Comics I Bought: April 30, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got no new comics. But I did get a hard cover collection:

Guardians of the Galaxy - "Earth Shall Overcome"

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

Jack Kirby's The Losers by Jack Kirby

Here is yet another 1970's Jack Kirby comic that I had never read before. I'm really glad these are being collected and reprinted. Even if they are only being printed on newsprint.

"The Losers" are a group of four American soldiers in World War Two. They are called the Losers because their missions are always getting fouled up. They get the job done in the end but it seem to always be done the hard way.

I can't sing the praises of Kirby's 1970's work enough and this is no exception. I didn't know what to expect from a Kirby war book and what I got was different from most other war books I've read.

It's non stop action from cover to cover but there is always a sense of dread. The enemy, both Japanese and German, are always shown as formidable and usually outnumber our four heroes as they struggle for survival. The Losers are also not immune to injury as they can get shot up pretty badly in any given issue which helps heighten the feeling of constant danger.

The odds are stacked against them, their missions go wrong, and even the guys on their own side think they're bad luck but The Losers never stop fighting. Usually they only have a small part to play in some larger battle but they eventually get their part done.

The enemy characters seem even more fleshed out than the Losers. Sometimes we get to spend a couple of pages with the enemy and get to know them slightly but the Losers are almost always on a mission or running for their lives. There is little time to get to know them. But still you empathize with them. They are you and me.

So once again Kirby hits one out of the park. The man could just make good comics. The Losers is no exception.

Write Now

I'm looking for something to write about tonight and so far I have nothing. Some nights are like that. I say nights because that is, mostly, when I write. I'm a morning person so that is a little opposite for me. Well maybe not since it makes sense that I'd write at night. After all I have to work during the day like everyone else so when else would I write?

Yet I think that I might write better at night. That's the opposite part. I draw and do everything else better between the hours of 8 AM to 2 PM. Once the clock hits 3 PM my concentration isn't what it once was. I'm better after 6 PM and can make my way through stuff then if I have to but after 10 PM I'm nearly useless.

I've never pulled an "all-nighter" in my life. They are just counter productive for me. I don't gain any time on a deadline staying up late. I mess things up and make mistakes when I'm tired. I've always been better off going to bed and getting some rest.

All that does make it a little odd that I think I write better at night. Maybe it's the quiet. All my other work, whether I'm drawing or on the computer, I do amongst noise. I'll have music, the TV, the radio, a podcast, or something on to listen to. But for writing I need some quiet to hear the words in my head.

Isn't it odd that to see lines on a paper when I'm drawing I prefer to listen to things? Sometimes the quiet gets in the way of my concentration when I'm doing that. If it's too quiet my mind starts to wander away. It drifts outside of the confines of the paper I'm drawing on and I can't get anything done. I daydream instead of draw.

Yet when I'm writing I have to turn all the noise off. It doesn't have to be dead quiet but I don't want any music or voices in the room with me. The words in my head don't come if there are other people talking. Even music that is all instrumental is no good. I can write through it easier than if there were vocals but still that makes it hard to concentrate.

It could also be the dim lights at night that help my writing. When drawing I need all the light I can get. I like working in front of a window with the world going by outside. It helps my concentration. But when I write everything visual becomes a distraction. The TV being on, even with it muted, becomes too much of a distraction when I try to write. At night when the blinds are closed I can write easier.

I've been learning to touch type recently and that has been a huge distraction. I can see why people never bother to learn to touch type once they're past school age. It's real real slow when you start out. People who learn to touch type in school probably aren't trying to concentrate on writing as they're learning to touch type. It's two different tasks at once.

I've been doing it for a few weeks and I'm up to only twelve words a minute. That is way slower than my brain is going as I write. I'm probably three times as fast as that when hunting and pecking. I keep switching between the styles of typing because the my touch type slowness is frustrating and impeding my writing.

Since the writing in the main purpose of my typing I have to go back to hunting and pecking at times when my brain wants to speed up. I also notice that though my writing is better at night my touch typing gets worse the later it gets. It's a weird situation but I still haven't given up on touch typing. Maybe someday my speed will increase but not yet.

