Old Football Fun Fest

Ahhh... watching old football games. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm digitizing an old New York Giants game. It's the Giants/Bears playoff game from January 1991. I was lucky enough to be at this game so this is the first time I'm seeing the TV broadcast. A friend of mine (or his Mom) used to tape almost all of the Giants games in the late 80's to early 90's. He used to have a whole room full of taped games from all sports. Alas, at one point in time his wife made him get rid of them all. I managed to rescue about thirty games from the trash but I wish I had known they were being tossed because I would have grabbed more. At one time he had every game from the Giants 1986 championship season but I only got three of them. Ouch.

I've had the tapes sitting on my shelf for half a decade now and I've been meaning to digitizing them for years but haven't. Digitally captured video takes up a lot of hard drive space. Even if it's only going to be there temporarily. But the years have passed and hard drive space has gotten cheaper so I finally have enough space not to worry about it.

A couple of weeks ago I finally got tired of deciding which game to start with so I grabbed a random tape of of my shelf to see how long it would take to digitize and compress. I have a video capture box that my VCR is hooked up to. I just have to play the tape and software on my computer video captures it in real time. The video is captured in the digital video format (.dv) and the game took up about 30 gigs worth of space.

This tape also still had commercials in it that I wanted to cut out so I had to video capture it in pieces and them put the pieces together. I did this in Quicktime easily enough but I had to save it as a .mov and that took my old computer over an hour. And the new file was 60 gigs. Let's hear it for cheap hard drives.

The final step was to compress it and for that I used my Elgato Turbo which is a little USB hardware device that does nothing but compress video into the mpeg-4 format. It does it a lot faster than my old computer and doesn't tie up my processor. It's a nice little add on. It took the thing about five hours to compress the 60 gigs down to around three gigs in the Apple TV format. Not bad since I could still use my computer during that time without a performance hit.

Funny thing is, since I grabbed a game randomly, it was a game I didn't even remember. I'm sure I saw it back then but I don't remember every game. It was game two of the 1988 season when the Giants played the 49ers at Giants stadium. Steve Young was playing for an injured Joe Montana and Lawrence Taylor wasn't playing at all because he was suspended for the first four games of the season. It was a defensive struggle most of the game. Montana relived Young after halftime but didn't get much going either. Late in the fourth quarter the Giants scored and went ahead. It looked like they were going to win. Then on third and long with about 40 seconds left Montana hooked up with Rice for a 78 yard TD catch. Twenty years later I got pissed off and couldn't believe they lost that game. They had it nearly all wrapped up! Rice had done nothing all game until that point. Still it was fun to watch.

Though I cut the commercials out I left in the halftime show in. I wanted a little glimpse of what was going on in the league all those years ago. Plus it's funny to see how primitive halftime looked in 1988. Just three guys giving you the scores with a few highlights. No talking over beds of music, only a few graphics, and no one was screaming. It looked like a million years ago.

No commercials and no halftime show in this playoff game. I don't have to start and stop the tape. There is nothing for me to do but watch. That makes things a lot easier. I'm still not sure how quickly I'll get all the others done but the Giants winning the Super Bowl this year has motivated me to revisit some of these old games. Time sure flies.

I'll leave you with this in game observation: Lawrence Taylor was playing on the field goal team. I don't remember that.

Comics I Bought: April 24, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got 1 new comic plus a hard cover collection:

Supernatural - Rising Son - 1

Marvel Masterworks - Captain Marvel Volume 3

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Shanna The She-Devil" by Frank Cho

Frank Cho's art is the reason I picked this one up. He is really good at drawing pretty women. Other things too but you can tell he really likes drawing the dames. This book was originally supposed to be a Marvel "Max" book and have some nudity in it but then that idea was dropped. When I was working in the Marvel Bullpen I had to Photoshop the nudity out of the first few pages by the strategic placement of bubbles and frosted glass. I don't think Frank Cho drew and nudity past those first few pages and if he did I never saw or heard about it.

I would categorize this book as a horror story. A bunch of soldiers crash land on an island and find it is inhabited by dinosaurs. They also find a genetically enhanced women (Shanna) in a Nazi (?) lab in a giant test tube. They wake her up and she helps them fight the dinosaurs. Survival horror.

