Zoa and Color

Been doing this little ditty called Zoa Space Fantasy on a local news/message board. The pages are in the mini-comic format, all hand work and scanned/arranged digitally. A lot of fun so far and promises to be mucho fun to come.

But the colors are washed out. I’m not sure what’s happening. The original pages are hand colored with Prismacolor markers on bristol and they really pop. But digitally – at least on most monitors I’ve seen – they don’t pop so much. I guess I just need to do some Photoshop tweaking before saving for the web. I had hoped to keep it as raw as possible. I even leave the little bits of messiness around the border that results from putting a jet black template behind a scanned page with different values. I like the roughness of it.





As far as the story goes, we'll just have to see where it goes. We've got demon drives and space witches and tekwizards and all that jazz coming up. Basically a space rockin' romp.

Later

Thoughts on Famous Deaths

People die every day. If you live long enough it is inevitable that people you know will die. It is inevitable that people you’ve heard of will die. So why are we so shocked when famous people die?

I heard that Heath Ledger was found dead at age 27. I was genuinely saddened. I loved the campy little movie A Knight’s Tale and I thought Ledger was incredible in Brokeback Mountain (as a good friend puts it “He carved his performance out of old leather”). I heard a bit of water cooler talk about it at work and I began to wonder why we worry so much about people we don’t actually know.

It is a little bit odd, but I think if you enjoy art (meaning film, music, all of it) then you will develop a connection with the artists. They speak to you personally. That’s the power of art – it reaches inside us and finds out what makes us tick. It shows us secrets about the world, about ourselves. If any of you are rolling your eyes at that, think about your favorite song or a song that seems to speak truth to you. If you’ve ever found yourself singing along or letting some old, sad song wash over you then it shouldn’t seem like such a nutty idea. When we lose an artist we feel it more profoundly than we might feel the loss of a stranger from 1000 miles away who never reached inside and touched us.

Of course there is a danger in this. The cult of personality surrounding many famous people is somewhat troubling. The world shook when Princess Diana died, and I’m sure there was a good reason for that. But there was an unfortunate feedback…a negative feedback in the form of media saturation. So for a while we were all going “Please, please, please shut up about Lady Di.”

Our monkneysphere’s aren’t that big, but there must be some kind of place in them for people who make magic but who we will never meet in real life. Otherwise why would we care when an actor or a musician or a comic book artist dies?

To quote the rock band Monster Magnet, “I was thinkin’ how the world should have cried on the day Jack Kirby died”. I didn’t cry the day Jack died, but when I look at the wealth of art he left behind and the immortal impact he had on comics art I do feel a sadness that I don’t always feel when I hear about a stranger dying in a car crash in Wisconsin.

It’s a curious thing.

The Starry Eyed Wisdom of Nada Plainbritches

Catchy title to a somewhat vapid post. Empty it is...all full of nothing. Three in the AM and I'm going to bed now. I've updated Blood Red Comics with more images both new and very, very old.

As I sit here about to fall asleep at the keyboard I have this somewhat pleasant feeling that I'm destined to be an explorer inside my own head. This is pleasant because I have a lot of cool things in my head. However, it bodes ill for any plans of world domination. I will never be a King among men, only a regular Joe. My visions will largely remain locked inside this bone cranium cell, constantly clawing at my insides with their bloody knuckles and soft, soft fingertips. They move and writhe and swirl and dance inside me and I love the pain they bring.

Blogs are fucking weird.

Oops

Ya know, in that last post I said something like "I am NECESSARILY talking about...yadda" but what I actually meant was "I am NOT necessarily talking about...yadda".

Kinda changes the meaning a little bit. So no, I was not referring to the ubiquitous all present generic universal nameless formless god that so many people believe in.

More later.

Agnostic, I

Belief in God has been on my mind a little bit lately. I haven’t really talked about it for a while, been doing other things. But it seems that all roads lead to Rome and all thoughts lead to meaning. Good, Evil, God…these seem to be closely linked with my thoughts on meaning.

A couple of years ago I started thinking seriously about what I believe. When we found out we were going to have a baby it suddenly became very important for me to come to an understanding – a deeper understanding – of literally EVERYTHING. And so I’ve been trying. And I’m still trying.

I’ve never really believed in God. Looking back at myself as a child I was always kind of afraid of churches and preachers and the Bible. They talked about punishment for stuff I didn’t even understand…yet I seemed to be implicated in. It was frightening…so frightening that I eventually got up before a congregation and got saved.

I never went back to that church and I never attended any church again as a person interested in believing.

So God and church kind of remained a murky, uncertain idea in the back of my head for many, many years. I went through a short Jesus phase when I was 18, actually having several very moving spiritual experiences thinking about Jesus. I recall telling my girlfriend a couple of my Jesus thoughts and she looked at me like I was on drugs. She was very much a church girl and she didn’t approve of my Jesus thoughts. After she convinced me to burn all my “evil looking” heavy metal tapes (which I did, in a barrel, with mixed emotions) I started to lose that Jesus feeling again.

