Radiant Comics

I picked up a book recently, “Cover Run: The DC Comics Art of Adam Hughes”. I’ve never been a huge fan of Adam Hughes’ work but I generally like it when I see it. Since he mostly draws comic book covers for comics that I don’t read I haven’t seen a lot of his art. So almost all of the work collected in this volume is new to me.

So why did I pick this up? Mostly because I’ve had a minor interest in “Pin-up” art for the last couple of years. A lot of my own art tends to run the gamut from intellectual to weird. Sometimes I think my work has a tendency towards a cold impenetrableness so I like to work some sexiness into it. People relate to sexiness. It can humanize things.

It was a couple of years ago that I discovered a book about the pin-up art of Dan DeCarlo. He’s the guy who created the Archie Comics style and drew the Riverdale crowd for years. He also did a lot of cheese cake cartoon pin-up art back in the 50’s or so. I really like Decarlo’s pin-up art. It’s good stuff. It inspired me to try some cartoony pin-up art and infuse a little cuteness into things.

Another book I got recently is also about cartoon pin-up art from sometime in the 50’s. This time the art was buy the creator of “Plastic Man” Jack Cole. Once again really nice work that I enjoyed looking at and learning from.

So that brought me to this Adam Hughes book. Hughes is more of a classic “Good girl” style illustrator where Cole and DeCarlo are more cartoonists. I generally prefer the more cartoony approach but I was interested in giving Hughes’ work a good look. I’m glad I did because I really liked this book. And I liked it as much for the writing as for the art.

Hughes wrote the book himself and with each full page cover that we are presented with we get his insights into what he was thinking while he was working on the cover. Plus some pencils sketches to go along with things. I found this an especially interesting look into the mind of a self taught artist.

As an art school educated artist it made me realize how hard it is, even as naturally gifted as Hughes clearly is, to learn art/illustration on your own. There are things he mentions it taking him a long time to figure out that they teach you in the first year of art school. Plus there are tools. In art school you spend a lot of time learning a lot of tools. Without art school how do you even know such tools exist? You don’t unless a colleague shows them to you and explains how to use them. Hughes has an appetite for learning new things and so was always on the lookout for people to show him stuff. Luckily for him people did.

Hughes is also one of these talented artists who is insecure about his work, tends to put it down at times, and can be his own worse critic. I’ve always been suspicious about that attitude and have always suspected it was schtick to get attention. Except that every talented artist I have ever met who has had such insecurity was not faking it. They were genuinely insecure. As a matter of fact pointing out the flaws in your own work is a pretty bad technique for getting attention. Yet I still suspect people of faking insecurity. Tells you how suspicious of the world I am.

An observation about self taught artists/illustartors that I’ve noted before is also evident in Hughes work. The hardest part of teaching yourself how to make a picture teaching yourself color. Not that Hughes’ color is bad or anything it’s just limited. That might also be part of the limitation of representative illustrative color but it’s also because color can be complicated. Most self taught artists learn a few basics about color (analogous, compliments and such) and stick with them but mostly keep things monochromatic. Hughes mostly does that but makes up for things with well done tones. There is nothing wrong with his color he just uses a lot of the same simple solutions that other illustrators use. This could also have to do with time and money.

I would have liked to have seen some of Hughes’ photo reference reproduced in this book but none was. Some comic artists use photo reference badly but Hughes uses it well. He’s no slave to a photo but mines it for its information. I would have liked to have seen that part of the process but the first rule of photo reference is don’t let the audience see your photo reference. It can mess up how they see the final picture. It might not but why take the chance? Most artists have no problem showing a fellow artist their photo reference but keep it from the public at large.

One more thing I noticed about Hughes’ artwork. Almost all of his women have narrow hips and small behinds. That’s unusual for cheesecake and super heroine drawing. I guess it’s what he prefers but I found it a little odd at times. Especially since the small hips are always toped off by giant boobs and lots of cleavage. Just a style thing that struck me.

After reading the Adam Hughes book I picked up “52 – The Covers” featuring the art of J.G. Jones because I was on an “Art of..” book roll. This volume features the 52 covers that Jones and colorist Alex Sinclair did. They had to make one cover a week for a year for the DC Comic series “52” that came out a few years ago.

I wouldn’t put Jones in the same class ad Hughes but he’s good. I liked the thumbnail sketches of the covers they presented and Jones’ notes. He really didn’t go into his process of drawing but wrote of the ideas behind the covers. Since these were almost all classic type comic book covers rather than bland modern ones with characters just standing around they each had a story to tell. Jones told us the story behind the story. A nice book overall.

