lot of the print runs are under 10,000 copies. Many closer to 2,000. That would make them pretty rare but not in the least bit valuable because hardly anyone wants them. The demand for these small press comics, if you could even find them, would be almost zero. I imagine part of that is not only the general public’s disinterest but because the people who, like me, actually bought them probably still own them. I don’t think small press fans get rid of their comics as readily as mainstream comics fans because we know that they are hard to find even if they are worthless.
I was once at my regular comic shop buying one of my regular small press books, they ran about $3 a piece then, when the owner of the shop noticed there was some defect in the printing of the cover. As I said before, condition is everything when it comes to comics so he asked if I wanted him to reorder the comic to replace the flawed one with a pristine one. I do like to keep my comics in nice shape but I declined. I told him not to bother because in ten years my flawed copy will be worth exactly the same amount as a mint condition one. “They’ll both be in the 25¢ bin?”, he replied getting my joke. It was one of those jokes that was funny because it was true.
One of the things that has been making comics less rare these days has been reprint collections. I don’t even think they’re referred to as reprints anymore. Just hard cover and trade paperback collections. Some people buy those exclusively and have no interest in the individual monthly issues. But I’ve noticed that now some of these collections are going up in value as long as a) they are out of print and b) it doesn’t look like they’ll be coming back into print anytime soon.
The one book the jumps out at me that fits into this category is “Avengers Assemble” Volume 2. Volumes 1 and 3-5 can be found in print at Amazon.com and the likes for cover price, about $35, or less but volume 2 is out of print and can only be found used at Amazon for $150. The book is only four years old and the original comics it reprints could probably be found pretty easily and cheaply but since this volume is not likely to be reprinted anytime soon the price has risen on it.
I just completed my collection of hardcover reprints of the Dark Horse “Conan” series this week. I used to buy the monthly comics but sometime around the third hardcover volume I decided to sell my monthlies and get the collections from then on in. Except I didn’t realize that the first volume was already out of print. It’s been on my back burner of things to get and I finally pulled the trigger on a used copy. It was no where near as expensive as “Avengers Assemble Volume 2” but at $35 it was $10 above the original retail price.
“The Eternals Omnibus” by Jack Kirby is another out of print book that went up in price. I was going to get it but never did. It’s original $75 price tag (it’s a big book) is now at around $150. I ended up getting the original 1970’s issues on Ebay for around $20. How’s that for a strange twist of comic book fate? As long as the package is nice and it’s out of print the collection of reprints can be worth more than the original comics. As long as someone wants them that is.