Radiant Comics

I’m tired of the winter and I’m ready for the spring. So it’s time to wax a little poetic. I’m not a winter hater; after all it’s the only time I get to wear my long coats. I dig a good long coat. They’re so much cooler than short coats. But every year come the beginning of March I get tired of the cold, ice, and snow. This year is no exception especially after the extra cold weather of the last two weeks when we should have been inching towards warmer temperatures.

I’m also tired of riding a stationary bike and want to get out on the road and ride a real bike. There is hardly a more boring form of exercise than pedaling a mock bicycle that goes nowhere. Sure you can have the TV on, listen to the radio, or even read a book (if you don’t ride too energetically) but that barley cuts down on the tedium. Outside on a real bike with the world flying by is a more fun. Even if I do ride the same route almost every time. And nothing beats powering up a hill and then breathlessly flying down the other side. A hill is hard work followed by the satisfaction of a reward. The only reward on a stationary bike is not falling completely out of shape.

I do want a new short coat for the springtime. I usually wear a sport coat as my spring and fall jacket. I had one I liked and wore for years until the lining wore down to nothing. It was some lightweight poly blend that held up well and was a great green color. Last year I got a wool sport coat. Turns out I’m not that fond of wool for a light weight coat. It’s too warm and the color isn’t a good as the old one. Still, I wear it. Maybe I can get the lining fixed in my old one.

And the sunshine. I can really use some of that. Sitting out in the spring sunshine and drawing. That sounds like a good time.

This is the time of year I wish I were a baseball fan. Springtime goes hand in hand with the start of a new season. I think that’s why baseball fans are the most hopeful and poetic of all sports fans when a new season starts. They look forward to a nice spring day to sit in the sunshine and watch their team play. It’s not until the hot sun of summer and many losses that a baseball fan gets despondent. The August sun and a losing team does not a happy marriage make.

I do like going out on a cold winter night though. As long as I’m all bundled up with hat, gloves, scarf, boots, and a nice warm coat. Keeping warm is a lot easier than keeping cool. Plus the world empties when it gets too cold out so there is more room in the world for me. Still I’m tired of the whole freezing cold thing for this year. And a warm spring night can bring out the people and make you feel like you’re part of something. There is a lot more sense of community in the spring. Winter is every man for himself.

And there is a little glimpse into anticipating the springtime me.

Recently I was watching a documentary on HBO called “Thin”. It’s about four women who are at a clinic for eating disorders. All the women are too thin. Hence the title of the film.

I know all about how “the media” gives young girls visions of unrealistic body types i.e. almost everyone on TV and in the movies is young, pretty, tall and thin but I still find this “thin” disorder baffling. I don’t fit the demographic model for those who have the disorder but I should be able to relate to it on a human level. Yet it’s tough with this one.

I find other common disorders much less baffling and and more easily explainable.

Overeating: food tastes good and it makes people feel good to eat. When people don’t have a lot in their life to make them feel good they can eat to feel good. There is tons of food around so it’s an easy temptation. I’ve overeaten at times and have eaten because something tastes good rather than because I’m hungry. I can relate. That’s an easy one.

Alcohol: Feeling bad? Have a drink and you’ll feel better. That’s why the stuff was invented. Drink too much and it will make you feel bad all of the time and then you need some hair of the dog. Then you have a problem. I am not nor never have been a drinker but I understand wanting to feel good, wanting change your mindset, or escaping from the everyday. I can relate.

Gambling: It gives people a rush (so I’m told I get no rush) and makes them feel alive. When it’s someone’s only way to feel alive life gets crazy. Math, numbers, and odds are real to me in such a way that I know the house will always win in the long run. I can’t get past that and as a result have no interest in gambling but I understand wanting to get rich quick. And thrills. Who doesn’t understand being hook on a thrill?

Sure those explanations don’t take into account the complexities of any given individual’s life and they may be simplistic but at least the allow me to relate on some level to those who suffer from those problems.

