Radiant Comics

I had a little bit of bicycle trouble recently. I needed to make some repairs. I know my way around a bike fairly well so I made them myself but, let me tell you, they were not without frustration. If I remember correctly my bike is just over three years old now. I’ve ridden it through three summers and two winters (I skipped that first winter). This is my fourth summer on it so I guess it was time for some serious repairs.

I ride my bike in a lot of bad weather. Not monsoon type rain but I do go out when it’s a light rain or after a big rain when the roads might still be wet. I’ve even been caught in a downpour every now and again but I try not to go out when that looks like a possibility. The rain is probably harder on the bike than the winter riding I do. Then it’s just out in the cold. It’s not like I ride when it’s snowing out so in the winter the bike doesn’t get very wet. I don’t think bikes like rain rides very much.

The first thing I noticed going wrong was an odd clicking sound that the bike made when I pedaled. It sounded like it was coming from the pedal cranks but it was hard to tell. It was obviously happening in a rotating pattern and it only happened when I put some force on the pedals. Had to be the cranks. But it would only make the noise when a lot of force was applied. That’s what made it so hard to figure out. When I put the bike up on my bike stand and pedaled it with my hand it didn’t make the noise. The force of my legs pushing down on the pedals as I rode made something click. I ended up oiling the cranks over a series of rides before the noise went away. I’m still not sure exactly what made those clicks.

That did lead me to make a detailed inspection of my bike. It’s needed a tune-up for a little while so I gave it the once over. The back tired has been a bit out of true, which makes it wobble, so I decided to see if I could adjust the tension on the spokes to make things right. That’s when I noticed I had a broken spoke. I’ve never replaced a broken spoke before so I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a place on the internet that sold individual spokes. There were some sets of spokes but they were more expensive than a cheap new rim. I also wasn’t too sure of the size of the spoke I should get.

That lead me to try and live with the broken spoke for now and adjust the others to compensate if they could. I’ve tightened spokes before but have never trued a wheel. That’s tricky business. I got out my pliers and gave it a try but was having trouble turning the spokes. I ended up going to the internet and ordering a proper spoke wrench to see if that would help. When I got it a couple of days later I put my bike on the stand and tried to adjust the spokes. Nothing. They wouldn’t budge. They were all frozen in place. I guess all that rain riding did them in. I tried to force one but only ended up snapping it as I figured I would. Now I had two broken spokes. I broke down and ordered a new rim for about $50.

I learned years ago that when you buy a rim for a bike’s back tire it doesn’t come with gears on it. You can use your old gears or make an additional $30 purchase. I chose my old gears. That means I need a special little gear wrench to get them off. I already had one from my last bike but when I got the new rim I discovered my new bike needed a different gear wrench. Instead of two prongs this one had eleven. Back to the internet I went but found two different eleven pronged gear wrenches. I flipped a coin and picked one. A couple of days later it arrived and it’s a good thing they’re only about eight bucks because I picked the wrong one. I went back and ordered the other.

Meanwhile all this time, about a week and a half, I had still been riding my bike with two broken spokes on the back wheel. The wheel was still stable but it being out of true meant that I had to widen the brake pads so the wheel could spin without rubbing against them. This cuts down on braking power. The first time I rode it that way I had to be really careful because I didn’t have enough braking power to make myself comfortable. I adjusted them a little tighter but still couldn’t wait to get the new back tire up and running.

I even ordered a chain whip wrench along with the gear wrench. That wrench is for gripping the gears as you turn the gear wrench counter to it in order to loose the gear cassette. I think when I did this years ago with my last bike I just jammed the gear cassette against a piece of wood so it wouldn’t move but I figured for twelve bucks I’d be a little more sophisticated this time and it feels good to add tools to the ol’ tool box. It makes me feel like I’m prepared for things.

After getting the second gear wrench in the mail things went fairly smoothly. The gears came off the original rim easily but it took a couple of minutes of observation to figure out how to get them on the new one. There are a bunch of grooves and ridges on the thing and they only line up one way. At first the pattern of grooves and ridges appeared to be symmetrical but it wasn’t. I also had a slight amount of trouble getting the tire tread under the bead of the new rim in the spot near the intake stem but eventually I got it.

The bicycle runs smoothly now. No noise in the crank and no wobble in the back wheel. And most importantly I got my braking power back. It’s good to be able to stop when I want to. There’s less fear in the ride that way.

I’m tired of trade paperback collections of comic books. That’s this week’s statement. Maybe it’s because I’ve bought a lot of them over the last few years and haven’t even read them all yet but lately I’ve been looking for more new monthly comics to buy and haven’t been so interested in collections.

