Radiant Comics

So I finally bought a new monitor this week. I went with the Dell UltraSharp twenty seven inch one. It’s big and takes some getting used to but I like it so far. It gives me a lot of room to work. But one unexpected thing came with it. A strange sense of nostalgia.

The nostalgia actually isn’t directly related to the new screen. It’s related in a more roundabout way. Y’see the new screen is a high resolution one. That means that all of my desktop pictures (wallpapers) are too low res to display properly on it. I like to change background pictures fairly often so because of the new monitor I need a whole new set of pictures.

Sometimes I use my own photos as backgrounds and sometimes I find things on the internet. I gave a quick look on the web but didn’t see anything I liked. So I decided to look through some of my own photos.

I like to take candid shots. When I worked in NYC I would to get in to the city early on summer Fridays. Good Morning America would put on a concert in Bryant Park featuring whatever pop star was out promoting that week. I would use the opportunity to walk among the crowd and take pictures of people. The performers too but I usually found the crowd more interesting.

It was a challenging environment in which to take pictures. People were constantly milling about and angles and compositions would be gone in an instant. Plus I had to be inconspicuous as I snapped so as not to ruin the candid nature of what I was after. Luckily there was a concert going on to distract everyone.

This all took place in the summers of 2004 and 2005. I worked with the photos back then but haven’t looked at them much since. There are some good ones and, due to the nature of candid photography, lots of bad ones. It was this Bryant Park set that I decided to mine for possible desktop backgrounds.

Photography is a strange medium. It captures life like images and all over detail almost effortlessly. It freezes moments in time like nothing else. As a consequence it leaves the person looking at the photo with a whole lot of things to make sense of. And it opens up the imagination to create all sorts of stories.

What does that look mean? Fleeting glances become forever trapped in a photo. Who is this stranger I am taking a picture of? Their clothes, their food, their drink, their hair, their bags, and everything else around them in a photo tells a story. A story to be filled in by the viewer.

And that is what I do as I look at these pictures. I fill in stories. I can’t help it. It’s how my mind works. But what was funny to me was the nostalgia I had for these stories about these people in pictures. People I don’t even know. I was wondering who they were even as they now looked familiar to me because I had worked on these photos back in 2005.

Some of them showed up in a few pictures. They were most familiar. Subjects I liked so I tried a few times to get a good photo. I failed more than I succeeded but all of the photos add to the story.

Some of the people who worked the event were there every week so I have multiple picture of them in different outfits and such. They have the most expansive stories as I look through the photos. But I don’t really know them at all. Not a name to be found among them. Yet they are familiar to me and I feel a sense of nostalgia as if I knew them in the past. Strange.

I have no name for this weird type of nostalgia that looking through photos of strangers I took picture of years ago has brought upon me. I don’t know them or their real stories. Just the ones that came into my head then and now. I guess we did share some good times in Bryant Park listening to live music but not really. I bet the French have a name for this type of nostalgia. They’re good at naming such things.

Last October as I was coming around a corner on my bicycle it shimmied on me in a weird way. My seat was suddenly unstable beneath me. I stopped, got off, and inspected my bike. I thought that maybe the front derailleur had come loose but it was tight. I got back on for a test ride and it was still shaky.

When I got off the second time I was finally able to suss out what went wrong. Some welds on the frame broke. The bottom of the tube that is under the seat was no longer properly attached. That’s the part right between the pedals. Since that metal tube sat in a larger joint connecting it to the other tubes it only wobbled a fraction of an inch. But the bike was still unrideable.

Being that my bike was twenty years old I decided it would be best to replace it. I can fix just about anything on a bike but I can’t weld a frame. And after that many years what other welds were ready to go?

October is about the end of my biking season so I decided to wait and save up some money for a new one rather than rush out and get one on credit. That and I had no idea where to get a new bike. The couple of local bike shops I used to frequent are long gone.

I checked on the internet throughout the winter but I really wanted to buy locally. So I checked on the internet again for local bike shops. They were some shops a couple of towns away and among them the closest had a bad internet review that scared me off. A decided to try the second one.

