Radiant Comics

As of this writing I’ve posted fifteen hundred comic strips of my “Four Talking Boxes” comic strip. I started posting them back on January first of 2010 and have been posting five of them a week ever since. That’s a solid amount of comic strips and has made me want to release them digitally as a sort-of comic book. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now but haven’t quite wanted to put all the work into making it happen. It’s a lot of work.

I actually figured out the format a couple of years ago. I post them on this site as a horizontal comic strip but I don’t like the way that looks on an iPad. Too much wasted space. But when I first came up with the idea for this comic I decided to make all four panels the same size so I could reformat the strip into a vertical rectangle. The first two panels would be on top and the final two on the bottom. Of course, that meant reformatting all the comics. Reformatting so many things means a lot more work.

Luckily for present me the past me figured out just what to do to reformat the horizontal strips to vertical and saved it all as an action (a macro) in Photoshop. That means all I have to do is open the horizontal strip in Photoshop, hit a button, watch as the action runs to reformat the strip, and then type the strip’s number on it (the one thing I couldn’t automate). I don’t even remember what all the steps in the formatting are so it’s a good thing it’s all saved for me. It still takes time to do all that but considerably less time than if most of it wasn’t automated.

What really takes a lot of time is proofreading the strips. It’s always tough to proofread yourself even though I do it a few times before I post the strip. First I write a strip, second I proofread it, third I proofread it a few weeks later when I make the art, and fourth I proofread it the day it posts on this site. You think that would be enough but it wasn’t. Especially for the early strips that I did back in 2010.

In the beginning of the strip I was still figuring things out. It took me a while to learn how I wanted to do my lettering. I use a font that my friend and comic book letterer Dave Sharpe made but how I wanted the balloons to look and the lettering to stack is what I had to figure out. That took time. There are certain things I needed to learn to get to look right. Since a word balloon is a horizontal ellipse I want the top and bottom sentences to be the shortest with the middle ones being the longest. This sounds easy enough but unless you’re really paying close attention it doesn’t happen. And I wasn’t paying close enough attention in the beginning. I get it right seventy five percent of the time but there was always a couple of balloons that were off per strip in my early ones.

It also took me a while to catch on the the fact that I didn’t want any dangling I’s. That’s when the capital letter I appears by itself at the end of a line. It doesn’t look right. It throws off the balance of a balloon. I’d heard of that before and knew I should get rid of them but it take a while to notice them in practice. Now I eliminate all dangling I’s as a matter of course but back in the first couple of hundred strips I had quite a few of them.

Reading the early comic strips was quite a chore in itself. The strip has always been about conversation but the conversation didn’t flow in the beginning like it does now. It’s just different. It took me a while to catch on to that and not let it bother me. I did end up changing a word or two here and there but nothing too drastic. Sometimes I saw a clumsy turn of phrase that I couldn’t let stand but most of the time things were okay.

After I had all the corrections made I had to remake all the files that I had made lone ago. I needed a new gif file for the website. As long as I was making these corrections I may as well post them in place of the old ones. Then I needed a tif file for the book that is going to be turned into a digital book. That’s the main one that I make the vertical jpeg and gif files from. Making the tif file took the longest as that is the one I use the reformatting action on. The other two types I easily make with another action that re-saves them in the jpeg or gif format.

Here is a tip for you. A Zippo lighter is good for holding down the return key. My “Four Talking Boxes” strip is initially made in Illustrator but all the reformatting of size is done in Photoshop. So I drop the files on the Photoshop icon but before Photoshop opens them I have to make sure the parameters are correct and hit the return key. That means I have to hit the return key for every file. If I’m opening twenty five of them at once I place the lighter on the return key and it holds it down for me and therefor presses return each time. Some low-tech automation for you.

It took a remarkably long time to get these done. I’m up to the first two hundred strips so far but I want to do another fifty more for the first issue. It took all of Saturday morning, about four hours, to get the first hundred finished. I had changes on nearly every single one go them. I expected to have changes on maybe ten to twenty percent of them, after all I had proofread them many times, but it ended up being more like ninety percent. That’s a bit underestimation of time. Ah well, no one else if gonna do it.

I’ve been working this week on some of my faux comic book covers. My “Covers to comics that don’t exist” series. I’ve got a bunch of different comics in that series with logos and trade dresses all set up for them. The Painted Lady, The Enigma Prism, The Bronzeman, and Fascist Planet are examples of my fake comics. Or maybe they’re hypothetical comics. The covers are real after all. This week I came up with another one and it came together in a different way than they normally do. What is the normal way you ask? The normal way is that I decide I want to create a new series name and logo and then that’s what I do. That’s pretty straight forward. Weirdly this one was not.

