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Heroes Beacon

30 May

I’ve managed to rouse myself from my slack blogging long enough to entreat you, my internet friends, to help support the efforts of some Saint John pals in establishing a much-needed new comic shop in the heart of that city. The shop will be called Heroes Beacon and you can check out their plans here. As I write this they are about 2/3 funded with three weeks to go, so don’t wait for the last minute, get in there now and get one of those perks. I have already spoken for one and am thinking about going for another.

I have also drawn a poster artwork thing for them to use as they see fit, I think it makes a decent overview of what you can expect to find there once they get up and running. The important thing is to tell your friends and contribute, so share it up!

heroesbeacon_900px_url

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Spring, Sprung

14 Apr

Tsk, I haven’t posted for about a couple of months. Bad blogger, me. Sometimes I like to take a bit of a break. There hasn’t been much to report anyway; at least, not much for public consumption. I’m still working, still drawing comics when I’m not working, commuting from Saint John to Kingston (where I am now), and so on. I feel like I am slowly coming out of the usual winter funk, thanks to getting more creative stuff done, starting up with running again, making some new friends. The only thing I would like to do more of is maybe catch up on some video gaming and reading. Oh, and meditating. I’ve been really slack about that. I’ll figure it out.

On the bright side, I have been able to get a better handle on finances, partly due to a new app I’ve been using called You Need a Budget (YNAB). I still need to do some training to take full advantage of it but I liked it well enough during the trial period to pay for a full license.

Still enjoying the Apple TV and Hulu Plus; most recent favourite is Kroll Show starring Nick Kroll. Netflix has also added a pile of great cartoons, including Adventure Time, Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated, Justice League Unlimited, Venture Brothers, etc. It makes for a pretty hip Saturday morning.

I was sorry to hear about the passing of Roger Ebert recently. Discovering his and Gene Siskel’s show on PBS in my early teens led me to think about films more deeply than I had up until then. He regretted the entrenchment of the superficial, “thumbs up” review systems that publicists were so happy to put on posters; it was in his print reviews that I was pointed to other critics like Pauline Kael and encouraged to start thinking more critically myself. In more recent years, his blog often featured well-considered and unashamedly liberal examinations on issues pertaining to life in America. I’ll miss him.

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The New Cable

11 Feb

There used to be an expression that flew around in the early days of the internet, especially when it came to file sharing: “information wants to be free.” This is, of course, a stupid thing to say for many reasons, not least of which that it’s a personification; information doesn’t “want” anything. It is not sentient. It simply exists.

What those people really meant is that information should be more accessible, more transparent, and more affordable. After years of being charged $20 or more for ten songs or a movie on a plastic disc, people have embraced the opportunity to download a copy (even if it is not a top-quality one) for nearly nothing. Not surprisingly, those who own the content have fought this tooth and nail, be it the record industry, film studios, publishers; and now we find ourselves in a middle ground where we can obtain much of the entertainment we want sort-of-illegally for free (I use the qualifier because file sharing is legal in some countries, decriminalized in others, illegal in still others); or we can sort-of-buy it legally for a dollar or two (again, I qualify because we don’t so much buy the content as license it, trusting that it will be there in the cloud for us when we want it).

I used to pay about $70 for high speed internet service and another $50 or so for basic cable. Had I sprung for digital cable with movie channels and such, it would have been more like $100. Here in Canada, the television media are controlled by a few large companies regulated by a body called the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission, or CRTC. The CRTC is supposed to regulate these businesses on behalf of the Canadian public, but more often they seem to make decisions that benefit the protectionist interests of those companies, who depend on the income generated by providing Canadian clones of popular American or British series and channels.

There are those who would argue that this system feeds a lot of money into the Canadian entertainment industry, helping to keep all those struggling actors and film crews working, and I’m sure that is true. It is a license condition of those copycat channels that a certain percentage of their programming be Canadian in origin. I don’t want a single precious hair on any single precious Canadian artist’s head to be curled by what I’m about to say.

