Radiant Comics

Lately, once again, I’ve been working on some comics. I haven’t completed anything in the area of comics that I would consider successful in a long time. I’ve worked on comics in fits and starts and completed a little thing here and there but nothing good enough to work on any further. Nothing has turned into anything real.

I’ve been working on paintings and prints but have been wanting to make a book of some sort. I like books. Sure I could fill a book with reproductions of my prints and paintings but that doesn’t really interest me. I need the book to say something more than, “Here is a bunch of stuff”. Hence I am lead to a favorite medium of mine: comics.

That is when I face the next problem. The same one I’ve faced for years: comics are a lot of work. Paintings, prints, and photos are also a lot of work but each takes less time to explore an idea that making comics does. A single painting can take me as much as 120 hours of work or I can do one in one in six hours. I can choose to explore many ideas quickly or one for a while. There can be variety in size and execution depending on what I decide I want the painting to be about. There is no such freedom with comics.

If I were to do a comic book by myself it would take me about ten to fifteen hours to complete one page. That is a long time. When you multiply that by the number of pages it would take to tell a story you can see why comics are a commercial art medium and very few artists do “art for art’s sake” choose comics as their means of expression. A standard twenty two page comic, which is a small amount of space in which to express ones self, would take a person (at my speed which I consider about average) every weekend for half a year to complete. That’s a lot of time and work. It’s also why I haven’t been interested in making comics for years now. Nobody is going to pay me to do it and it’s not worth my “art for art’s sake” time.

Writing-wise I can cover more topics and ideas in this blog than I can in a comic. That doesn’t mean I like blogs better than comics it just means that a comic is a whole lot of work and there are easier ways of expressing myself since this is not a commercial venture. Hell, over the years, a lot of cartoonists have discovered that it’s way easier to write a cartoon that to draw one so they hire out the drawing work and make more money with their time. Once again, it is a lot of work to draw a comic. There is a reason that the vast majority of amateur web comics are poorly drawn or cut and paste jobs. It cuts down on time and lots of web comics are all about the joke. Not the drawing.

But still I get ideas for comics that pass through my mind. I’ve been working some of them out on paper but I’m not there yet. The problem is that I am not interested in creating a narrative story that is standard for comics. Act one, act two, act three. It’s just too much work and I only have the narration to express myself. I find that too limiting. I want something new.

So I’ve been working on more of a “unified art theory” approach to the thing. Sounds good but I’m not quite sure what that means. And it’s my idea. I have been taking some of my drawings, paintings, and prints and tying them together into a single expression. Ha. Like that’s easy. Still, it allows me to try and make a book like I want and still not be tied to always drawing panels on a page with one directly following the next like unrelenting little soldiers. I have no idea how it will turn out or if I will ever finish it beyond a few pages in the concept stage but I’ll give it a try for a while. I like unified things. If only I knew what I was doing. Such is life.

I watched the movie “Vanilla Sky” the other night. I had seen it before (years ago) and was ambivalent about it. I didn’t remember the movie much except that it had some good stuff in it but I was disappointed by it. Not overly so but just a little. In watching it a second time all these years later I liked it much better. I think it falls into a category of movies that work better with the second viewing.

I believe the problem lies, with this particular movie, in the fact that halfway through a “mystery” is introduced. I put the word mystery in quotes because it is not a real mystery. In a real mystery you have a chance at solving it. A classic whodunnit story introduces a whole bunch of characters, reveals a crime, shows clues and red herrings, and then challenges the reader (or watcher) to figure out who done it. You have a chance to figure it out if you want to. I prefer to watch the mystery unfold than to try figure it out but in the bad ones I figure it out without even trying.

The problem with “Vanilla Sky” is that the mystery format is not really followed. Sure there are a couple of “clues” but those are not nearly enough to figure things out and the storytelling gets purposefully weird in the middle. All of this creates confusion. A good quarter of the film, near the end, is confusing and caused me to no longer be into the world of the film. At the end it is all explained and everything makes sense but it’s too late because my head is already elsewhere.

I liked it more this second time through. I remembered the reveal so everything that happened made sense. Even though the character (Tom Cruise) was confused I wasn’t anymore. It made for a better movie watching experience. I’m not sure what the movie makers could have done differently to make the first time viewing better. If this is the kind of story they wanted to tell it’s tough to do conventionally. I think some movies are just better the second time through. Knowing the reveal helps the viewer understand everything that is happening in the world. The problem is that most people will never watch a second time. It’s a movie making conundrum.

The second thought I have about a movie is, “Whatever happened to the movie ‘Diner’ (1982)”? All through the Eighties I couldn’t escape that film. It was on every critics “Top Films of Whatever” list and was always being referred to. It was “The Film That Defined a Generation” and the soundtrack was ubiquitous. I only realized recently that I haven’t heard it mentioned or read about it in maybe a decade. I just checked and it only rates a 7.1 (not bad, really) on the Internet Movie Database. What happened for that movie to fall so out of favor? I haven’t seen it since about 1984 or so and barely remember it but I remember being annoyed by its omnipresence for years. It was as culturally relevant, both critically and popularly, as “Pulp Fiction” (1994) was but “Pulp Fiction” shows no signs of going away. The world is a mystery.