All I have to say about that shop is, “Boy has biking changed in twenty years”. I’m somewhere between a casual rider and an enthusiast. I ride for exercise and because I like it. I ride three days a week for about forty five minutes. I think my course is fourteen miles. Plenty of big hills in it. There used to be plenty of bikes for people like me. Not anymore. Now everyone is supposed to be Lance Armstrong.

I noticed a lot of high prices as I looked for bikes on the internet. I saved up six hundred dollars for my new bike and I didn’t even want to spend that much. As I looked around the shop I was in sticker shock. $1500, $1800, and $2500? It’s a bicycle not a motorcycle. I soon found out that their bikes started at $850.

Bicycle parts are better made and more expensive now I was told. I’m not quite sure how much better they could be than my old bike which lasted me twenty years. If a part wore out I just replaced it. It rode fine. I wasn’t racing anyone but I could go fast.

Back to the internet it was. I ended up getting a an internet sale only bike for about $430. It claims to use all the same parts as the more expensive bike shop bikes but sells directly to the consumer and so passes the savings on.

One of the reasons I wanted to shop locally is that I didn’t want to put the bike together and tune it myself. Any bike that I would have to have shipped to me I would also have to put together myself. That’s how it goes with bike buying.

My Dad first taught me how to assemble a bike when I was about eight and I have taken bikes apart and put them together a lot of time since but I haven’t wanted to do that much recently. I’m getting old I guess. But I also didn’t have the money (nor would I have wanted to spend it) for the bike shop bike so that was that.

So now I have my bike and I am in the process of putting it together. It’s more of a pain in the ass now because new bikes are needlessly complicated. Gear shifters are no longer mounted on the handlebar stem but have been moved to the brakes.

Instead of depressing the breaks you push sideways on the brake handle to upshift and there is a little thumb lever on the brake handle that downshifts. Sound like a recipe for disaster to me but we’ll see. I’m almost tempted to strip the new bike down to the frame and put all my old parts on it.

I already put my old pedals on because the new ones have built in toe clips and straps. Once again I’m not pretending I’m in the Tour de France. I’m on a road with cars, deer, people, and whatever. Getting my feet off the pedals quickly and efficiently has been essential on more than one occasion. I’ve tried toe clips. They put the fear of Zeus in me.

I haven’t finished my tuning of the bike because I decided to spend the rest of the money I had saved on a bike repair stand. That will make things easier on me and thats how I want them. It should arrive sometime in the next week or so.

I couldn’t even ride my bike yet if I wanted to. Another thing that has changed is the tire valves. Bike tires now use some fancy new French valve. My air pump doesn’t fit it. I had to order a new air pump for thirty bucks. Even with the extra expenses I’m still way under the bike shop price though. Sometime you have to do it yourself.

I hate character design. That’s my opening for this week. I find it tedious and annoying. But that is what I’ve working on in regards to my still unnamed web comic. It’s a bit of a slog for me and the going is never as fast as I want it to be.

Don’t get me wrong. I love drawing all sorts of new characters. Faces are one of my favorite things to draw and I got a million of them in my head. I am always drawing new faces and “characters”. I’ve been complemented on the wide variety of interesting people that I draw and think I’m pretty good at that sort of thing.

But here is the thing. Making an interesting drawing of a character is not character design. Making an interesting drawing of a character is making a interesting drawing. In character design you have to take that “interesting drawing” and turn it into six “interesting drawings” that you will use to make a wide variety of drawings. That is not an easy task.

In character design you have to visualize and draw the character in three dimensions. You need a front view, back view, three quarters view, side view, looking up, looking down, and plenty more. You need to know, or be able to figure out, what the character will look like from any angle. It’s a lot of work. I’ve known people (and envied them) who are good at character design and like to do it but I’m not one of them. For me it’s a big pain.

To further hinder me my drawing tends to be two dimensional. I’m not usually interested in trying to render some real world object in a three dimensional way. Instead I’m using marks on paper to create a world or character that make sense in the confines of a two dimensional rectangle. A completely different type of “realism”. Plus creating something in two dimensions often doesn’t translate well into three dimensions. It can be apples and oranges.