The new fake series I came up with is called “Love-Love”. I’m not sure the exact starting place for creating it but I remember wanting to work with something positive. A lot of my series are dark and strange so I wanted something more upbeat. Besides that general thought things started with my “Message Tee” comic strip. That’s the strip I run on Saturdays where a person is standing in T-Shirt that has a message on it. To do that strip I drew a lot of different characters in Tee-Shirts. I put the words onto the shirts with the computer so the drawings all have blank T-Shirts. I have about 150 nine by twelve inch ink drawings of people in T-Shirts. A few weeks ago I pulled a few of those drawings off my shelf to color them. It was something that struck my fancy at the time.

The first thing I knew I wanted to do was to put something on the shirts. I didn’t want them to be blank but I also didn’t want to be drawing a lot of words on them. Back in the 1990s I made a comic book called “Delia Charm” and she wore a shirt with the word “Love” on it. Since I was looking for something positive I thought that would do the trick. Typographically “Love” is an interesting word to deal with. It has two rectangular letters on either end with a eclipse and diagonal in the middle. It has to be balanced just right but it can be worked with. I did just that and then grabbed my markers to color the now “Love” clad person. Things went well and I colored a few drawings. I liked them. Then I stopped.

Another thing I’ve been working on lately is my “Painted Lady” faux comic book covers. I made a few of these but was tired of doing them. I wanted to make some more covers but had nothing in mind for what I wanted to do. I wanted something positive with some sort of mass appeal to it rather than my usual weird quirkiness so I cast my mind about for what interested me. I though of my punk rock romance comic cover from this summer but those are a lot of work. They take days. I wanted something quicker and that’s when I thought of those “Love” shirt drawings. They were positive and I thought I could make them into a romance comic cover. A nice single figure cover. But what to call the comic?

As simple as the name “Love-Love” is it took me a while to come up with it. Names can be tricky. It took me even longer to make the logo. Though the logo looks simple it took me the better part of a day to do it. I’d say six hours. Simple is often deceptively hard. A lot of comic book logos these days are really just a word in a computer font and that’s exactly what I didn’t want. I made the logo on the computer and started with a font but wanted to end up with something that was more than just the word “Love” in a display font.

My initial idea was to have the word “Love” twice with both of them tilted towards the hyphen in the middle. The left “Love” skewed to the right and the right “Love” skewed to the left. It sounded like a good idea but turned out to be impossible to do. It’s all because of the shape of the letters. The first “Love” was actually easy. It tilted to the right with barely a hitch. I even curved the bottom of the “L” to match the curve of the “O”. But when I tried to tilt the second “Love” to the left things didn’t go well. It’s all about the spacing.

Initially I tried to get the angle things tilted left to be the same number of degrees when tilted right. This opened up way too much distance between the “V” and the “O”. Y’see the “V” is symmetrical but none of the other letters are. So as the angles of the “O” and “E” changed around it the “V” remained the same. It was now too far from the top of the “O” and the bottom of the “E”. I messed around with those angles for a good long while but could never get them to look right. Sometimes symmetry makes things look unbalanced despite the math being right.

What I ended up doing was using some asymmetrical symmetry. The illusion of symmetry. The “V” is the same because it was symmetrical to begin with, I skewed both the “L” and the “E”, but then I flipped only the center hole of the “O”. There is still a lot of space between the bottom of the “V” and the “E” but with the “O” still close that distance doesn’t matter as much. I kept the relationship between the outside of the “O” and the “V” the same in both words and that seemed to solve my problem. It sounds like a simple and fast solution but it was not. It took a long time to get correct. That and I reshaped a lot of the “E” and “L”. They don’t look exactly as they started.

After getting the logo correct the rest was easy. I made a drawing, Inked it, colored it with marker, and then for a finishing touch added some colored ink to the background. In the end I like how it came out. It’s colorful and positive. I’m putting some up on eBay for people to buy too. Take a look. http://http://www.ebay.com/itm/161880808164?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

Since I wrote last week about the summer TV season I thought I’d write this week about the new fall TV shows that premiered. There has been a couple of interesting news shows but mostly returning ones and some fair to middling new shows. But of course that is fair to middling in the category of shows that I actually like. A mediocre show that I don’t watch is a whole other category.

