Comics I Bought: February 26, 2009

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

Usagi Yojimbo - 118

Savage Dragon - 145

Mr. X: Condemned - 3

Fear Agent - 26

Creepy Archives Volume 2

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

"The Astonishing X-Men Volume 2" By Joss Whedon and John Cassaday

I was ambivalent about the fist volume "The Astonishing X-Men" and now here comes volume two reprinting issues 12-24 of the series. And guess what. I'm still ambivalent. This book is like the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead...

I'm a long time comic book reader. I haven't been reading the X-Men with any regularity since the late Eighties but I have a passing knowledge of things that have happened in the world of the mutants. And I'm a hardcore comic reader. Still I had almost no idea what was going on in the beginning of this book. And I read the previous twelve issues! A casual reader would put this down all confused.

Characters are introduced into the story and not even named. The plot of the first few issues is so incomprehensible that I still don't know what happened. Either the X-Men were attacked by the Hellfire club or they weren't. The reason for this confusion is the development of "mind powers" in the Marvel universe.

In the old days super heroes and villains with psychic powers could move things with their minds, force others to bend to their will (which usually made the victim fight much less effectively than if he were fighting for himself), see things, or cause their victims to feel some pain in their heads.

Not anymore. Due to power creep now psychics can pretty much do anything. They can basically change reality for any number of people. They can even make people behave how they want them to by "implanting" some wacky psychic instructions at any time in the past and the person will have no memory of it. Psychics are basically walking plot devices now.

So the first part of the book has two psychics and the X-Men weaving intricate plans. Or maybe none of it happened. I don't know because they kept explaining plot twists by saying it was all in someone's head. A psychic did it.

After that part of the story abruptly ends the X-Men go off into space and the book gets better for a while. Not great but there are some good plot and script moments. And the story generally makes sense even though it involves a prophesy. I usually hate stories with prophesies in them.

The art is generally pretty good though I have to say I've seen Cassaday do better. Maybe it was my general over all confusion with the story and it wasn't his fault but the art seemed off in places. Could just be me.

Oh, and I thought the ending was dumb.

So there you go. Some good stuff and some bad stuff. Just like the first volume. No, I think this volume was more incomprehensible.

More Web Comic Stuff?

I can't seem to escape this idea that I want to make a web comic. I've already worked on and given up on many ideas for a web comic. Mainly because they are too much work for too little reward. Make that no reward. But making comics is just in my bones. I can't quite stop thinking up stuff.

Since the web comics I've made so far are akin to color Sunday strips I thought I would try for a something more along the lines of a the more simple black and white daily strip. The problem with that is that I don't have much to say in that form. Most daily comic strips, wether on the web or in print, are gag a day strips. I hate gag a day strips. I generally find them dull and relentlessly similar to one and other.

I actually should be more kind to gag a day strips. There have been great ones; Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and Doonesbury are my favorite three. It's just that gag a day has been the dominant comic strip form for decades now and there are so many bad ones. And believe me if I were to do a gag a day strip it would just add to the dreck. I can't write gags any better than all the other guys out there doing it badly. And at least they like to write gags. I'd probably do it worse than the dreck that's out there.

So that leaves me with the other dominant form of the comic strip. The adventure story. There aren't many of these left and I can't think of a good one currently running. Maybe there is one but I don't know of it. The heyday of the adventure strip happened before I was born. It doesn't matter anyway because an adventure strip is way too much work for me. An adventure strip takes at least three times as long to draw as a gag a day strip.

With neither predominant form of comic strips looking like they will have anything to do with me I languished. I put aside any notion of web comics until this week. I decided to give it a go based on some dialogues I've been writing. No gag and no plot just two people talking. For some reason I like writing two people talking. I try to make it interesting and humorous but there is no gag or joke. I don't know what to call them.

This week I decided to write a dialogue as a comic strip. It consisted of making four panels and then writing what the two people were saying to each other in word balloons. The writing went well. I made a few strips but then, of course, the problem comes with drawing them.

There is a reason most web comics are so badly drawn. It's a lot of time consuming work to draw them well. And very few are getting paid for that time. So I tried to come up with a style I could draw quickly in. My strip is about dialogue so it's really all talking heads but I can't just draw it that way. I've got to vary things up. That takes even more time.