It’s one of the questions a modern comic book reader has had to ask himself. Should I buy a monthly comic and read each part as it comes out or wait for the whole thing to be collected into a book? It’s fun to read a comic monthly but often the collection is cheaper, nicer, and easier to handle and store. That and a lot of times nowadays things are “Written for the trade”. We don’t get monthly cliffhangers. The story just stops when the issue ends and picks up with the next issue. Each individual issue doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end. Instead things happen and then they don’t. It can be a frustrating to read a story done like that month to month.

Of course trades and hard cover collections have their downside too. First off not everything gets collected into a book. Secondly I notice in myself and others that “Waiting for the collection” often means never buying the collection because by the time it finally comes out I’ve lost interest in it. I read or hear about a comic I might like a couple of months before the first issue comes out which means the trade won’t be out for six months after that so by that time I’ve forgotten I was even interested in it. I really have to keep track of what collections are coming out in the coming months if I want to get some. And I have kept track pretty well over the years but I’ve grown bored of keeping track. Or maybe I haven’t seen as many things I’m interested in lately.

I might be tired of collected editions because a lot of them that I’ve bought over the years have been collections of older comics. Maybe I’ve already got all of those that I want. How many more collected editions of good comics from my youth (or before) are left to publish? Not a ton I guess. I’ve got a lot of good comics from the 60’s-70’s in nice collected editions already so how many more could interest me? Not too many recently.

Last summer I tried to find some new monthly series to buy. I tried a bunch of mainstream super-hero comics and liked a few of them from DC but then they went and relaunched their entire comics line and the few I liked were no longer there. I tried some of the new series from DC and ended up liking about four of them but now that four is down to one. I don’t think I collect a single Marvel series but I have been buying Iron Man regularly as it’s collected plus I’ve bought some of the new Spider-Man and Hulk collections.

It’s to Image Comics and Dark Horse Comics that I’ve turned this time to find most of my new monthly comics to buy. They’re harder to find than Marvel and DC comics and often not in great supply on the shelves of most comic book stores. That means that most of the time you can walk into a comic book store and get the latest issue of Batman or Spider-Man but the latest issue of “Reset” by Peter Bagge might not be lying around. That’s why I started adding new series to my subscription list at my local comic shop before the first issue even comes out. If the story sounds good and the art looks interesting then I want to give it a try. That’s how I’m going to find new things.

I’m still collecting my same old comics too. Usagi Yojimbo, The Walking Dead, The Savage Dragon, Dark Horse Comics Presents, Rachel Rising (anything by Terry Moore), Mud Man (anything by Paul Grist), Love and Rockets, Rasl, Glamourpuss, and a few other things that come out less frequently. But that’s not very many comics. I think I was down to one or two comics a week even with some of the new DC comics I had been buying. I wanted more.

It’s a good thing for me that Image Comics has been having a big push this year of new creator owned comics that are in a wide variety of genres. From old fashioned super-heroes to spy stories, crime stories, alternate history stories, sci-fi, and fantasy the variety has been more to my liking. I’m not much of a fan of the same-old same-old from Marvel and DC.

I’ve already added the new Image comics “Fatale”, “Danger Club”, “The Manhattan Projects”, “Saga”, “The Activity”, “Mind the Gap”, “Hoax Hunters”, and “Thief of Thieves” to my subscription list plus from Dark Horse “MIND MGMT”, “Reset”, and “Ragemoor”. And from IDW the new Bernie Wrightson “Frankenstein” series. All of them are pretty good. I don’t expect them all to be around as long as “The Walking Dead”, especially since some of them are mini-series, but I’ll stick with them as long as they’re good. I’ve even added some new ones that have yet to come out to that list. It’s a good time to be looking for new comics.

One more reason for preferring monthly comics comes from an off-hand remark from the radio show GEEKTIME!. It’s a show about all things geeky so, of course, they talk about comics. One person said to the other, “I’ll get you the collection” and a third person said, “You know me I don’t like collections. I prefer comics because I like covers”. That’s one thing I also like about monthly comics: the covers.

Though they usually reprint the covers in most collected editions they don’t have the same impact. Looking at a comic book cover is looking at an objet d’art but looking at it in a collection it’s just another page somewhere in the middle of the book. Out of context it loses it’s power. Quite often in collections the covers are printed without their logos. This ruins them for me as it not only changes their context but also their whole composition. Removing such a large design element leaves things looking awkward. Covers are one of the best parts of comics yet in a collection they can get lost or ruined.

