Radiant Comics

I like containers of all kinds but I just missed with my latest container. That’s because I find it fun to put things in order. Alphabetical, numerical, chronological, or even spacial. Y’know big books have to go on big shelves no matter who their author or what their subject matter is. But that’s a topic for another day because my books are hardly in any order at all. Besides by height.

This week I finally got a couple of portfolio cases that I’ve been meaning to buy. One that I’ve been meaning to buy for about two years now. As you can see my love of putting things in order is far from an obsession. It was a big forty inch by thirty inch basic black art portfolio that I bought. I need it specifically to store some large photos that I made. The photos are matted on twenty four by thirty six inch matte board. I’ve stored them for the last two years in a card board box that I’ve been meaning to replace with something more durable. The portfolio case is it. It costs about a hundred bucks and until now it just never made the budget.

The container I missed on is a fancy aluminum art case. That was more of an impulse buy. I’ve been putting my comic book original art collection in order lately. All the eleven by seventeen inch art has been put in mylar sleeves and all the art that is smaller than that has been mounted on eleven by seventeen inch paper and slipped into a mylar sleeve.

I thought the next logical step would be to get a nice eleven by seventeen inch case to put my original art collection in. I found an aluminum case on the Dick Blick art supply web site. It was slightly larger than eleven by seventeen inches in order to fit eleven by seventeen paper. Perfect. Or so I thought. When the case was delivered I opened it and went to place a page in it. Missed it by that much. The mylar sleeves, being designed to hold an eleven by seventeen inch piece of paper, are ever so slightly bigger than the aluminum box also designed to hold an eleven by seventeen inch piece of paper. It’s a sixty dollar box too. Oh well.

I ended up putting some of my own artwork, drawn on eleven by seventeen inch pieces of paper, into the box. I don’t usually put my own stuff into a mylar sleeve so I didn’t have to worry about it fitting. It’s a nice box but it was anti-claimatic when it didn’t go to the purpose for which I intended it.

I also loaded some of my own art prints into an eleven by seventeen inch display portfolio. That’s an inexpensive portfolio but it’s nice and holds a lot of pages. I’ve had that portfolio sitting around for years doing nothing. I don’t know why I never put anything in it but it sat around so long that I forgot I had it. Rediscovering it was it impetus for me to buy the new portfolio cases and put things in order. I also bought a second of the inexpensive display portfolios. I filled up the first one and still had some of my prints left over. Now they are all snug in their sleeves.

I’ve also been looking for a box to put my gouache and acrylic paints in. When I mix colors in those two mediums I put the paints into cubbies (little plastic containers). The cubbies then go into a box. I’ve been using a couple of card board boxes for years now and they are not very nice. Barely functional I’d call them because they don’t stack well.

I bought a couple of cheap Tupperware-like trays with lids but when I got them home I discovered they were too rounded. The cubbies wouldn’t stack right to the side of the tray and I couldn’t get nearly the same amount of cubbies in as I could in the cardboard box. They took up more room than I wanted them too.

The trays also didn’t go to waste. I replaced a shoe box that I used to hold tubes of acrylic with a couple of the trays. Tubes don’t exactly stack efficiently so the curved sides of the tray don’t matter. Another of the trays I brought to a party filled with candy. The kids dug it.

So I’m still looking for some boxes to replace my cardboard ones. Good squared sided stackable boxes. Not too tall either since the cubbies are short and any space above them in a box would just be wasted. Cubbies.. heh heh. That word always makes me laugh.

One panel at a time. That’s how I’ll have to do it. I’ve been working, again, on my pesky web comic. I’m closer than ever to making something I actually like. But the assembly line nature of making comics is bringing me down. Pencil, ink, letter, and color are the relentless steps involved. The step that is killing me right now is the coloring step. Only because it is digital and I’m tired of working on screen.

I’ve already broken my panels off of the page. I no longer draw a normal page of comics because it’s too small. I want to draw bigger than that. So after I do my layout I draw each panel on a single sheet of paper blown up to as large as I’m comfortable with. After scanning and coloring I’ll put them all back together into a page.