One final thing. The movie “Reign of Fire” is really bad. Everything that is wrong with big Hollywood movies is in that film. It’s not even entertainingly bad. Stay away!

Being a computer user and my preference being an Apple computer I often check in with a website called Mac Daily News. It gathers all of the Apple related news into one place. A lot of the news is about those big old music companies trying to get some leverage on Apple’s iTunes music store so they can dictate to Apple how they want to do business. Like they do with brick and mortar CD stores.

The iTunes music store is set up so that the buyer doesn’t have to shell out for a whole album. Every song is sold for a dollar whether it’s good or bad. You can buy the whole album too for about ten bucks. This is a good deal if there are more than ten songs on the album. But the record companies hate it.

Record companies are used to charging a premium for a hit song. Let’s say you heard a great song on the radio. You used to have two choices to purchase it. Buy the album for $17.99 (before the internet and lawmakers made them lower their illegally inflated prices) or buy the CD single for 4.99 or so. Now you have the choice to buy that song for one dollar. Record companies hate that and I can see why. Clearly they make less money. But I can also see why people would love to pay one dollar for just the song they want.

Most music, according to the charts, is bought by kids and young adults. There are a lot of reasons for this, including the fact that most of the marketing dollars are aimed at them, but one of the reasons that I really hadn’t though about (before the notion popped into my head) was album fatigue.

On the Mac Daily News website it is always pointed out (by whoever is commenting on the news for that website) that the album is an artificial construct invented by the record companies to make more money. As I pointed out if you like a song you have to buy an album of songs to get it. The illusion of value exists because there are many songs on an album and per song it is cheaper than buying them all as $4.99 singles. But you’re buying them without ever hearing them. Maybe you’ll like them maybe you wont. Some musicians have embraced the concept of the album as a whole work (Pink Floyd) but for the vast majority they are a collection of nearly random songs.

I noticed as I grew older that when I would mention a new album by so and so more and more of my friends would turn their noses up and say something like, “Eh, I’m done with albums”. Often they would mention whole albums they bought where they only liked one song. I often put this down to them getting older and not as into music anymore. As a consequence they weren’t a choosy as they should have been and got some stinkers for albums. But now I’m rethinking that conclusion.

I did the math and stumbled onto the concept of “album fatigue”. Let’s run some numbers. For the sake of argument I’ll say that every album has ten songs. By the time a person reaches their twenty fourth year or so they probably have a hundred albums. That’s a thousand songs. Now I’ll break down how much someone likes their music collection. Ten percent great albums. They like eight out of ten songs the other two are just okay. Ten percent lousy albums. They like one song, four are just okay, and five suck. Forty percent good albums. They like four songs, four are just okay, and two suck. Forty percent mediocre albums. They like two songs, five are just okay, and three suck.

Those are just guesses based on my own experience but they leave us with this: out of a thousand songs: 330 songs they like, 420 songs that are just okay, 250 songs that suck. That is an overwhelming amount of mediocrity in a music collection. As a person gets older and has less time to listen to music that person has a one in three chance of hearing a song that they like when listening to their own record collection. It’s no wonder people stop buying albums and listening to music. You get to the point where so much dreck is accumulated that it’s not worth it to ever buy another album. I think this is what happens to people and why they are embracing the age of MP3s and buying just the songs they like. Why not just add the songs you like into the mix. It’s easy with MP3s.

I think the age of the record album is definitely over. The musicians and big music companies may not know it yet but it is. Album fatigue is almost everybody’s destiny.

Damn, my hands are burning. I must have little microscopic cuts or something on them that soap has gotten into. I was putting the plow blade on my John Deere riding mower since winter is coming and that involves tools and mucking around under the machine. I have a couple of obvious scrapped knuckles but I must have some unobvious abrasions too. It’s not really very painful. I just noticed it as I began to type. I don’t work too often with tools in such as manner so I have no idea how to avoid such burning hands.

But anyway… there are lot of things that I don’t know how to do. An air freshener almost outsmarted me this week. I’ve never used much air freshener and am not wise to their ways but I decided to try one out since I never liked the stale air of a closed up house in winter. I got one of those cheap cone shaped ones. I figured I’d start out with the dollar model and see if I liked it. It has a long cone of plastic on top and a short base. I sussed out to spin the cone but then nothing. It didn’t seem to open. There is a small hole on top and if you squeeze it some scent comes out but that hardly seemed to do much. I put it down, came back latter and managed to figure out to pull the cone upwards with quite a bit of force. I had tried this earlier but it didn’t budge. The stickiness of the gelatinous stuff inside keeps the cone in place and you have to break its seal before you can pull it up to open it. Now plenty of scent comes out and the room smells like a chemical toilet. I might go with the stale smell of winter.

