Radiant Comics

What have I been up too lately? I’m not really sure. I’ll have to think back. Two weeks ago I finished a whole bunch of art cards. Those are little drawings or paintings done on paper that is the size of a baseball card. A piece of art to hold in your hand. I draw and/or paint them with various methods but this time I used my markers. I used a pencil too but markers were how I finished them.

To start the art cards I dipped into my sketchbooks to find some images I wanted to work with. I organized my sketches on the computer and set them up so that nine sketches could be printed on a single sheet of nine by twelve inch bristol paper. I printed out the sketches in blue line and then drew over them in order to make finished drawings. Next I scanned in those finished drawings and printed them out in blue line and finally worked over the blue line drawings with my color markers.

Some of the art cards I made from already finished drawings. I’ve been scanning in all of my drawing for a decade and a half now so I have quite a vast library of images that I’ve made. Sometimes for these art cards I’ll flip through that library to see what catches my eye. Then I’ll repurpose all or part of a drawing for a new art card. It makes things go faster if the initial drawing is already done but I don’t always want to work with an image I’ve already made. That’s when I go back to my first method.

I use these art cards to make my “Drifting and Dreaming” comic strip that I post on Sundays. I use two of what I call “Cartoon Art Cards” (a drawing of a person talking) to surround a single regular old art card and write a small text story underneath them all. That’s one of the ways I make comics but I’ve also always meant to sell some of the art cards on Ebay or some such. Art cards are meant to be sold to the public or traded with other artists but I’m not well known enough for anyone to care about mine. I’d be lucky to get ten bucks for a card and since it takes about an hour to make one there is not much profit in it.

I spent a lot of time making those cards over that week. I made about forty of them. That’s a lot of hours. One thing I liked to do with the cards is to line them all up in a grid pattern. They looked nice together. I’ve always said that numbers impress and though any individual art card may be pleasant enough on its own when they are all seen together with their colors and images all bouncing off of each other they really look interesting. I think it would be really cool to make a poster out of a whole bunch of art cards. That’s a bit beyond my printer’s size range though.

I’ve also been working on one of my large photo collages of my cousin’s wedding. It’s something I usually do for my friends and family when they get married. Weddings are notoriously difficult to take photos of. There are lots of moving pieces and bad lighting situations to deal with. Pro wedding photographers use many pieces of equipment and expensive lenses to handle all the bad lighting. Plus they have to anticipate where to be and handle the wedding participants plus the wedding guests. It’s not an easy gig and not a business that I envy.

I’m good at making something from nothing though. That’s what artists generally do. I can make something nice out of a lot of crappy pictures as long as I use the good parts of the crappy photos. I’ve learned how to shoot an event not for any individual photos but for an overall feeling of the thing. It’s difficult to describe and not easy to do because I have to stop myself from worrying about capturing that “One image” as I shoot. I leave that “One image” to the pros.

I’m having a particularly difficult time with this photo. Usually when I make one of these collages I have a few central images that I work around. This time I really didn’t have any. Due to odd weather related circumstances I could barely shoot the actual ceremony. Then the hall that the reception was in was large, cavernous, and dark. Plus they turned the lights nearly off when the dancing began. Pretty typical. Shooting weddings ain’t easy. That’s for sure.

I’ve gone about making this collage differently than my other ones. Since I had no large central images to build around I picked at the edges instead. I’m not sure exactly how it worked and it took a long time to do. It was sort of like how you do a puzzle by putting together the edge pieces first but not really. It was a struggle to surround an idea that wasn’t there yet. I had to keep on believing that I could pull it all together. Good thing I did.

I still need to buy some canvas for those stretchers I bought back in the beginning of the summer. I worked on a couple of smaller canvases this summer but never finished the one that is still on my easel. I don’t know why but I lot interest in it half way through. I might still finish it someday. We’ll see.