One final thing I like about comics and their covers is that thumbing through a stack of comics is like looking at a time machine. A stack of thirty comics or so can represent five years of monthly change in artists, design, characters, and the world in general. It’s fun to look back at them and see all the things that have gone on. That’s what good comic book covers can do.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like collected editions. I especially like oversized deluxe hardcover collections. They’re fun. I’ve got a lot of nice comics in those formats and I’ll certainly be getting more, especially those really pretty oversized collections, but for now I’m going to be concentrating of finding some new monthly comics to read. That’s what I’m into these days.

Things take their own time. That’s my lesson for the week. It’s a lesson I’ve learned over and over. You’d think I could remember it but it can be a surprise when I realize that I’m not always in charge of my own creativity. The lesson not always a surprise though. Sometimes it’s just a reminder. Oddly enough it’s when things are going poorly and I’m not very successful at being creative that it’s easy to see I’m not in charge. It’s hard not to notice then. It’s when things are going well and then they all of a sudden come to a screeching halt that I’m surprised I’m not as in charge as I thought I was. It’s a strange phenomenon.

It started last winter when I bought a half dozen new 18×24 inch canvases. That’s I size I didn’t usually work at but I had a brainstorm of an idea and bought them on a bit of a whim. Whatever my idea was for the canvases, which I don’t quite remember anymore, it didn’t work out and I abandoned it. I used one of the canvases back then to make a painting but the rest of them have been sitting there waiting for me to paint on them. This week I felt like using one of the canvases so I grabbed my book of ideas, found an image I liked, and worked it into a finished painting. It all went well. Of course the painting took a bit longer to do than I thought but it come out nice. I am happy with it. The crashing to a halt part came when I tried to ride that momentum into a new painting. Things stopped going well and I didn’t get a second painting done.

What happened? I have no idea. I was feeling good about getting a new painting started as I looked through my sketchbooks for ideas but nothing jumped out at me. Even though I could find no inspiration I did settle on one image I wanted to use but then I couldn’t even get it past the sketch phase. I started making a drawing of it but part way through I lost interest. That is always a bad sign. There is no sense in forcing anything so I let it go and started looking for a new image to work on. Once again I saw nothing that I wanted to work on.

It was weird how everything came to a stop. Before then I felt like, creatively, I was making all the right moves. It had just spent three days working on a painting and was feeling good about it. I wanted more. I thought, for sure, that I had another painting in me right away. I had all those canvases sitting right there ready to go, I had sketchbooks filled with images, and I had my well tested method of working so why couldn’t I keep going? I was feeling it. I had the desire and the know-how so what happened? Who knows? It’s another of the mysteries of life. It’s a good thing I have other creative things that I like to get done.

This is where my love of working in multiple mediums comes in. I like to do a lot of different things. Painting, drawing, printmaking, markers, gouache, or whatever else. I try to go with the flow. When I run into a wall with one medium I can get around the wall with another medium. As I was looking fruitlessly through my sketchbooks for an image to make into a painting I switched gears when I saw one that I could make into a print. When one thing things doesn’t work I move to another. That’s not a good method for everyone but it has served me well.

Before I started this particular painting I had been, once again, working on developing a comic book story. My white whale as of late. This was my second such attempt in the last few months. My first attempt had fizzled out as so many attempts before it had but this one was scaled back and working fairly well. I’ve been developing some one page comic strips as prints. That kinda scratches two itches. The comics/prints are meant to be viewed as a single image and not continue from page to page. The page is the image and the image is the thing. Yeah, yeah, I still don’t have it all worked out yet.

The painting that I finished interrupted a comic print that I was working on and the second painting I tried to work on was interrupted by yet another comic print. I don’t know what that all means except things take their own time. There is my leaned lesson again. I have yet to finish one of these new comic prints of mine but I have faith that I will. So far they’re not easy to finish. I’m making them differently than a normal comic page in that every panel is getting attention as if it’s its own print. That’s a lot of attention.

A regular comic book page wouldn’t normally get so much attention. Deadlines don’t allow it. Drawing a comic book is full of compromises because of time and the fact that you really only get one draft. There is a lot of drawing involved and it has to get done so you can’t treat it all as if it’s precious. Being that my comic/prints aren’t comic books I can put a little more preciousness into them. Of course that comes at a price too.

Often just trying to get things done has an advantage over trying to get everything right. Not always but a lot of the time just getting things done allows you to cut out a lot of unnecessary stuff and get to the heart of the matter. A little too much time and preciousness can paralyze things. That might me my second lesson of the week but it’s not one that I forget like my first lesson. Y’know right about now I’m tired of lessons. I think I’ll go read.