It's a well done tale. Nothing spectacular. No great insights into human nature or the inner workings of the universe but a constantly moving chase scene of a book with lots of great drawing and gore. It's the kind of comic you can pull off the shelf just to thumb through and look at the drawing. Good stuff.

There is one thing that bugs me about it though. It's not actually Shanna the She-Devil. The story has nothing to do with the Marvel character of that name. The story doesn't even necessarily take place in the Marvel universe. So why is it named "Shanna the She-Devil"? I have no idea. Shanna is hardly a character that sells a lot of comics. It's Frank Cho's artwork that sold this book to me and probably to most people so why not some new name? I know that these days everything has to be a retcon or re-interpretation of something but c'mon. If you're just going to take the name of of some fourth string character why bother? But anyway, pick this one up if your a fan of action and pretty drawings.

Hard To Drive

I'm tired of hard drives already! That's my exclamation for the evening. I got backups and backups and backups. Yet I bought another backup drive. Staples had a 500 gig USB drive on sale for 120 dollars. I really didn't want to spend the money (when do I ever) but I wanted all of my backup data in one place.

I've got two 250 gig internal drives. The first is the one I boot from and that has most off my applications and, more importantly, a folder called "Work". This is where all of my own artwork goes. All of my digital prints, scans of my drawings, scans and photos of my paintings, and my web site graphics. Needless to say this is important information that I want to back up. It runs 50 gigs or so. I thinned it out some a couple of years ago when backup wasn't as cheap as it is now. I put a bunch of stuff on DVD. Nothing too important but now I have to track it down and add it back to the main folder. I like everything in one place. Backup info that you can't find does no good.

The second internal drive has plenty of room on it. I back up the "Work" folder there and have some applications and random things that ended up there. I dump video I'm digitizing on to this second drive so I need lots of room. Then I compress the video and get rid of the huge files. Plus it's a second boot drive.

I have Mac OS 10.4 installed on the second drive but I run 10.5 on the main drive. Believe it or not I need 10.4 installed because of one program that I still run in the Mac Classic environment: Adobe Streamline. It's a program that hasn't been updated since before Mac OSX was released but I still need it. It converts bitmap drawings into vector drawings. Adobe programed Illustrator to perform this task a couple of versions ago but it doesn't do it to my liking. Illustrator knocks out shapes where Streamline layers them. This isn't a big deal unless you actually want to edit your drawings in which case knocking shapes out of their background shapes creates holes if you want to edit the top shape. Confusing stuff if you've never done it before. I think I've just discovered a way around it so maybe I can get rid of 10.4 and the classic environment once and for all.

My third drive is a 320 gig external drive that I got from a job when they needed to give me about 80 gigs worth of images and things. I keep all of the work I do for them (I've added another 50 gigs worth) and some other clients on that drive. The problem is that I don't trust the wacky drive it's on. It's a Maxtor drive and it is the loudest drive I have ever heard. I read up on it online and lots of people note how absurdly loud it is. It sounds like a drive with its fan off kilter but this drive has no fan. When I turn it on in the morning it makes this terrible sound but with some experimentation (I got tired of whacking it on its top - that can't be good for it) I discovered that if I change the drive from the horizontal to the vertical position and back a couple of times it will quiet down and remain that way until I turn my computer of and on again. I'm glad it quiets down because I couldn't work with it on otherwise. It's that loud.

My fourth drive is a 500 gig external drive. It's my media drive and I have about 350 gigs worth of photos, music, and video on it. I bought that drive so I could consolidate my media on one drive. It used to be spread across three drives. That got really cumbersome. Consolidation is your friend. At least after it's done. Doing it is a pain.

My fifth drive is a 250 gig external. This was my first backup drive and it used to have my media and such on it too but it developed some bad blocks and I lost a little data. Now it's strictly a redundant backup drive and I keep it unplugged and powered down. It can't die on me if it's not turned on I say!

Then come my two 80 gig external drives that used to be internal drives. I had them hooked up but now they are powered down backups. One has yet another copy of my "Work" folder (I am careful) and the other some of my photos. At only 160 gigs combined they weren't enough to back up all the stuff I wanted to. Hence the new 500 gig big backup drive.

