Radiant Comics

When I need to commute into the city I need to carry a bag with me. Just like everybody else I have to carry stuff. Mostly it’s food, water, an iPad, two cameras, and art supplies. I don’t like to think about food during my commuting work day so I always eat the same thing. I have a banana, two pieces of bread, a bag of carrots and cucumber slices, two granola bars, and a small bag of nuts. That’s what I’ve settled on over the years,

I also have a small bag of art supplies in my carry bag. It’s only about six by eight inches and contains various pens, a 5×7 inch pad of paper, some small art card pieces of paper, and some markers. I used to carry a second larger bag of art supplies too but I didn’t use it much so I’ve stopped packing that one. I also used to have a commuting schedule with more down time in it to draw but not anymore. So I don’t need the extra bag of supplies.

I don’t like backpacks. I prefer sling bags or messenger style bags. I like the bag to be over a shoulder but I don’t like it on both shoulders. The only explanation I have for that is that I find it clumsy to put on a backpack. I find it easier to put on a one strap messenger bag.

Last spring (2024) I started to have a problem. I started to have a little bit of pain in the back muscles of my shoulder. It wasn’t tremendous pain or anything like that but it still hurt. In the past I’ve had different shoulder pain and it was always related to my work posture. Usually my work posture when working at the computer. Even more specifically I can think of two cases of shoulder pain where I got new equipment that changed the way I stood at the computer and I eventually had to adjust my posture to make the pain go away. This time the pain came when there was no new equipment.

Eventually my Spring semester ended and I didn’t have to commute for the summer. The pain subsided. It usually came and went anyway. But then I decided to head down into NYC to take some street photos. Soon after I put the bag over my shoulder the pain came back. Now I knew what was causing it. I almost always carried the bag over my right shoulder. For years and years. There was my problem.

The bag I had been carrying was a backpack style bag with only one strap. I had to unhook the strap on the bottom and move it to the other side so that I could carry it on my left shoulder. As soon as I did this the pain went away and I was okay for the rest of the day.

I started to think I needed a new bag and it would have to be a backpack so that the weight would be on both shoulders. I looked online at various backpacks and bookmarked a couple of them but never bought one. I just didn’t really like any of them because I don’t like backpacks. I was thinking about keeping on using the one I had and just switching shoulders but I was kind of done with it. Then I thought of switching back to my old art bag.

My old art bag is one specifically designed for artists. It’s a big messenger style bag but it’s a little bit larger than a regular messenger bag so that you can carry 11×17 inch pieces of paper. I always liked this bag but it was wearing out. Years ago I had to sew one of the sides of the shoulder strap on since it tore off. I was afraid other parts of the bag would wear out soon so I switched off it. It was also an expensive bag. I think I got it for half price a long time ago but I see it now listed for about $150. That’s a lot.

While looking online for a new bag I saw one at an art site that seemed like my old art bag. It was on sale at a big discount too. Instead of around $75 it was $25 ($35 with shipping). I decided to take a chance on it. My gamble didn’t pay off. Win I got the bag it was clearly inferior to my old one. But it wasn’t terrible. All my other bags have a pocket on the side of the bag that could hold a water bottle. That’s essential to me. The pocket this one had on the side was too narrow to hold even the smallest water bottle. It had various pockets on the front under the front flap and it took me a moment to figure out that one of those could fit a water bottle and the side one was for an umbrella. Whew.

I packed this new bag and carried it for the first day but then I bailed on it. The real deal breaker turned out to be to be that it had no handle on the top. That’s something I always look for but didn’t on this bag. Besides carrying a bag over my shoulder I also like a handle on the top so I can carry it like a briefcase with my hand. This bag only had the shoulder strap. Maybe I can figure out how to sew a handle on top but until then I just didn’t like carrying this one. Too many times I reached for the handle and it wasn’t there.

I ended up switching back to the 11×17 inch art bag with the sewn on strap. I just couldn’t go back to the one that hurt my shoulder and I wanted that 11×17 inch size again. Sometimes I have to carry paper that big and that’s when I used to either switch back to this bag or strap another 11×17 inch bag to my pack. I got tired of doing that.

So that is the story of my everyday carry bag. I will probably stick with my worn down art bag for a while until it wears out completely. Then I might have to save up and buy a new one. Or sew a handle onto my other new one. But that’s a problem for another day.