Things pile up. That’s what’s my mind is on today because I spent a whole day earlier this week cleaning up the things that had piled up around my studio. It started with my drawing table. As I work I always end up setting things in the upper left hand corner of my drawing table. They’re the things that I want handy at a moment’s notice like various sketchbooks, receipts to be filed, drawings that I’m in the middle of, or reference material. Sometimes that upper left corner starts to overwhelm the rest of the drawing board and I have to clean things up, or at least re-stack things, in order to work. This is a fairly common occurrence.

The next stage is occurs less frequently. That’s when I can’t get a thing done until I clear off the top of my drawing board entirely. Clean the slate. It usually has to do more with my state of mind than the state of my drawing table. I call it clearing my drawing table in order to clear my mind. I strip everything off of the top of the table from stuff stacked in the left hand corner to all the little knick knacks that might be across the top of it, wash it down, and put away some of the crap that has accumulated. It’s a little bit of a fresh start to get my mind going.

I ended up up in the third stage this week that has to do with organizing and putting away a bunch of my drawings. This only happens a few times a year. Some time ago I installed a pair of drawers on the underside on my drawing table. I wanted a place close by to store drawings. I always have a lot more drawings then actual projects that I may be working on at any given time but I want my most current drawings easily accessible. I need to look through them in order to figure out what I want to work on next. In the first drawer are drawings that I haven’t made anything finished out of just yet and in the second drawer are drawings that I have made final paintings or prints from. Sooner or later I have to empty that second drawer. I was at the point where it was full.

This is the tedious and hard part. I have to put all of those drawings away somewhere. I have a cabinet with flat drawers in it that hold a lot of stuff but even that is getting filled up. All the drawings go in boxes and the boxes go in the cabinets. I’ve collected various types of boxes over the years but last year I made some new boxes to store drawings in. Some are 11×17 inches, some 11×14, and some are 8×10. Trying to figure out how to stack them can be a little annoying. It’s also not easy to make boxes. I’ve made them out of matt board and foam core board but either way takes time. It’s still cheaper than buying storage boxes though. A lot of life comes down to whether you have time or money on your hands.

Before the drawings can be filed away I have to spray fixative on the pencil drawings. Fixative is a special clear coating that goes over pencil drawings to keep them from smearing. I only use it on finished drawings since using fixative means that the pencil lines can no longer be erased. Not everybody fixes their drawings but I like to because I draw in really soft pencils and when I stack pencil drawings on top of one and other the front of one can get smeared by the back of the other. You can really ruin a drawing that way.

Since I use spray fixative I have to do that outside. It’s like using spray paint and I don’t want to do that in an enclosed environment. The stuff stinks and I don’t want to breathe it in. I have a table in back of my house that I lay the drawings on to spray them. Normally I have more drawings than table space so I spray them in layers. I put some drawings down, spray them, let them dry for a few minutes, put some more drawings down, spray again, repeat until all the drawings are fixed. Then I leave them all sitting there for an hour or so to blow the stink off of them. If I bring them in too quickly I’ll make my studio smell badly. I have to watch out for wind gusts though. I’ve ended up chasing drawings across the yard. My final step in my fixing process is to mark the drawing in the lower right corner with a red dot. That dot lets me know which drawings have already been fixed. It take the guesswork out of things.

Figuring out where all the drawings are going to go is the hard part. I mean what order do they go in? I still haven’t figured that out to my satisfaction because mostly I have to organize the drawings by size and that’s not much of a system. If I were to stack 6×9 inch drawings in with 11×17 inch drawings that would take up more room and not stack very well. It doesn’t work. But the problem with storing the drawings by size it that I do various stages of a drawing at different sizes. Usually the pencil sketch is around 6×9 inches, the pencil drawing 9×12, and the finished in drawing 11×17. It would make the most sense to store all versions of the same drawing together but that’s not going to happen. Space-wise it doesn’t work.

That’s the real headache of filing all my drawing away. Space. It always wins out over conceptual organization and that annoys me a bit. I find it tough to put stuff away without really organizing it. What’s the point of having anything if you can’t find it? I really would like a better system for storing this stuff but I don’t have one. And I’m pretty got with making up systems so it’s especially annoying that I don’t have one for my drawings. At least I scan all my drawings in and can find them digitally. That helps a lot.