First up is “The Grinder”. This is a new Rob Lowe half hour comedy and I like it. He plays a big time actor who just came off a long running TV series where he played a lawyer. He’s moved back to his home town where his family still lives and has inserted himself into his brother’s law firm. His brother and father are actual lawyers. It’s a bit of an absurdist comedy with a good supporting cast and lots of family dynamics. I like it but it needs better ratings if it’s going to get a second season.

Then there are the conspiracy/mystery/action shows. There seem to be a lot of them these days. The first one is “Quantico”. It’s about a bunch of FBI recruits. Half of it is told in flashback and half of it in the present. The flashback part is their days at the FBI academy and the present part is just after they graduate. One of them has been framed for a terrorist attack and is on the run trying to prove her innocence. I like the present parts better than the flashbacks. The flashbacks seem a little absurd (and not in a Grinder good way) as everyone seems to be hiding a secret. It should also be called “Models Join the FBI” because the whole cast is ridiculously good looking. This one is doing well in the ratings.

Another of those shows is “Blindspot”. That’s the one with the woman who is dropped off in the middle of Times Square covered in tattoos with no memory. And the tattoos are clues to future crimes. It’s an okay show. Every week they figure out a clue and go stop a crime. I find amnesia to be a gimmicky storytelling device so I mostly ignore that part. This one is also doing well in the ratings.

The third in conspiracy/mystery/action genre is “The Player”. An ex-soldier gets dragged into stopping bad guys by a mysterious group of people who like to bet on if he can stop the bad guys or not. And someone may have kidnapped his estranged wife after faking her death. Or she’s dead. He has to fight for justice and find his wife. This one is mostly action and isn’t doing too well in the ratings. It’s not expected to last but I’ll probably watch it until the end.

I think there is only one new show in my favorite genre “The quirky detective” genre. That would be “Limitless”. It’s based on a movie I’ve never seen about a pill that can make you smarter. There is conspiracy stuff going on in this one too (I think that’s a prerequisite for crime dramas these days) but it’s mostly crime solving stuff. Like most quirky detective shows this one relies on the lead character’s wit and charm to carry the show and they do a good job of it here. I think this one is doing okay in the ratings. We’ll see if it sticks around.

The weirdest new show I’ve started watching is “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”. I guess you’d call it a comedy/drama. It’s about a twenty-something high priced NYC lawyer who chucks it all to move to a small California town where her boyfriend from the summer she turned sixteen lives. It’s got craziness, comedy, and elaborate musical numbers. It’s so weird that I can’t imagine it’ll last very long but I like it.

Now I’ll run down some returning shows I watch.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D – I like this one. It’s the only Marvel or DC superhero show that I watch. It doesn’t have much super heroics in it and that’s just fine with me. It’s got a good cast and some snappy writing as they go about their adventures. That’s all I ask.

The Big Bang Theory – I know this show has worn out its welcome with some people who are too cool for the room but I’ve been watching it since the beginning and think it’s solid.

The Blacklist – This show has picked up for me every season. It’s in the conspiracy/mystery/action genre and has done a good job changing every season. I didn’t even like it at first and stopped watching but then gave it another chance with season two and kept watching. I’ve liked season three the best so far.

Bones – In its eleventh season and still plugging along solving crimes. It might not hold a lot of excitement for me and at it’s worst is pretty dull but it’s still an okay procedural and almost falls into the quirky detective genre. At least it’s got a hero that believes in reason. I’ll take that.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine – A show that has gotten funnier as it goes along. An ensemble comedy about police detectives in Brooklyn. I’ve heard it called a modern “Barney Miller” and I’ll go along with that. It’s goofy, witty, and funny.

Castle – Once again a mix between the crime procedural and quirky detective genres. In its eighth season I know what to expect from it and it delivers. Solid, light, and occasionally heavy police stuff.

Fargo – Just started a new story arc that has all new characters and the same quirky style as the first season. I’ll give it a watch.

iZombie – If you liked “Veronica Mars” (and I did) then there is a solid shot you’ll like “iZombie”. It’s more fantastical and less down to earth but has the same witty style.

The Last Man on Earth – I liked the first season of this one but didn’t love it. This second season has started out much stronger and I hope it’ll keep being good. I think this show has potential.

The Middle – Solid family sitcom. I didn’t like it much at first but it grew on me. I’ll keep watching it.

Modern Family – Still a well made, funny, witty, and creative family comedy. I can see why this one wins awards because there is a lot of talent and imagination in it. And it tries really hard. In a good way.

Scorpion – I can’t tell if this show is ridiculous on purpose or by accident. Either way I find it amusing. Not great but amusing. Some shows are fine because you can half pay attention to them while doing something else.