I have copied about 300 gigs worth of data copied to the new drive. I have about 100 more gigs to copy over and then all of my backing up will be done. Good. I'm really sick of thinking about data and hard drives.

Comics I Bought: April 17, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got one new comic and a hard cover collection that was on sale for half off:

Rex Mundi vol 2 - 11

Daredevil by Frank Miller Companion Omnibus

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Fragile Prophet" by Jeff Davidson and Stephen R. Buell

This book has one of the best endings I've read in a while. I thought I'd lead with that because I want you to know that I really like this graphic novel. The whole is better than the sum of the parts. That's good since some of the parts can really use work.

"Fragile Prophet" is they story of an autistic boy with "Fragile X Syndrome" (a real thing) who can predict the future. He is being raised by his older brother as they make there way in the modern world where the boy's talents lead him to performing on TV. But the book isn't any kind of social critique on the media. It's a personal tale of the boy and his older brother trying to keep each other safe and find their place in life.

The story is fairly well told but not particularly well drawn. It's the kind of book that if you pick it up and flip through it there is not much good drawing to catch your eye. There is a lot of amateur hour bad drawing. But there is good drawing too (the good drawing parts made me pick up the first book from this team, called "Video", a few years ago). The artist clearly has talent he's just not all the way there yet. It's a black and white book that has been colored in grey tones and not very well. The tones seem random at times. And don't even start me on the lettering. I cringed at some of the balloon placement choices.

You can see why I lead with a compliment because despite the comic looking, at times, like a bad black and white small press book it really is good. It makes you feel for the characters as the story unfolds and tells a story with some freshness and originality to it. And I really did like the ending a lot. Give it a try.

The Age of the Internet For Sure

I really am living in the age of the internet. The convenience of it has spoiled me when it comes to shopping. Making a phone call to order something is now such a bother. And ordering from a catalogue? I remember when I used to do that. Seems like a million years ago. I'm not even sure what I used to order from catalogues. I suspect it was never a lot. I did place a few orders of comics that when I was a teenager. That's how I acquired some back issues. I also ordered my duster from a catalogue too. That I remember. It's falling apart these days but I've patched it and still continue to wear it.

Nowadays I get my mylar comic book bags and protective sleeves for my original comic art collection from a company that has a website but you have to phone them to place your order. Phone them during business hours from nine to five that is. I've been putting off doing it, not only because of the expense (these bags are not cheap), but because I have to make a phone call to order. Imagine that, a phone call is what I consider a hassle these days.

Most of my shopping is done at a local store or on the internet. I'm big on Amazon but I buy from a variety of sites. I just ordered a few really obscure comics from a site a friend recommended. I signed up with the site, logged on, found the comics I wanted, and then paid for them. No muss no fuss. Of course now the comics have to show up in my mailbox. I've ordered obscure comics before that have never showed up. Sometimes a site shows that they have the comics but they really don't. But they don't take your money when that happens so it's disappointing but not robbery. Nobody likes to be robbed.

Recently I've had a bad consumer phone experience. In the last month and a half I've had to get on the phone a four times to try and get a part for my stationary bike. A V-Belt. Boy was that a waste of time. The belt broke on my stationary bike.That belt does what a chain does on a regular bike. But no problem, right? There is a sticker on the bike that gives me a number to call for parts. How convenient.

I called it. They charged me thirty five bucks for the wrong belt. I need a 46 inch V-Belt and they sent me a 50 inch flat belt. I called again. No problem they said they'll send a new one as soon as they get it in. In two weeks. They even said that they'll e-mail me when they send it. Two weeks later and no belt. I call a third time. Whoops, their bad, no problem they'll second day air me the right one. Two days later I get the same 50 inch flat belt. I call a fourth time. The guy I get this time doesn't get what the problem is. His manager says "Don't worry. It turns into a V-Belt when you put it on". What? It's a magic transforming belt? According to the manager it is. He had no answer for how it was going to shrink 4 inches but the manager insisted they had no V-Belts as parts. I asked for my money back. I'm still going through that process. Let's hope they don't rob me.

