Good Morning to all my 530 subscribers!
Really? I have 530 subscribers?
That’s what my subscription form says. I haven’t been able to figure out where that number comes from but, hey, glad to have you reading. Even if you’re a bot. Bots need love too.
Since you’re reading this it means you’ve survived another week! Congratulations! Pat yourself on the back. Scratch someone else’s back and maybe they will scratch yours. I hear, however, that it’s good manners these days to ask first.
Gatekeeping
I started a rant here about the enthusiasm for AI in … far too much. I’ve deleted it in favor of just saying – current human culture isn’t prepared to put it many good uses. The fact that it is was and continues to be generated by plagiarizing the creative work of real humans is, to me, a clear indication of this. I was inspired to rant by going to haveibeentrained.com. This website claims to search the databases that are being used to train art theft AIs. I put my name in the search engine and up popped a number of my images. I put in the names of some of my characters and up popped more of my images.
If you register with the site it gives you the opportunity to both upload images and register websites that you don’t want scraped for AI training. I’ve got way too many images online – just at Skookworks.com – to spend time uploading all of them, so I’ve registered all my websites and marked them as NO AI TRAINING zones. I don’t know if that will make any difference.
I got an email from someone at the site to confirm that my information was real and accurate. I responded to the email and got a response to my response. That was promising.
I don’t know of any site that does the same for the Large Language Model AIs.
The First Five
Over on Facebook my friend, Jason Levine, nominated me to post 10 comic book characters that have influenced my interest in comics. One character a day for 10 days. No explanation, no review, just the character. Each day, I am to nominate someone to do the same.
Rather than nominate anyone I asked for volunteers. If someone wanted to play, they just needed to say so in a reply. One person each day.
And, while I’m not going to give any explanations there, I’ll be doing so here in this newsletter. The first five are in today’s edition; the next five on the 21st.
The hardest part about this challenge is that, at this point in my life, it’s not specific characters that interest me. I pick up comics and graphic novels based on who is writing and/or drawing them. And even when I was a kid there are a number of characters whose comic I read only because of the artist drawing that comic. I mean, I don’t care about Dracula, in general, but I loved Tomb of Dracula by Wolfman and Colan. Most of the characters on this list fit that criteria. They were only done by one creator (or creative team) and I’m not interested in reading versions done by other folks. I did start collecting a lot of series because I liked one creator’s version and then kept collecting it when that creator moved on because I’d grown to like the character.
1. Spider-Man
This is the first comic I ever owned. It’s not a standard Spider-Man story. It’s a riff on King Kong with Gog, an alien, standing in for the big gorilla and the Savage Land, standing in for the lost world of Skull Island. Also, Gwen Stacy plays the Ann Darrow role and gets carried off by Gog. I had a small allowance that, for a few years, covered the purchase of one comic a month. At the time, Spider-Man only appeared in one regular comic so that worked out for me.
2. Swamp Thing
Time passed. My allowance got bigger. I added The Incredible Hulk to my regularly set of regularly purchased comics. I loved monsters and the Hulk was a monster that fought other monsters. There was a book store in town that had a rack of comics. I’d go in regularly and skim the comics. I kept getting hooked by Swamp Thing. He was a monster that was weirder than the Hulk who fought weirder monsters than the Hulk did. But my allowance, while bigger, was still pretty small. It took a lot for me to decide to add another series to my must-buy list. I finally took the plunge with Swamp Thing #24. The series was cancelled with this issue.
3. Tintin
I discovered Tintin when my family stayed with one of my Mom’s old friends. She had at least two Tintin albums sitting on a coffee table. One of them was definitely The Shooting Star. Americans often thought of comics as being just “superhero stories” – despite plenty of examples of comics that featured none. Tintin really showed me that “comics” was a medium for telling all kinds of stories. I don’t remember if, when I read Tintin the first time, I knew that it was not an American comic. I probably did. Mom’s friend had a lot of books about African and Asian mythology. She probably told me that this Tintin was a translation. I don’t remember. I do remember wanting more. The stories were longer than American monthlies and the format was larger.
4. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
I’m not sure how old I was when we discovered Perelandra. Perelandra was a comic book store. It sold new comics and back issues. My mother told Brian, the owner, to let me and my brother buy anything we wanted. She didn’t believe in censoring our reading. She’d gotten us adult library cards when we were, maybe, nine and ten. If we didn’t already, Glenn and I soon had paper routes, earning incomes that far surpassed our previous allowances. More money meant more comics and Perelandra gave us plenty to choose from. One of those choices was The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers – sex, drugs, crime, more drugs, hippies, more drugs. Freak Brothers didn’t make me want to do drugs but it didn’t dissuade me either. There’s a lot Freak Brothers DNA in Misspent Youths.
5. Cerebus the Aardvark
I don’t remember which issue of Cerebus was my first. I know it was before the author, Dave Sim, decided to turn the series into a single, 300 issue, graphic novel. I’d read other self published comics (Elfquest is a prime example) but Cerebus (through Sim’s gung ho editorializing) was the series that inspired me to want to forget about working with regular publishers and publish comics myself.
The Process GIF
That’s it for this week. I hope the summer is treating you well and, if you’re in the parts of the world getting record heat, you’re managing to stay cool.
See you in seven!