Now I need to find some more comic book cover books. They’re fun.

I should be a millionaire. I really should be. That way I could buy all the gadgets and gizmos that my heart desired. I think I could buy love too despite all the poets, song writers, and romantics telling me I wouldn’t be able to. Most of them were poor anyway and sound like they’re talking about sour grapes.

Anyway this all has to do with the latest iPod model I’ve been reading about. It’s still just a rumored model and plenty of those Apple rumors never come true but it’s about time that they updated their iPod touch. The rumor says that the new one, coming in September, will finally have a still/video camera and will be able to do video chat over Wifi. Sound like fun.

I have no great need for an iPod touch camera. Not for taking pictures or video chating with but my old, first generation, iPod touch is just about out of room on its hard drive. I, of course, could have filled the hard drive up immediately with music but that wasn’t the point for me. I wanted it not only as an iPod but also as a portable way to carry all of the photos and videos that I shoot. Something I could keep with me at all times. Or at least most times.

I like the idea of pulling out my iPod at a party and showing a picture to someone who happens to ask if I remember so and so. That’s why I digitized all my snapshots. I used to have to say that I had a picture of so and so back home and the person I was talking to never got to see it. Now it’s, “Excuse me while I whip this out”.

I might not get a new iPod because I also want an iPad. The iPad with its much larger screen would be a whole lot better for viewing photos on. I wouldn’t be able to put it in my pocket and go to a gathering though. I’d have to have a bag with me. That might not be much of a problem since I often carry a bag to parties with my camera in it. I could stick the iPad in that.

Another thing I want the iPad for is viewing photos on my own. I have taken a lot of photos. I also make art out my photos. I cut them up and paste them down in ways that suit me. I used to have a box full of photos that weren’t good enough to make it into any kind of album but I’d mine these rejects for small parts of them I liked. I’d incorporate those small bits into a larger photo. That’s how I use photos.

It was easy to look through a box of pictures. Pick them up and look. Then came the digital age. For nearly ten years I’ve had no physical photos to looks through and I’ve never been happy with photo organizing/browzing software. First off I don’t need a program to organize my photos. I do that myself with folder at the OS level. And I find browsing through them in one of these programs to be tedious and hard. I’m not quite sure why but it’s a far cry from browsing through a box of photos. This is what I’m hoping the iPad would be good at. Browsing photos. That would be its number one use for me. A tool to easily let me see my digital photos. I haven’t really checked it out yet though.

Now throw in the fact that I want to replace my long in the tooth digital camera and I really need to be a millionaire to afford all the new gadgets that I want. I’ve been following my “Take pictures with whatever you’ve got” motto but I have camera envy for a lot of these new models. They all have more megapixels and better lenses than mine. Plus they all start up, shoot, save, and zoom faster than my five year old one. Maybe by Halloween.

I’ve told this story before but I’ve never written it down. So now I will. It’s the story of my socks. Y’see, unlike the rest of the world, I wear two different colored socks. Usually nobody notices such a thing in the wintertime but in the summer, when I were shorts, it tends to stand out as I seem to be the only one doing it. There is no real reason to have the same color sock on each foot but everybody does. It’s not even thought about. Unless someone happens to notice my mismatched ones. Then they say, “Your socks don’t match”. Like that is a surprise to me.

It was late summer in 1988. My last semester in college. Like most college students I didn’t like to do laundry because it meant a couple of hours sitting in a laundry room being bored. Who wants that? So I, like a lot of college students, had a large supply of socks and underwear. About a month’s worth was probably average for a college student. That way you wouldn’t have to do laundry for at least three weeks.

Being a morning person and not a drinker I used to do my laundry on Sunday mornings. I had the run of the laundry room because nobody else was up and around that early. Plus there was no fun to be had at that hour so I didn’t have to miss out on anything to do laundry.

So there I was one Sunday morning. I had just finished washing and drying my clothes and was in the middle of folding them. I had folded most of them and was left with a basket full of socks. A month’s worth of socks is sixty of them and I thought to myself that I could spend the next ten minutes matching and folding socks or I could just not care if my socks matched. I chose the “Just not care if my socks matched” option.

Most of my socks at the time were tube socks. You know, the white ones with colored stripes on the calf. So really the only thing not matching was the colored stripes. I guess they were the training wheels of wearing mismatched socks.

After college I started getting solid color socks. I preferred bright colors because if I was going to mismatch my socks I might as well be obvious about it. Wearing a black and a dark blue sock would make people think that I mismatched them by accident and that was not what I wanted. People feel sorry for you when you mismatch your socks by accident. Who needs their pity?