I ended up drawing two strips and though I did them quickly it was not quickly enough for me. And I found drawing it so literally boring and I didn't even like the drawings in the end. The kiss of death again. Ouch. So now I'm going to try something new.

I'm going to draw a few more strips to see what they look like. Then I'm going to try and suss out where I am going with it visually and work up a book of poses for the characters. A lot of web comics guys cut and paste poses or panels over and over but that is not quite what I have in mind. I'm looking for a bit more variety and a lot less obviousness.

There is no getting around that I am doing a strip based on dialogues so there is no need for exotic locales or action sequences. There is a limited number of ways that I can draw two people talking to each other. I'm going to try and find a number of talking poses and use them as a starting point for my drawing. I'll draw some varied heads and faces and see if I can tie it all together into a finished strip.

Y'know it could be that I have a hard time working in a linear fashion these days. Pencil, ink, and color. Pencil, ink, and color. Pencil, ink, and color. A lot of times I want to do things out of order. I'll have to build up something of a backlog. That way I can work on whatever part I feel like at the time.

I think I'll even try out a couple of 3D programs I have that are designed to help artists draw stuff. You can quickly work up 3D reference figures in them and use the figures in the same way you would use reference photos. Since the strip I'm working on is not photo realistic I'm not sure how much it would help me but I want to try it out.

Once again I have no idea if this will ever amount to anything. But I am enjoying writing the dialogues. And that is something.

Comics I Bought: February 19, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics plus a graphic novel:

The X-Files -4

Rex Mundi Vol 2 - 16

Mysterius The Unfathomable - 2 (First issue for me. I thought I'd give it a try)

Solomon Kane - 5 (Another first issue for me. I thought I'd give it a try)

Chronicles of Some Made (A 2008 Xeric Award Winer. Thought I'd give it a try. That's my theme for the week.)

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

"The Devil Dinosaur Omnibus" By Jack Kirby

I said it before and I'll say it again: 1970's Jack Kirby comics are my favorite Jack Kirby comics. And it's amazing how many of them I've never read. Such as "Devil Dinosaur".

This is a collection of the original nine issue series published by Marvel Comics in 1978. The introduction says it originated as a pitch for an animated series that never happened. This comic sure is fun non the less.

Being that this was my first time reading these I never knew Devil Dinosaur had a little origin story. I always thought he was a regular dinosaur except he was red. But no. As a youngster he was almost killed by some man-apes, driven into a volcano, turned red by the volcano, saved by Moon Boy, and made faster, stronger and smarter than other dinosaurs.

Kirby mixes and matches everything in his telling of tales from long before the dawn of man. Different species of early ape-men, such as Moon Boy's Small-Folk and the fearsome Killer-Folk, exist side by side with all sorts of dinosaurs. And everybody is striving to survive.

Oh, and the people can talk but the dinosaurs can't.

Much like a lot of comics of old there is more story in one issue than in six of most modern comics. Devil (he doesn't have the last name "Dinosaur" anywhere in the book except the title) and Moon Boy try to keep peace in the valley in which they live. They have to take on, Killer-Folk, Dino-Riders, other dinosaurs, space aliens, giant spiders, giant ants, a "Demon Tree" (the aliens left behind computer), and a witch.

Evert issue has a well told story and lots of Jack Kirby action. No gritty reality here but lots of imagination. None of Kirby's 1970's books lasted many issues but writers are still mining concepts he created in them for today's comics. I don't know if his 1970's work was ahead of its time, after its time, beside its time, or kitty corner to its time but I do know that all these years later they are real good.

Not everybody is a 1970's Kirby fan though. Someday I'll write down my thoughts on why a lot of people are left cold by it but not today. Today I'm happy to have gotten to read another good collection of Jack Kirby comics that I had never read before.

More Odds and Ends

I just opened up the lid of my year old air freshener that is only supposed to last three months. It's of those cheapo things that has a big wick sticking into some sort of smelly oil. It doesn't really freshen the air in any way but it makes the room smell sweet for a little while.

The reason this air freshener is only supposed to last a few months is that is says, in the instructions, to throw the lid away. Yes, it actually says to unscrew the cap and toss it in the trash. Why anyone would do this is beyond me. I kept my cap so I could turn the air freshener off.