I looked up on the internet how to touch type and one site said that a person should be up to speed in about a week but I took that with a grain of salt. Unless that is a week of typing six hours a day I doubt anyone would be up to their eventual full speed of touch typing in their spare time.

So that's the state of writing with me.

Comics I Bought: April 23, 2009

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

The X-Files - 6

Mr. X: Condemned - 4

Ex Machina - 41

Savage Dragon - 147

100% Paul Pope - Hard Cover Collection

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

Angel: After The Fall Volume 2: First Night by Joss Whedon, Brian Lynch, and Various artists

They really should have made this the first volume. I'll say that right off the bat. Instead they had the first volume of the story start months after this one. Weird. It was a storytelling choice but I think the wrong one.

To recap: the Angel TV show ended with a big battle about to start. A cliffhanger. Then the comic series started months later (in story time) with the whole city Los Angeles transported to hell. Things had been happening off camera for a while and we were thrown into the middle. Volume 1 wasn't well executed and was confusing.

I liked this volume much better than the first. It's a thin volume made up of short stories. Each story tells what happened to an individual character on their first night in hell. Each story is also drawn by a different artist. There are a wide variety of styles but they all work together pretty well. The variety of art is one of this collection's strengths.

"First Night" is mostly about the set up information you need to understand volume one. Why didn't it come out before volume one? I don't know. Except that's the way Whedon wanted it.

There is not much else to say about this book. It was pretty good and I enjoyed it but there is no real story here. It's all the same story over and over. What happened to so and so on the first night L.A. got sent to hell? It was all variations on a theme. Not a bad thing but not a lot to talk about. It's the specifics of each person's story that make them interesting.

I would say that this volume, like the first, is for Angel fans only. I liked it better than the first but I still can't see it appealing to a general comics fan. And if you want to check out some Angel comics I'd start with Volume 2.

Spring Football Fever

The NFL draft is almost here. It starts on Saturday the 25th. An oasis of football in the middle of the off season. Unfortunately it's not that exciting an event. A list of college players names really. And draftees often don't end up doing well in the pros no matter how high they were drafted. But it gives all teams hope and us fans something to do for a day. Even if that day is just filled with a list of names.

I have another off season football source now. Since I changed from cable TV to satellite TV I actually have the NFL network. I can get a fix of football 24/7. Well, almost. Most of the NFL network is pretty uneventful. Some of the news and commentary shows are good but there is not always a lot of things to talk about in the off season. There is more than there used to be but football news isn't football.

The NFL network covered the NFL scouting combines thoroughly. The problem is that is not an event that demands to be covered thoroughly. It's a bunch of college athletes running, jumping, and going through football drills. It's hardly riveting television. The forty time that a player runs at the combine might be important to the player and the scouts but hold little excitement for me.

The combine is also a little disturbing in it's resemblance to a slave auction. We get to see players poked and prodded at little like cattle. Of course I haven't seen a real slave auction but this is kind of how they look on TV or in the movies. That can be a little strange. It reminds me of Spartacus. Such is the life of a wannabe pro athlete.

There are also a lot of "Top Ten" specials on the NFL network. Top Ten Nicknames, Top Ten Characters, Top Ten Draft Steals, Top Ten Trades, and Top Ten You Get the Idea. These shows can be entertaining but there is too much padding in them. Too much what's coming up, what has gone before, and repeated footage. An hour show has about forty minutes of stuff in it. Throw commercials in and these shows are tough to sit through.

I like the highlight package "America's Game" that they show on NFL network. They are the same ones that you can buy on iTunes and are well done. They highlight Super Bowl teams of the past and tell the tale of their championship year. There is also a series called "Missing Rings" about really good teams that didn't win the Super Bowl. That's a interesting show.

I haven't been able to get into the replays that the NFL network broadcasts of recent games. I find them too edited. It ruins the flow of the game for me. Sometimes plays start and end too abruptly. Plus it seems like the game is edited around the commercials. The game used to exist because of the drama on the field and now it exists to show commercials. Something is backwards about it.

There is this weird thing the NFL network does. It's called "As it Happened" or something similar. They show you the good plays of any given Sunday as they happened in real time. If there were six games on at once they show you which game had the most exciting play at that moment. They start with a play from game three and then switch to game six and then to game four. It's a really weird way to watch football. I'm not sure if I like it or not. It's just plain strange.