Each panel can then be it’s own individual piece. I will make some into prints or paintings and have those linked to the piece in the strip. It’s a labour intensive process. Much more so than when a panel is just a panel. Each panel having to stand on its own and work well on the page is not an easy combo. Plus none of it is as literal as a normal comic. What the hell am I doing? Yeah, that’s the question I’m always asking.

It’s the computer coloring that’s bothering me right now. There is a tediousness to the process that is annoying. I miss the surface of actual painting. That and the method itself I’m using to color these panels I find dull. I like the end result but getting there is a chore.

Now that I finally bought my new computer I’m almost ready to figure out how I’m going to integrate video into my web comic. I have some ideas but haven’t tried any of them out yet. A video camera would help but you can’t have everything. I’ll have to use the video function of my still camera to start out with. Lo-Fi is the new Hi-Fi they tell me.

One thing I do know about the video portion of my web comic is that it will have to be more literal than the drawn portion. Video is generally literal just by it’s nature but I need something to ground this whole thing because the comic strip is pretty far out. I have to remind myself to stay on this planet sometimes.

I am planning on getting a LCD drawing tablet for my computer. One of the tablets where I can draw right on the tablet’s LCD screen. The tablet is a screen. That might take some of the tedium out of my coloring process as it seems more natural. And I can put it on my drawing table to work on it as I do all of my drawings on paper. I don’t have it yet though so I’ll have to soldier on.

I think I’m going to break my process down even further. I’ll pencil, ink, and then color one panel before I move on to the next. That way I won’t have to stare at a computer screen for so many hours in a row. I’ll get a handle on this yet. But that’s the report for now.

I finally did it. I replaced my six year old Apple G4 Dual One Ghz Quicksilver tower with a new “I can’t even keep track of specs anymore they’re so out of sight” Apple tower. I was originally going to get it back in June before I had to spend some money on dental work so it seems like it’s been a long time coming. The old computer served me well. I was still doing all my Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign work on it up until Friday so it’s a viable machine. But now I have the latest and the greatest. Well, not quite greatest. You can spend twice what I did on an Apple tower. Those things get crazy.

I’ve sung the praises of the Apple Migration Assistant program before. You hook up your old computer to your new one via a Firewire cable and it transfers all of your settings and documents over for you. When you turn on your new computer it looks just like the old one. And all your passwords are in place. That’s important. Instead of taking weeks to get back to normal it takes hours.

Things didn’t go so smoothly for me this time. My old computer didn’t want to play nice. It was one hard drive specifically. Y’see I cranked up the new computer and followed the Migration Assistant instructions. Connect the cable and turn on the old computer while holding down the “T” key. But when my old computer showed up in the Migration Assistant program my main hard drive wasn’t there. My secondary hard drive was but that doesn’t have all the settings I wanted. Why would one internal hard drive show up but not the other? No idea.

I decided to take the my main hard drive out of my old computer and put it in an external case. Maybe standing alone It would show up properly was my reasoning. I grabbed one of my external drives pulled it out of the case and put my main drive in there and plugged it into my new computer. The drive mounted and popped up on screen. I thought I was in business but when I ran Migration Assistant the drive still didn’t show up. I double clicked on the drive to open it up in the Finder but it froze the whole computer.

Keep in mind that this is the main hard drive that I have been using to run my old computer. I have had no problems with it recently so why is it doing this now? Who knows? It baffled me.

Next I decided to switch the physical positions on my main and secondary hard drives in my old computer. Maybe putting the first one second on the chain would work. I also had to remember to change some little jumper switches on the drives that indicate which is master and which is slave. I did that and started it up. At least I tried too. The old computer would start up and then shut itself down. I then changed the drives and switches back and it started right up. Huh? Computers are crazy.

At this point I decided that since my new computer could see my second internal hard drive I would boot up my old computer with the second drive and use Migration Assistant to move my settings from hard dive one onto hard drive two. Except I was foiled because Migration Assistant, on my old machine, couldn’t see hard drive one which was on the same machine. This was getting weird.