Earlier in the summer (it’s September 2 as I write this) I mentioned that I bought a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 camera (http://radiantcomics.com/art-writing-photos-bryant-park-and-time/). That’s a small 3-Axis stabilized camera that I’ve mostly used to shoot video as I walk on the streets of NYC. The video it shoots is really clear because the camera has a one inch sensor. All of my other digital cameras have smaller sensors so the video on the DJI really stands out for me.

Though it’s mainly designed for shooting video the camera can also take still photos as well. I’ve taken some photos with the camera but not really a lot of them. I mostly take street photos these days and I like a big zoom for taking those. I have a 40x zoom on my pocket camera that I carry so the DJI’s 2x zoom is pointless compared to that. But this Labor Day weekend my friends had a get together so I decided to try out the DJI’s photo abilities and see how good they were. Here is how it went.

A photo taken right from the DJI.

First off this camera is weird looking. My friends kept making references to “Men in Black” and getting their minds wiped. So people are going to notice it. They are especially going to notice it because with only a little bit of zoom and short lens you have to get right up in their faces with the camera. Often I like to take candid photos of my friends so I’m in the background a bit with my camera. Not with the DJI. With that one I’m up in everyone’s’ business.

I’m also not used to the interface of this camera. I’m used to a regular camera that has a menu but also has a physical dial so that I can check the settings at a glance. The DJI only has on screen settings and it’s a fairly small screen. It’s also a touch screen so that makes things easier but I’d have no hope of changing any settings without my reading glasses.

Not knowing the settings very well got me into a little trouble late in the day. There is a small joystick on the camera that can move the lens on the gimbal up, down, or side to side. That’s how I like it but you an also change the up and down on the joystick to work the tiny 2x zoom. Sometime duty the picnic I accidentally changed the setting and then I couldn’t move the camera down as I was trying to do. It was annoying because I was in the middle of taking photos and couldn’t stop and fiddle with the camera.

What tied into that problem was me trying to take photos in selfie mode. When the camera goes into selfie mode the lens spins around 180º to face me and it kicks on a facial lock mode too. So the camera’s lens will follow my face around. When this happened I’d use the joystick to move the lens up or down a little to get my friends in the selfie too. But with the joystick in Zoom Mode I couldn’t do this and was stuck. As I learn the controls better this will only be a minor inconvenience but yesterday it was a real pain in the neck.

One feature I really miss on this camera is burst shooting. That’s when I press the shutter button once and it continues to take photos as long as I hold it down. That is good for candid photos especially. If I hold the shutter button down on the DJI then the camera powers down. That can be a bit of a problem. I don’t know if there is a setting I can change so that doesn’t happen. I just don’t know the menus that well. I almost always shoot in burst mode on my other cameras.

I mentioned before that this camera has a big one inch sensor. As my friends were checking out the camera one of them asked if it took better photos than his new iPhone. That’s a tough question to answer. I haven’t seen the photos from a new iPhone to compare them side by side but I know that the latest version of iPhones, in general, take nice photos. But they often also use automatic software to make the photos even nicer than they are. The one inch sensor in the DJI really adds a clarity to the photos that my other cameras can’t match but is that good? Or are software enhancements better?

When I got home I transferred my photos to my computer and backed them up. Then I looked at the photos with my iPad. One of the things I’ve said over the years as I’ve gotten older (I turned 58 this summer) is that low resolution is my friend. Seeing myself if full HD with that one inch sensor can be a little bit startling. In my head I don’t look 58 but in the hires photos I sure do. I could probably use a little bit of the automatic iPhone software to make myself look better.

I actually have some plans to take the photos and edit them a bit on my iPad but that hasn’t happened yet. On first glance I can see that the candid ones I took were full of awkward facial expressions and questionable composition. What’s good about burst shooting is that if a person has their eyes closed in one photo they might be open on photo four. It gives me choices. What’s good about the one inch sensor is that I can re-crop the photos and still have a lot of detail to work with.

Of course sometimes there is too much detail in our now old faces. That’s the story of life though and I can always give us all a little bit of a blur to take some of that detail away. But usually I don’t edit every photo I take. I edit the ones I eventually do something with. So maybe we’ll all just have to stay old for now just like in real life.