I did finish a bunch of prints a few weeks ago. I drew some interesting drawings of faces about two years ago that I never did much with. I couldn’t find anyway to add color to them that interested me. All my usual methods bored me with those faces. Totally unrelated to that search I recently was working on a Photoshop filter recipe to manipulate and make something interesting out of low-res photos that I found on the web. One day for no particular reason I decides to run that filter recipe on my drawing of faces. The faces were colored in my usual way that bored me but the photo manipulation of them totally changed their character. I liked them. I ended up digging out about three of those old faces to color and run the filter recipe on and made some new prints. It was nice to be able to finally make something I liked out of those drawings.

So I guess that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m sure there are some other things too but I went with whatever came to mind. And the mind is a tricky thing.

It’s the new fall TV season and lots of old TV shows are back plus some new ones have arrived. I don’t have much to say about it as the returning ones I usually watch are pretty much the same and none of the new ones have really caught my eye. I did notice one strange little trend though that harkens back to old fashioned TV.

In the old days of television there was no real meta-story unless the show in question was a soap opera. For example in “The Rockford Files” the lead character, Jim Rockford, didn’t have a story arc. He just solved cases every week. Girlfriends came and went with each episode and were rarely mentioned again. Jim was always single and thus able to has new love interests whenever the writers wanted him to. Things were unchanging and each episode was self contained. That’s not the way things are anymore.

Most new shows have a meta-story. That’s a story that goes on all season even if it’s not the main focus of each show. Two shows I watch are “The Mentalist” and “Castle”. Both are police police shows where the main characters track down bad guys every week. Each also has a meta-story that is dealt with every so often but isn’t the reason for the show. In “The Mentalist” the main character is a police consultant but he also is hunting down a serial killer names Red John who killed his wife and child. In “Castle” the main police detective has been hunting her mother’s killer for years. There is some vast conspiracy behind it.

Neither of those meta-stories is usually on the front burner for many episodes. There have been other shows where the meta-story is a lot more prominent. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” comes to mind. That was one of the first shows to embrace comic book style continuity, build a whole “Universe”, and have a season long story arc. “Buffy” coined the phrase “Big Bad” to describe whatever super-powerful villain was gunning for them that season. “Supernatural” is a current show that follows that formula pretty well. It’s a show I watch and they mix up and use a lot of imagination in their “Big Bads”. As you might imagine it’s hard to escalate the threat level every season on a show and it can get repetitive. Not every show doesthat well.

“Veronica Mars” was a show that I liked and recently watched for a second time. It wasn’t a show that had a, now traditional, Big Bad but instead had an overall big season long mystery story going on as Veronica solved smaller mysteries from week to week. I thought it was well done but in the show’s third, and last, season they changed things from one season long story arc to three third of a season story arcs. I read this was done to make the show easier to follow and garner more ratings. I never thought the show was very hard to follow to begin with and it didn’t succeed in getting more ratings. It was a nice change of pace though. I don’t think the change hurt things.

Often these shows with meta-stories like season ending cliff hangers. Not all of them. Sometimes shows wrap up that season’s Big Bad storyline in the last episode of the season and sometimes they leave you with a “To be continued” and you have to wait until next season starts to see the conclusion. Often the cliff hanger is after that season’s Big Bad is defeated and they give you an “Everything you know has changed” cliffhanger that leads into next season’s meta-story.

So that’s the state of things in today’s meta-story TV world. So what is the small trend I noticed? Well, since it was only in two shows I watch it’s really small but it still made me laugh. It’s kind of a variation on the old “Everything is back to normal at the end of the episode” routine. In the old days before meta-stories a show occasionally liked to hit viewers with a super dramatic “Everything has changed” moment to make things exciting. Except by the end of the show the status quo was back. I’d give examples but I really don’t remember any. I used to hate it when the writers pulled that cheap stunt.

The funny thing is that a similar cheap stunt was pulled on both “Castle” and “The Mentalist” and I didn’t mind at all. I was happy to get back to the status quo because the meta-stories aren’t that important in either of those shows.

In “Castle” they had a cliff hanger at the end of last season. The main detective and Castle’s partner got shot in the chest by a sniper by someone who didn’t want her investigating her mother’s murder. The new season opened with her being rushed to the hospital and saved. They then flash forward a few months and she’s recovered and things go back to normal. It was, bam, she’s shot in the chest and then, bam, everything is back the way it was. It made me laugh. Nowadays a lot of TV shows would drag that story out for half a season but it was over and done with in half an hour on “Castle”. Don’t get me wrong I’m glad they didn’t drag out that storyline but I do find it funny. I mean why did they bother?