My usual method of drawing works against me too. I often use a surrealist automatic drawing method. That is where I draw with no preconceived notion of what I want to draw. I see where the drawing leads me and go in that direction. That is how I can come up with the unusual drawings that I like. With normal illustrative drawing, which is character design’s category, you have to visualize what you are going to draw before you draw it. It’s in your head and then you get it down on paper. I’m not used to that any more.

So I’ve spent a lot of last week asking myself, “What does this character look like from the side?” followed by “Does this look right?”. Usually I ask myself, “What the heck am I drawing?” followed by “Does this line make the drawing more interesting?”. It’s a totally different mind set with different problems and solutions.

I’ve been trying to bring the two mind sets together. I wasted a lot of my time drawing a bunch of characters in a “realistic” illustrative fashion. I referenced things and figured it all out in three dimensions and ended up being completely bored with the drawings. Now I’ve been trying to bring in some of my interesting two dimension drawing techniques into the three dimensional character design. It’s kind of tricky. And a bit frustrating. And laborious.

But at least I now have some character designs that don’t bore me to death. I have a long way to go on them and some of them may have to be abandoned but I think I’m on the right path. Man this takes a lot of work. But if the character designs bore me imagine how an audience would feel about them.

I bought a new computer last year. An Apple Mac Pro. I make my living on that machine and it was time for a new one. But I still haven’t upgraded my monitor yet. I haven’t entered the world of LCD monitors and am still working on my trusty old nineteen inch CRT monitor. Since they include the part of CRT screen that you can’t actually see in such measurements it’s really a seventeen inch screen. It’s a NEC Multisync 95.

I can’t remember what brand my first monitor was. I got it in 1995 and it was a seventeen inch (fifteen really) CRT that cost me around $700. That ran nicely until 2001 when it died on me. That’s when I purchased the NEC model.

The NEC model was really supposed to be a stop gap monitor. I hadn’t planned on replacing my monitor before it stopped working and therefor had no money saved up for a new one. That’s how I usually do things. If I plan on replacing something I save up.

Monitor prices had come down a lot from 1995 to 2001 and LCD monitors were just starting to appear at nearly affordable prices. I looked around at all sorts of different monitors and was trying to decide what to buy. There were plenty of cheap CRTs but there were also some nice specialty graphics monitors. They were also CRTs but were priced at around $700. Comparable LCD monitors were about $900 at the time.

I was in a bit of a quandary. Buy a big (twenty one inch I think) graphics monitor for $700, a newfangled LCD one for $900, or take my chances with a cheaper and smaller non-graphics CRT monitor? I ended up going for the cheapest route. I figured even at only seventeen inches that was two inches bigger than I was used to. Plus the NEC was about $250. That is considerably cheaper. I figured I could make due with it until LCDs came down in price.

Now, eight years later, I’m still using the damn thing. I never thought the color on it was quite as rich as my original monitor but that never held me back. I can’t believe the thing is still running. But it is. And I’m still looking to replace it.

I’ve wanted a new LCD monitor for about three years now. But one of the questions I always ask myself before buying an expensive new piece of equipment is “What will this allow me to do that I can’t do now?”. The answer with a new monitor is “Nothing”. I’ll have more room to work but that’s it. Other things have always gotten purchased before it.

Another factor is that the LCD monitors that I would like to buy are freaking expensive. And the cheap crappy LCD monitors of today are so much worse than the cheap crappy CRT monitors of yesterday. A $250 LCD monitor is not as good as my $250 CRT monitor from 2001. It has to do with viewing angles, color reproduction, contrast, and such things but come down to the fact that I need a graphics LCD monitor.

Apple makes some really nice ones but they are pricey. I’d love their big thirty inch monitor but not for $1800. And the new twenty four inch one is $900. Plus that one has a connector that is different for the connector on my computer that I just bought last September. Annoying.

