I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got seven new comics.
Check them all out here:
I haven’t had it in me this summer to take street photos in NYC. I went down for a day in June but then July got busy and I never made it back. I think the same thing happened last year. Then August rolled around. NYC has something they call “Summer Streets” the first three Saturdays of August where they close down Park Avenue to traffic and open it up for bikers, walkers, joggers, and skaters. I throw a backyard BBQ every year on the first Saturday in August so that’s out but I’ve made it down the second Saturday in August for the last few years to take photos of all the action. For whatever reasons I wasn’t up for doing that this year and then that second Saturday became a rainy day so I opted out for sure. That left just one more City Streets Saturday.
I made it down to NYC that third Saturday. I somehow motivated myself to get on the train and head in. I still wasn’t feeling it but I went anyway. Usually I get off the train at Penn Station at around 10:30 AM and catch a train back home at about 3 PM. All the time in between I’m taking street photos. As I got off the train I walked east over to Park Avenue taking some photos as I went but I was mostly moving quickly until I hit the Summer Streets.
I still wasn’t feeling it. I don’t even think I walked as far as I usually do. I hung out around 34th Street for a while and then walked down to about 27th Street. Usually I go another ten blocks or so downtown to where there is a gathering point but I get better photos where it’s more open so I skipped that this year. I eventually turned north and made my way up to 42nd Street and Grand Central Terminal. All this took me until about 12:30 and I was taking photos the whole time.
My next step, as usual, was to go over to the steps of the Midtown Library and Bryant Park. There were the usual tourists at the steps and I wandered among them taking photos but it was pretty robotic. There wasn’t much going on and I wan’t in the mood. On the other side of the library in Bryant Park there wasn’t not much going on either. The lawn was closed due to recent heavy rains and lots of foot traffic but there were some people around sitting at the tables under the trees. I took some photos but fewer than usual.
As I was walking near the Sixth Avenue entrance to the park I noticed there was a street fair going on uptown. They had Sixth Avenue closed off at 42nd Street and further uptown as far as the eye could see. I walked over that way. There were venders on either side of the street selling food, clothes, souvenirs, and trinkets of every conceivable kind. And a lot of people too. I wandered the center of the street taking photos all around me. I was finally starting to feel it.
“Feeling it” is not even about taking good photos. I wouldn’t know if I took any good photos until I looked at them later plus I’ve never noticed any correlation between my mood and the quality of the photos I take. I can take good photos when I’m feeling bad and bad photos when I’m feeling good. I was just happy to be feeling good as I was taking some photos. Feeling good really helps with motivation if nothing else. What can get me out taking photos is remembering feeling good when I was out taking photos before.
I finished taking photos at about 2:30 PM and started heading back downtown to catch my train home. I took photos along my walk to Penn Station and was pretty tired by the time I got on my train. Taking street photos takes a lot out of me. A lot of energy is burned. Though I make sure I eat and drink as I go I was extra hungry when I finally got home.
Usually my street photos sit in a folder on my hard drive for ages after I shoot them. When I want to post one on Instagram, make a digitally manipulated one, or make a finished photo in general I look through them and find one I like. But recently I’ve been making big ink drawings so I got the idea in my head to make a big photo collage. I haven’t made one of these in years so I was excited to get one underway.
I make my photo collages digitally but then I print out all the pieces, add adhesive to the back of them, cut them out, and them attach them to a big 22×30 inch piece of paper. I started making this one the next day after taking the photos which is about as fast as I’ve ever started one. It was fun working that big again. I kept a couple of the photos large and had to print them out on 13×19 inch paper but the rest of the bits fit onto 8.5×11 inch paper. It takes two or three days to make the digital file and another two to print, cut out, and assemble the physical photo. It’s not a quick process. I even alternated drawing a large ink drawing with working on the digital file. I found that moving in and out of the process helped me visualize what I wanted for the photo better.
I ended up making the photo about the “Summer Streets” portion of my day. I may not have been feeling it but I got good photos. Lots of action and crowds of people involving themselves in all kinds of physical activities make for good street photo subjects. Plus there are views from the middle of the street that I don’t get to take photos of very often.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics.
Check them all out here:
I’ve been thinking lately about comic books in general and Marvel Comics specifically. I used to work at Marvel from about the beginning of 1990 until the summer of 2005. I was one of the people in the office who worked behind the scenes to get the comics made. I was in the Bullpen doing production work. First it was by hand and then by computer.