Nearly the same thing happened in “The Mentalist”. The cliff hanger at the end of last season was that The Mentalist character thinks he has found Red John, shoots Red John while at the mall, and waits for the cops to come take him away. Pretty strong cliff hanger but everything was resolved within the first episode of the new season. Y’see The Mentalist uses his detective skills to track down Red John’s wife/partner in crime and finds their next victim still alive. He then goes on trial where he acts as his own defense lawyer and is found not guilty of Red John’s murder even though he killed him. And, of course, it wasn’t really Red John that he killed but some other serial killer. All that in a hour. For most shows these days that would be a season and the cliff hanger would be the verdict. But they wanted the status quo back so they made it happen. Once again, I didn’t mind but it did make me laugh.

So TV is back for fall season and that is about the only thought I have on it. Well I did watch one episode of “Terra Nova”. It had strong family values and violence against dinosaurs. It seems to be going for mainstream appeal but it was pretty well done. I’ll watch some more of it. Probably until it gets too mainstream for me. I like a little edge to my TV. So what are you watching?

I’ve been a bit of a junkie lately. A pre-code junkie. I’ve been going a little crazy buying hardcover reprints of early 1950’s “Atlas” comics. That’s the name Marvel Comics had at the time. They changed over to “Marvel” in the 1960s. It’s an era of comics that I’ve had very little familiarity with until recently. I can trace my interest in those comics to two specific things. The first is the book “Ten Cent Plague” and the second was “The Steve Ditko Archives: Volume One”.

“Ten Cent Plague” is a book that tells the story of comics in the 1950s and how they became the object of a morality crusade. The persecution went all the way to the U.S. Congress. It was bad. Basically if you were involved with making comics back then you didn’t admit it. People who made comics were seen as one step above child molesters. Lives and careers were ruined. The book ends with a long list of artists and writers who never worked in comics again. It’s a sad story for those of us who love comics.

“The Steve Ditko Archives: Volume One” was my first chance to read non-EC Comics (EC Comics are the most famous comics of the 1950s with names like “Tales From the Crypt” that we all recognize from their influence on TV and the movies) from the early 1950’s. By the time 1954 rolled around comics in the U.S. were self-censored by an industry body called the Comics Code Authority. All comics had to be safe for children. It didn’t matter that many were being written for and sold to adults. Since the Steve Ditko stories were before the comic code (Pre-Code) they were uncensored. Not that they were racy, gory, or anything we would think of today as overly adult but they were different from censored comics. I found them the be fascinating from a creative and historical point of view. But they were also Ditko, one of the best comics creators around, so I didn’t think to be interested in comics from other creators from that time. Of course I didn’t know a lot of them either.

That all changed when I decided to read “Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era – Strange Tales: Volume Two”. That book has been sitting on my shelf, unread, for about two years before I picked it up a couple of weeks ago. And I couldn’t put it down. It was filled with stories that were made by uncensored minds. There didn’t have to be happy endings, good didn’t always triumph over evil, sometimes good wasn’t even around, and death could lurk around any corner. There is a freedom to the stories that wasn’t around post-censorship. They weren’t all great stories but some were. And they were all different than the censored eight page horror stories I was used to.

I found it interesting that there were so many good cartoonists in this early 1950’s work. It makes sense. Sure there were some talented, famous guys just starting out. Guys like John Romita and Gene Day who later went on to become well known but there were a lot of others who were the ones mentioned in “Ten Cent Plague”. Guys who never worked in comics again. But they had been working in comics for a while. American comic books were invented in the late 1930’s so by the early 1950’s they were well established and some artists had been working in comics for five or ten years. They were talented veterans exploring new story ideas and growing up with the medium. Until censorship killed it all.