I went with the bright colors for years. I liked them. After I did laundry they all went into one big pile in my drawer and on any given morning I’d pick the two colors I felt like wearing. It was a system that worked for me. Sometime in the late 1990’s solid, brightly colored socks became hard to find. I don’t know why. Some fancy of fashion I suppose. But that lead me to switching over to wearing one black and one white sock. One strange day that prompted a teenager in a schoolyard I was passing through to yell, “Black and white always look good together”.

My next change in sock color came with a change in wardrobe color. It was sometime in the early 2000’s when I just couldn’t stand to wear any color but green. Red bothered me, blue bothered me, yellow bothered me, purple bothered me, white bothered me, it all bothered me and I have no idea why. I could take some black so I switched my whole wardrobe over to just green and black. Therefore I wore one green sock and one black sock. At some point I even had a hard time finding green socks so I dyed some white socks green. That’s the only time in my life I’ve ever dyed anything.

After about five years of green and black I started to be okay with wearing other colors again. Nowadays I’m back to a full spectrum wardrobe and my socks are back to one white one and one black one. That’s fine with me because black and white are the easiest colors to find men’s socks in. I don’t know what happened to the glory days of the early 90’s when brightly colored socks were easy to find but they are nowhere these days.

After nearly twenty two years of wearing mismatched socks they look completely normal to me. I accidentally wear matching socks about as often as someone else would accidentally wear mismatching ones and when I do it looks odd. I can’t see why both of my socks should be the same color.

People often react oddly to seeing me wear two different color socks. That’s because they have no idea why they wear matching ones. They wear matching ones because that’s what they were taught as children and that’s how the store sells them but it has never entered their mind to give a thought to why. It’s a strange thing. It’s society’s programing at its most basic level. As much variation as there may be in clothing everybody matches their socks. From punk rock to steam punk and from high fashion to low fashion there are matching socks.

So what conclusion have I come to after decades of wearing mismatched socks? Nothing profound really. People don’t want to think about socks at all. If my mismatched socks makes them think for a minute the only thing that comes to their mind is that I’m weird. Then they go right back to not caring about socks as long as they match.

I’ll admit it. I thought my printer woes were over. After all, back at the end of February I bought a brand new printer. A Canon Pro 9000 Mark II. I went away from Epson who made my last two printers because I wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the Epson I just got rid of. It mad nice prints but for the last couple of years was real twitchy and I ended up wasting a lot of my time and money to get it to make nice prints. Then it broke for good. So I got the Canon.

I can’t really say if the Canon makes better prints than the Epson. I’d have to run tests side by side to determine that but somehow I think the Epson prints were a little livelier. That could just be my imagination and I do like the way the Canon prints but on some level I must find them a little inferior. I’m not even sure why. Like I said it could all just be in my mind.

I’ve been perfectly content with the Canon for time I’ve had it. It’s worked well with no trouble or struggle to get it to print correctly as plagued my Epson near the end. It worked well enough so that I stopped thinking about it at all and used it as the tool it is. That’s until one recent Saturday when it stopped working at all.

I was printing out a proof of a print that I was coloring and the first time it printed fine. As I tried to print out a second proof something went wrong. It wouldn’t print a thing. I checked the little printer program that tells me what’s going on with it and it gave me a meaningless to me error number and told me to unplug the printer and call a service center. Unplug the printer? Was going to explode on me?

I tried turning the printer on and off, unplugging it, re-installing the printer drivers, and anything else I could think of. The printer did nothing but blink its orange light at me time after time and I kept getting that same error message. I’ve been using Epson printers since 1997. I can’t remember if I had two or three of them but in all the time I’ve owned them I’ve never had to call a service center. They always ran well or I fixed them up myself so they would run well again. But after a little research on the net I knew that the Canon was having a hardware problem. Nothing I could fix.

So I e-mailed customer service on a Saturday afternoon and they got back to me within the hour. Not bad. The guy asked me a couple of things and had me try a couple of things but they were to no avail. I guess this is a problem they are familiar with because they offered me an exchange for a refurbished one or I could take it to an authorized repair shop.

The nearest repair shop was too far away so I opted for the exchange. I had to jump through a couple of more hoops and e-mail them a copy of my receipt but by Sunday afternoon they said one would be UPSed to me on Monday. I was to put the broken one in the box the working one came in, affix the pre-paid UPS label, and drop the broken one off at a UPS drop point. Simple enough and it was in the end but not before one more little hassle.