The problem with scented air fresheners, beside the fact that sometimes I don't want to smell them, is that eventually your nose gets use to them and you can't smell them. They may as well not be there. Where is the point in that? So I like to cap mine after a while and save it for later. Since the cap isn't off twenty four seven it lasts a lot longer than three months. I think I'll cap it now though. It's giving me a headache.

Last night I had a hamburger for diner. I had it a different way than usual since I'm big on new ways to eat the same old stuff. I had it on a toasted and buttered roll with hot sauce. It was good.

I was in Wisconsin once and butter on top of a hamburger was one of the ways they served them there. It was at a famous hamburger joint the name of which escapes me now. They had a lot of different ways that I had never heard of to serve a hamburger. Even the famous hamburger joints in Manhattan I've been to didn't have all these different kinds of Wisconsin burgers. And the Manhattan joints have a wide variety of burgers.

My variation on the butter burger was good. The difference was that I buttered the roll and not the burger. And of course I added hot sauce. Now I'm not going to tell you it was better than the Wisconsin burger joint's one, because it wasn't, but at least it hit the spot for me. I was looking for something different and I got it.

I tried a new genre of video game on my Nintendo DS this week. It was a "Seek and Find" type mystery game. There really is no point to the mystery except to use it as a framing sequence for the seek and find stuff. What you have to do is find a picture of some small object amongst a whole lot of small objects on a bigger picture.

It wasn't the most challenging game in the world but after "Advance Wars: Days of Ruin" it was refreshing to have something not so challenging. The game keeps your eyes nimble as you are constantly moving them around while scanning the picture for the objects on the list. It reminded me of doing the find the hidden pictures puzzles in "Highlights" magazine when I was a kid. Who didn't love those?

My computer went a little crazy on me this week. On Sunday night I noticed that the sound coming from my Harmon Kardon Soundstick speakers was muffled. On Monday morning it was still happening so I ran through all of my trouble shooting procedures. From a Safe Boot to running Disk Utility to booting from an install disc nothing that I did would fix it. So I gave up and went for a ride on my stationary bike. When my exercise was done I came back, restarted my machine, and everything was fine. I have no idea why. The mystery of computers.

One more food related thing from this week. It has to do with potato knishes. I haven't had a knish in a little while but had one this week. I always have my knishes with mustard and usually a little cheese too. Cheddar or Pepper Jack are my usuals but this week I had one with Mozzarella. I think I have a new favorite now. I slice open the knish and put mustard on one side and the cheese on the other. Then it goes in the microwave for a minute before the two haves are reunited. The creamy texture and taste of the Mozzarella just went so well with the potato knish. Good stuff.

Comics I Bought: February 12, 2009

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

Walking Dead - 58

All Star Superman Volume 2

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

"The Lone Ranger Volume 2: Lines Not Crossed" by Brett Matthews and Sergio Cariello

I'm a fan of westerns more than I'm a fan of the Lone Ranger. I remember watching the TV show (from the 1950's) when I was a kid (in the 1970's) and I think there were a couple of Lone Ranger movies or TV movies since then but only that 1950's TV show left an impression. I remember it being a fun, straight forward kids TV western. Nothing really special for me.

I picked up the first volume of "The Lone Ranger" because it was a western and enjoyed it. Now here comes the second volume. I liked this one even more. It could be because I've grown tired of "origin stories" and volume two has none of that compared to volume one or it could be that the storytellers are finding their groove.

I like the characterizations in this book. The Lone Ranger is a man haunted by the killing of his brother and trying to deal with that by getting some measure of justice while upholding law and order. All while wearing an outlaw's mask. It's a kind of madness but he doesn't want it to be that. He just hasn't quite worked it out yet.

Tonto is the voice of reason trying to balance the Lone Ranger out. Tonto keeps his own counsel but seems to be hanging around because he thinks it's the right thing to do.

The Lone Ranger's sister in law and young nephew are still around too. I like this because it grounds him a bit. He's not a lone seeker of vengeance hiding out on roof tops talking to his own inner narrator like we've seen so many times before. He seems much more human than that.

The art is done by Sergio Cariello who I worked with many years ago in the Marvel Bullpen. This is the best stuff I've seen him do and his storytelling is very good. He deserves more credit in the advertising of the book because I never see his name mentioned in the ads. John Cassaday's name is in all the ads for drawing the covers but Sergio's interior art is what makes the book.