I had known that Marvel was collecting “Atlas Era” stuff in their “Masterworks” line but wasn’t paying much attention to it. I bought a couple of volumes of “Tales of Suspense” and “Tales to Astonish” that are filled with familiar names, Kirby, Ditko, Ayers, Sinnott, and Heck but those “Atlas Era” books are from the late 1950s and are Post-Code. They’re creative and enjoyable but nothing like the Pre-Code comics. I only bought the Pre-Code “Strange Tales” book back in 2009 because it was on sale for cheap. I didn’t even realize that is was a Pre-Code collection. Now I hopped online to see what other pre-code collections were out there.

One thing I’ve learned from collecting hard cover reprint collections over the past few years is that the ones that go out of print can rise in price quickly. Or they can linger in print for years. You never know. I find Amazon the easiest way to tell if a book is still in print because if it’s not then they only have used copies. Or other merchants who sell through Amazon have used copies I should say. I found about five volumes that were out of print already. Prices had started to rise on some of them but I still found copies at decent prices. Only one was above the fifty dollar mark and being that the original retail price was sixty dollars I don’t think that qualifies as real expensive just yet. They must have printed more copies of the earliest volumes because I found copies of a couple of the earliest ones at twenty five bucks a piece. All told my spending spree over two weeks was about a hundred and fifty dollars. That’s a lot of money for me so I must have had the fever.

I am thoroughly enjoying all the books I’ve read so far. Each one also comes with a nice historical introduction by a guy who has made a specialty out of studying the history of the era. Since comics didn’t usually have credits in those days he does his best to identify the creators involved. Plus he gives us what background he knows on who they were, what work they did, and what work they went on to do. As a fan of both history and comics I find it all fascinating.

Unfortunately, like in the stories, there is sudden death among the 1950s creators too. One of the main, and most talented, artists of the Atlas Era was a man named Joe Maneely. I had only seen a few of his stories before this, mostly westerns, and was not familiar with the breadth and scope of his work. It’s really good stuff. He was a talented and prolific artist who was a favorite of editor Stan Lee’s. In reading about the history of the era I found the reason I’m not too familiar with Maneely’s work was that he died young. It was in the late 1950’s and he was only 32. I read up on the internet about him and found he died by falling between NJ Transit train cars on his way home one night. No one really knows how or why he fell since he was by himself but I guess that’s why they have those “Don’t Ride Between Cars” signs on trains. You really could fall. It makes me a little sad and pensive to discover the work of a man only to discover he died so young and so long ago. But then again I’m happy to have discovered it at all.

A handful of shiny beads. That’s what’s entertaining me tonight. Not really but that’s how I sometimes think of my dice collection as I’m rolling a few of them around in my hand. It’s not even fair to call it a dice “Collection”. I once heard a friend accuse a second friend of not having a comic book collection but a comic book accumulation. Or it may have been baseball cards or sports magazines. It was so long ago that I can’t remember which. Anyway what first friend was saying was that the second friend’s stuff had no order to it. There was no rhyme or reason to what he collected besides what he could get his hands on cheaply. The accumulator would just drag stuff home and put it in a pile. The stuff didn’t matter to him accept that he had possession of it.

My dice collection is kind of a dice accumulation. Back in the early 1990s when I was first starting to work on a photography style to call my own I decided I wanted to take some still lives of various little tiny colorful stuff. Small toys, marbles, toy cars, and dice were among the things I gathered. I’ve always been a fan of dice. I have no interest in gambling with them but I like dice as objects. I have an affinity for math and dice are very mathematical. They’re a nice square shape and if you toss them a random number from one to six will appear. I’ve always liked them on that basic level.

So in those days I used to work in Midtown Manhattan. There was a store a short walk away called The Complete Strategist. It was a gaming store that sold everything from Backgammon to Monopoly to Dungeons and Dragons. If it was a game that wasn’t a video game you could buy it there. As a bunch of my coworkers were gamers we often used to kill a lunch hour by walking over to the Strategist, as we called it for short, and check out the gaming stuff. We used to buy our Magic the Gathering cards there when we were into that game back in 1994. But before then it was dice. Since dice are an integral part of many a game the store had a lot of different varieties of them. They, of course, had ten-sided, twenty-sided, and all the other varieties of role playing game dice but it was really the regular old six sided dice that I liked best.

