Radiant Comics

As I write this this evening I’m a bit tired. More tired than usual. I’ve been writing these blogs in the morning for the last few months but as I sit here feeling fatigued I felt like hitting the keys on the old keyboard. Maybe it’ll perk me up. It’s been a tiring day today and I’m not even sure why. Twice I had to lie back in my chair and rest for about twenty minutes. I mean, really kick back and almost take a nap rest. That’s unusual for me. I think that thunderstorm that woke me up at 4 AM disrupted my sleep more than I realized it did. I was even so tired that I was getting wobbly-legged at the end of my bike ride this morning. That rarely happens. Yawn…

I had a hard time getting anything creative started this week but I did manage to get some things done. How’s that for a contradiction in terms? I wanted to get something done on the iPad comic I’ve been working on but it was no go. I had nothing. I also wanted to start a new painting but for whatever reason also couldn’t make any headway on that. Once again I had nothing. So I pulled out some of the character drawings I had already drawn for future “Message-Tee” comics and inked them. Sometimes the simplicity of the choice between black ink and the white of the paper is what gets my brain going.

I worked on a lot of “Message-Tee” comics last year. I have finished comics stockpiled and post one a week here on my site. So earlier this year I started making some new drawings for future strips but haven’t worked on them in a while. I had about twenty five different character drawings done in pencil. That is a pretty good amount of work but I had yet to ink any of them. I was busy with other stuff all summer and wondered if I would ever get to them. Then this week happened.

Maybe the reason I haven’t worked on “Message-Tee” in months is that I like to have a stockpile of drawings to ink. When I can’t get anything started it’s good to get some drawings finished so it’s good to have drawings laying around waiting to be finished. So far I’ve inked twenty of the twenty five drawings this week. At times I hit a cruising speed with them and the ink, paper, and I became one with each other. The ink flows off the brush without me even thinking about it. When that happens drawing in ink can be like meditating or chanting. It’s a place where I become unaware of my separation from the work. And then it stops. It’s a fleeting feeling.

Along with inking all those pieces I also had to do the production work on them. That’s rarely fun to do. It’s a necessary evil and there is no becoming one with anything to be found. It starts with scanning the art. That’s the easy part. Place the paper on the scanner, load the preset scanning parameters, preview the art to make sure it’s in the right place, hit the scan button, and wait a minute or so for the scanner to do it’s job. Repeat as many times as you have drawings. Simple.

I have a nice scanner. It’s an Epson GT-15000 and can scan 11×17 inch drawings. It’s a little old and Epson doesn’t even support it anymore but I got it refurbished for fairly cheap and with the help of some third party scanning software (Vuescan) it’s been a workhorse for years. It makes nice scans and I hope I never have to replace it.

After scanning I have to set all the pages up to be colored. This takes a bit of work and is tedious when I have a lot of drawings to set up. I color this strip in Illustrator and I’m kind of particular about how I like to work in that program. It’s kind of technical and involves how Illustrator makes shapes from bitmapped images but, years ago, I figure out some actions (automatic macros) that set up the images how I like them. It’s not quite as automatic as it would be in a perfect world and I have to pay attention to things as I set them up but it only takes three to five minutes to do. Of course that’s per drawing so multiply that by twenty drawings and you’ve got a pretty tedious hour to an hour and a half on your hands. An hour and a half of having to pay attention to repetitive and boring little details. Welcome to life.

Take a break. That’s the best advice I’ve gotten while doing this sort of work yet sometimes I forget to do it. I just want to power through and get it all done but that’s not always the best bet. I think I got about two thirds of the way done with prepping the pages when I forced myself to take a break. Powering through was failing me as the tedium was starting to drive me crazy and give me a headache. It’s hard to explain how meticulous and dull such work can be. But after a ten minute break I came back and finished up the last third of the work lickety-split. That taking a break thing really does work.

I still have five of my “Message-Tee” drawings to ink and then I have to color them all. That’s not such a “One with the universe” thing either so I’m not sure when I’m going to get the coloring done but at least it’s more fun than doing production work on the drawings. I also could start doing some more drawings for the comic. I’ve been doing the pencil drawings in a sketchbook I bought for just that purpose and I haven’t flipped that open since the springtime.