Last week I wrote about having a cold for twelve days and how that just killed any momentum I had for making art. It stops it dead in its tracks and whenever I get sick I fear I’ll never be able to capture my artistic drive again. Life drains that drive out of almost everyone and I always fear that I’ll be next. So this week I decided I had to get started on something.

I was just looking at my calendar and saw that the last Big Ink Drawing that I made was back in January of 2023. It’s August 24, 2024 as I write this so it’s been a long time since I made one. Of course, the first thing I had to do after deciding to make a Big Ink Drawing is to decide what the drawing is going to be of. I have a few different ways of doing this but the one I didn’t want to use was starting from scratch.

I have made a lot of drawings in my life and most of them never turn into anything finished. Since I scan in all my drawings right after I make them I have a whole folder full of thousands of drawings, a lot of them finished pencil drawings of some sort, so I can look through the scans for something I can work with. Then I remembered my drawer of drawings.

Underneath my drawing table I have a couple of drawers. In one of them I put finished or nearly finished drawings that I might work on in the future. Except for one the last couple of years I stopped using this drawer. I don’t know why. I used to go into it a few times a week to add drawings or take them out but over the last two years that kind of stopped being my habit and the drawings that were in there just sat there. I think it was during the week that I had my cold that I remembered it again and looked through it for the first time in ages. Then I sat down and rested again.

As I was trying to figure out what to make a Big Ink Drawing of I thought of the drawer. I looked through it and two drawing jumped out at me. One was of a female figure and the other was a man’s face among a bunch of design elements. I thought I could combine the two drawings into a new composition.

Here is a tip that I didn’t learn until I was around thirty. Always date your art. Whether it’s a finished piece or a working drawing put a date on it. In my twenties I used to be able to remember when I made things. But as I made more and more stuff and time went by I eventually forgot. Did I make this drawing in 1996 or 1998? I sure didn’t know. That’s when I started to write dates on everything. Also put names on things so you can tell one from another.

I mention that now because that’s how I know how old these drawings, that were in the drawer, are. The female figure (named “Run Around Now”) is from February 6, 2009 and the male face (named “Cleaning Windows”) is from July 5, 2010. They’ve been hanging around for a decade and a half waiting for something to be done with them.

Also the names of the drawings have nothing to do with what the drawing is of. They’re just random names I thought of as I was naming them. If you sit around waiting for the perfect name to come to you then you’ll never name anything. That’s what stops people from naming things. They think if the name isn’t clever and appropriate then they shouldn’t name it. I say to just give it a name so you know what to refer to it as (such as when I’m writing down in my calendar what I worked on that day) and don’t worry if the name is meaningless. You can always change the name later anyway.

After I picked out the two drawings I went to find the scans of them that I made way back when I made the drawings. Since I dated the drawings it was easy. I looked in my folder of scans for the “Date Created” of the digital files and looked for the ones created around the dates on the drawings. They were right there in it took about thirty seconds each to find them. I was ready to go.

I took the scans of the two drawings and combined them in Photoshop. The drawings fit together nicely and this part was really easy to do. Then I printed out the new drawing composition in blue line on an 11×17 inch piece of paper. My intention was to refine the drawing even more to be get it ready to be blown up and transferred to a big 22×30 inch piece of paper. It was then that I came to a complete halt.

It turned out that I didn’t want to refine the drawing on that 11×17 inch piece of paper. I stared at it and just couldn’t’t do it. I decided I wanted to refine the drawing at full size on the 22×30 inch piece of paper. I usually don’t do that with my Big Ink Drawings but this time I wanted to. So that’s what I did.

First I blew the drawing up to 20×28 inches (I want a one inch border around it) and then printed the drawing out in pieces on eight 8.5×11 inch pieces of regular inkjet paper. I taped the paper together and then taped the printed drawing onto the 22×30 inch piece of paper. I got my graphite paper, put it between the two sheets of paper and used a hard pencil to transfer the drawing onto the big piece of paper.

The transfer is never perfect but it usually good enough to start drawing with ink over it. But this time I still had some refining of the drawing to do so I got at it. It took me an afternoon but eventually I got the drawing refined enough in pencil to start drawing in ink over top of it.