I certainly don't expect that level of nonsense when I order my comic bags. I've ordered from them many times before with no trouble but it still it takes a little preparation. I have to figure out which bags I need, what their order numbers are, how many I want, and I have to order during business hours. Even though I work from home that is usually when I'm working. I have to get business done during business hours.

It was actually easier to make a call during the day when I was working in an office. Then any excuse to take a few minutes break was a good one. And there are plenty of people to make sure you get back to work. Working alone at home you have to be self motivated and that is a spell that's easily broken. Making calls to order stuff is more of an annoyance at home. It's a weird thing. I got better things to do when taking a break at home. In the office there are never better things to do.

Most of my internet ordering gets done at night. After hours. Just like everyone else that's when I have time to look around and see what's there. Shuffle from page to page in search of some hard to find old thing that's interesting in some way. You get pictures, descriptions, fast service (well, mostly) and all on my schedule. This whole phone thing is so 1990's.

Comics I Bought: April 10, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got no new comics but I did pick up two hard cover collections that were on sale for half off:

Spider-Man and the Black Cat - "The Evil That Men Do"

Tales To Astonish - Masterworks - Volume 2

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"The Young Avengers" Hardcover Collection by Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung

I read an issue or two of "The Young Avengers" when it came out back in aught five. I remember thinking that it was pretty well done but I never read any more issues. Cut to a few years later and I'm looking for some thing to get at the local comic shop so I pick up this hardcover collection of issues 1-12. The writer I've never heard of but I've liked Jim Cheung's art since his days drawing "Scion" for Crossgen comics. I decide to buy it and give it a read.

I'm having a hard time reviewing this book because of it's teen angst subject matter. It's a well drawn super hero comic so that's never an issue. It's the story that I have a problem with. Or maybe it has a problem with me. The writing isn't bad. In fact it's well done. It's the whole teen super hero "all the world is full of melodrama" thing that doesn't interest me. Maybe I'm an old fuddy-dud but I just wanted the Young Avengers to stop whining so much. "Back in my day teen super heros knew when to shut up" (said in old man voice).

Besides the whining it's a good book. There is a lot of well drawn action, the dialogue is snappy, and the teen angst driven plot lines are actually pretty interesting. I don't want you to think I didn't like this book. It just didn't suit my taste at times.

The basic plot of the book is that a bunch of teenage (14-16 years old?) super heroes are gathered together by another teenage super hero to help protect him from Kang the Conquerer (the actual Avengers are disbanded at this time). The tag line of the book is "They're Not What You Think". That's because these super heroes generally have no relationship with the Avengers. They are not their teen sidekicks or anything like that. They are mistakenly called "The Young Avengers" by the press. They even didn't name themselves that. Oddly enough by the end of the book it's revealed that most of them have some relationship with the Avengers. So I guess they are who we think they are. But that's not really too important.

So there you have it. "The Young Avengers" is a well done teen angst, coming of age, super hero book. I just happen not to like so much teen angst in my super hero comics. But if that sort of thing doesn't bother you or you like teen angst super hero comics check out "The Young Avengers". You'll like it.

Arghhh....

Damn. Some nights are just frustrating. Days too. Not in a "general life" sort of way but in a specific "the drawing I'm working on came out crappy" kind of way. Failure is not a fun thing I tell ya.

I've been working on a comic for a new website I want to put up. I haven't worked on many comics in recent years and the one I'm doing now is experimental in its structure and storytelling. It's been slow going. It doesn't help that I don't have exactly what I want to do, in terms of it's presentation and integration with other web media, completely nailed down yet. I told you it was experimental. It also didn't help that I tried to rush my own process. That never works out for me. Except sometimes I have to work fast. Changing speeds can be helpful. Knowing the difference between working faster and rushing is the tough part.

I've been working on this comic for a while. This is the third version of it as I've tried to suss out exactly what format I want to work in. Print and the web each have their own considerations especially since a normal comic is vertical and a computer screen is horizontal. That's a fundamental difference. The web can also be much more non-linear. So I've worked up and drawn a half dozen pages in a couple of formats. I've finally decided on a horizontal size and page layout. I've also had to redraw each page two or three times as they story transformed.

I have been trying to get the first eight pages written and drawn all winter. I thought I finally had that done and then would be able to move on to finishing them with ink and color. After ink and color I plan to work on integrating prints, video, and paintings into them. That'll really be a challenge.