Undereating I don’t easily relate too. It really looks to me that it should be mostly an emotional problem. I think overeating is mostly an emotional problem. Eat to fill an emotional void and it becomes a habit. Fix the underlying emotional problem and the habit of overeating can be fixed easier. Undereating (in the program I was watching I know no undereaters myself) doesn’t seem to have an underlying emotional problem. At least not one I could see. Don’t get me wrong, the women all seemed to have emotional problems just none that I could see obviously linked to the undereating. I can usually see the emotional problems liked to overeating. Especially in TV documentaries where they spell things out for you.

Maybe undereating baffles me because these women seem to be getting nothing out of it. They are all unhealthy and miserable yet want to be thin so badly that they are perfectly willing to continue not eating. One even said that if death was the price of being thin then she was willing to pay it. Ouch.

To further confuse me the women don’t even know that they are thin. They think they are fat. Overeaters know that they are fat. How come undereaters don’t know they are thin? It’s a whole different ballgame. It’s like their brains are wired in a completely upside down way. This disorder passes my comprehension by. But I do feel for them. Underweight is even more dangerous than overweight and the women’s suffering in this documentary is clear. I think I need a cookie.

I’m as big a pro football fan as anyone. I’m in front of the TV every week for the Giants’ games and at least have the TV on for many other games. I may not actually sit and watch every NFL game but I have an interest. The games make good background noise if nothing else. I’ve played fantasy football every year since the late Eighties. That was before the age of computers when my league had to figure out who won and lost our games by looking up the stats in newspapers. Pencil and paper, baby.

At the end of April is the NFL draft. That’s where all the NFL teams get together and choose which college players they can hire. The draft is televised every year now. As entertainment it’s pretty much a non event but still a few football starved friends and I get together every year. We hang out and watch the draft. It’s a good chance to get together because you don’t have to pay too much attention to the actual draft. Social events don’t need something that demands your attention interrupting them.

Now, for the first time, the NFL has come up with even more of a non event to watch. The NFL scouting combine. To be fair it is such a non event that it’s only on the fledgling NFL network which my cable system doesn’t even offer. I can’t see it. At least the NFL draft is on ESPN. But still it’s only the first year the combine is televised so it may grow into an even bigger non event.

The NFL scouting combine is where college football players and NFL scouts get together in one place (Indianapolis) so the potential draftees can get measured, weighed, and race to see how fast they are. I haven’t seen it but I can safely say that I think the entertainment value is zero. But still people want to see it. Only the hardcore need apply.

The funny thing is that a lot of the top guys coming out of college don’t even participate in the NFL combines. That’s because there is another day, NFL Pro day, where college athletes work out for NFL scouts. I guess the top guys don’t want to be seen with the rabble. I have no idea if NFL Pro day will be televised. I think it is not centralized like the combine so it would be harder to shoot. The scouts show up at individual colleges for Pro Day.

I don’t watch any other sports besides pro football with any regularity. Sure I’ll catch a baseball, basketball, hockey, or soccer game every now and then but I have no favorite team in those sports and don’t care much who wins or losses. So in the football off season I only flip by ESPN for shorts bursts. But in those short burst I’ve managed to catch some NFL combine news. Yes, ESPN has reporters there keeping an eye on who can run a 4.3 forty.That’s a forty yard dash in 4.3 seconds and the difference between being drafted in the first round and getting millions of dollars and not being drafted at all.

These reporters can make whole segments out of nothing. Opinions based on opinions based on opinions about who the surprises and busts will be. Who will move up in the draft because of these work outs? Who will move down? Opinions and speculation from talking heads is running rampant this week. Opinions on who has “character” and who doesn’t. It’s easy to tell who doesn’t have character. They’re the ones getting arrested. Dead giveaway.

So if you have the NFL network you can tune into the new ultimate football non event. At lest until they invent another one. I think they should televise the GM meetings where they decide to cut veteran players for salary cap reasons. That would be exciting non event TV.