You see, it occurs to me now that while information may not want to be free, it may very well want to be region-free. It is completely idiotic, for example, that you can buy a DVD in Australia and not be able to play it in America. It makes sense that DVDs may have different formats that reflect the video standards of their home nations – NTSC vs. PAL and what have you. But if you want to import a cool new kung fu movie from Japan, it probably won’t play on your Canadian system. And why not? Not for any technological reason, but because some giant Canadian company hasn’t licensed the content to sell it to us yet.

It is the 21st century. Why are we allowing Rogers, Bell, or Shaw to take a cut of something that they did not make themselves? Why do they get to slap together packages and bundles that ensure a cable subscriber will have dozens of channels they do not want for the sake of getting the few that they do?

This is pretty much why so many of us are “cutting the cord”; cancelling cable entirely and downloading torrents or streaming video through the websites of those copycat networks. But, if some of my friends and I are any indication, the torrenting free-for-all is slowly migrating to content services like Netflix, which- gasp- recommends programs based on what you like, rather than whatever bundles the network wants you to take. Netflix has even started to acquire the rights to new original programming, most famously the cult favourite Arrested Development.

In the ongoing search for more options, some of us have gone a step further and subscribed to a VPN service that allows us to circumvent regional restrictions; which is a fancy way of saying that for $5 a month, I can watch the American version of Netflix instead of the Canadian. And yes, the American one has a lot more options. Do I care that some big corporation that holds the American license for a program is getting a few cents that some other big corporation that holds the Canadian license is not? No. I truly do not give a shit. Netflix is still getting $8 a month from me, and they are able to report and track what I am watching to the people that make the royalties.

This has taken on a new dimension with the recent addition of an Apple TV to my setup, because once the Apple TV has been configured with that same VPN service, hey presto! An app for Hulu Plus appears on the menu. Hulu Plus is sort of like Netflix, except it’s only available in the US and concentrates more on TV, including shows that are currently running. It is also ad-supported. Since it is US-only, it is a little trickier for a Canadian to sign up for it, but it does seem to work (for now anyway) and for another $8 a month, I now have access to new shows from NBC, ABC and Fox, as well as a lot of other smaller networks; plus an assortment of movies, most notably the Criterion Collection, which would be worth the price of admission alone.

So, $8 for Netflix, plus $5 for the VPN, plus $8 for Hulu Plus, and whatever portion of the internet bill I would be paying equals a new kind of cable- digital and tailored to my preferences and devices – for less than the cost of basic cable from a giant Canadian corporation. And since I am paying for those services, the creative folks should be getting royalties somewhere – more than they were getting when I was only torrenting, anyway.

Do you see what is happening, CRTC? Rogers, Bell, and Shaw? You are obsolete. Concentrate on what we now need in this country: reliable high speed internet and related services at a reasonable price. Stop trying to be movie moguls; you suck at it.

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Money Rules by Gail Vaz-Oxlade

1 Feb

You may recognize Gail Vaz-Oxlade from her perennially rerun TV series Til Debt Do Us Part, in which she would show up at a couple’s home, analyze their (usually abysmal) financial situation, and make a budget for them. I used to watch Til Debt when I had cable, in the background while I worked every day, and I suppose it sank in; while my financial situation was not as dire as those on the show, it has never been really good either despite a decent income. About a year ago, I decided to make more of an effort and went from having no budget and being a regular payday loan recipient to having a budget, paying down some debt, freeing myself from a bunch of bank fees, and accumulating some retirement savings.

Things could still be better of course, and I have some significant financial challenges coming up (most notably a wedding), so I picked up Gail’s new book, Money Rules, for a “booster shot”, as it were. I believe that she has just wrapped a new TV series that will tie into it as well. Money Rules is pretty much what the title says: instead of a step-by-step process with a particular goal, it is a large collection of rules, each accompanied by a short essay explaining the logic behind them. While all of the rules involve money somehow, some of them are for everyday use and some are better suited for major life events like buying a home. The rules are not in any apparent order – in fact, they have been randomized so that you will not skip an entire chapter assuming that they are not for you.

