Radiant Comics

The question I asked on my Facebook status today was, “How is it that Apple can make such nice laptops and such lousy laptop power cords?”. I asked that as the cord from my recently (July of this year) purchased Macbook Air stopped functioning properly. How annoying. Apple laptop power cords are notoriously bad. By bad I mean that they often break long before the laptop does (at least anecdotally) and cost about eighty bucks to replace. My cord on my previous Mac laptop lasted about a year and a half before it broke. I’ve heard others, who travelled around with their laptops more than I did, complain that their cords lasted an even shorter time. I used the laptop itself for six years. I used four cords with it but only two of them were official Apple power cords.

My Macbook Air power cord even stopped working in a different way than one normally stops. Usually the cord gets a break in it. The electricity stops flowing because the wire is broken inside. A small gap not visible on the outside. On a Mac laptop this is easy to tell because they build in a little light at the end of it that lights up when the power is flowing. If you wiggle the cord around a bit you can make a connection and get the power flowing and the light to light up again. At least for a little while but you know that the power cord is as good as gone.

This power cord is acting even weirder than that. A few days ago I plugged it into the laptop and got no light. Strange. I jiggled the cord around and nothing happened. I reset the electrical strip that it was plugged into but still got no power. I then plugged the thing into an outlet that was across the room. Still no light and no power. Jiggling the cord did nothing. It didn’t seem like a break in the cord. I moved the power cord back to its usual outlet, plugged it into my laptop, and then I had power again. Weird. I had no idea what was happening but I let my laptop charge. A fluke I hoped.

For about two days after that the same problem kept happening. It was like playing roulette. It was completely binary. I’d plug it in and either it would get power or not. Red or black. Jiggling the cord didn’t affect the situation at all. I could plug it in three times in a row, not get power, and then on the fourth time the power would be back. As long as I didn’t unplug the power cord from the computer the power cord would work. Even moving the computer around.

I prefer to run my Macbook Air on battery power so I can easily move it around so that’s how I continued to work. Then I started to obsess over if the cord was going to work or not. It was really annoying and distracting. After about two days of this I couldn’t deny I had a real problem anymore so I made an appointment at the Apple store to have the thing looked at. My appointment was for that night, Friday, at 6PM. It’s the Apple store in the Palisades Center Mall and boy was that place crowded. There were at least a hundred people in the store and it’s not a big box store. It’s crazy how busy that place is these days.

I made my way back to the “Genius Bar” (cue jokes from “The Big Bang Theory” TV show) and signed in with a woman whose job it was to sign people in who have appointments. It still took until about 6:20 PM for someone to see me. Like I said the place was a mad house. There were three people behind the bar taking care of about nine people’s problems. I kind of got lost in the shuffle for a few minutes but I was glad that mine seemed like an easy problem.

Most of the people are the store who were taking care of problems were getting their iPhones looked at. Being that I haven’t been to the Apple Genius Bar since before the iPhone came out this was a bit of a surprise to me. It makes perfect sense since Apple has sold a lot more phones than computers in recent years but I found it a little sad for some reason. I think I was a little nostalgic for the days before the iPhone took over almost everything Apple. Maybe that and the fact that I don’t have an iPhone. I could have just been feeling out of the loop.

I told the guy behind the counter my problem and he took the cord to try on his computer. No little green light came on and no power flowed. I was really glad of that. Like I said the problem had been intermittent and we all know the frustration of showing the repairman the problem and the problem isn’t there. I was relieved that the problem was there. So he immediately said that they’d replace the cord. Of course then there were none in stock. How annoying. Plus they couldn’t pull one off the retail shelf and give it to me. Something to do with inventory serial numbers. They’d have to order one for me and it would be in in a couple of days. He did suggest that I could buy a new retail one and return it when I picked up my replacement. That sounded like too much of a hassle to me so I got my receipt for the future one and left. I have a desktop too so worst case was that I would have to stay off the laptop for a few days.

When I got home I tried my bad power cord and it worked. I was happy to be able to charge my laptop battery but I unplugged the thing at night. It made me nervous to have it plugged in and unattended. As I write this on Saturday I’ve had the laptop plugged in all day and the power cord has worked all day. I still don’t like working with it plugged in but what the heck it’s only for a few days. I’m also going to unplug it tonight. I hope the new one is in soon.

There are too many cobwebs around here. That’s the first thing I have to say. I’ll have to get rid of them of course but I never seem to notice them until there are a ton of them around. It’s completely pointless to write about since no one cares about anyone else’s cobwebs but it’s just distracting me right now as I attempt to write. I’m going to have to get up and clear them out. Back in a minute.