On Monday instead of getting a notice that they shipped the printer I got an e-mail saying it was on back order. I found that a little annoying. Luckily on Tuesday I got another e-mail saying it was on its way by UPS Ground. That evening FedEx showed up at my door. Canon also sent me a set of inks for the printer. That was nice but I found it a little odd that the inks came second day air and the printer was coming by ground. After all the inks do me no good without the printer. They probably just came from different departments and warehouses though.

I had one small concern with the printer exchange. In every e-mail about swapping printers they said (in obviously cut and pasted instructions) I was to remove the print head, ink cartridges, power cord, and any paper trays and use them with the new printer. I was not to send them back with the broken printer. The problem was that when I turned my printer on it did nothing. The printer head and ink are supposed to move over to be removed only when you lift the ink cover and they shift themselves left. I lift my ink cover and nothing moves. How was I supposed to get the ink head and cartridges out? I figured I’d worry about that when the new printer arrived.

Like I said before, they obviously must have dealt with this particular problem before because when the printer arrived on Thursday, despite the cut and paste directions saying they wouldn’t be there, there was a new print head to be installed (the print head is replaceable on this model unlike my Epsons and is easily snapped into place) plus a complete set of inks. That made me happy.

In no time at all I was up and running again and happy to have a working printer. I use my printer a lot especially when drawing. I scan in a drawing, change its size, and then print it out in blue line so I can work on it some more. A printer makes things easier for me.

I hope this one lasts longer than the last one did but overall Canon did a nice job getting my problem sorted out quickly and I had the replacement printed five days after mine broke down. I’ll take that.

I wrote all that and then on Monday morning, four days after I got it, the replacement printer stopped working. It wouldn’t power up at all. I’d hit the power button and then the printer would flash its green light at me twice and turn off. This time they overnighted me a replacement printer. Hopefully this one will last a while.

Lately I’ve been watching the TV show “Friends”. It’s a show that I watched every week when it was on first run TV but I never watched it in syndication or in repeats. About five years ago I did run the whole series as I worked. I hesitate to say I “watched” it then because I really just listened to it as I was working. It didn’t get my whole attention but I enjoyed it as I remember.

So I’ve only seen the episodes twice at most and the last time was half a decade ago. That makes is fairly fresh to me as opposed to my favorite shows that I’ve seen many times. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” comes to mind as a favorite whose episodes I have watched at least three times a piece already. “Austin Stories” is a short lived series with only twelve episodes but I’ve seen those twelve at least a half dozen times since the show ran in 1997. I’ve seen all the episodes of “Lovejoy” a few times too. And though I haven’t watched it in years I used to watch “Seinfeld” in syndication all the time. “Friends” never qualified as a favorite by those standards but I liked it.

I was interested to see how “Friends” held up after all this time. I just finished watching the third season so this isn’t an analysis of the whole series but the show was on my mind tonight so I thought I’d write something down. What made it get on my mind was the fact that I thought the show had finally gotten good in the middle of season three.

I didn’t think the first two seasons of “Friends” were terrible or anything but I would describe them as too “Sit-commy” for my taste. I could see a lot of the jokes coming from a mile away. Not all of them, like on many sitcoms I don’t like, but probably about a third of the jokes were hammy sitcom jokes. There were good ones but plenty of cringe worthy jokes too.

So what changed? I mean besides the writers and actors doing a better job because they have some experience with the characters under their belts? That seems fairly obvious and is the overall driver of quality but I’m referring to a specific creative difference. I think that difference is the character of Ross (David Schwimmer) changing and getting wackier.

For the first two seasons Ross was the character who was level headed and couldn’t do much wrong. He wasn’t the funny one (Chandler), he wasn’t the dumb one (Joey), he wasn’t the spoiled one (Rachel), he wasn’t the neurotic one (Monica), and he wasn’t the flakey one (Phoebe). He was the boring one who things happened to. His wife turning out to be gay and having an unplanned child with her. Situations happened to him. He was his situation.

With the middle of season three Ross’ character starts to change. He starts to do wacky and unpredictable things. I remember at the end of the series that some people were complaining that Ross was too wacky and no longer realistic but I also remember him becoming my favorite character after being my least favorite one. I like wacky. Of course not having seen the series in ages I had forgotten that Ross’ character gets funnier as time passes.

Before seeing Ross’ change I was contemplating not watching the rest of the seasons. I kept watching only because I had nothing else I wanted to watch that would allow me to zone out and relax (I’m really better at doing stuff than relaxing) for twenty minutes or so (my attention span for TV is short) every now and again. But now that the show has stopped being too sit-commy for me I’m going to keep watching. I’m even a little excited to see the upcoming seasons now that I remember why I liked the show. It might not be a favorite but it’s a good laugh.