I have only skimmed the book so far, but I plan to go through and highlight the ones that are most urgent for me and make a plan to implement them this year (for example, “Everyone Needs an Emergency Fund”); identify the ones that are good to think about in the medium term and long term (“Lose Your Bad Habits”, “Save While You Pay Off Your Debt”); and identify the ones that I should be following every day (“Embrace Simple Pleasures”). As in everything she does, Gail’s tone throughout is a mixture of common sense, humour, and acid wit, especially when her target is those who have a vested interest in relieving us of our cash. I suspect this book will pay for itself very quickly.

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Anniversaries

29 Jan

Lots to celebrate this week. First and foremost by a large margin is four years with Nicole. The first few months were rocky and tempestuous, and we still have difficulties, but it’s nice when your worst relationship problem is that you live apart some of the time and want to spend more time together.

One of the unexpected ways that we have bonded is by collaborating on our webcomic, Time Wounds All Heels, which turns 6 months old today. That may not sound like a long time – especially for a weekly comic – but TWAH is by far the most sustained creative effort I have been involved in since I started drawing comics over 20 years ago, and has been exposed to the largest audience (rapidly closing in on 25,000 views). I’ve never felt so enthusiastic about drawing every day.

Finally, it’s been just about a year since I bought the iPad 2, partly so that I could see what kind of platform it would be for making and viewing comics. The short answer: a great one. The iPad is the kind of device I used to dream about when I was hunched over my light table, watching the same UMDs over and over on my PSP. Depending on what I’m doing, the iPad is my radio, TV, web browser, book or comics reader, video game platform, planner, typewriter, and sketchbook. It would have been nice to get it at the lower price it sells for after the introduction of the iPad Mini, but otherwise I couldn’t be happier with it.

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I’d Still Be Writing 2012 on My Cheques if I Still Wrote Cheques

14 Jan

…which is just a roundabout way of saying that I haven’t quite adjusted to the new year yet. The end of 2012 was a mad dash of holiday visiting and times with Nicole and Jack, then moving in to my new digs on Duke street, then getting back to work, part of which involved sorting out a new laptop and extracting work-related stuff from my Mac. Not to mention trying to get ahead of schedule on the webcomic, which is going reasonably well.

That said, the new year is treating me pretty well. I’m quite comfortable in my Duke street room, was able to squeeze a surprising amount of the stuff that I prefer to keep in it, and took the opportunity to get rid of some unnecessary junk at value village. My typical day involves sitting at my desk or on the bed and tapping away at the keyboard or scratching away on the Wacom while going through various series on Netflix. It’s like being in a kind of productive hibernation.

I should get off my ass and get back to running and meditating. One thing at a time, I suppose. At least I have been getting some reading done, most notably some books I got for Xmas: Corpse on the Imjin by Harvey Kurtzman, Came the Dawn by Wally Wood, The Year of the Beasts by Cecil Catellucci and Nate Powell, and The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. Coming up are Pete Townshend’s autobiography and volumes 3 and 4 of the new volumes of Love and Rockets.

I’m heading up to Kingston this weekend, with a quick stop in Toronto on the way, to visit Nicole for a couple of weeks. I also need to book tickets for the second annual trip back up with Jack on the train for his March break. It’s a 24 hour trip; good thing he likes the train!

I’m hoping to find a Jot Touch pressure sensitive stylus while in Toronto to see how it works with Sketchbook Pro on the iPad. SBPro is a pretty impressive drawing app and I could easily see myself using it for general sketching and roughs for comics, once I have a stylus that allows for more precision than the cheap pinky-sized thing I have now. I’ll post some results once there is something to post.

For now, back to drawing. Hope your new year is going well.

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2012 Comics Review

7 Jan

Whew! What a year it’s been. I recently posted about my favourite and least favourite films on the webcomic that I do with Nicole, which is in itself a good indicator of how comics have come to take a greater role in my life again. I’ve been reading more of them, getting more involved in the community of them, and most importantly, making more of them. Here are the highlights, in no particular order:

1) the iPad and digital comics. It was a little under a year ago that I picked up an iPad 2, partly to experiment with making comics in a format that would work with it, and partly to experiment with reading comics on it. I am pretty pleased with the experience of both, and with the device in general. I use it for gaming, streaming video, writing scripts, social media stuff. I don’t use it much for drawing but am hoping to do some more this year.