I’m a bit exhausted right now from doing yard work. On the Saturday before Halloween we had a big snowstorm around these parts and since the trees still have their leaves on them the snow brought down a lot of tree limbs. We were lucky enough not to lose our electricity but people all over the North East did lose power for days on end. I had a lot of tree branches come down in the back yard. Big tree branches.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many branches come down in one storm. Even hurricanes and blizzards. As I’ve been bicycling throughout the week I’ve seen more and more broken branches appear on people’s property out near the road. That’s where you put broken branches around these parts so that the wood chipper can get to them and chip them and take them away. It doesn’t look like the town wood chipper has gotten to any of them yet though. I’m sure there is a lot more important clean up to do first. Still the amount of broken branches amazes me. If they’re not out by the road a glance into the yard shows that they haven’t been cleaned up yet.

For my yard clean up I had to break out the chain saw for the first time in years. I don’t have much call for a chain saw except to cut up the occasional branch but usually the branches are small enough that a pruning saw will do just fine so the chain saw sits. It’s an electric chain saw. I’m sure if I used a chain saw all the time a gas powered one would be better but being that I haven’t pulled it out in at least three years I prefer an electric one. It plugs into the wall and starts with the push of a button. No muss no fuss. I’m sure it would be much harder to start a gas powered one after it had been sitting idle for years. Gas powered lawn mowers are like that.

I only attempted to do about half of the cleanup work that needed to be done. I know my limitations. I haven’t attempted the really big tree limb yet. It’s a foot across and is still half way attached ten feet in the air. That’s going to be tricky to get down. Instead I cleaned up the chestnut tree. At least a third of it had come down. I think I made twenty five to thirty trips up to the front near the road dragging branches behind me. There were a lot of branches. They were big too hence me needing the chainsaw to cut them down to a manageable size. But they still weren’t a foot across.

In the middle of this all the chain came off the chain saw. I picked the saw up, turned it on, went to cut, and it wouldn’t cut the wood. I looked down and there was the chain on the ground. I figured it was time to figure out how to put a chain on a chainsaw. It turned out to be fairly easy. Of course the first thing I did was to unplug it. After that it was simple to spot the big nut on the base of the blade. It’s only an eight inch saw. I removed the nut, slipped the blade off, put the chain back around the blade in the groove, put the blade back in place, and tightened the nut. It all went smoothly until I went to cut and it wouldn’t. Turned out that I put the chain on backwards. Whoops! I repeated the process and got things right.

That saw saved me a lot of work. I’m tired just from hauling the branches but if I had cut them too I’m be much worse off. Using a hand saw is a lot of work. Two days after the storm I used the hand saw a little bit and it was tiring. Being that the chain saw is electric I didn’t want to drag out the extension cord when snow was on the ground. I only meant to make one or two cuts but one thing leads to another and it ended up being ten or twelve cuts. With a hand saw it’s real important to be at the optimal angle and that doesn’t always happen. It’s real annoying. And tiring. I must have made a hundred cuts with the chain saw today on branches from an inch to five inches thick. Those five inch branches would have been a nightmare to cut through by hand.

One other thing I had to cut through this week, though not with a chain saw, was my package of mylar sleeves. Most people are familiar with mylar sleeves as the clear plastic bags that someone would put comic books or even old LP record albums in. I do put my comics in them but this package was mainly filled with the “Map Size” mylar sleeves.

Map sleeves are about 26 x 36 inches. That’s a big sleeve and it also has to be shipped flat so it was shipped to me in a box that was just a little bigger than that and a couple of inches thick. But it was the edges of the box that I had to cut through. Or at least I had to cut through the copious amount of tape that held them on. It was packed really well and since they didn’t want the edges of the sleeves to get smashed. The box’s edges were reinforced with extra cardboard that was bent around all four sides of the box and taped on. I’m telling you it took me fifteen minutes to open that box. But the sleeves were all in good shape.

I don’t actually put maps in my map sleeves. I use them for the large photo collages that I make. The photos tend to run around 20 x 30 inches and I mount them on an even larger piece of matt board. I then slip the whole shebang into a giant sleeve of mylar and I don’t have to worry about the photo getting scratched up. I don’t do a lot of photos that big so an order of ten sleeves, for about $60, lasts me for a couple of years. I’ve been known to double up photos in sleeves sometimes too. They’re not cheap after all.