Since I married a beautiful young lady who shared an alarming number of my own views I didn’t really have to deal with the God subject again for many years. I mean, church is one thing. I always disliked them and I was vocally opposed to churches as a young adult in my roaring twenties. But I didn’t talk about God very much. I do recall writing some rather nasty, negative poetry about religion when I was in college, and I think I drew a rather distasteful image of Jesus on a cross. But even in that darkest of expression I wasn’t insulting Jesus…in my writings and doodlings Jesus was PISSED OFF at Christians for being closed-minded fools. And he was venting all the foul-mouthed, middle-finger-flipping pressure he had been saving for two thousand years. Ya know, all that young adult angst and grit and passion stuff.

But, aside from the occasional proselytizing from pious college Christians, I rarely discussed it with anyone.

Enter my son.

When you know you are about to become a father something clicks inside you. Suddenly all your weaknesses, all your personal foibles, all the stuff you keep hidden in the peripheral zone of your life comes rushing to the surface…an ugly, misshapen, shambling mound of a monster that threatens to undermine your child’s chances at having a good start in life.

And so I started taking my thoughts more seriously. I started analyzing my own beliefs and expanding my own knowledge. I wanted to learn, to grow, and most importantly to understand.

Belief in God was one of the topics to be dealt with. Does my belief define me? Can I label myself Atheist, Agnostic, or Believer? Should I? It seems prudent to define how I believe, and these are the tags we use to do so. I don’t think they have much function beyond being convenient descriptors, but then again perhaps they function as guides. I don’t know.

I’ll spare you the rambling (well, mostly) and cut to the chase.

First, a short definition. God, as I use that word here, means a “personal” deity. A literally existing all powerful superbeing. A Yaweh, Odin, Indra, Freya, or Jupiter kind of being. I’m necessarily speaking of the more ubiquitous “God” that has no shape, no form, no name, and is not associated with a particular religion. That view of God is so ambiguous it is virtually indistinguishable from an Agnostic’s Naturalism where the whole panorama of Mother Nature herself (if you’ll permit me a bit of panache) is so loved as to be something like a worshipped idea. In short, God = Yaweh/Allah.

Atheism itself is a strange animal. I’m a naturalist – meaning I lean toward natural, probable explanations rather than supernatural ones. So Atheism is attractive to me. I don’t see any evidence for God, therefore he must not exist…?

No, that’s where I part ways with the hardcore atheists. I mean, I’ve read the “New Atheism” books by Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris (and others) and found much in them to admire and much that I had not thought of before. But their willingness to shut the door completely on any concept of God is a little bit unsettling to me. It isn’t that I think we may discover God someday, or that I’m afraid of what God might think. It’s just that I take my philosophy to heart. I don’t know everything and I’m not willing to make an unequivocal, absolute statement like “There is no God”.

Here is where things get tricky. See, I don’t actually believe in God at all. When I say “believe in” I assume it is an active statement. I assume it means to invest belief in something. I don’t. I never really have. Doesn’t this make me a de facto atheist? Well, the term atheist means “without God”. I can buy that as a definition. I live without God every day. But the common understanding of the term seems to be a little different. It seems to mean “one who believes there is no God”. And I think that’s different.

If you believe in God, you are actively investing belief. You are doing something. It insinuates some kind of effort on your part to put something of yourself into the idea of God. So to believe there is no God means the same thing. You are putting energy into the idea that God does not exist. Well…I don’t do that either. I can’t possibly make a claim like that. I’d have to be fully aware of the entire universe in order to say – without a doubt – that God does or does not exist.

So I’m an Agnostic. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. Hardcore Atheists believe Agnosticism is fence-straddling, or a step on the road to Atheism. I disagree. I’ve always been Agnostic, and I still am. I don’t know if God exists or does not exist.

Now, that being said, I will submit that I live my life as if there was no God. Maybe you could argue that this really does make me a de facto Atheist. I don’t know. I guess you’d have a good argument there.

But from my perspective, from the place inside myself where I make conscious decisions about what I do and do not believe, I invest energy in wonder and in amazement…not in absolute declarations. I do not invest in the idea that there is or that there is not a God. In my everyday practical and even everyday spiritual life the question is not very important (see my definition of God above).

I am an Agnostic, and I am a Naturalist. I have an intimate understanding of what this means to me and I’m finding it easier and more interesting to express that understanding. I’m also finding it easier and more fulfilling to hear the thoughts and beliefs of others. I think that listening to ideas with which you might not agree can enrich your own understanding. It might even make you aware of thoughts within yourself that you didn’t know were there.

The Brain Leaketh

I blog to myself at work. I type these rambling emails going on and on about a comic idea, a way to do a comic, or some piece of philosophical gibberish. If I posted everything I write to myself on this blog I'm afraid no one would ever read it again.

What am I saying...it's a blog. No one reads it now! Well, maybe a couple of people.

I'm sleepy and feeling weird. I'd better shut the hell up now.

BTW, comics are actually coming to bloodredcomics.com. Just give me a few more...ya know...months.