So that's my take on the NFL network. There isn't really a ton for them to do in the off season. We got two weeks of Jay Cutler trade speculation this year. Not terribly compelling television but the talking heads were glad to have that to talk about. They really have to vamp to fill time in the off season. But here comes the draft.

Comics I Bought: April 16, 2009

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

Rex Mundi Vol 2- 17

The Walking Dead - 60

Mysterious the Unfathomable - 4

Herbie Archives Volume 3

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

Astonishing Tales 25-36 starring Deathlok the Demolisher by Rich Buckler, Doug Moench, Bill Mantlo and others

These comics hit the stands in 1974-1976. I probably got them in about 1978 or 1979 and they were a favorite of mine during my teenage years. But I hadn't read them in over twenty years before now and sometimes comics I remember fondly don't hold up well when read in adulthood.

I'm happy to report that these hold up pretty well. Deathlok is mainly the work of Rich Buckler. He plots and pencils most of the issues. Doug Moench is the scripter for the first six issues and then Bill Mantlo takes over that task. There are a variety of inker/finishers on the book. The lettering is also notable for having an early, hand lettered, computer type font.

Deathlok takes place in the then future of 1990. It's a dystopian future where an unnamed war has been going on for ten years. Deathlok is a cyborg built to change the balance of power in that war. He was supposed to just be a machine but part of a man's brain, who died five years before, was used to run the cyborg. When Deathlok is turned on everyone is surprised that there is a person in there (some say the movie Robocop swiped a lot of stuff from Deathlok).

Deathlok breaks free, wanders off on his own, and tries to find his way in the world after being dead for five years and then coming back in a monstrous body. All this on a wrecked island of Manhattan.

The whole series has a fairly modern feel to it. There is a lot of military stuff going on and they don't shy away from killing and maiming. There are few, if any, thought balloons to be found in the Moench issues but there is an internal running dialogue between Deathlok's human and computer selves. This is in captions much like the first person narration that is inescapable in today's comics.

I liked the Moench scripted issues best. I think he captured the pissed off, mixed up, crazy, hopelessness of waking up five years after you've died to find yourself trapped in a monster's body with a constant computer voice in your head. There was a directionlessness to these issues that rang true to me.

The Bill Mantlo scripted issues were still pretty good but were a little more conventional. The plot went in a little more conventional direction too. Deathlok lost a little of his despair any agony at being alive but I'm not sure how much longer that could be kept up. That has always been the achilles heel of most Deathlok revival series. Sooner or later he has to accept that he is alive again and begin to live but that also negates what makes him interesting. Some characters weren't meant to continue.

I was happy to read these issues again after all these years. They hold up well. They are a lot different than most 1970's Marvel comics. I hope Marvel reprints these in a nice hardcover book one of these days. I think the original issues are still the only place these can be found.

Shone Like the Sun

I am a sucker for TV shows about unsolved mysteries. Historical mysteries, crime mysteries, astronomical mysteries, zoological mysteries, and even, on occasion, supernatural mysteries. I bring this up because I have been watching what is probably the best of these shows. "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World".

I like the thirteen episode series because it is the most straightforward and scientific. They cover a variety of subjects and have a lot of eyewitness stories but don't spend much time on wacky speculation. They lets stories be stories and facts be facts. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don't. Arthur C. Clarke will let you know when he has doubts.

I also like the style of "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World". Being that it was made in 1980 or so there is some solid film making. It was before the MTV age of fifty edits a minute and people talking over beds of music for no reason. They put a camera on a storyteller and let him tell a story with subtle camera movements and thought out reframing. They make it easy for you to pay attention.

I was a fan of the Leonard Nimoy narrated "In Search Of..." series when I was a kid in the 1970's. That was a continuing series and therefore much more hit and miss that the Arthur C. Clarke one. "In Search Of" was much less scientific but not always so and was often entertaining in its wackiness. There was a one on past lives that made me laugh even when I was twelve. And I wish I could see the one about finding out if plants scream. Some mysteries are bigger than others.

For some reason the "In Search Of..." episode that I still love best is the spirit photography one. It's filled with people in the 1970's going around to all sorts of places and taking photographs in hopes of a ghost showing up in one. The people are so ernest too. They really think they are taking spirits' pictures.