Digital comics purchases have not dominated my buying habits by any means but I have taken advantage of comixology sales and kind publishers who send me galleys, allowing me to read stuff like Saga, Morning Glories, the first volume of the Scott Pilgrim Color Edition, Faith Erin Hicks’ Friends With Boys and Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, Eddie Campbell’s The Lovely Horrible Stuff, and Lucy Knisley’s upcoming Relish.

This year also saw a number of high profile attempts to get into the digital comics business, like Mark Waid’s Thrillbent and a variety of Kickstarter projects. One of my favourite discoveries of these is Bandette by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover, published through Monkeybrain Comics.

2) making comics. Or perhaps more accurately, making the time for making comics. This year I managed to finish a new all-ages mini-comic called the Five Seconds Summer Fun Special, and get a good start on a new weekly webcomic called Time Wounds All Heels. I did both in Manga Studio EX, slowly overcoming the learning curve both for the application and the lovely Wacom Intuos 4 tablet that Nicole got me last xmas. As I write this, the webcomic is closing in on 20,000 visitors since it started in August, which makes it far an away the most-seen thing I have ever written or drawn.

My goal for this year is to continue working on the webcomic, improving my skills in general, and maybe get started on another project on the side.

3) the community. As I worked on making more comics, I naturally found myself sitting at my computer more, watching shows and movies on Netflix with a Twitter application updating in the corner. I started following other comics people from many sectors of the business; amateurs like myself, webcomickers, indie pros, mainstream artists, a few publishers and agents. I think that I probably now follow as many comics people as I do non-comics people, or close to it. Having that Twitter feed feels like being more immersed in the community, and has led to some nice exchanges and discoveries.

I also managed to make it to the inaugural Harbour Con-Fusion here in Saint John, a relaxacon where I exhibited for the first time in years. I had hoped to also make it to TCAF and the new Dartmouth CAF, but unfortunately could not. I hope to attend and/or exhibit more this year. After the convention I created a facebook group for Atlantic Canadian cartoonists to discuss their work as well.

I have also just recently gotten a little bit more involved with Reddit, initially to promote the webcomic, then to promote this blog a little, and finally as a regular reader of some subreddits that interest me. Reddit seems like it could be a gigantic time-sink if I let it, so I wish I could spare the time to do more there, but it’s a start.

4) women in comics. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the headlines associated with this topic this year: the rant by an artist about female cosplayers being “fake geeks”, the treatment of female artists by major publishers, the popularity of tumblrs like Escher Girls, and much much more. Not to mention the strong voices of female creators like Gail Simone, Hope Larson, Kate Beaton, Kate Leth, Faith Erin Hicks, and others discussing everything from current working conditions to rape culture.

All of this, along with other personal matters, weighed on my mind more this year than any other. I want women to be treated fairly and equally, and respected. As someone who draws comics about relationships, it was important to me that they be done properly. That’s why it was important to me that I collaborate with my partner Nicole, educate myself about feminism a little more, and just generally think before I write or draw. Can’t guarantee I will always succeed of course, but I’ll do my best.

5) really good comics movies. The Avengers, the last Dark Knight movie, Dredd, Amazing Spider-Man. None of them perfect, but generally a vast improvement on their predecessors.

6) really good comics in general. More than before I feel like I live in a golden age for comics, where it doesn’t really matter if Marvel or DC or whoever else cranks out any good stuff (though I realize sometimes they do). There is so much good stuff coming out from independents, from alternative publishers, self-publishers, webcomickers, and so on that I don’t really have time to read it all. It’s inspiring and energizing to walk into a great comic shop like The Beguiling or Strange Adventures and see the new EC artist collections by Fantagraphics next to the latest issue of Pope Hats, Kirby fourth world collections, auteur graphic novels, Love and Rockets, Archie digests, and so much more.

So, that’s all I can say for now. Gotta get back to making those comics. If you’ve been reading them (or this), thanks. Here’s to an even better year ahead.

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No Money, Mo’ Problems

19 Nov

Yesterday was one of those days where everything just seemed to go right. We had been out late on Saturday night to a birthday party for some of her classmates, so Nicole and I slept in, which is a rare luxury for either of us. Then she found out that she passed her comprehensive field exams, which is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) hurdles to obtaining a PhD, so obviously that was good news, and a great load off her mind. She has more challenges ahead, but she can take a bit of a breather now.