Now that I look back on it I think it took me two years to develop my “Message Tee” strip. I may have all the steps down now to make one but it was a long time coming. I have to remember things like that when I get frustrated trying to come up with exactly how I am going to do this new iPad comic I’m working on. It’s always good to fall back to the known when the unknown gets too confusing.

I was never much of a late night person. I like to get my sleep. Sure in my youth I would stay up late with the rest of the gang but these days that’s a rarity. And that’s not such a bad thing. The whole gang is a bunch of years older. Nowadays, at age forty six, it takes me until about Thursday morning to stop being tired after staying up real late on a Saturday night. And I’m not even a drinker so there is no hangover to deal with. I bring this all up because last Saturday night was one of those times when I was up late. I had my annual backyard barbecue and was up late that night. I didn’t hit the sack until around 3 AM yet was up ay my usual time of 7 AM. Ouch.

I’m a morning person. That’s when I have the most energy. The downside of that is that I can’t sleep late no matter when I fell asleep. When the morning rolls around I’m up. Even if I’m still tired I can’t sleep. It’s annoying and the main reason why I’m not a huge fan of staying up late. Of course it’s not that first day after getting no sleep that’s the problem. It’s the second day. That’s when the fatigue really hits. And, of course, if it’s a Saturday night when I stay up late then that second day is a Monday. Talk about compounding a problem. Back to work with a yawn. Oh, well, things will get back to normal eventually.

One of the things that comes along with throwing a BBQ is leftovers. I like leftovers. I don’t understand people who won’t eat them. I used to work with a guy who hated leftovers. On occasion he would bring some leftovers in for lunch and then end up not eating them. He would start to eat them but then sigh, toss them out, and go get something else. He didn’t want to eat the same thing that he had for dinner last night. That’s something I never got. I don’t care if I had the same thing the night before. If I like something one day I’m still going to like it the next day. And I don’t have to cook it again. I’m fine with reheating stuff as long as it’s done right. And since I’m the one doing it it will be done right. By the way always reheat Chinese food in a frying pan. That’s your leftover tip for the day.

Mostly what I have leftover this year is chili that I made. I always make a lot for the party because leftover chili is a good thing. I made a chicken chili and a beef chili and there is some of each left over. I threw a bunch of it in the freezer and some of it in the fridge. That’s another good thing about leftover chili. It freezes well. I think I’ve had a bowl of it a day for the last four days. I also have been having some leftover hamburgers. They’re frozen to begin with so there is not much to do with the leftovers but keep them in the freezer. Hamburgers aren’t usually in my diet but I’ll have a few for as long as they last. They’re there after all.

One more leftover that I don’t usually eat is chips. It seems that people like to bring a bag of chips to a barbecue but then don’t really like to eat them. There is always better stuff around to eat at a special occasion. Every party I go to these days has half a dozen bag of chips left over, unopened, after the party ends. Mine was no exception. This is where you have to maintain discipline an throw most of them out. I read somewhere that it’s chips that put weight on people more than any other food. People tend to eat more of them than is suggested and they are loaded with calories. I can confirm that I eat more of them than I should if they’re around. That’s why I don’t like to keep them around.
I had a bit of the post-party letdown again this year. That’s the feeling that hits in the day or days after the party when I realize that everyday life is back and everyday life is not a party. Darn it, we were having such fun! I think my post-party letdown was dulled this year by shear fatigue. I do not do well on three hours sleep. But it was a fun time anyway.

I still don’t quite have everything back in it’s place after the party. I don’t know why it is but it takes me a while to put things back in their places. Usually it’s small things that I can’t be bothered with right away. For example I have yet to put my electric griddle away. That’s a small ten by fifteen inch grill that I uses as a warmer during the BBQ. I set it on 200º F and put metal pans of whatever food on it. It’s an easy way to keep things warm all day. The griddle only makes it out of its box once a year for this event so it’s usually just sitting there in its place. It hasn’t made its way back into the box in the four days since the party. Me having no energy doesn’t help get it back in its place. All the big stuff is back though and everything will get back to normal sooner or later. I’m almost sure of it.

One single magic marker without its cap. That’s what went wrong with my last order of art supplies. Nothing big. It arrived in the box with the rest of my order but it was dried out since the cap was off. I e-mailed the web site and they sent a replacement right away. So why am I pondering this now? I’m not sure. It could be that I found the whole experience absurd. The notion that the whole retail and delivery infrastructure that has developed in the world was being used to bring me a single magic marker was a little nuts.