There are three brothers in the episode who use a Polaroid camera to take their photos. They go to a graveyard, take a pic next to a grave, wait a minute before peeling the Polaroid film, and then hope a ghost shows up in the photo. That looks like a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. If I ever go ghost hunting I want that same type of Polaroid camera. It seems the most appropriate.

The mystery type shows that I like the least are the U.F.O shows. They are all exactly the same. The same story over and over with no corroborating evidence. Yeah yeah, I know, the government is keeping all the evidence under wraps. Yawn. There has been no new information on any U.F.O. TV show since the 1970's. The same crap over and over. I can't take it. U.F.O.s go away.

Another thing I can't take are some of these newer hour long unsolved mystery shows (and TV documentaries in general) with a lot of padding in them. When the show starts they give a preview of what they are about to show, as they go to commercial they give a preview of what is coming up after the commercial, and when they come back from commercial they recap what they've already shown you and give a preview of what's coming up. It's repetitive and annoying. I don't need to know what you're going to show me. Just show me.

I always liked the actual show called "Unsolved Mysteries" hosted by Robert Stack where viewers could call in and help solve whatever was unknown. There was a lot of crime stuff on that show that eventually got solved and they would hit you with an update in a later edition. Sometimes we got closure on their stories.

A fairly new type of show is the "Ghost Hunter" type show. A group of people go out with all sorts of equipment and try to find ghosts. Needless to say they never find anything. The only show of this type I like is the first season (2002) of the British TV series "Most Haunted". It was a lean half hour of the host and crew mostly did nothing but scare themselves late at night. They never found any ghosts but it was entertaining. The next season the show became an hour long and was dull and padded. I think the show is still on the air today.

Yep, I've seen all these type of shows. All that conspiracy stuff that was in "The DaVinci Code" was old news to me. There had been quite a few shows about it. There were many more "The DaVinci Code" conspiracy shows after the book was a hit. None of them added much to what I already had seen but a couple were okay.

One day I hope to see a show where they finally find Atlantis. Wouldn't that be fun?

Comics I Bought: April 9, 2009

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

Echo - 11

Hulk - Red Hulk Volume 1

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

Giant Size Hulk by Various People

Giant Size Hulk is a hardcover collection of a few Hulk specials that came out in 2008. This book is tinged with nostalgia for me. Besides a bunch of new stories there are some older stories from the 1970's. The whole thing is clearly supposed to bring back memories of the giant sized comics of the 1960's and 1970's.

Much like those comics this one is a mixed bag. The stories are all self contained but link together thematically. We get a Thundra story as she takes on the Hulk and a Thundra story from the 1970's as she takes on the Fantastic Four.

There were two stories that stood out to me. A John Byrne drawn Hulk annual from the 1970's and the last story in the book. A Hulk versus Hercules story from last year. The rest of the stuff was alright but not spectacular. But that's okay.

Part of the fun of annuals was variety and volume . You never knew what you were get but you knew you were going to get a lot of it. An annual with one good story a mediocre one and some reprints was always a lot of fun.

This fun was taken out of annuals sometime in the 1980's when the variety was taken away. Instead of many stories you got just one and odds were it was going to be mediocre. It was the end of an era.

So that is why this Giant Size Hulk book is tinged with nostalgia for me. It harkens back to a fun format of a bygone era. So even if it wasn't a collection of great comics it was still a fun collection. Some good stories, some mediocre ones, and some solid reprints. For some reason that recipe still works for me.

The Fatigue of Faces

Six weeks. That's how long it took me to get step one done on my web comic. Hmmm... maybe it wasn't really step one; maybe it was step one in the drawing of it. Either way it was a tough step.

What this step included was character design and and character illustration. I decided to take a whole different approach to drawing a strip than is normal for a comic. I don't have the time to draw a daily strip so I'm going with a different approach. A cut, paste, and manipulate approach.

I started with the characters faces. I drew six different views of a character's face, scanned them in, and colored each of the faces in Illustrator. I then drew three different poses for said character, scanned them in, and colored each in Illustrator. I then put each head variation on each body variation. I did this for four characters. That's a lot of heads and bodies to draw, color, and bring together.