I ended up buying a lot of six sided dice over about a six month period. All sorts of colors. Solid, speckled, translucent, I bought them all. I wanted variety. I must have ended up with about one hundred to one hundred fifty six sided dice. I used them in my still life photos (which were pretty mediocre) and then put them in a box and put the box on a shelf. Over the years I’d pull the box off the shelf every now and then to look at the dice. I’d never do much with them because what is there to do with a hundred dice but I’d enjoy looking at them for a moment.

The only other time I bought dice was in 2002 when the Heroclix game came out. That was another thing we would do to pass a lunchtime. Play some Clix. For some reason since it was a new game I wanted some fancy new dice to go along with it. I ended up getting about twelve new dice. Even though the game only calls for a pair of dice I went overboard just because it was an excuse to get new dice. Now that I think of it in 1995 I did buy a game called “Dragon Dice” that I still have the dice from. That was a collectable dice game made of various-sided specialty dice that represented Dwarves, Elves, Goblins, and other monsters. Since they’re their own game I don’t really count them as part of my dice collection but they certainly are part of the dice accumulation.

All of this comes up because recently I’ve pulled the dice off the shelf so my seven year old nephew and I can play with them. We don’t even play real dice games but we do roll them. We also see how high we can stack them, build things out of them, put them in color order, or just line them up in shapes. With some imagination dice can be fun toys. For my birthday my nephew even got me a Chessex “Pound of dice” pack. I put it on my Amazon wish list knowing that he’d probably want to get it for me. I always wanted to buy one myself but could quite bring myself too. The pound of dice is exactly what It sounds like. For about twenty bucks you can buy a bag of around a hundred dice of random and various colors. Some are factory seconds but that’s okay. After getting that pound of six-sided dice I was inspired to buy a pound bag of the multi-sided gaming dice. So I did. Now I’ve got a lot of dice.

Soon after I got those new dice I knew I didn’t just want to stick them back on the shelf. I had gotten to enjoy looking at them and rolling them around in my hand. I find they ease my eye strain that comes from drawing or starring at the computer screen all day. Maybe it’s their color or three-dimensionality but they’re quite soothing to look at. Being me I had to come up with some sort of easy way to store them that also made them easy to look at. I didn’t want to line them up by color and put them back in their box. That was boring, cumbersome, and didn’t encourage me to pick them up.

I went to my local supermarket to scout out some storage boxes. I wanted the box to be clear and rectangular. On my first trip to the store I got nothing. Then I noticed something. The rectangular cardboard box I already had was bad for rummaging through. Since the dice were rectangles and so was the box the dice would fit in snuggly and were hard to pick up. This made me decide to pick up a clear rectangle-ish Rubermaid container that had round corners. I got it home, put it next to my recliner and dumped the dice into it. Beautiful. The dice are easy to see and rummage through.

Of course that wasn’t enough though. I now wanted to separate the various types of dice. I went back to the store and got some small containers. They were about a cup or cup and a half in size but they ended up being too big. But the Rubermaid pack I bought came with little five ounce containers too. I thought they’d be too small but they turned out to be the perfect size. I even went back to get more of the five ounce ones. I now have seven of the five ounce containers sitting inside the bigger thirteen by nine inch container. The small containers take up less than half the space. Each of the seven containers is dedicated to a particular type of die (twenty-sided, ten-sided, twelve-sided, etc.) with the six-sided dice in the main container. It’s a system that satisfies me.

So after all these years I finally found a way to appreciate my dice. As I sit in my chair I reach down, pick out some colors, and contemplate the universe. Or at least clear my mind a little. I’ve even learned a few new dice games. Farkle anyone?

The biggest danger I worry about when I’m out riding my bicycle is cars. They’re big, they go really fast, and they often have drivers who don’t pay as much attention as they should. The place I most worry about cars are is at intersections. On the open road a car that is coming up behind me seems to always see me. I guess it’s hard to miss a cyclist when he’s right in front of you but at an intersection it’s a whole different story. I’ve heard it said that when on a bicycle treat all stop signs like yield signs and treat all stop lights like stop signs. That’s a good recipe for survival. You just don’t want to be hanging out at the crossroads for too long when on a bicycle.