And let's not even mention the lettering. It's taken me weeks to figure out what I want to do with the lettering because somehow everything I did looked bad to me. I want a lettering look different than your average web or print comic. But what exactly that look is took a while. But at least I figured that part out.

I had pages two through eight done and was working on page one (it's been a weird process) when I thought I was there. I put together page one from a variety of drawings from previous versions. Usually at this point I had been completely redrawing the page after transforming it form an earlier version. But I got tired of doing that and though I could go to the final inks on page one without any more drawing. I was wrong.

I just finished the final inks on page one and the page is not right. It's a failure. I should have redrawn it because even through the drawings were in a pretty finished state after being drawn for earlier different page layouts they were now in a new context. In that context they needed further work. My impatience made me miss that important fact. Context always matters.

It's a tough feeling when you look at a bunch of work you did and realize it all has to be redone. It's even tougher when you know that you should have realized this at the beginning of the process. It's my own damn fault! That's my frustration tonight.

At least I have been having some fun with the cards I've been making. They are playing card size and I'm going to be using them for promotion. I've been making some new drawings and taking some old ones and printing them out, double sided, on my printer. Then I laminate them and cut them out. I even bought a little cutter that rounds the corners of the cards. They end up looking kinda neat. I think I'll make more of them. But first I have to redraw that damned page. I can't look at it right now. I'll wait until morning. Things always look better in the morning.

Comics I Bought: April 3, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop and I got 5 new comics this week. No hard cover collections because I just had to send Uncle Sam some tax money. I un-stimulated the economy :

Buffy Season Eight - 13

The Walking Dead - 48

Grendel Behold The Devil 5 (of 8)

Jack Staff - 15

American Splendor Vol 2 - 1

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"The Saga of the Seven Suns: Veiled Alliances" by Kevin J. Anderson and Robert Teranishi

"The Saga of the Seven Suns" is a series of sci-fi books that have been published over the last five or six years. I only know this because back when I was working in the offices of Marvel comics I stumbled onto the first book in the series lying about the place. Though I hadn't read much sci-fi since my college days I thought I'd give it a read. I enjoyed the novel. It was written in a page turning style and kept me entertained. It annoyed me because, as many "series" books do, it had no real ending. Just a sort of "to be continued" ending but still the book was good. I never read any of the others though.

"The Saga of the Seven Suns: Veiled Alliances" is a comic prequel to the series. It was published in 2004 and I remember seeing it on Amazon when, after I read the novel, I looked up some info about the series of books. This graphic novel didn't get great reviews but they were mostly from fans of the novel and not comic fans. The comic was also said to have spoilers if you haven't read the second book. I haven't but damed if I know what the spoilers are.

I picked this up on a slow comics week and really didn't expect much of it. I was pleasantly surprised. It's not a great comic but it's a good one. It held my attention all the way through.

As a prequel it takes place before the events of the first book. It tells the story of how Earth people first met with an race of people from outer space. They are benevolent but still everybody faces challenges as we all have to get along and learn from each other. This book gives the "origins" of various factions of space traveling Earth people.

The writing is good. As good as the novel I'd say since it's the same author. It's also written differently than a usual comic. It's written in that page turning "best seller" novel style. It constantly changes scenes every four to six pages and you always want to see what is going to happen next. It's plot driven just like the books in a way that comics usually aren't. There is a lot happening and I'm not sure if someone who hasn't read at least the first novel will get what's going on.

The artist, Robert Teranishi, I haven't heard of before. The art looks like it is un-inked and colored and printed from the artist's pencils. This is still a relatively new technique and as such has a tendency to look "unfinished" at times. It lets me down on occasion but overall the storytelling is good. The art also looks like it is coming from a "book cover illustration" place. By that I mean lots of floating heads some collage like elements. Normally I hate that sort of stuff on book covers but Teranishi make it work for me here because he integrates it well into the story telling. It's a bit different from traditional comic storytelling.

So here is another book that goes into the "pleasant surprise" category for me. It's a well done graphic novel done in a style that's not your everyday comic style. It even makes me want to read the other books in the novel series. If you're looking for a fun sci-fi diversion give this a read.