It’s the eternal question of those who have a collection of any kind. What kind of order do you put things in? That’s the difference between a collection and an accumulation. There’s order to a collection and you can find things. People who have accumulations don’t even know what they have or don’t have.

Almost all of my comics are on book shelves. I love shelves because you can get to what’s on them easily. Most collectors use boxes made for storing comics to house their collections. I find this too cumbersome and it makes getting to the comics quite hard. Boxes pile upon boxes and getting to a comic in the bottom box means moving those on top. A lot of effort has to be expended. I build shelves everywhere I can. I have lots of them but I can always use more. I advise everyone to learn how to build shelves and book cases. It’s not hard.

As the guy who invented the Dewey Decimal system could tell you: when it comes to organizing books doing it just alphabetically doesn’t work. New comics are being made (and bought) every week and my collection is constantly expanding. Thus when the finite room of a particular shelf has run out, but there are still new comics to add, the the whole collection has to be shuffled around. That’s if you do things alphabetically.

I solved this problem years ago by putting inactive comic book series (ones that I no longer purchased new issues of) on certain shelves by themselves. This meant that I no longer had to move these ones around. Ever. I was also free to group them alphabetically or by subject or publisher. This approach also includes a computer data base of my comics and their location. But that’s not hard. Computers are real good for that stuff. So if I want to find where the hell my “Omega the Unknowns” are I just enter it and bookcase three shelf four is what I am told. That makes things easy to locate.

Most of my book cases are filled with inactive series. Only three shelves on one bookcase held active series (in alphabetical order). Much less to rearrange as new issues are purchased. That system had held up for years until this week.

The problem was that those three shelves which accounted for my active collections are big. I’d guess there are about 1300 comics in total on those three shelves. That’s a lot of comics and since I haven’t changed my system much in half a decade there were a lot of small inactive series on the shelf. Mini-series, cancelled series, and series I only bought a few issues of. It became impossible to browse those three shelves easily or with any satisfaction.

Browsing a collection is one of the joys of collecting. That’s why it’s important to have some order. Seeing one thing naturally leads you to want to see another that’s some how connected to it. The connection my be emotional, logical, or it may have something to do with buying both things at the same time. Who knows? But if picking up one thing makes you want to see a second thing than that second thing better be easy to find. Or you will soon find yourself frustrated and disinterested. This was my situation with those three shelves.

One of the fun things about comic books is going back and rereading them. This wasn’t happening with those three shelves. So I rearranged them for easiest browsing. Here is the system I came up with.

First I had to weed out the crap. If you follow my “Comics I Bought This Week” posts then you will notice that my tastes are not very mainstream and I am always looking for a new series to try. As a consequence I had about a hundred first, second and maybe third issues stuck on my three shelves. Comics I didn’t like and never bought again. Still I shelved them because no comic collector wants to throw out comics. I pulled them off and maybe I’ll put them on Ebay at 99¢ for all of them. I still don’t want to throw them out. But I might.

A little aside: 99.99% of all comic books are worthless. I know the newspapers like to print articles every now and then on how comics, like the first Superman or Batman, are really expensive but those are the rare exception. I have a lot of comics but none are worth any real money. Hardly any are worth the three dollars an issue I pay for them off the stands. You find this out quickly on Ebay. Most comics are like new cars. They depreciate the moment you drive them off the lot. An eclectic collection like mine would probably only be bought by some comic dealer who buys by the pound. Yes, that’s how many worthless comics there are out there. Unless you can show a dealer specific things to interest him it’s not worth his time to go through a eight or ten thousand book collection. They just weigh it and give you X dollars a pound. X isn’t a high number by the way. And now back to our subject at hand.