I think I’ve been in the most danger from cars as I approach cross streets. Cars will be sitting there waiting to pull out and sometimes they pull out nearly into me. Usually it’s one of three scenarios. The first is that I’m riding up the street and a car is on the cross street on my right waiting to pull out. The driver is looking to his right, away from me, and is waiting for traffic to clear. He hasn’t looked left in a while as the traffic to his right has got his attention. As that traffic to his right clears he just starts to pull out without ever looking left again. That’s when I almost get run into as I’m coming from his left. I can sometimes tell when this is going to happen as I approach the car and the driver just isn’t looking my way for a long time. I say, “Look back at me. Look back at me. Look back at me.” in my head and slow down as I approach. I’ve never actually been hit but there have been close calls.

The second scenario is when a driver dismisses you as a danger. It’s usually the same cross street scenario except this time the driver will look right at me and then cut me off. By the look in said driver’s eyes I think they look through me. I’ve even had some look at me and then through me as they pull out. I think what they are doing is looking for danger, being distracted by the bigger danger posed by other cars, and than not even seeing me as I was dismissed as not being a danger to them. And then I get cut off and nearly ride into the side of their cars.

The third scenario I can think of happened to me just a couple of weeks ago. I was riding along on the far right side of the road coming up to an intersection with a traffic light. It was a green light that seemed a bit stale. The car coming up behind me must have thought so too because he sped up and then made a right in front of me. He nearly clipped my front wheel and/or made me ride into the side of him. Only slamming on my brakes saved me from a collision. I just wanted to throw rocks at his car. I mean why would anyone do that?

This all comes to mind tonight because I was, once again, nearly run over by a car. Except this time I was on foot! I was walking on the sidewalk down my usual route on a local road. I like this walk because it’s a nice wide road with nice wide sidewalks. Very little danger. Lots of room for everyone. Except tonight. It was like scenario one on the bike. I was walking on the side walk and there was a car up ahead of me waiting to pull out of a pizza place. Not an uncommon occurrence. As I walked in front of the car, on the sidewalk, he pulled out into me. I put my arms out onto the hood of the car and rolled off unhurt as he stopped but I couldn’t believe it. The driver just never saw me. By the look on his face he was more stunned than I was. I was okay so I sent him on his way but come on, look where you’re driving before you drive there. I should have been paying more attention too and will in the future. Usually in that situation the driver and I make eye contact and he acknowledges that I’m walking in from of him. Or I walk behind the car. In the future if neither of those happens I’m not going.

Something like that happened to me years ago on the streets of Manhattan. I was heading down to work one morning walking down Park Avenue from Grand Central Station to Twenty Eighth Street. Somewhere along that way I was stopped while waiting for the lights to change. The light went green and I started to cross the street. It was then that a driver, obviously not used to driving in NYC, thought she had edged too far into the intersection. When the light turned red in front of her she decided to back up into the crosswalk. The cross walk I was walking in. Do you want some advice? Don’t ever back up into a crosswalk! Once again I spun around, put both hands on the car, and jumped back. I was unhurt but, damn, that’s a bit unsettling.

Oddly enough the last time I got hurt on my bicycle involved nothing but my own bad luck and misjudgments. And it happened in my own driveway. As I was coming home after a ride there was a newspaper in my driveway. My driveway is a steep hill and the paper was in the middle of the hill. Usually in this situation I’ll stop at the top of the hill, walk my bike down, and pick up the paper. Alternately I’ll stop at the bottom of the hill and walk up to the paper. It’s not a long driveway. For some reason on that day I decided to stop my bike in the middle of the hill. I didn’t even stop all the way when I started to dismount and my weight shifted too far forward. I went flying over the handle bars and landed on my left hand and then my shoulder and head. It was a good thing I wear a helmet. I immediately checked for bones sticking out and there were none. I also checked to see it my arm had its full range of motion and it did. Then my elbow swelled up and was out of commission for a few weeks. The feeling of stupidity as I rolled around my driveway with my arm in pain was pretty intense too. I can injure myself all on my own I don’t need help from other stupid people. If only the cars on the road knew that.