The marker wasn’t even a “Need” purchase. It was one of the new Prismacolor brush markers that were released this year. A month or two ago I bought a handful of them to try out. I got one in each color of the rainbow (there is a selection of 100+ markers in the set) and they were pretty good. The only problem I had was that the red and the orange that I choose (from looking at a picture of them) were a little off from what I wanted. Oh, well, I was just trying them out anyway. No big deal. I moved on.

Last week I had to put in a “Need” order: paper. I was running low on 9×12 inch bristol and needed some more. I had recently tried out the new Dick Blick house brand bristol board and generally liked it. Since it is considerably cheaper than the paper I can buy at the nearest AC Moore I decided to put in an order. As with any order I put in with the Dick Blick web site I look around to see if there is anything else I might need or want. Shipping can be expensive so it’s better to put in one big order than a bunch of small ones. But money has been tight lately so that put the kibosh on me being interested on stocking up on anything but the paper I needed. Then I remembered those markers.

I hadn’t used the markers much since I had bought them. Part of the reason was that I didn’t have a good solid red or orange. Of course I had good reds and oranges in other marker sets but somehow that wasn’t enough. The old collector’s instinct kicked in and I wanted those two colors for the Prismacolr brush set. They’re only $2.50 a marker, which isn’t a whole lot of money since I was only buying two of them, so I picked out what looked like a purer red and orange than I already had and tossed them in my virtual cart along with the paper and a couple of random black markers. I’m always trying out new black drawing markers.

I’ve ordered plenty of pens, pencils, markers, and small art supply stuff from a variety of places over the years. Usually they pack things well. They put the small stuff into either small boxes or small bags. Often the pens and brushes come in small and narrow plastic bags that get stuck into a larger box. That keeps the pens and brushes from rolling or being thrown around the larger box and getting damaged. I never really even though about it before. Of course there was the one time that I ordered a bottle of ink in the winter. It froze, expanded with ice crystals, and cracked the lid off of the top. Fortunately the ink was still frozen when it arrived and didn’t get all over the place. I think that’s my only other art supply damage story.

So back to this one. My package arrived. A dozen pads of 9×12 inch bristol board and four markers. At first I though they forgot the orange one because there was a small bag with the red one and the three random black drawing markers. Weird. Then I notice the orange marker was sitting near the bottom of the box wedged between the pads of paper and the side of the box. Its cap was off. Not good. After I emptied the box I found the cap but it was too late as the marker was dried out.

What happened? There was plenty of room in the little plastic bag. The bag was folder over neatly and taped down so the marker didn’t fall out. I guess someone just threw it in the box at the last minute after someone forgot about it. Check the order sheet, whoops no orange marker, toss one in the box! That’s probably as far as the thinking went.

It wasn’t the end of the world but now I had to send off an e-mail to customer service saying that the cap came off the marker in shipping and could they send me a new one. I knew it would be no problem and they would but still the absurdity of the whole thing hit me immediately. One marker? This whole big vast operation of economic infrastructure was going to get going because of one marker? Not even a “Need” marker?

I know this isn’t really all for me. People would still be working, trucks would still be rolling, and planes would still be flying even if the cap had never fallen off of my orange Prismacolor brush marker. But somehow as I was standing there with the dried out marker in my hand it seemed crazy to start all that into motion just so I could get a working marker. I even hesitated for a couple of hours. I put the cap back on the marker as if that would help it marshal its forces and rally back to draw again. After all it wasn’t totally dried out. I could get it to make thin and halting orange marks on the paper. After a couple of hours of that denial I pulled out the computer and shot off an e-mail to customer support. No problem they were sending me out a new one. The absurd journey of my lone orange marker had begun.

I’m stuck on format. Maybe not stuck. Undecided might be a better word. I’m, once again, working on a new comic. This time I was inspired by a few new comics I read that were made for the iPad. I’ve read regular print first comics for the iPad before but they never did much for me. I prefer to read a print comic in print. The iPad is a bit too small for me to read print comics on but the made for iPad ones I saw read really well. It’s not likely I’ll be doing any comics for print so this got me thinking more about doing them for portable digital devices. That in turn got me thinking more about format as it relates to comic books.