I really should have something to say but I’m at a loss. I had nothing going on this week. Nothing at all. At least nothing significant that I can remember. Yet when I look back at my calendar there are things on it. That’s exactly why I keep a calendar. It’s not that I’m so busy with appointments that I have to write them down to keep track of them. As a matter of fact I have very few appointments. I keep a calendar so I can look back and see that I have accomplished some things.

My calendar is actually more like a journal. It’s not filled with stuff I have to do but with things I’ve done. I keep it for times just like these when I’m sitting around and feeling like I’ve accomplished nothing lately. I actually do a lot of work. Drawing, painting, writing, or whatever I have going on but when the work is for myself and not for someone else it’s easy to forget it has any value. Even if it’s just valuable to me. It’s even easy to forget I’ve done anything.

I have the tendency to think only about the next thing I want to do. The last thing I did can leave my mind quickly and I no longer feel its presence. I forget I did it. That’s why I write down what I did during any given day. So I can see it a glance. I especially have a way of forgetting the regular things I do. Like my “Four Talking Boxes” comic strip. One of the things that I did this week was to finish another week’s worth of comics. I’ve published nearly five hundred comics on my web site and that’s quite an accomplishment. But somehow in my mind after I finish my strips for the week it doesn’t count to me as having done anything. After all I always do that. It’s weird.

Another thing I got done this week is that I finished two new prints. Now how does finishing two new prints count as not getting anything done in my mind? I’m not sure. The prints I finished are from a new series I was working on called “Unchain Your Brain”. Usually my prints have sentence/saying/slogan on them but each print says something different. This series is my attempt to make a “Branded” series of prints. They all say the same thing. All of the images are different from one and other but they are some of my oddest images. But that’s kind of the point. I’m looking to unchain my brain with them and come up with new stuff.

I think that’s the strange twist for me this week with the “Unchain Your Brain” prints. The more of them I’ve done the more I’ve been seeing them as a message to myself rather than as a message to everybody else. That’s not usually the case. So finishing these particular prints seemed less important and easier to forget about than others. Weird. I’m going to have to start posting stuff again to let other people see.

I got a couple of pages drawn in my inkbook this week. That’s what I call my sketchbook in which I draw only in ink with no great forethought before drawing. It’s how I come up with my odd imagery. I draw six to ten small drawings on a single five and a half by eight and a half inch page. It doesn’t take a long time to draw a single page, a little over an hour, but it takes me a year to fill a hundred page sketchbook. That means I get about eight pages, or fifty to one hundred small drawings, done a month. I’ve been doing that for thirteen years so I have quite a collection of drawing to mine for ideas. But, once again, that’s something I’ve managed to do consistently so I don’t think much about getting it done and therefore on a night like tonight they don’t count towards my feeling of well being. Though I did them it doesn’t feel like it.

One other thing I finished this week was the photo I made of my cousin’s wedding. It’s a present for him. That’s the thing I do for friends and family as their wedding present. I take pictures and I cut and arrange said pictures into one big picture that hopefully tells the story of the wedding. It takes a lone time to make one. People seem to like them. But tonight it feels like I didn’t finish anything. Why is that? I think it was because I considered it a forgone conclusion that I’d finish it. From the moment I heard about the wedding I knew I’d be making one. And I did. In my mind it was already finished before I even did it. So when I actually finished it it was no big deal. Strange because it took a lot of effort to do.

My paying work gets written down on the calendar too but for some reason that rarely gives me the satisfaction of getting things done. After all it’s stuff that has to be done. If I don’t do it then I won’t get paid and I’d like to be paid. It keeps the lights on. I do like to note the paying work though. When I go and look back at my calendar at least I can see when I’ve earned some money.

One last thing that goes on my calendar is my bicycling. I note the days that I go for a bike ride. There is no real reason for it except to look back and see that I did it. Y’see I can’t even remember what year it was when I started riding regularly again. The keeping of calendar doesn’t go back that far. It could have been 1997 or it could have been 2002. I don’t know. It’s lost in the mist of my memory. I had ridden a bike all through my youth and on again and off again through my young adulthood but it wasn’t until my late twenties that I started to ride regularly. But I can’t remember how regular was regular. I can remember riding another route when I started up but I can’t remember when I switched over to my now regular route. Was their time in between the two routes or did I stop riding the first one and start up the second a while later? I have no idea but I’m pretty sure I’ve been on this current route for at least a decade. And since I’ve been keeping a calendar for the last four years I know exactly when I did ride.