That’s where I am now. I’m almost finished with stage one of the inking. I’ve got the basic lines down but next is figuring out where I want to put black areas, areas of texture, and patterns of line. That’s all the fun and unplanned (as of now) stuff that becomes the technique of the drawing. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve had a summer cold for the last week and a half so I’ve barely gotten anything done. The cold hasn’t been especially bad but it comes with fatigue and a lack of concentration. As I’ve written before I can trudge through a day and get paying work done because I have no choice but any art of my own is nearly impossible.

Today (Tuesday the 20th of August 2024) was the first day I got a “Dreams of Things” cover done. It took me about twice as long to marker color it than it usually does. Yesterday it took me all morning to get a three marker ink drawing finished and that usually takes an hour. Lsat week I don’t think I got anything done except for one “Dreams of Things” cover that I inked. I must have had a bit of energy that day. Mostly I tried to rest and watched TV.

I’m not much of a binge watcher of TV but when I’m sick I don’t have anything else to do so I’ve been watching a couple of shows. I actually have been rewatching a couple of shows. Sometimes it’s easier to rest when I have something on that I’ve seen before.

The first show is one on Apple TV called “Severance.” It came out back in 2022 and it only has nine episodes. It’s a bit of a mystery show that also has a little bit of science fiction in it. It’s about a group of people who work at an office job but the job has a twist. The twist is that they have to undergo a process called severance in which their memory is cut in two. Their work selves have no memory of their outside selves and their outside selves have no memory of what they do at work. Why would anyone do this? They have their reasons and some of them are part of the plot of the show.

It’s a stylishly done show with interesting sets that have a lot of liminal spaces. Hallways galore. I like the look and feel of it. The mystery is what the heck they are doing there? They’re got some shady bosses and their actual work is on computers and is removed from whatever else is going on at the place. The office is very buttoned up but the four people who work in the department start to get curious about everything.

As I mentioned it’s a mystery show and here is a funny thing about me watching it again. After I watched it in 2022 and some of the mystery was revealed I wanted to watch it again with this new knowledge in mind to see what the show was like a second time through. The problem is that I waited two years and forgot how the season ended. So watching it again this time was almost just like the first time.

The second show that I’ve been rewatching is the show “Lost.” I watched it back in 2004-2010 and really had no interest in rewatching it again but I heard of a different version of it. A fan cut. To me “Lost” started a whole new genre of show in which the plot was, “What the heck is happening on this show?”. It was a mystery show but instead of a show in which a mystery was solved the whole show was a mystery. We didn’t know anything about the characters on the show, what they were doing on that island, and why were so many strange things happening on the island.

One of the reasons I never had much interest in rewatching the show is that they just stacked mysteries on top of mysteries and I didn’t think there were many satisfying answers to the mysteries. I enjoyed the show and never really expected satisfying answers (I know how TV shows are written) but when it was over I was done with it. But then I heard about a fan cut of the show.

I believe “Lost” just made it to one of the streaming services for the first time this summer so it must have made it into my social media algorithm. That’s how I heard about the fan cut, “Chronologically Lost.”

Since “Lost” has a lot of mysteries and we know nothing about the characters’ pasts there are a lot of flashbacks in “Lost.” That was one of the big complaints back in the day. People wanted the plot to move forward and it was forever moving backwards. There was even time travel in the show near the end. Talk about moving backwards. So some fan somewhere decided to re-edit the show so that it was in chronological order. All the flashbacks are at the beginning. Then they released it onto the internet.

I would not recommend watching “Chronologically Lost” if you’ve never watched the show before. Stick with the real thing. I’m enjoying it as a curiosity but it might be hard to follow if you’ve never seen the show before. As I said there are a lot of flashbacks in the show and it takes about twenty five episodes that are all the flashbacks before we reach the plane crash that was in episode one of the real series.

The episodes made of these flashbacks that were created for the fan edit don’t really have the same kind of dramatic structure as real episodes. The fans did their best and it’s well done but it’s not always like watching an actually TV show. It’s often just watching the events in the character’s lives in chronological order rather than a TV drama with first through third acts. I like it but I’ve seen the show before so I know what’s going on.

One final show that I’ve been watching random episodes of is a favorite of mine. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Yes, I’ve seen all the episodes multiple times but as I was resting sometimes I just needed a laugh. Sunny is always good for that.

Chris Giarrusso’s cover to Venom War #1

I wrote a few weeks ago that I’ve never been a big buyer of back issues of comic books, I generally buy new comic books, but this summer I bought a bunch of issues of early 1970s Sub-Mariner. That has turned into a little bit of a trend for me as over the last month or so I bought a few other back issues from the web.