One good thing about spraying my drawings and putting them away is that I get to look at them all. I rarely look at that many of my drawings at once but I guess I should do it more often. I get many new ideas when looking through the drawings. It almost makes up for the headache it gives me.

I can never buy as many art supplies as I want to when I put in an on-line order for my stuff. I’m just not that rich. But I do love looking around a virtual store for bargains and odd little things that might interest me. It takes me me two or three days to order from an art supply web site but that’s because I look around so much. Sometimes I look around at three or four on-line art supply places to see what each one has. It also takes two or three days because I’m not really looking around that long. I’ll check out a site for twenty minutes or half an hour while watching TV. I guess it’s the modern equivalent of window shopping.

This week I managed to get my order up to $360 before I finally put an end to looking at stuff. That’s my habit, I keep poking around until I finally have to put an stop to my shopping because I can’t afford the bill. Then I start taking things out of my virtual basket. It’s always easy at first because I usually have a few nearly useless items in my basket. Stuff I looked at and went, “Eh, that might be interesting” but upon further review I say, “Boy, that’s dumb. I’ll never use that”. I can’t even think of an example that falls into this category because I forget them right away.

I do remember an example of the “Well, I don’t REALLY need that” category. That’s when something kinda cool catches my eye but upon further reflection isn’t really that cool. This shopping trip that thing was ellipse templates. In this computerized day and age not a lot of people still use ellipse templates but I do. I’ve got a lot of them and I can’t remember the last time I bought one. It was probably the 1990s. I don’t have a need for new ellipse templates but I a saw a couple of ones that were of a slightly different style than the ones I have so I put them in my cart. It was my collector’s impulse at work. I wanted the templates more to have them in my collection than because I needed them. On top of that I don’t really even have a collection of ellipse templates. I just have ellipse templates and plenty of them. It’s a collector’s impulse to turn everything into a collection though. In the end the templates didn’t make the cut.

With this process I shrunk my basket down from $360 to $85. I put a lot of stuff on the ol’ wishlist for later and ended up mostly buying paper and markers. A roll of artist tape was thrown in there too. All the stuff I wanted most immediately though markers are something that is subject to my collector’s impulse too. There are so many different types these days and I want to get them all. Markers are fun but they can also be expensive. I pulled two sets of markers from my basket, the new Prismacolor brush markers and the new Sharpie brush markers, so I’ll have to get them some other time. I ended up adding to my Copic sketch marker collection instead. They were the ones on the top of the list.

At $5.25 a marker the Copic markers are not cheap and the price on them can add up quickly. They have sets of Copic markers but they’re not cheap either. A set of 36 is $188 and a set of 72 is $352. That’s a lot of money to lay out for a marker set. Especially since, at most, I’d probably end up using about two thirds of the set. That’s the way things are with marker sets. There are a lot of colors I’m sure I wouldn’t find useful in any large color set. These big marker sets are somebody else’s idea of a bunch of useful colors. I prefer my own idea. That’s why over the last two years I been building my own Copic sketch marker set.

I started small. I started with just one color, blue, to see if I even liked the markers. I bought a dark, a medium, and a light blue. I figured that would give me a better feel for the markers than if I bought one each of the primary colors, red, blue, and yellow. With three shades of a single color I could see how good their color was and do some tone work. Three markers is a good number for testing out a brand. After I liked them I decided to buy some more colors. I got a light and dark of red, yellow, green, purple, and orange plus a black marker. That’s another fifty bucks worth of markers and didn’t give me a huge variety but it was a good start. Keep in mind I was collecting them over time so getting everything right away wasn’t the priority. Fifty bucks every three months was easier than three hundred right now.

Eventually I added more to the set of colors. I added a medium version of each of those colors and some light and dark browns for skin tones. Over time I built up a palette of around forty colors with only two or three of the colors being clunkers. I think that’s a much better ratio than I could get in any of the sets. Now I’m at the point when in this order I was adding a fourth version of whatever color and buying some outlier colors. It’s fun creatively and it scratches that collector’s itch. A boy has got to have a hobby.

The last thing in my basket was a little notebook. I used to always carry a notebook with me where ever I went but as I’ve been working from home for years now I haven’t had the need to. That and I was tired of those 69¢ notebooks I used to use. They are too fragile.The Molskine ones I use now are a bit too big to be carrying around so I leave them at home but recently I’ve been wanting to write things down when I’m out walking. Ideas have started to come to me then. I saw a new smaller Moleskine notebook at the online shop and ordered a couple. I don’t know exactly why but that silly little note book got me excited about little notebooks again. Yeah, I’ll take my excitement where I can get it.