The colorist, Marcelo Pinto, also does a top notch job. I'm used to complaining about coloring in comics but not here. Marcello knows how to use a muted palette, when to brighten things up a notch, and best of all how to color "dark" without muddying things up. The color makes the line work even better. I wish that happened more in comics these days.

So if you're looking for a good comic, western or not, check out volume two in this Lone Ranger series.

Table It

This week I added drawers. What a fun thing. To modify things. To make them better. Or at least to make them suit my needs better. Where I've added drawers is underneath the surface of my drawing table.

I've modified my drawing table quite a bit over the years. I originally bought it way back in about 1991. It wasn't the best table I have ever seen. It's basic structure seems a little needlessly complicated and it has always annoyed me that I have to undo two wing nuts to change the angle of the table. A classic drawing table has one big wheel on the left side that you loosen to change the table's angle. That is a little easier than the two wing nut method.

For some reason the store I bought this at (Pearl Paint in NJ) didn't have any tables in the classic big wheel style. I got this one because it was the best one they had. It has served me well over the years but it is not an example of outstanding craftsmanship. It's solid and stays together but is hardly inspiring as a piece of furniture.

The first modification I made was to add a side tray to the table. That is a typical drawing table accouterment and nearly everyone I know gets one when they buy a table. The side tray screws on to one side of the table and has lots of little sections and wells to stick pens, pencils, erasers, and everything else in. It's essential. Without it there's no place to pile up your crap except the table top.

The second immediate modification I mad to my drawing table was to jack it up. I work standing up and tables are built for sitting down. It wasn't tall enough. So I built a platform out of two by fours for the table to sit on. Then it was tall enough.

I also made the platform serve another purpose. It holds the barbell I used to use for curls. The barbell sits at nearly ground level across the bottom front of my table. It keeps the weights out of the way and anchors my drawing table very nicely. I don't exercise with that barbell any more since I switched over to all dumbbells but it's tucked away and not bothering anyone. And bump into the table all you want. It has seventy five pounds keeping it in place.

They other modifications I made to my drawing table mainly have to do with expanding the side tray. I've used wire, screws, and even tape to attach extra penholders and things onto the side of my side tray. Who can have enough penholders? My side tray is about twice as big as when I bought it. I have about fifty different pens, pencils, and markers sticking up out of it.

I also built a small platform for the left side of my drawing table. This holds my jars of water that I clean my brushes in as I work. It's much smaller than the side tray since it's main purpose is specific rather than the general "Holds everything" nature of the side tray.

I even built a little extension off of the top edge of my drawing table that holds a small plant.

My latest modification is one that's been rolling around my brain for years. Since there is space immediately underneath the surface of the drawing table and since I stand at it and don't sit then there is room for drawers. I always looked at the space and thought I could use it constructively.

What finally motivated me was the ever shrinking size of the work space I had on top of my drawing table. It was constantly being cluttered up with drawings and papers in general. Every so often I'd clean it off but I usually had no place for the stuff to go.

Sometimes I have ten or twenty drawings piled up that I had worked on in the last couple of weeks. Some would get past the drawing stage and be made into something but plenty wouldn't. Either way I needed them handy to look at. Tucking them away wasn't the answer even though that did clear off my drawing surface. Easy access drawers close by were the answer.

I searched out how to stick some drawers up under my drawing table. Turns out it was easy. I found a place on the internet that made "Add a Drawer" kits. They are made to go underneath any old work table. First you assemble the drawer and then you screw the top of it into the table's underside. It was easy. It all took only a couple of hours to install.

The drawers were also a nice size for what I needed. They are twelve by eighteen inches plus about four inches tall. Since I work on a lot of eleven by seventeen inch paper (or smaller) they fit in the drawers neatly. I have two drawers side by side underneath my table.

So now I've reclaimed my drawing table's surface space while still having a lot of drawings at my finger tips. Another modification that makes life a little easier. That's what it's about. If only the rest of life were as simple.

Comics I Bought: February 5, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics plus a magazine:

Buffy Season Eight - 22

Echo - 9

Back Issue Magazine - 32

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

"Ultra: Seven Days" by The Luna Brothers

The first thing I picked up by the Luna Brothers was the survival horror book "Girls". I liked it so I thought I would give some of their work previous to that a read. This is one of them.