My next solution was to use a program called Carbon Copy to make a clone of my main hard drive and try to migrate from the copy. Problem was that I need a free external hard drive for that and mine had data on them that I didn’t want to mess with. But I do have two hard drives that I don’t use because they were giving me trouble. I figured what did I have to lose so I set one of them up to be made into a clone and went to bed.

The next morning I saw that the clone was made so I double clicked on the hard drive to check that the files were copied and it froze my old computer up. Great. I restarted and ran Disk Utility on the new clone hard drive. Three hours later it was still finding things wrong with the drive and there was no end in sight. Disk Utility usually takes half an hour at most to fix a drive so something was really freaky here. I cancelled disk utility and gave up on that drive. To the trash with it.

But just because I was curious I plugged the clone into my new computer. Lo and behold Migration Assistant saw it and started copying files over. I though that maybe I got lucky. I didn’t. Half way through the copying Migration Assistant said that the info couldn’t be read and cancelled out the transfer. Oh well.

I then ran DIsk Utility again on my main hard drive. I had done this already but I do it often when there is trouble. Disk Utility found some more stuff wrong and fixed them up. The new computer still refused to see the drive though. So a few little problems wasn’t the problem.

I was ready for my second external drive to be made into a clone. At least I know exactly what was wrong with that drive. It has some bad blocks. Whatever info was once there is now gone but the computer will work around those blocks now that it knows that they are there. Still I don’t trust it so it’s not a hard drive I rely on. I set up that drive to be made into a clone and left for the day. It takes about three hours to clone my main hard drive by the way.

When I came back that evening I went straight to the computer and checked out my new clone drive. It was there. I double clicked the icon and it opened without crashing anything. Yay! I then plugged it into the new machine which saw it with no problem. Migration assistant then started transferring things over as I held my breath and waited for a failure message. None came. Whew! Everything got transfered over. Nice. A happy ending.

Today I’m hooking up and testing out all of the equipment I had attached to my old computer that are now on my new one. I don’t expect many problems because my old computer was running the latest operating system as is the new one. I also have to do some work deleting stuff on the old computer before I get rid of it but that is for another time.

As I was reading the “Creepy Archives” volume one (haven’t posted the review yet though I loved it; go out and get your copy now) a thought struck me about the absolutely gorgeous art. “We don’t see comic art like this anymore”.

Styles in art and illustration come and go and every style is informed by the time and place around it thus making even comics draw today “dated” but this is a little different. This is something I hadn’t noticed before.

I had never read the issues of “Creepy” (1-5) reprinted in this archive. I am familiar with all of the artists involved, Reed Crandall, George Evans, Frank Frazetta, Gray Morrow, Angelo Torres, Al Williamson, plus a few others, but I hadn’t seen all of their work from this time period gathered together.

These are all artists who were working in a classical adventure comic strip style. This means that they relied on photo reference. They all had vast files of photos, books, and magazine clippings to see what something looked like if they were called upon to draw it. Or if they needed a picture of a character standing just so they would call on friends to pose for them and shoot it themselves. Not every panel would be photo referenced but some would.

For years the classical illustration type of photo referencing remained in comics but wasn’t the dominant style. Artists coming out of the Neal Adams school (not literally a school) were using photo reference to a degree but most comics were of the Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko school where things were mainly drawn from the imagination. That type of drawing dominated for twenty years or so and it’s still going strong.

In recent years photo referencing has made a big comeback. This is because of the advent of computers and digital photography making it easier than ever to take and manipulate photos. But there is a big difference. Instead of this photo referencing style being based on classical illustration it’s based on photo realism.

Photorealism is a fine art style that came alive in the late Sixties and early Seventies. It was all about using a photograph as a guide to make a painting. The end product was a painting that looked like a photograph. People would do a double take when they realized they were looking at a painting. These paintings are all about how the camera sees the world. That is different than how the human eye sees the world. The difference can be summed up by noticing that when people see a photorealistc painting they mistake it for a photo and not reality.

It is this photorealism that informs today’s photo referenced comic book art. The classical photo referenced illustration style never tried to make the reader think he was looking at a photo. The reader always knew he was looking at a drawing but it was sometimes photo referenced to make the world of the drawing as believable as possible. Most people would never even know that photo reference was involved.