Oh and I’ll have to note that I wrote this blog today. I don’t always remember to do that but I try.

Once again my search to find a new video game that I want to play has ended in failure. There is nothing out there that interests me. I’ve heard good things about the last Batman game but I have almost no interest in playing a Batman video game. It doesn’t help that the name of the game is “Arkham Asylum” because that is one of the things I don’t like about Batman comic books.

Arkham Asylum is the place in Gotham City that all of the crazy villains get sent. The Joker is the prime example. For some reason they never get sent to jail despite the fact that those stupid villains are forever breaking out of the asylum. It’s just too easy a story short cut for the Batman writers to resist. Want to put Batman in danger? Have him have to go to Arkham Asylum. Want to give Batman something to do? Have a bunch of villains break out of the asylum. Batman stories aren’t really known for innovation and for me Arkham Asylum symbolizes that lack of innovation.

The odd thing is that I pay no attention to whatever story is going on in a video game. I don’t care. I just want to play a game. Plus I don’t find video games a very good medium for stories. That’s probably why I can’t find a game to play. Most video games are all about the story and not much about the gameplay. At least on the consoles.

One of the things I’ve liked about my iPod touch is that the iPod/iPhone platform has reinvigorated video games. Hits like “Angry Birds” are based on gameplay rather than story. Sure there’s a little story going on but it doesn’t get in the way of the game. There are other games I’ve played on the iPod that were also fun. I haven’t played it much in a while though. I think it’s because I have iPad envy. All of the games would be much easier to play on the larger iPad but I have yet to get one of those.

The last XBox 360 game I bought was “Borderlands”. It was a best-selling game, had a ton of nice reviews, and the art style looked interesting to me so when the price came down to about $20 I decided to buy it and give it a try. I knew I was in trouble right away. As I came to the screen where I had to choose one of three characters to play I couldn’t decide which one to pick. All three of them seemed stupid and not the least bit interesting. I think I stared at those characters for ten minutes before I picked one. I was disappointed right then. After that I played the game for an hour or two and never touched it again. That’s pretty much been my XBox 360 experience for a few years now. Of course part of my problem is that none of my friends play video games anymore. Not online or in person. That’s they way things are when you’re forty-something.

I’ve notice a generational change when it comes to online video games. I’ve had XBox Live on and off over the years but I’ve only used it to play games with friends. Playing online with a bunch of strangers is an odd idea to me. Video games are social so I want to play with my buddies. I’ve seen younger players, teenagers or so, jump right online and start playing with whoever. They don’t even think about it. It’s not even particularly social because they weren’t talking to the strangers over the headset as I would with my buddies. They were playing as if the other opponents were the computer. There was nothing odd about that to the generation who has always had online gaming.

I’ve mentioned before that last year I bought the latest version of Street Fighter. It was pretty much a nostalgia purchase because I don’t play fighting games much anymore. They’re boring to play against the computer all the time. That Street Fighter game is still sitting on my shelf in shrink wrap. Since October 20, 2010. Yep, it was such a nostalgia purchase that I haven’t even bothered to open it. It’s a good thing it was cheap because otherwise I’d feel ripped off. Every now and then I pick it up and look at it. How is that for a weird way to play a video game?

This week I ended up deciding to play “Halo: Reach” again. I bought that one when it came out back in September 2010 and have played it through a couple of times. The Halo games seem to be the ones that I like the best and can always go back to. But this time I got the idea to look for some sort of Halo guide. There are lots of online walkthroughs for Halo and I’ve consulted them every now and again but if I’m going to play along to a guide, so that I don’t miss anything, then I prefer a book. It’s easier than having to be on the computer and playing Halo at the same time.

I figured there would be some print material on Halo and sure enough there was. I usually have no interest in buying play guides/walkthroughs to go with my video games because I want to play the game and not have a read-along adventure but this time I wanted to see if I missed anything interesting. That and because the game wasn’t a new one I was pretty sure I could find a cheap walkthrough book. And I did. I managed to find a used big old hardcover Halo guide that originally went for $35 on Amazon for $10. That was my kind of price and it was cheaper than getting some new video game that I have no faith that I’d like. The book is neat too. A lot of art work and a lot of maps and info. So far I’ve spent more time looking through the book than playing the game but that’s okay. I like books.

I’d like to play some video game football again one of these days but there isn’t a football game I’m interested in. Madden football is the only game in town with the NFL license and I haven’t liked that one in years. There is only one other football video game (it doesn’t have the NFL license) and that is “Backbreaker Football”. I’ve demoed that one and it didn’t hold my interest. I think my days of liking video game football games are long over but I hold out hope. They’ll get one right someday just by coincidence. Until then I’ll play some Halo.