Some comics are up my alley and some are not. Unfortunately this is one that is not. "Ultra: Seven Days" takes place in a world where super heroes are stars much like Hollywood actors are in our world. They work for private corporations (normal ones not evil corporations), are on call to do good, fight crime, plus they have lucrative endorsements so image and marketing are important. This is the story of one of those super heroes, a woman named Ultra, and her trials and tribulations. Plus two of her friends.

This book is not bad. It's just that I don't care one whit about the lives of celebrities. As a matter of fact I go out of my way to avoid hearing about them. I don't read any gossip or pop culture magazines. I never watch any of those TV shows that are all about celebrities or read any websites about them. I find celebrity gossip tedious. I don't know any of them so why should I care who they are seen with?

That is the biggest problem I have with the book and it's just my taste. The story is well told and the dialogue is snappy. I'm not a huge fan of the Luna Brothers' art (especially the coloring) and I find their no line weight style boring but they have talent and originality that I do appreciate.

So if you're not as put off by celebrity culture as I am and are interested to see it crossed with super hero culture then check out this book. The Luna Brothers do a better job than most at making comics even if their style isn't always to my taste.

Albums and Pictures of Things

Album art. That's one of the things I was doing this week. That is, I was making my own album art. It was the final step in getting my iPod Touch to look exactly as I wanted it to.

I've written before on making playlists (à la mix tapes) in iTunes (or whatever program you prefer). It's how I like to listen to music these days. I even copied the MP3s of my music in my playlists so that I could enter new information into the songs' metadata and give them my playlist name as the album they belong to. That keeps things from getting messed up.

The one thing I overlooked after I set up my thirty-some playlists was album art. Since all of the songs on my playlists now stated that the album they belonged to was the name of my playlist rather than an actual album the original album art that was attached to each song disappeared. Poof! Into the ether.

There was still album art associated with each song but is was a nearly random default piece that attached itself to my playlist named albums. Each of my playlists had a piece of art attached to it from some actual album art in my collection. My playlist "Rolled and Landed (don't ask me what it means even I don't know) had a James McMurtry album cover attached to it. It was confusing.

Since it took so much work for me to get my playlists up to snuff I was tired of dealing with them. Random art from other albums was okay with me. Also making an album cover takes a while. More time than I wanted to spend. But then, unbeknownst to me, my brain was working on the problem. And interesting way to make a quick album cover hit me. Google images.

In case you've never used Google images before it's just like a regular web search at Google (or whatever your favorite search site is) except you hit the "Images" link and it just shows you pictures instead of web sites. Lots and lots of pictures.

So I would put the name of my playlist into Google images and see what sort of images it found. Sometimes the results would be literal, such as for my "One Wolf" playlist, and sometimes anything could happen, such as for my "Phineas Flatters Us" playlist.

Lots and lots of choices. And since the images were only going to be seen on screen low resolution images were fine. I'd pick an image, open up Photoshop, and add the name of the playlist in type. No fancy type work. Just basic. I kept things simple and got things done.

As I said before it takes a lot of work to make a real album cover. Or at least it should. I have seen plenty that were badly cranked out. But thanks to random images on the internet I was able to make a low res album cover that was interesting enough for me (and I'm fairly picky) in about five to maybe ten minutes (for the couple of stubborn ones).

I'm generally pretty fast with graphics on the computer (it is my profession) but it was the vast number of images out in cyberspace that made this little project of mine go so fast. There were so many interesting choices that I was bound to find something. And quickly. Image, type, choose font, and it's done.

This isn't a method that would work for commercial purposes. The images are property of whoever their copyright holders are and someone would need permission to, say, put them on the cover of "Time" magazine but for a guy making album covers that almost no one will ever see but himself it's a great method. I knocked out thirty something album covers in an evening.

So now my iPod Touch is looking real cool. It's loaded with all of my playlists and when I flip it into "Cover Flow" view I no longer get a useless collection of album covers that don't even relate to my playlists. I get a series of album covers with interesting images on them that also state the name of my playlist. They're useful now.

The images can surprise me too. I made them so fast and furiously that I don't even remember what some of them look like. So as I flip through my playlists in Cover Flow view I say, "Oh look at that cool album art" as if some one else put it there. Gotta love album art.