What I also find interesting about this new photo referenced/photorealism phenomenon is that how the camera sees has become the new realistic. Lens flares are the most obvious example of this. A lens flare is when light hits a lens in just such a way as to make a hot spot. When looked at through a camera lens a piece of anything shiny can radiate light like the sun.

Photographers have worked for a hundred years to keep lens flares from ruining their pictures. But now on computer created art they are placed in to make things more “realistic”. Ten years ago when computer coloring first hit comics there were lens flares on everything. It made the drawings more “realistic”. Things have died down on that front but in video games the lens flare is alive and well.

“How the camera sees” is the new realistic in 3D video games not “How the eye sees”. I find it distracting and unrealistic but game makers don’t. Lens flares during a dramatic moment as a bright light shines in your character’s eyes are the norm now in video games. It ruins the realism for me because I know that, in reality, you need a lens to have a lens flare thus in that moment of the game I no longer feel I’m immersed in playing the game but merely watching it through a camera.

Which brings us back to comics and photo referenced/photorealism. Some guys do it well and some don’t. The guys who don’t are the ones who always remind me that I’m looking at a photo based work. At least they’ve laid off the lens flares in comics. No if only some of them would go back and look at how the old guys used to use photo reference. They might get some good ideas.

I’ve been off my game. That’s because doing the same thing over and over again does not appeal to me. Which is why I am still trying to figure out what to do with my web comic. And I don’t have it licked yet. That and I don’t want it to be just a web comic. Talk about not knowing how to define a project.

I’ve been working on this thing forever. I’ve put in a lot of time on it, finished a bunch of stuff, but it’s still not what I want it to be. What I want it to be is a total integration of all of my different ways of working. Painting, drawing, print making, and comics. With, maybe, a little photography in there too. You see the tall order I’ve set for myself.

Not all of these mediums translate into a web comic very well. Most web comics are drawings with a little color thrown on. Most web comics are about the punch line and the art is merely functional. That’s because the art is the time consuming part. I have no interest in writing punch lines and how much time does anyone have to consume? So what is mine going to be about?

Most web comics are also about compromise. Usually in the form of sacrificing the quality of the drawing to get the job done. Once again, this is necessary in order to finish a strip. It takes too long to labor over a drawing for a strip. Especially one that is paying you nothing. Or less. My work is about the quality of the drawing so that’s a problem when I go to make a comic. I have trouble making that compromise. I end up getting disinterested and it shows.

Then there is a problem I have with narrative storytelling. I don’t want to do it. I like narrative storytelling. First act, second act, third act, and all. But whenever I set out to do some in a comic I’m completely bored by it. It’s like a straight jacket.

In order to do narrative storytelling well you have to draw exactly what the story calls for. Simple enough and I used to be able to do that but my work has changed a lot since I last made comics. For the last eight years my work has been about finding images from the back of my imagination that are unusual.

I started, years ago, using a surrealist automatic drawing method to see things on a blank piece of paper that were unusual. I drew without having a preconceived notion of what I was going to draw. If the lines on the paper lead me to a chair, a face, a car, or a figure so be it. I try to pull things out of my head that no one has seen before. I’m good at it too.

Unfortunately this is the exact opposite of what it takes to draw a comic. If the narrative says, “A man walks down the street”, you have to draw a man walking down the street. There’s no choice. This is what I can’t do anymore. I’m so used to drawing without a preconceived idea and pulling the unusual out of a piece of paper that I can’t follow a preconceived narrative. Even if it’s me who comes up with the narrative.

So if there is no narrative in a comic what is there? That is the question I’ve been wreslting with for almost a year now. So far there is no easy answer. I’ve walked down paths that all seemed like dead ends and have nothing finished to show for it. That’s the frustrating part.

I’ve finished some paintings and prints during this time but even that’s a little dull for me. I’ve used the unexpected in them to such a degree that I expect it now. I need a new unexpected. Once again you see the crazy tall order I set for myself. I do like a challenge.

Anyway, this week I set off down a new web comic path. If this is the one that will lead to success I don’t know. But at least it’s a path. I’ve been wandering in the wilderness for a lot of this summer. It’s nice to be on a path.