I finally made it down to the NYC Comic Con this past Saturday. I haven’t been to a NYC comic book convention since the late 1990s. I can’t even actually remember when it was. It could have been 1996 or it could have been 1998. It was so long ago that I really have no idea. In my defense there weren’t many big comic book conventions in NYC for a number of years. As a matter of fact the last one I went to in NYC wasn’t a “Big” comic con at all. It was one of the smaller NYC ones that were held two or three times a year. A small NYC con is actually fairly large just not New York City big.

Being that I’m a cartoonist, a comic book fan, and worked in the comic book business for a decade and half you’d think I’d be able to make it down to one of the conventions but somehow I never did. I tried to go the first year that they held this convention back in 2006 but I never even made it through the front door. There were too many people and the fire marshal closed the place down. That kind of soured me on the whole experience. That and having to order a ticket in advance. Somehow I’m lazy about that and I’m not usually lazy.

Not that ordering a ticket in advance mattered that first year I tried to go but if you want to go to future NY Comic Cons then buy your tickets ahead of time. I didn’t that first year but my friend Ed did and he still couldn’t get in. Y’know, fire marshal and all. I never can decide early enough if I want to go or not and the show sells out quickly. So I never ended up going. Friends of mine have told me to sign up for a professional pass but since I have no real association with a comic book company anymore I never bothered to try and get one. I have since found out that they are fairly easy to come by since it doesn’t involve the convention giving you any exhibition space. Maybe I’ll sign up for one next year.

This year I went with my friend Bob. He’s a cartoonist and had a table in Artist Alley so people could come up and buy some drawings from him. He had an extra pass to the convention so he invited me to come along. They often give the artists extra passes if they ask for them because all the convention has to keep track of is table space. There is plenty of room for people since the convention is in a larger space than the one the fire marshal closed but table space always has to be tracked. There is only so much of it and they don’t want to over-book the artists.

I wasn’t going to be sitting at the table so I didn’t need table space anyway. I wanted to go to the con and see a whole bunch of friends from the business that I hadn’t seen in years. That was my entire agenda for the day and I had a fun time filling it. It’s always good to see old friends.

Bob and I took the train in to Penn Station and arrived at the con at about ten in the morning. It’s a ten to fifteen minute walk to the convention from the train station and it turned into a bit of a parade with all the people walking over to the same location. There is not much over at that part of Manhattan except the convention center. Plenty of people were in costume too which added to the parade atmosphere. It was a little confusing getting into the con since we weren’t sure exactly where to go but since we had Artist Alley Exhibitor passes they let us in some random door that no one else was going in. I was told later on there was an official pro entrance but I never saw it.

After we got in Bob set up his art supplies at his table and proceeded to do drawings all day for people. I started to walk around the convention, mostly in Artist Alley, and talk with friends. All day. From ten in the morning until six thirty at night I didn’t sit down for a moment. I had a great time. I saw some people I hadn’t seen in three months and some people I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. I had a grand old time. People come from near and far for this convention so in addition to the NYC comic book people there were friends who had moved away who come back for this con. I really should have gotten down there years ago.

The only thing missing from my comic book convention experience was comic books. I had no time, nor really the inclination, to look for comic books or anything else for that matter. Artist Alley, where I spent most of my time, was fairly subdued. The main convention part, where all the vendors were set up, was a mad house. It was shoulder to shoulder, crowded, and loud. I popped over to the Marvel Comics booth to see if any of my old co-workers were there but I couldn’t get near it. There was some Avengers movie promotion going on and the place was surrounded by people. I walked around a bit and glanced at the comic book vendors but wanted to get back to socializing. So I did.

There are certainly a lot of people walking around in costumes at the comic con. Way more then there were back in the early 1990s. I liked them all to. I’m for anyone who likes to play dress-up. They’re just having a bit of fun. Why not? There were plenty of good looking women dressed up but there were also some who I can only assume were professional models. You can tell them form the ordinary good looking women because their costumes are well crafted and their asses are hanging out. The regular pretty women have no problem showing lots of cleavage but it takes a professional to walk around showing that much butt cheek. That was the only insight that hit me at the con. You think I’d have something deeper but not this time.

So that’s my recap of comic con. Not a whole lot to tell but that’s how I thought it would be. It was a social occasion for me and a chance to catch up with old friends. I’ll take that any day.