Not long after that I checked that the new instalment of our webcomic, Time Wounds All Heels, was online and that readers were checking it out. It was and they were, so I did my usual routine of posting about it on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, and set about making breakfast. When I refreshed the site stats around midday, the visitor count was way up thanks to Reddit traffic; in a short span we had already surpassed a previous high watermark. I’m not sure why or how, but by the time 24 hours had passed, more people had looked at the comic in these two days than in the previous four months of its existence combined. More people had viewed the comic than anything else I’ve been involved in before, including plays that ran for multiple nights to full houses at the Imperial Theatre.

It’s a curious feeling. It’s not really pressure, but I am definitely more mindful now that there is an audience, and I hope they continue to enjoy our work. When you work as hard as we do in solitude, be it in academia or comics, with not much in the way of compensation, it’s good to know once in a while that you’re reaching someone.

We went for a walk in the late afternoon, enjoying the late fall weather and doing a little shopping; we strolled by a potential wedding venue. We closed out the day with movies, a puzzle, and some cherry pie that I made. All in all, a wonderful day.

Digital Comics Thoughts, Fall 2012

19 Oct

You may recall that after the beginning of this year, I bought an iPad and posted some words about digital comics, particularly what they should cost (especially if they are coming from a major publisher) and how they could be produced by independent artists. It’s hard to believe that it was less than a year ago that people were fretting about how Marvel and DC would get their books to market, what it would cost, how it would impact comic shops, and so on.

My opinions on all of that stuff have not changed much, but I do have more data to work with now in terms of my own experience and buying habits, so I thought I would check in. So, here is a bit of an update:

1) Paid legal downloads. I don’t do a lot of this, and when I do it tends to be either a title on sale in Comixology or one that is “on special” for a limited time. I usually hear about these deals on Twitter, where I follow dozens of cartoonists and publishers who work in all genres. I have not yet gotten into the habit of checking Comixology every Wednesday to see what’s new; but then I haven’t been in that habit with comic shops for a long time either. Generally, I don’t care for paying a same-as-print price for a digital file which I can’t freely copy but which I have to store; this applies to video games and other software as well as comics. That said, I have found some nice gems when I bother to look, like Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover’s Bandette or Penny Arcade’s Lookouts comic.

2) Unpaid legal downloads. Some artists, especially webcomics artists, have experimented with providing samplers or archives of their work for free, like Rich Stevens’ Diesel Sweeties or Mark Waid’s Insufferable. J. Torres invited reviewers to do the same with the first volume of his series Bigfoot Boy, drawn by Faith Erin Hicks; a book which I recently picked up in print. I expect I will do something similar in the future once I have enough instalments of my own webcomic, Time Wounds All Heels, built up.

3) Unpaid borrowed downloads. This is probably more common with regular novels being lent as ebooks through public libraries, but I have been able to read a fair number of graphic novels lately through a galley service, which provides DRM-protected books that expire after a few months. They are intended to be read in Adobe Digital Editions, which is a terrible thing to try to read with on a standard computer screen; and thanks to Adobe’s butthurt over Apple not wanting to deal with the piece of shit known as Flash, there is no version of ADE for the iPad. Fortunately, an independent app called the Bluefire Reader will handle ADE content, so I am able to read those books in a comfortable format. The tradeoff is that if I finish a book, I write a review about it on my blog and send the resulting link to the publisher. Seems fair enough. It tends to be smaller publishers like First Second, who can harness the power of online reviews for their sort of books perhaps a little better than a more-scrutinized publisher like Marvel. My only complaint about this route is that some publishers do not provide a very readable copy of the book; presumably concerned about DRM being broken and PDFs of their books being released into the wild, they submit a very low resolution file that makes the artwork look like shit and the text difficult to read. In which case, why bother?