I go to the comic shop every week to buy my comics but I never get any new Marvel comics. My tastes have leaned towards indie books since I was about 20 years old in 1986 but I still checked in with Marvel and DC every now and then. I still check in with a DC book here and there but no Marvel’s at all. I was even a Marvel kid so that’s where my nostalgia is but even that doesn’t help. They’re not a good brand to me anymore.
I can remember in the early 1990s at the height of the comic book boom talking to an editor (I can’t remember who) about the boom. At that time sticking a specialty gimmick cover (foil, hologram paper, metallic paper, a fifth ink, embossing, die cuts, etc.) on any random comic insured that it would sell a ton more than without that cover. Everyone knew this was a bad idea in the long run. It wasn’t even debated. We were essentially “Tricking” people into thinking a comic was special and sooner or later they’d get wise to the trick and probably feel betrayed.
I naively asked “Why do we do it? Why don’t we stop?” Then the editor asked me “How can we stop?” Those comics with those covers put an extra couple of grand into people’s pockets every month. Even if it’s bad in the long run people aren’t going to give up that extra money now. How could they? Who is going to turn down money for giving customers what they want?
I had no answer for him. I didn’t know how to make it stop. It took me a lot of years to know the answer is good leadership at the top. Someone at the top should have noticed that this was a bad idea (as we all did) and even though it made money put and end to it. The person should have had the vision to take a more stable path to profit. That’s good leadership. Short term gimmicks are not better than focusing on making excellent comics. But good leaders are rare and not usually in leadership positions.
The leaders and decision makers at Marvel made their success by exploiting Marvel’s intellectual property to make money. That’s how you move up the ladder in a big entertainment company. Not by making great entertainment but by making great deals. It certainly isn’t a bad thing to make great deals but the idea that the great deal comes from a great comic gets lost. Without the great comics you can’t make any great deals. But eventually, almost inevitably, the cart is put before the horse. The deals become what drives the business. After all it’s the deal people that are in charge. Deals come before everything and making excellent comics take a back seat. That’s a tough environment in which to make excellent comics.
Make more comics to make more money is also basic wisdom at Marvel. But that’s a tough road and can water down a brand. Imagine that Marvel made fifty comics a month. How many of them would be excellent, good, satisfactory, and bad? Maybe ten excellent, fifteen good, fifteen satisfactory, and ten bad. That’s not a bad average. You have a four in five chance of being satisfied and a fifty percent chance of thinking “That was good.” That’s a good brand.
The problem is that the people in charge (who may not know a good comic from a bad one) think that if fifty comics are good then a hundred will be better (Marvel was publishing a hundred comics a month in the early 1990s). But the reality is that a hundred will be worse. The excellent-good-satisfactory-bad ratio doesn’t scale up. You won’t automatically go from ten excellent comics to twenty. If you could do that you’d already have twenty excellent comics out of fifty. You’d be lucky to add one or two excellent comics to the bunch.
If you’re publishing fifty comics a month you already think you have your fifty best creative teams. Add fifty more comics and unless you get lucky the talent will be lesser. The ratio for the new fifty will probably be more like 2 excellent, 8 good, ten satisfactory, and thirty bad. You just went from ten out of fifty bad comics to forty out of a hundred bad comics. Twenty percent bad to forty percent bad. That makes for a bad brand.
I don’t even blame the makers of the comics for this (from editors to letterers). I blame the leadership and decision makers at the company. That’s because making excellent comics isn’t in their wheelhouse. It wasn’t the key to their success so why should they know how to do it? They should be held accountable but first making excellent comics has to be prioritized. Deals still have to be made but they will be made easier with excellent comics.
How does this all affect the creating of comics? Well the creators aren’t dumb. They are all freelancers so they have to keep the staff people happy or they don’t get work from them. So they learn what work will keep the deal people happy. Spider-Man is a best seller? So let’s give them more Spider-Man. And lot’s of other Spider-People. Need deals for backpacks for young girls? Here is Spider-Gwen, Spider-Woman, Spider-Girl, and Silk. Do those ideas make for excellent comics? Who knows? That’s not really the priority.