To help with the construction of the eventual strip I had to pay special attention to characters' eyes and mouths. I made these separate from the faces so that I could manipulate them when putting together a strip. I can change the expression on the characters' faces by changing the mouths and eyes a bit. I don't want to endlessly draw each character's face over and over for each new strip. I couldn't do it. At least not for free.

Having the characters look at each other as they interact in the strip is important so I constructed the eyes in such a way as to be able to change the way the eyeball is looking. This took some more time but will save time in the future. That's what this was all about. Saving me time in the future.

It was tough sledding though. I'm not a fan of character design and working on only the nuts and bolts of the strip with no finished product in sight was hard for me. One of the reasons I like making art is because I like to finish things. Finishing a piece is often the most satisfying part and slogging through all the stuff you have to do to get to finish something is what stops most people from ever finishing anything.

After I finished the first two characters I almost gave up and threw in the towel. My strip is about conversation and is mostly talking heads so visually it's tough to do something interesting. I grabbed a few of the strips I had written and tried to use my two finished characters to make the dialogue come to life. I couldn't. It looked awful. All of the variation I had drawn into the characters was negated by the sameness of each panel.

I was frustrated and nearly gave up at this point but I left things for a few hours and then came back to it to try again. I abandoned my ideas of literal storytelling with the pictures and concentrated on making the strip look good. I varied the sizes and positions of my two speakers with no regard for how they were literally moving around on the stage. The dialogue was literal enough without the staging having to be so too. I put together a couple of strips with looser staging.

That seemed to pull things together for me. That and changing the characters' expressions a bit more. It took me weeks to get those two characters finished so seeing a couple of strips nearly finished and generally to my liking gave me the motivation I needed to get the other two characters done. Two men and two women. They have no names yet. And so far the men have on weird masks and the women weird hats. That makes things more interesting for me.

The best character I designed was the last one. That's because I built her in Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is a vector graphics program which uses points to make a line (sorta like connect the dots). When I scan my art and bring it into Illustrator it uses thousands of points to make the lines in my artwork.

The same line that Illustrator's "Autotracing" makes with twenty points an actual person can make with two. So I made a character's head with the minimal number of points I could. That's cool because now I can use that basic head and manipulate a few points to make a new character. Wider jaw - shift these two points, bump in the nose - shift this point, and on and on. Once again this is all about saving work in the future.

Now I'm tired of working so much now to save me work in the future. The characters are well under way and I can start finishing some strips. I still have no idea what it's called or where I'm going to post it but I'll cross those bridges when I come to them. Right now I want to finish a couple of paintings and then a couple of strips. I haven't gotten to finish anything is six weeks and that is fatiguing.

Comics I Bought: April 2, 2009

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

Buffy Season 8 - 24

Glamourpuss - 6

Savage Dragon - 146

Invincible Ironman: The Five Nightmares

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

Spider-Man: "New Ways To Die" Mostly by Dan Slott, John Romita Jr., and Klaus Janson

These Spider-Man hardcover books have been coming out fast and furious since the whole line was merged into one monthly comic. I haven't liked every one of them and I haven't bought every one of them. They've been up and down. I bought this one because I liked Dan Slott's work on some other volumes. JR Jr. on the art didn't hurt either.

This was an up volume. Fun stuff. Spidey faces off against Norman Osborn and the Thunderbolts. I'm a little annoyed at this new Marvel Universe where outright villains are openly running the US government. It makes things a little less believable for me and a little too much like the Wildstorm Universe. But I went with it.

This is classic Spidey stuff with Aunt May, Harry Osborn, a newsroom, and things not going Spidey's way. There are lots of fights with the Thunderbolts, lots of Spidey fighting hurt, and a new super villain. The Anti-Venom. Or is he a hero? Time will tell.

The artwork by Romita and Janson was, of course, good. Those two always do a nice job and this was no exception.

My only complaint is with the aforementioned villains in powerful government jobs with no oversight. It's a world with no government checks and balances and no detectives to track down wrong doing. Every day there are a million cop shows on TV. We all know how detectives work but apparently (an overused word but appropriate here) there are none on the job in the Marvel Universe.

All in all I enjoyed this book. I'm always up for a good Spider-Man story.