I still have to do a bit more work with my hands tomorrow. I have to put the wheel weights and chains on the tires of my riding mower. Without them I won’t get much traction as I try and clear my driveway of snow. The wheel weights are cumbersome but not much of a problem to put on. The chains on the other hand… With the advent of snow tires and then all weather tires I don’t think most people have anything to do with tire chains anymore. That’s a good thing. They are a pain in the ass to put on. Maybe a pro working in a garage snaps them on real easily but I don’t. They have to be wrapped around the tire and then hooked on just right. There is no give in chain and if they’re too loose they’ll fall off with the first plow. That’s what happened to me last year. In the middle of clearing the driveway both tires had their chains fell off on me. I was so aggravated. Luckily my aggravation was relieved when I was able to put the chains back on quickly and easily. To this day that baffles me because they’ve never gone on quickly and easily before. I have no idea what I did right. Life is a mystery.

Computers are a mystery too. A few week ago I installed the new operating system, Leopard, on my laptop. About a week later my trackpad stopped working. I had no idea why and I tried everything I could think of to get it going. I restarted multiple times, ran disc utilities, repaired permissions, did a safe boot, booted it off of the original install disk, and even tried some trackpad software that is supposed to add extra functionality to it. Nothing worked. All my computer would tell me was that there was no trackpad installed. I tossed out the preference pane from the third party trackpad software but that didn’t deinstall the program. I know this because every time I emptied the trash it told me it couldn’t throw out the preference pain because it was still attached to something. This annoyed me for a couple of days before I tracked down the deinstaller and got rid of the program. Next restart the trackpad worked fine. Why? Who knows? Computers are a mystery.

It’s all a mystery. Isn’t it?

Whew, busy day getting mundane things done. Maybe not so much mundane as ordinary. First I had to clean up the leaves from around the yard. There are many ways to clean up leaves and the most popular one around here seems to be to pay a service to come and pick up all your leaves. I still do it the old fashioned way. I do it myself.

All the leaves still haven’t fallen from the trees, as they usually have by now, so I may have to do a little more of this. But what the hell, I wanted to get most of it done. With no leaf blower I use a rake. It’s much quieter and I listen to music on my headphones as I rake. The key to cleaning up so many leaves is not moving them too far. Or at least finding an easy method of moving them far.

There are also various methods of disposing of leaves. You can’t burn them in my populated suburb so nowadays most towns around here have leaf pickup. In my particular town you can bag your leaves in big old paper bags and then the town sends people around in a truck to pick them up and dispose of them. A couple of towns away they have a big vacuum truck that drives around and sucks up all the leaves that people have made into a big pile near the road in their front yards. They’re a rich town.

The tried and true method that I use, having learned it from my father, is to spread the leaves thinly all over the lawn and mow them into mulch. Since the leaves gather, or rather are blown by the wind, up against all the edges of the yard the chore is to get them all into the middle. That’s where the raking comes in. And the plastic tarp.

The best method for moving all those leaves is also one I learned from my dad when I was a kid. Place a piece of plastic, about ten foot by ten foot, on the ground and rake the nearby leaves onto the tarp. When it’s full just drag the leaves where ever you want them to go and dump them off. It’s so much easier than trying to move leaves across the yard by just rake power alone. The joy of tools. Even if just a piece of plastic sheeting.

So I raked, moved the leaves to the middle of the yard, and mowed and mowed and mowed. I was on the riding mower so that part wasn’t too bad but it’s a bit tricky mowing leaves. They pile up and clog the mower if you’re not careful. You have to be cautious and try to keep them as spread out as possible. There is not set pattern for this as there is with mowing grass. When I was done there were just tiny chopped up pieces left that will break down easier to feed the lawn. All in all it was a three hour process that left me really tired at the end. Where has my youth gone?

The second thing that I got done was a bookshelf. I’ve gotten a lot of books over the past year and I need a place to put them. They’re piling up all over the place and that’s not good. I decided to build a bookshelf to go on top of my dresser. Last weekend I went and got the lumber for it but hadn’t yet done anything with it. So I measured twice and cut once, stained the wood, and put together the pieces with screws. It’s still drying right now so it doesn’t have any books on it.

Bookshelves are actually fairly easy to build. They’re basic. I’m pretty handy and I have no trouble figuring out how to build them but no one is going to mistake me for a real craftsman. I just don’t have the patience for that. I want it up and holding books as quickly as possible so that I can go back to drawing, painting, or some such. It’s there that I’m a craftsman. I have boundless patience for that. Funny how life works.

So that’s how I spent my day after Thanksgiving. Getting a couple of chores done. I can’t wait to get those books up on the shelf because I want to go work out some ideas for a drawing or two. And the rest of you leaves: stay out of my yard!