4) Free online comics. Apart from the above mentioned galleys of graphic novels, these are far and away my most common source for reading comics now, from old favourites like John Allison and Tatsuya Ishida to relatively new ones like Kate Leth or Eric Dyck. Webcomics artists support themselves all kinds of ways, from website ads and physical merchandise to day jobs and commissions. I try to support the ones I like however I can.

5) Ethically questionable downloads. Let me get this out of the way: I download torrents of stuff, especially TV shows, movies recently released on DVD, and the occasional album by some band I want to check out. Downloading torrents is legal in Canada (though uploading is not, resulting in some confusion, but I suspect the main goal is to discourage wholesale widespread piracy rather than downloading something for personal use). I have no qualms about downloading TV shows; to me it is no different from having digital cable, and it is not my problem that Media Corporation A has not yet figured out how to measure and bill Media Corporation B for it. The big reason I don’t have reservations about downloading TV or new DVD releases is that the quality of the resulting file is not a replacement for what you would buy; it’s watchable (usually) but it’s not HD, it’s just a compressed AVI or Quicktime rip of a better quality product. I think it’s fair in the sense of sampling, and there have been numerous occasions where downloading that way has led me to buy the DVD later for myself or as a gift.

However, I am not so comfortable with downloading rips of digital comics as torrents, or ebooks, or other situations where the file you get is basically the file you would get if you paid for it. As a result, I have done very little torrenting of comics, with the exception of a few situations where I have already paid for the series in print and would like to have a digital copy to carry around or refer to. The most notable instance of this is Lone Wolf and Cub, which I originally bought in the form of Dark Horse’s tiny trade paperbacks; 27 volumes at about $12 a pop, totalling over $300 in comics which due to my advancing age and sudden need for bifocals, I could no longer read. So, I downloaded them and am not losing any sleep over it. Your mileage (and local laws) may vary, of course.

So, the main lesson I have taken away from owning an iPad so far is that I am reading more digital comics than I expected I would even a few months ago, and sometimes even paying for them despite my initial skepticism of services like Comixology. If there is ever a service like Netflix for comics that allows access to a content library for a flat fee, I would probably be all over it. Publishers with deep backlists, like Marvel and DC, might want to consider it as a way to generate interest in the current adventures of their characters.

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The Searchers, Summer 2012 Edition

17 Sep

Whew, once again I’ve been slack on this blog; mainly because I’ve been working hard on my webcomic Time Wounds All Heels. If it’s not part of your weekly comics regimen, check it out, won’t you?

Anyway, longtime readers of this blog will recall that from time to time, I post a list of the search terms that lead people here. Sick, strange people. Here are my favourites from the last few months:

camp rock 2
skiing movies
england in the 70′s
russian contemporary immigrant fiction
step up revolution
fun sexual punishment
popular young woman from hollywood
how to upload .ibooks file to wordpress
the masochist supervillains
jim caviezel the equalizer
kinky spankings
russian immigrant cinema
famous claymations
will forte
3d gay penis bdsm
aspect ratio comixology
jeremy sisto eastbound and down
hot young bitches
hot vampire women
teen supervillain spanking story
watchmen vs citizen kane
swinging with the finkels racist
bed perspective sketch
lee majors spanking
write a letter to nicolas cage
chernobyl diaries ending explained
nicknames for goofy girls
avatar the legend of korra episode 12
is channing tatum in scott pilgrim
michelle rodriguez biceps
alexandra breckenridge erotic
silver age comics spanking
why krull failed in cinema
superman spanking wonder woman
is the hart of dixie set the same as gilmore girls
ophelia lovibond tumblr
“scott marshall” scam
how to make mini comics
mini comics publishers
on burn notice do they have a studio or do they just film the show all over miami
who is james garner mass effect
lego john cusack

The “Scott Marshall scam” search was an eye-opener. Turns out some douchebag that shares my name has been ripping people off with stock market scams, leading to an attempt on his life. For the record, if anyone out there is an angry investor, I am not him and I don’t know where he is.

I think my favourite is “why Krull failed in cinema” – why indeed? It’s a mystery of the ages. I also like the idea of Lego John Cusack; there could be a Lloyd Dobler set with ghetto blaster and pen, a High Fidelity set with a record shop, a Grosse Pointe Blank set. Let’s do this, pro builders.

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