Second I needed to create “browsing sections” that made sense to me. I made a “by artist” section. This is a section of stuff that doesn’t read well but has nice art. Some series that I only have a few issues of and they don’t fit in anywhere. For example: George Perez’s “Crimson Plague” only lasted two or three issues and ended in the middle of the story so there is no reason to ever go back and read it but the art is nice. If I want to browse some Perez art there it is in the “by artist” section. Same with thirty other artists.

The next section is the “complete mini-series” section. Each of these is a stand alone compact single story made up of about four to eight issues. When I want a small story I can check out this section.

Then comes the “complete series” section. These are whole runs of small series usually no more than twenty issues or so. The make up a larger canvas than a mini series and are good for when I want to dive into more ambitious concepts.

Lastly comes the “incomplete series” section. These are made up of short series that I am missing an issue or two of. Or maybe a series that was cancelled before it’s time. The section of broken dreams. Browse here at your own risk.

Of course I still have my “active series” section. It’s only three quarters of a shelf long now but at least I can see them at a glance. I did do one thing to make browsing easier. I got some card stock paper and made some dividers that stick out beyond the comics with the name of the comic book series on it. Now I can browse the dividers and know what’s there. They are in alphabetical order of course.

Now if only I had a system for all of my trade paperbacks and hardcovers.

No pro football until September! I’ll have to distract myself with video games.

There is a new Yu-Gi-Oh! game out for the Nintendo DS (Spirit Caller). I might get it but I’m not sure. I have other Yu-Gi-Oh! games and the card battle genre is one that I enjoy. The genre started with Magic: The Gathering and involves picking out 40-60 cards from a vast library of different cards (1400 in the new Yu-Gi-Oh! game) and then building a deck out of them to “fight” other people and their decks. The strategy comes from deciding what tact you want to take and trying to figure out just which cards to put in your deck to stay on the winning course. Fun stuff.

The problem with these card battle video games is that collecting the virtual cards is always part of the game. That makes for a very big drawback. You are basically crippled at the beginning of the game. Your choices are few, your deck is weak, and the games you play are usually uninteresting. It takes a lot of slogging through the mire to get enough cards to build a deck that is interesting to use. I’ve played a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! and I’m not a beginner’s deck guy anymore. But that’s where a new game always starts. With a beginner’s deck.

These days I find a similar problem in a lot of different genres of video games. In most racing games you used to pick a good car and race. Now you have to pick a crappy car, race, win some races, and then upgrade your car until it’s finally okay. Only then do you get to race with a good car. The game starts out crappy by design. How crazy is that? But it’s the norm now. People even expect it.

Games used to be wide open but now you have to unlock things. Instead of giving a player a lot of choices right from the start you have to “earn” them. It even gives players a sense of satisfaction as they earn special items. Not me though. Don’t give me a watered down game that only gets good later on. I won’t stick around for later on.

I don’t mind power ups and new weapons in shooters. If the game is well done and the base weapons are good then the new weapons just add spice. You can always go back to the base weapons and have fun. The games I don’t like are the ones in which once you upgrade your weapon you never go back because the original was crappy to begin with.

I’ve quit playing a lot of games only to have someone tell me, “Well it gets good later”. I want it good now. Not later. I paid for the game and I want my choices in front of me from the beginning. I don’t want to unlock hidden character, powers, and costumes. If the game is good I’ll play it. If it’s not then the promise of a “reward” of secret game play isn’t going to keep me from turning it off. Put your best foot forward.

A game series that I have always enjoyed is SSX snowboarding. It’s exciting and fast paced with great sound and visuals. As a racing game it’s top notch. I just don’t like using the crappy snowboards at the beginning. I never bought SSX On Tour (the last one) because I didn’t want to start at the beginning again. I’ve had it with games that withhold the good stuff from me.

That’s why I’m undecided if I want the new YU-Gi-Oh! game. I know it’ll be good. But only after playing for enough hours to get interesting cards. The last Yu-Gi-Oh! game I bought sat around for six months before I felt like starting it. I played the hell out of it eventually but good from the go it is not. Like so many other games.