The Simpsons – Been watching it since season one and I still like it. I don’t care that other people think it’s not what it used to be.

Supernatural – Eleven season in and they still find a way to make it fresh. Shows like “Bones” and “Castle” I still like but know what to expect. With this one they keep coming up with new stuff even within the monster hunting formula. I admire the imagination put into it.

Undateable – A half hour comedy that is now broadcast live on Friday nights. I like it. They’re trying hard to made me laugh and succeed often enough.

The summer TV season is over and the new fall one has arrived. That is if there is such things as seasons anymore. Things blur together as not only streaming, on-demand TV happens but first run streaming TV happens too.

I watched a few summer TV shows that were okay. At least four of them won’t be back for another season. “Under the Dome” made it’s way through three summers with thirteen episodes each season. It was never a great show but it was okay. It posed as one of those annoying “The plot of this story is us wondering what is going on in this story” TV shows but it was really about all the characters plotting against each other. It didn’t really matter why the dome was there. It mattered that the dome amped up the drama in a small town. When it took a sci-fi turn in its last season to explain things it was anticlimactic. It was solid but if you missed it don’t sweat it.

Another “What is going on in this show?” show was “Wayward Pines”. There was no dome but there may as well have been. Once again it was a bunch of people brought to a small town and things are not as they seem. Mysterious and oppressive government, missing technology, can’t get out of town, and time travel?!? All the weird stuff that makes for a confusing story. It was okay but I just had to look up the name of it because I couldn’t remember. This was a ten episodes and done mini-series.

The third now cancelled show I watched this summer was “Extant” with Halle Berry. This one made it through two thirteen episode summer seasons. This second season they changed the whole tone and plot of the show. The first season was more conceptual with one plot about creating an artificial boy and another about weird alien life coming to earth. There was a lot of mysterious vagueness. In the second season the did away with all that vagueness and gave us an evil conspiracy and some killer robots. Plus they knocked off Halle Berry’s boring scientist husband from the first season and gave her a new rugged bounty hunter love interest. Or maybe he was a cop. It was the future so who knows? Once again it was a solid show but if you missed it it’s no big deal.

One show I didn’t watch much of was “Daredevil”. Everyone seemed to love it but me. It was on Netflix and was almost universally praised but it didn’t do it for me. First off I don’t much care for origin stories. I find them boring and all the same. They decided to make this a season long thirteen episode origin story so I was out after three or four episodes. It wasn’t terrible. I just didn’t care. I know the story already and to have it told to me over thirteen hours was too much. No amount of brutal, slow motion fight scenes could win me over. I can’t love them all.

I did manage to catch all of the TV show that nobody watched “Welcome to Sweden”. This is a joint US and Swedish made show that is part in English and part in Swedish. Don’t worry, they provide subtitles. It’s a nice little comedy. It’s had two ten episode seasons with ratings as low as things can go on network TV. I think the only reason it got a second season is that it runs in Sweden too so it’s paid for already. I like the show even if no one watches it. It’s pleasant and little zany. Some nice Swedish scenery too.

Another under-watched half hour comedy was “Playing House”. It’s the story of two women who are longtime friends and one comes back to their home town to help the other out. It’s a buddy comedy. With only ten episodes last year and eight this year there aren’t a lot of shows but they’re all pretty good. I like the leads in the show, Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair. They’ve been in stuff before together and I find them funny. I don’t know if there will be a third season of this but I’ll watch if there is.

Another summer drama that I forgot to mention is “Complications”. This one caught my eye because it was from the producer of one of my favorite shows “Burn Notice”. It’s been cancelled after one season so it’s not going to have the same long life as “Burn Notice” but it was pretty good. It was the story of a doctor who saves a little boy’s life out in the street one day. That little boy turns out to be a pawn in a gang war and soon the doctor finds himself to be a pawn too. Not good for him. He tries to navigate his way through the gangs, the police, his family, and his boss all without making things worse. Of course he makes things worse. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a show. It was a solid man-in-trouble show. But now it’s gone.

A not very new show that I’ve been watching this summer is “Parks & Recreation”. It’s a show that was on for seven seasons and I always meant to check it out but never did. I have no idea why. The first five seasons of it were streaming on Amazon Prime so I finally gave it a look and was hooked. It’s a funny show. Lots of smart writing and crazy characters. It’s a show I really should have been watching all along. Good stuff.