So that’s why I don’t buy Marvel comics anymore and haven’t even checked in with nostalgia buys in the last five years. I think the creators are all trying their best to make good comics and there are probably even some good ones from Marvel (the odds say there has to be) but it’s a hard environment to make excellent comics in and after being burned by so many unsatisfactory comics form Marvel I don’t trust their brand anymore.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got six new comics.
Check them all out here:
Time flies. It has a way of passing that, in hindsight, makes things that happened a while ago seem like they happened just yesterday. That thought entered my head because I made some large drawings this week for the first time in a while. After I did them I checked my calendar and “A while” was longer ago than I thought. As I write this it’s August of 2018. I thought it had been about two years since I made my last large 20×28 inch ink drawing but then I looked it up and it turns out that the last one I drew was in January of 2015. That’s three and a half years ago. How did that happen?
I like making large ink drawings. I made a bunch of them from September 2012 until January of 2015 but then I stopped. One of the things about making large drawing is that I have to be in a large mood to do it. I have to believe that it’s important to make them. That’s true of making most art but the larger the piece the more I have to believe in it. That’s because they take up more time and space so they better have an importance to me or I’ll stick to smaller and easier to manage stuff. I don’t think that’s an unusual thought process either. It’s tough to be ambitious when there is no reward for the ambition.
When I first started making these large ink drawings I bought a new drawing board to put on my easel. It’s a 24×36 inch white pressboard that fits the large paper nicely. For the last six years it’s been sitting on my easel if I don’t have a painting on there. Since I haven’t had the ambition to make a lot of big paintings in that time it’s been on there a lot. I also put my 11×17 inch finished drawings on the drawing board so that I can look at them. Since it’s a white board I find the glare coming off it makes the drawings hard to see. So I keep one of my large ink drawings on the board at all times. That means for the last three and a half years I’ve been looking at whatever 20×28 inch drawing that is on the board and thinking to myself that I should draw another. Then time passed.
I think it was my annual birthday BBQ that got me motivated. I guess the aftermath of my BBQ might be more accurate. Y’see there is always a post-party letdown. Leading up to the BBQ there is lots to be done. The day of the BBQ there is lots to be done and a lot of fun to be had. Then the day after it’s all over and here comes the realization that every day can’t be a party. That’s the post party letdown. With me it can linger well into the week. Somehow in that funk the thought came to me to make a large drawing. I think I decided that some ambition would be good for me.
I looked through my pile of unused drawings for something appropriate. I remember thinking over the years that this one or that would make a good large ink drawing so I had a few to choose from. I picked one, printed it out in pieces on four 11×17 inch pieces of paper, taped the four sheets of paper together, and then transferred the drawing to the large sheet of paper using graphite paper. After that I started the drawing using markers, French curves, a brush, and ink.
Oddly, about fifteen minutes after I started I hated the drawing. Making a 20×28 inch drawing is a process and I seemed to have forgotten how to draw using that process. It was frustrating. I wanted to tear up the paper and start over. Or give up all together. But being that is was fairly late in the evening I decided to give it a rest and tackle it the next day. That was a good decision.
The next day I dove right in. I remembered how it was done and even added a few new things. One of the first things I came to grips with was that I should have completed my smaller drawing. It was a 6×9 inch drawing and really wasn’t ready to be blown up to 20×28 inches. I skipped making a finished 9×12 inch drawing so now I would have to do some finishing on the large drawing instead. This wasn’t the end of the world but was a step I usually didn’t have to do.
This particular drawing is called “Dance Through” and the 6×9 drawing was made on July 28, 2015. It’s been sitting around for a while. I worked on the large drawing for about 20 hours. That about usual for one of these. It’s not quite the same ambition as a 50 hour painting but it’s a lot more than a four hour drawing. I think one of the problems I had with it at first was that it has more small elements, like the woman at the top left, that in my other big drawings. It took a while to sync them all up and get the shapes and spaces right. It also took a lot of textures. I think I have about ten different textures in there as well as the black line. That took plenty of organization.
Working on this did it’s job. Sometimes it takes making a work of greater ambition than normal to really get into it. It pulled me out of my post-party funk and into the act of making art. It took a lot of thought and a lot of doing. By the end of making it I decided to jump right into another one. I spent my weekend making a second 20×28 inch drawing. This time of a large face. It was easier than the first one since the drawing was finished but by the end of drawing that second one I was finished. I had forgotten how much work they take and two in a row was tough by the end.
Still I’m happy with them. Happy enough that with some rest I even started a third. This one I’ll take slow.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics.