First off most of the comic books that I buy are new comics. I have a pull list at my local comic book store which means that they order and hold the new issue of certain comics each month for me. That makes life easy for the store and for me.

My shop (Comics Warehouse in Pearl River NY) also sends me an email each week with the “Final order cutoff” for the comics that will be out in a month. That means that it’s the last time I can order a given comic (that’s not already on my pull list) and be guaranteed of getting it. All I had to do is click on a button in the email and they’ll order and hold the comic for me.

I like getting that email each week and seeing the comics I can order. It helps me find new comics to read and to order specific things that I might not usually get.

When it comes to comic books I’m mostly an indie comic book reader. That means I’m not usually interested in Marvel or DC comics. I have none on my pull list. But an artist that I know (Scott Koblish) was doing some alternate covers on some X-Men books. I thought they were cool and wanted them. The only problem was that the first one slipped by me. I didn’t see it in the email and so didn’t get to order it. My comic shop tried to reorder it for me but it was sold out and they couldn’t get it. I had to turn to eBay.

It’s easy to get recent back issues off of Ebay but the problem is the price. Really it’s the cost of shipping. As I found out when buying those issues of Sub-Mariner this summer if I’m buying just a single comic book the shipping cost is going to be about $5. Most sellers are willing to place multiple comics in the same order for about that same shipping price but I wasn’t buying multiple issues.

In the end I paid around $15 for that X-Men #35 with the Scott Koblish cover and that was the cheapest price I found it for. I thought maybe that the price was so high (I bought others in the series for about $5-$6) because it was the first of the covers and it slipped by a lot of people. When I got the book I saw the retail price on it was $10 so that plus the $5 shipping made up the $15 price so I really didn’t pay any kind of premium for it.

After that happened the same thing happened to me again. Another artist that I know (Chris Giarrusso) is doing some alternate covers for a Venom comic. I wanted to get those but, again, the first issue slipped by me. There were so many Venom comics and so many alternate covers that I didn’t see #1. I got my preorder in for issue one in time but the Wednesday (new comic day) that Venom War #1 came out my comic shop had none of the alternate cover I wanted. So I went to eBay and ordered it for about $10.

A big order for back issues that I bought was from Lone Star Comics which has a website called mycomicshop.com. I’ve ordered from them a bit over the years because they have a lot of indie comics for cheap. I’ve filled in a bunch of series that I was missing issues of since I discovered them a lot of years ago. I keep a want list of comics on their site and decided to buy some stuff of off it. Mostly cheap stuff but it adds up and in the end I spent about $100, tax and shipping included, on 29 comics. I ended up finishing three series.

I bought the nine issues of Jeff Smith’s “Bone” that I was missing. Though this classic series is available in a few different collected editions I don’t have any of them. I haven’t liked any of the physical books they’ve put it out in so I wanted to complete my collection of the individual issues. I reread the whole series in its digital version on my iPad last year (as I commuted) and that made me want to get the rest of the comics even more.

The second series that I finished up was “Route 666” from Crossgen Comics in the early 2000s. It was back in September of 2023 that I decided to try and buy this whole series. I bought issues 1-19 for just $22 tax and shipping included on eBay. That was the cheapest I could find them but the last three issues of the series were missing. So I put them on my want list and there they sat until I finally decided to buy them about a year later.

Terry Moore’s “Strangers in Paradise” was the third series I finished off. Almost. I only bought four issues of it but that was all I needed. There are four volumes of SIP and the first one is the most expensive. There are only three issues in that volume and I already have a third printing of #1 but don’t have 2 and 3. I do have a collected edition with them in it though. These four issues completed volume two and I already had volumes three and four. I’m going to reread the whole thing one day.

The final series that I filled in were eleven issues of David Lapham’s “Stray Bullets.” That was another series from the 1990s that I was late to and missed the first 12 or so issues but I had them in collected editions. I finally decided that I wanted the original issues too.

Though I like collected editions of comics a lot I also like individual issues. Comics as periodicals are fun to read. There is only one chance to read them when they initially are printed and I like that experience. It’s also fun to thumb through a pile of old comics because they’re like a time machine. You can look into the past and watch the months roll buy as you go form issue to issue. That’s good stuff.