And I almost forgot two other shows I watched. One was the much talked about second season of “True Detective”. A lot of people didn’t like it but I thought it was okay. A totally different flavor than the first season (which I liked but the last episode was a letdown). The show might have been a mess but I found it to be an interesting mess.

The other show is the second season of “The Strain”. Vampire fighting goodness. I like my vampires to be evil and not sexy and that’s what we get here. Solid cast with some good writing except for the annoying kid. It’s not the actor’s fault. The writers keep making him do stupid things that get people hurt. He’s more a plot device than a character. Other than that I like the show. It just finished its second thirteen episode season.

So that’s what I watched this summer. “Parks & Recreation” is the best of the bunch with “The Strain” leading the pack of dramas. What did you watch and like?

I got it done. Finally. Yes, my 48 page comic “The Ghost of Fifth Street” is, at last, available as a digital book through both Amazon and Apple. This is the first time I’ve done such a thing and it took a while but it won’t be the last. I have a few other things I want to publish that shouldn’t take as long to do as a forty eight page comic book so I’ll get those out soon. First on the list is repackaging my webcomic in digital comic form. But that’s for later.
After finishing the actual comic book it still took some doing to get it ready for digital publication. I had the thing all set up in InDesign and ready to go as a PDF but it turns out Apple and Amazon have their own programs to format books in for their sites. Nothing is universal.
I started out with Amazon and found they have a program called Kindle Comic Creator that I would have to use to submit my comic to them. I downloaded the software and fired it up. I don’t know how many of you try out new software on a regular basis but it’s rare these days that software comes with any kind of manual or instructions. Luckily I have lots and lots of experience in image editing and layout software so it wasn’t too bad for me but I wonder what it is like for someone without my experience. The first question I had to ask myself when starting up the software was, “What the heck is this?”. I imagine a lot of people don’t know how to answer that question. Took me a minute.

I quickly figured out that I could open up my finished PDF of the comic in the software and it would translate all the pages into pages in the Kindle Comic Creator software. But to what end? It took me another little while to suss out that this software was all about detecting the comic book panels so that it could zoom in on a single panel to make reading easier on a smaller device. It would auto-detect most of the panels in such a way as I didn’t even know it was doing it. When I realized it was doing it I also realized I had to hand-set some of the pages where I had a single large image with captions floating on it. The software saw that as one panel and wouldn’t zoom in. I also had to break some panel designations in half because the panel stretched across the width of the page and therefor the software wouldn’t zoom either. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to get those panels in the proper order after I did that but I got it done.

When everything was ready to go I realized I hadn’t given it a final read yet. When I did I found some mistakes and then had to figure out how to replace the old pages with the new ones. Not hard but this all took time. Then I realized I wanted someone else to read it before it went out. I had a friend kind enough to read it out for me and she corrected a bunch of things. I read it one more time and found one last typo. Proofreading is a real pain. I decided to start over with Kindle Comic Creator rather than add and subtract all the corrected pages. I think I set up the panels in this book at least three times. That’s because I erased them once or twice in my learning phase. I can only imagine how frustrated a person not used to such software would be.

After I had all that done it was just a matter of signing up for an Amazon Author account but that wasn’t too hard. You just have to have all the tax and bank stuff you need ready to go. Filling out that info in this day and age always makes me a bit nervous but what are you going to do? I uploaded my finished file to Amazon and was ready to go.

Apple was trickier. First off there is no software specifically for comics with Apple so I would have to use iBook Author to upload my book. I’ve complained before about how much I don’t like iBooks Author and this didn’t change my mind. My first problem was that it can’t read PDFs. This was my finished format that most programs can handle. It said it needed a digital publication format (.epub) so I looked into that. The good news was InDesign, the book layout program I was using, could output in that format. The bad news was the comic turned out crazy when I did.

The quick version is the lettering is in Illustrator, the artwork is in Photoshop, and InDesign puts them together and outputs them to a specific format. Except that this time when the format was .epub it split the lettering from the art. It doubled the amount of pages and the lettering was on the left and the art on the right. Not good. After messing around with it for a while I thought I was going to have to rebuild the whole comic in iBook Author. I did not want to do that. The solution I hit on was to match up the art in Illustrator and then bring just that file into InDesign. It was doing what I was already doing but in a clumsier way. I hate doing things in a clumsy way but I had no choice.

Despite the clumsiness of both iBooks Author and the way I had to get my files ready things went pretty smoothly after I figure it out. I had to fill out all the same info I needed for Amazon and I was just as nervous doing it but it got done. A day later and they were both for sale and ready to go. You’ll find the links to get the books on iTunes and Amazon over on the top right. Check them out.