Check them all out here:
I was out for my usual bike ride the other day when something unusual happened. The cable for my front derailleur broke. I can’t remember the last time that happened. For those who don’t know a road bike generally has four cables on it. Two cables for the brakes (one for the front and and one for the back brake) and two cables for the derailleurs (also front and back).
The brakes are self explanatory but the derailleurs might need some explanation. They’re the part of the bike that changes the gears. One end of the cable is attached to the gear shift near or on the handlebars and the other end is attached to the derailleur. Move the shifter with your hand and the cable moves the derailleur which then moves the chain from one gear to the next. The front derailleur moves the chain on the gears near the pedals and the rear derailleur moves the chain on the back wheel.
When I cycle I usually only use two out of my sixteen gears. A high and a low. I keep the chain on the third ring down on the back gear cassette and then move the front derailleur from the big gear to the little gear when I want pedaling to be easier. I find this works for me as I don’t like to do a lot of shifting. There is no such thing as being in the perfect gear so I don’t bother to try. I like my two gears.
When the cable snapped I lost my ability to change the gears in front. I no longer had a low and a high. Since I was out on the road I adjusted my rear gear until I found a medium and settled into that. That’s also how I rode for the next two days as I waited for my new gear cable to arrive once I ordered it off the internet.
They must be making cables better these days than in my youth because I can’t remember the last time I changed a cable. I remember changing a lot of them back when I was a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s but I don’t think I’ve changed a cable in at least 15 if not 20 years. It’s really been a long time.
My current bike is about eight years old and has a new type of shifter on it. Before this I always had the old type of shifter. That was two levers mounted on the bike stem right below the handle bars. Pull one lever to adjust the back derailleur and the other to adjust the front. Now my bicycle has the gear shifts integrated with the brakes. Squeezing the brake grip with your hand depresses the brake but pushing the brake grip sideways makes the derailleur move the gear up one notch. Next to the brake grip is a thumb release that when pressed moves the derailleur down a notch. Pretty simple but I’d never put a cable in one before.
The cable I ordered came with a set of cables. One for the back and one for the front. The back cable is a bit longer but otherwise identical. It was easy enough to string the cable through the brake grip and along the eyelets on the bike where the cable sits but that’s when the fun began. With an old style gear shift the tension on the cable was important (or at least that’s what I remember). With this new style tension wasn’t as important. The derailleur sat in one position regardless of the tension on the cable and then the cable moved it into a second position. Seemed simple.
There are also two little adjustment screws on a derailleur. One limits how far the derailleur can move from side to side and the other shifts the derailleur’s position ever so slightly from left to right so you can make fine adjustments.
Everything was going fine except that no matter what I did the derailleur wouldn’t stay in that second position. It would shift the gear from the smaller ring to the bigger ring but then the derailleur would move back to the smaller ring. I had no idea why.
The derailleur always starts in the same position but as I mentioned before the brake grip has two possible positions. Depressed or undepressed. I switched back and forth between the two but still couldn’t get it to work. I even used a block of wood to move the derailleur into different starting position and then put tension on the cable but all that did was mess up the derailleur’s starting spot.
This went on for two hours and I cannot tell you how frustrated I was. But then to cap it off the cable broke. I don’t know what happened. I must have somehow set the cable to have too much tension on it. Then I moved the brake grip to try and shift gears and heard a snapping sound. I wanted to scream but instead I calmly grabbed the second cable, strung it through the brake grip and eyelets, and then took a break for dinner. What else could I do?
After dinner I decided to tackle it again. I tightened up the cable, tried the shifter, and it shifted up and stayed there like it should. Huh?!? It worked?!? I have no idea what I did differently but somehow it now worked as it should. Once it was on right I spent the next ten minutes making fine adjustments to try and get the derailleur not to rub on the chain. That’s usually the eternal battle with the front derailleur and it was quite a battle here.
I ended up losing that battle as I couldn’t get the chain to stop rubbing totally. I finally gave up and said I was done. The next day I took the bike out for a ride and was annoyed by the rubbing. It wasn’t a lot but it was there. But as I’ve noticed with my bike over the years the derailleur often stops rubbing by itself somehow. And it did as I rode.
Cables can get loose over the years and start to not shift correctly so I’ve often had to adjust them. Many time before I haven’t been able to get the chain not to rub but then a day latter it stops on its own. I’m not sure how that happens but it’s happened enough to make me think things have to “Settle in” after I finish adjusting stuff.
