I cannot answer why I waited so long to post an update. Nor can I answer why I decided to try it again. Blogging is a solitary endeavor, but life (and living it) is not. Does that make sense? So, here we go again...
There has been a revolution of sorts going on in the web concerning another interest of mine. Comics is my second hobby, and perhaps a better investment of my time (even though, computer consulting pays the bills). I first started drawing as a kid in grade school. My problem: it became a chore. All my friends started pestering me about drawing for them a picture of some superhero or another. That became boring. Contrary to belief, being popular and good at something did not self-reinforce, nor motivate into becoming an artist. Instead, I repressed it. For decades.
My subconscious kept needling me about something. In high school, and throughout college, I became interested in 35mm photography. I joined the photo club at RPI. I learned the chemical rituals of developing my own prints, both black and white, then color. I turned my bedroom in my mother's apartment into a makeshift darkroom. I was getting good at it. I even wrote a novel and several related science fiction stories.
Graduating from RPI. I went to work for the Department of Defense. I was part of a Quality Assurance Intern Program, and was sent around the country to dozens of schools, military bases and facilities (some of which did not permit cameras on the premises). The one thing they all had in common was that they were far from home, I did not have a car (that came later), and I got bored in the BOQs. If the laptop and internet had been invented, things would not have been so bad, but in those days dialup, CompuServe, and AOL didn't even EXIST. I started sketching, and rediscovered what I had forgotten since elementary school.
Fast forward a couple of decades.
Technology progressed. Massive portfolios of 2 ply bristol board and b&w illustrations transitioned to digitally scanned images on a computer hard disk. With color computers and displays, those b&w images were colorized.
With the introduction of animation software, and ideas for projects floating in and out of my head, I settled on doing a graphic novel. Massive outlines were written, then rewritten. One project was scrapped, because the background setup of that project became more interesting. Finally, the main story arc grew, supporting characters were developed, personalities fleshed out. The implementation kept changing, since the technology was evolving.
Learning new software was a chore!
The disturbing thing about it is the learning curve that has to go along with it. Not so much the time invested in the actual writing, or drawing layouts, the characters, the styles... The real issue was import/export, the file formats, compatibility, and operating system issues.
Are you aware that in 1986, Aldus Superpaint (a drawing program on Macintosh (pre-System 9) used Apple's PICT file format and handled multiple layers. In 2016, 30 years later, that same program still works (running in an emulated PowerPC environment called Sheep Shaver), whereas Apple seemed to have forgotten what the PICT file format could do. Their Preview app often crashes, or refuses to render any previews in Mac OSX v10.6.8 or later if given a PICT file with anything more complicated than the bitmap layer-0 plus 1 object layer?
I'm still figuring it out.
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