Dell also makes some nice graphics monitors that are cheaper for the size than the Apple ones but I’m still looking at spending a large chunk of change. I’d like an Apple monitor because of the color management capabilities it has, all Apple monitors can be calibrated exactly the same so a document’s color will look consistent across all of them, but I have never actually run into anyone using this capability. Clearly it’s not essential for me.

So I wait some more. Apple hasn’t refreshed their line of monitors in years. The twenty four inch one that came out last fall was made to run in conjunction with their laptops and not their towers. Hence the different connector. There keep being rumors of them updating the line but those rumors haven’t come true.

I think this might be the year I finally get a new monitor but I’m not sure. After all my stop gap monitor is still running strong as it comes up on its eighth birthday.

I can’t seem to escape this idea that I want to make a web comic. I’ve already worked on and given up on many ideas for a web comic. Mainly because they are too much work for too little reward. Make that no reward. But making comics is just in my bones. I can’t quite stop thinking up stuff.

Since the web comics I’ve made so far are akin to color Sunday strips I thought I would try for a something more along the lines of a the more simple black and white daily strip. The problem with that is that I don’t have much to say in that form. Most daily comic strips, wether on the web or in print, are gag a day strips. I hate gag a day strips. I generally find them dull and relentlessly similar to one and other.

I actually should be more kind to gag a day strips. There have been great ones; Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and Doonesbury are my favorite three. It’s just that gag a day has been the dominant comic strip form for decades now and there are so many bad ones. And believe me if I were to do a gag a day strip it would just add to the dreck. I can’t write gags any better than all the other guys out there doing it badly. And at least they like to write gags. I’d probably do it worse than the dreck that’s out there.

So that leaves me with the other dominant form of the comic strip. The adventure story. There aren’t many of these left and I can’t think of a good one currently running. Maybe there is one but I don’t know of it. The heyday of the adventure strip happened before I was born. It doesn’t matter anyway because an adventure strip is way too much work for me. An adventure strip takes at least three times as long to draw as a gag a day strip.

With neither predominant form of comic strips looking like they will have anything to do with me I languished. I put aside any notion of web comics until this week. I decided to give it a go based on some dialogues I’ve been writing. No gag and no plot just two people talking. For some reason I like writing two people talking. I try to make it interesting and humorous but there is no gag or joke. I don’t know what to call them.

This week I decided to write a dialogue as a comic strip. It consisted of making four panels and then writing what the two people were saying to each other in word balloons. The writing went well. I made a few strips but then, of course, the problem comes with drawing them.

There is a reason most web comics are so badly drawn. It’s a lot of time consuming work to draw them well. And very few are getting paid for that time. So I tried to come up with a style I could draw quickly in. My strip is about dialogue so it’s really all talking heads but I can’t just draw it that way. I’ve got to vary things up. That takes even more time.

I ended up drawing two strips and though I did them quickly it was not quickly enough for me. And I found drawing it so literally boring and I didn’t even like the drawings in the end. The kiss of death again. Ouch. So now I’m going to try something new.

I’m going to draw a few more strips to see what they look like. Then I’m going to try and suss out where I am going with it visually and work up a book of poses for the characters. A lot of web comics guys cut and paste poses or panels over and over but that is not quite what I have in mind. I’m looking for a bit more variety and a lot less obviousness.

There is no getting around that I am doing a strip based on dialogues so there is no need for exotic locales or action sequences. There is a limited number of ways that I can draw two people talking to each other. I’m going to try and find a number of talking poses and use them as a starting point for my drawing. I’ll draw some varied heads and faces and see if I can tie it all together into a finished strip.

Y’know it could be that I have a hard time working in a linear fashion these days. Pencil, ink, and color. Pencil, ink, and color. Pencil, ink, and color. A lot of times I want to do things out of order. I’ll have to build up something of a backlog. That way I can work on whatever part I feel like at the time.

I think I’ll even try out a couple of 3D programs I have that are designed to help artists draw stuff. You can quickly work up 3D reference figures in them and use the figures in the same way you would use reference photos. Since the strip I’m working on is not photo realistic I’m not sure how much it would help me but I want to try it out.

Once again I have no idea if this will ever amount to anything. But I am enjoying writing the dialogues. And that is something.