I’m glad I got that cable in right because for a while it looked like it wasn’t going to happen. Everything is back in order now and my rides are fine. Happy day.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics.
Check them all out here:
I think serendipity is bringing me this week’s bit of writing. It involves a few of my art habits converging to present two of my pieces in a way that I haven’t seen them before. Side by side to compare and contrast.
The first of my habits is my attempts to sell some of my art. To get it out into the world and make a little money. This is mostly a futile endeavor but I do it anyway. First off artists are on the wrong side of the supply chain of escalating art prices. For example: I know some comic books artists who have been producing work all their lives. Usually they get an assignment, draw the comic, have it published, and then the original art is returned to them. They can keep that art or sell it on to collectors.
Most of the artists sell the art on because comics don’t pay a lot of money so selling the art to pay the bills makes sense. The problem is that they didn’t get a ton of money for the art. If they sold a choice piece back in the 1980s or 1990s they may have gotten a few hundred dollars for it. That can add to to decent money if you can sell a dozen pieces or so and I’n sure they were happy to get paid. But now some of those same pieces have been sold over and over again at increasing prices each time until they’re worth tens of thousands of dollars. But the originals artist doesn’t see a dime of that. He’s at the wrong end of that chain with no way to get on the right end.
Of course I can’t even get that two or three hundred dollars for my stuff. I’m just too unknown. That’s the way the world works. But I post my stuff on eBay and Etsy anyway. I’ve sold some small $10 and $20 pieces but that’s it. I post some of my larger in drawings and faux comic book covers for $100 to $150 but I’ve only sold one of those in three years. That’s even a cheap price for them as they often take a day or two to make. But it’s still too expensive for people if they even notice it. But still I post them because a person has to try.
So that posting habit lead me to pulling out some 11×17 inch ink drawings to post on eBay. I’ve been using Etsy recently to try and sell my art so eBay was a bit of a throwback. I had a bunch of ink drawings stacked in a vertical file (another of my habits) so I dug through them to find ones to post. Then I didn’t put them away since I needed them handy in case they sold (I’m such a dreamer) so I put them on top of my small scanner (piling things on flat surfaces is another habit).
Of course I eventually needed the scanner so I had to move the drawings. Where did I put them? Well, another of my habits is to put recently finished work on my easel so I can look at them. So I put the drawings on the easel but put them behind my current work which made me forget the old stuff was even there.
I’ve recently started the habit of posting videos on Instagram. I’ve been posting photos and scans of my art for years now but video is something new for me. I want to get my face out there and humanize my art. Let anyone who wanders onto my feed know there is a person who makes this stuff. So today for the video I wandered over to my easel to give people a look at what was there. I was actually a little but surprised since I forgot those older drawings that I pulled out to post on eBay were there. I went through the drawings, showed them off, and then left them as they were.
As a sat here a little while ago waiting for the end of the day I glanced over at my easel. I always do that almost without thinking as I want to see and judge what work I’ve finished lately. Except this time it was two pieces from February and April of 2016 that were in front. It was a bit of a surprise. They were familiar but it has really been years since I looked at them closely. And they were both quite striking from a distance and worked well together. I wish I had planned it.
The piece on the left is a red ink drawing of a fire goddess. It’s a simple thing made up of a semi-nude woman drawn with red lines. It’s draw from a photo but modified with lots of flame iconography. Her hair is solid red but sticking up in points to suggest flame. Her paints and bikini-like top also have that same solid red with pointy flames on top. Besides that bent triangles around her arms and side also suggest flame. It’s not the most sophisticated piece ever but it works. My favorite part is how the white of the paper seems to glow among all that red. I don’t know that my green or blue ink drawing ever worked as well as this red ink one.
On the right is one of my “The Painted Lady” faux comic book covers. Issue twelve according to the number on the front. It’s in black and white and plays with pattern and positive and negative space. It’s also a photo referenced piece but it’s harder to tell at a glance because the patterns flatten it and it’s not about the gesture of the figure. In black and white my eye really has to pick through the forms to make sense of it all. Its nature is almost that of camouflage.
The two drawings look interesting side by side. Red vs black, clarity vs camouflage, lithe gesture vs stiff symmetry, and light and dark. I hadn’t seen them that way before.