The vast majority of print comics are vertically formatted like any other book. They’re taller than they are wide. At least until you open them and then the pages are side by side. But each individual page is still vertically formatted. I notice that a lot of digitally formatted comic books are horizontal. It could have something to do with computer screens being horizontal but with all the new e-readers and such you can format a digital comic either way since the device can be rotated in the reader’s hands. Hence a choice has to be made. Horizontal or vertical? That’s the choice I’m still undecided on.

I think the problem is that I’ve worked in the print industry since graduating from college way back in the late 1980s. It’s what I’m used to and my preferred way to read comic books. I think in “Print first” terms except that I haven’t printed any of my own comics in a decade. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how to format for both print and digital. That’s not so easy since it affects the layout of a page. It even affects what a “Page” actually is. Is a page on the iPad the same as a page in print if it’s vertical? What about if it’s horizontal? I already don’t like when a single vertical print page is seen as a single iPad page since it’s too small. So should I split the pages up if I go vertical? All of this uncertainty makes laying out a story a bit confusing.

Most web comics creators don’t make any money with their comics but some do. One of the ways those that make money pull it off is to sell print editions of their web comic. I am nowhere near doing that but it’s still in the back of my mind. That’s why I haven’t been able to stop thinking about print altogether but I think I’m going to have to for now. As a matter of fact that was my conclusion when I decided to make a test comic for the iPad which I am in the middle of. It’s slow going though.

One of the first problems I’m having in writing and sketching out the story is, “What is a page?”. I’m used to a page being literal. It’s a piece of paper of certain dimensions. With an iPad the concept of a page is a little more elusive. Sure I can think of it as the exact physical size of the screen but it’s not quite that. With a physical comic there is only so much space on a page and you have to take advantage of all of it. With an iPad you can add or take away space from a page at any time. A reader can touch the screen and just the first panel, taking up a third of the screen, appears. Touch again and the second panel shows up. Touch again and the third panel shows up and the screen is filled. Touch again and word balloons disappear and others appear. The same page can be half a dozen different pages. That can really add to a story but it’s complicated. So far I’m finding it tough to think all the way through.

That’s why for my test story I stripped things down. So far I’m going with one whole screen page at a time. Simple. The only problem is that I haven’t been able to get a lot done on it. It’s boring. Well, the boring part is still that I don’t like drawing the same thing over and over. By “Same thing” I mean the same characters. I don’t know exactly when it happened that I lost my patience for drawing characters again and again but it did happen and it’s a bad thing when you want to draw a comic. I created these three robot characters who are fairly easy to draw but I still got annoyed with having to draw them after the third page. Crap. I put the whole thing on the back burner and have been picking away at it bit by bit.

Meanwhile I came up with two other stories to tell in comic form and have worked on those a little. Neither is further along than my three robots story but they are all adding up to a jumble of confusion in my head. I’ve got a log jam at the format section. My mind still thinks in old paper storytelling terms while trying to adapt to the new digital format. I’m still not even comfortable with the format of how I’m drawing these on paper. It’s a “Page” thing again.

With a print comic you draw a bunch of panels on a piece of paper and that’s your page. That actual page becomes a page in a printed comic book. Since I’m doing this first story of mine as single page panels what size do I make the physical pages I’m drawing on? Do I draw one panel per page since that how it’s going to end up? What size should that page be? These are questions that I don’t have to ask myself with print comics since I already know the answers. With digital it’s all new.

I ended up drawing two iPad “Pages” on one piece of 9×12 inch paper. So now I have two pages per page. I’m not sure that’s working out. I’m drawing the panels with one on top and the other on the bottom. The problem is that they are never actually going to be seen that way. The reader will be moving through them as if they were side by side. I did they layout as individual pages but now that I’m drawing them two to a page it’s confusing my sense of storytelling. Or it could be that I’m not used to any of this yet. Either way I’ll continue to pick away at it and maybe one day I can figure this all out.

Alright. For the first time in nearly a month my bicycle is in good repair. After replacing my back rim a little while ago I’ve had a series of troubles with the thing that I’ve finally straightened out. At least for now. I don’t think this bike I have is a rugged as the last one I rode. Though I had to make repairs over the twenty years I rode my last bike I’ve had more problems in the last four years with the new one. They don’t make them like they used to. At least not for a price I could afford. Or maybe I’ve ridden it more in worse weather. Any way you slice it I still had troubles.

The first problem I had was my chain slipping. I’ve had some rear derailleur problems before that caused a little slipping but this was different. First off it only happened when I was bearing down on the pedals. Bearing down hard. Of course that’s the worst time for the chain to slip. It makes you feel like you’re going to fall off the bike. And who knows you just might. So that made me clean out the gears, clean up the derailleur, and clean out the chain. I adjusted everything on the back wheel from the gears to the axel. Nothing helped.

I finally decided to take off the gear cassette and give that a good going over. That’s when I discovered that I wore one ring of gears down to nearly nothing. Each ring of gears is made up of individual eighth of an inch wide gear spokes. One ring of gear spokes (the one I use most) was worn down to a point. Instead of an eighth of an inch of metal to grab the chain there was about a thirty second of an inch. No wonder things were slipping. I ordered a new gear cassette for the tire.

When ordering the gears I also ordered a crank remover. That’s another little specialized tool that is used for removing the crank that the pedals are attached to. My cranks started making a clicking sound as they have before. Since I couldn’t get them to stop I figured I’d take them off and try to see what was going wrong. When I got the crank remover I took off the cranks only to discover that I needed yet another tool to remove the bottom bracket (axel) that the cranks attacked to. I remember when I could take my whole bike apart with a normal set of wrenches. That was a long time ago.

Back I went to the internet and ordered the bottom bracket remover. Meanwhile I was still riding my bike. The gears were no longer slipping since I got the new gear cassette but that crank was making noise every time the pedaling got hard. It was really annoying and didn’t make me have a lot of trust in my bike. And then more trouble. Flat tires. Not just one but three in a row.

The flat tires were odd. After two flat tires in a single day I suspected a problem. Both flats came in different places on the tube but both were on the inside of the tube rather than the outside of the tube that is closest to the road. If the road wasn’t causing the flats than the rim must be. I looked at the rim tape that’s supposed to protect the tube from the rim and it looked to be failing. I tried repairing the rim tape with electrical tape (since I had no new rim tape) but that lead to the third flat the next day. Back to the internet I went to order rim tape.

When I got the rim tape I put it on and checked it out after it was placed as per the instructions. I went for a ride and didn’t get a flat. I was, of course, happy with that but then the next morning as I was getting ready to ride I saw my tire was yet again without air. At least I progressed to a slow leak. I replaced the tube and this time made extra sure that the rim tape was seated properly. As this was the only time in all my years of bike riding that I’ve had rim tape problems I was really hoping this would fix it. Luckily for me it did but I still don’t quite trust it yet.

Meanwhile my new bottom bracket remover had finally arrived. I had read on the internet that the noise from my crank probably meant that something was loose but it took a lot of force to get the cranks and bottom bracket off so I’m not sure how true that could be in my case. I didn’t see anything wrong but I cleaned things up where the bottom bracket seats. I bought some waterproof bike grease in case I had to lubricate the bottom bracket but it turns out that the thing is completely enclosed so I couldn’t grease anything in there. For some reason the screws that hold the cranks on were greased so I added some to them. After everything was back together the cranks were quiet again. It was a nice quiet. I still have no idea what was making the noise but it has stopped.

It ended up being three separate problems happening all at once. I don’t think that’s ever happened to any of my bikes before. I’ve also never seen a gear worn down like happened to mine. I rode on my old one for a decade with no problem. I guess the metal is not as strong in this one. I uses mainly the one gear in the back so it makes sense that it should wear down eventually but this seemed a bit soon.

I guess I should have gotten new rim tape when I got a new rim instead of using the old rim tape but it worked fine for a good month or so. Plus I’ve never had any rim tape problems so I didn’t know they could happen at the drop of a hat. I never even thought about rim tape before. Live and learn.

The crank problem was fairly familiar. I’ve had similar troubles with this bike that have come and gone over the past year and those seem to be related to riding in wet weather. At least now I have all the tools to deal with it. I’ve almost started trusting my bike to run right again. It’s a bit like coming off of a sports injury such as a sprained ankle. Even when the ankle gets better it takes a little while to trust that it can hold you up under the strain of running. In the end I’d rather it was my bike that I didn’t trust than my ankle. Bad ankles can really hurt.