New iMac New Cintiq Tablet

I’m a lifelong Mac guy— an Apple Stockholder and a big Anti-Microsoft guy— I upgrade my hardware about every 2-3 years on average. Last year Veronica went out and upgraded her iMac— she doesn’t do it as often as I do, maybe every 6 years, and she bought a yellow one now that they come in colors. As it happens about two weeks ago #2 and #3 sons each went out and bought new Macs for work— #2 got a blue one and #3 got a green one. #3 had mentioned to me that he was going to pick up the two machines in Natick and I told him I’d meet him there because these things are actually pretty heavy in the box.

The process for buying a Mac is pretty easy if you’re an Apple Card holder— tap your phone, they bring it out of the back and you’re on your way. While we were there I considered upgrading mine too but then I didn't want to carry back three of them.

So it was about a week later that I decided to go ahead, because I’d just did a rare sign up for a credit card offer with a major airline because they offered 85,000 bonus points to anyone who landed in the top 2% of credit ratings and I was confident I could attain that. Adding the Mac purchase (which I paid off instantly) tossed on another 2,000 points— I ordered the machine I wanted and opted for the $9 Two Hour Courier Delivery— that seemed like a deal to me— and of course as soon as I checked out I got a notice that it wasn’t available and it refunded me the $9. I opted to pick it up at the store in Marlborough and made the ride out there about an hour later.

Apple Stores are notoriously different— rubber balls for seats, tons of techs pushing product, and its loaded with Hipsters— I walked in said “nope, nope nope” to the first three techs I passed looking for the oldest and least obnoxious looking one I could find, showed him my QR code on my phone and in seconds I had the Mac and was walking back out of the store.

Upgrading hardware is fairly easy- unless you have things like a Cintiq Drawing Tablet installed like I do, you have to find the new driver, install it, tweak a couple of security settings and find the proper adaptors because now Macs no longer have thunder ports or standard USB plugs.

It took about three hours and I got everything running. I’ve had my 12” Cintiq from WACOM for about eight years, and it works like a charm. Veronica has the 22” version and I’ve tried it but its too big for me. Truthfully, the 12” has always been a little snug, so I decided to see if they’ve added any that I wasn’t aware of and sure enough they had a 16” model so I ordered that and gave my old trusty 12” model to #3 son who is launching his own freelance art career. I think it has a lot of years left so it should serve him well.

The 16” is very similar but I dig the larger size so again after about three hours I got it working— then I went over to #3 son’s apartment and spent about 2 hours getting his tablet working.

The new computer is much faster, no more waiting, no more pinwheels. The old iMac moved into a support role for my home streaming service.

And all is right in the world.

NOTE- Since writing this post I’ve traded my MacBook Air for a full fledged MacBook Pro and I’ve bought a second 16” Cintiq Tablet so I can work downstairs when I’m done working up in my studio for the day.

Convention Report: SANTA CLARA CA

SHORTBOXED is a new startup company that is working as a consignment center for vintage comic books— they’re looking to give eBay, WhatNot, Instagram and Facebook a run for their money. They’re introducing an APP that will allow you to track your collections and doing all kinds of things that if they can accomplish is going to make them a major player in the field.

They invited SUPERWORLD COMICS out for the show and because owner Ted was going to be traveling, sons #2 and #3 asked if I’d have any interest in coming out to help and to shop the show. I was buried in work but I thought the idea of four or five days sitting in the California sun sipping a cocktail by the pool and working on my laptop sounded like a winner (they proposed the idea to me in the middle of winter) so I agreed.

We left Boston on a 9am flight and arrived a few minutes before scheduled in San Francisco— caught an Uber the 45 minute ride to the show location and checked into our hotel which was connected to the Santa Clara Convention Center— it was a Hyatt— I’ve had good experiences with Hyatt Hotels in fact the restaurant at the Hyatt in Greenville South Carolina was four stars and maybe even five— so I was excited for the food here.

I shouldn’t have been.

More Next Week.

Bond...SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977)

Growing up in the 70s Roger Moore was my favorite Bond and this movie and MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN were my favorite Bonds— man how times change. This one is probably Moore’s best outing, but he’s still just not James Bond— he’s Roger Moore playing James Bond. This one is slicker than most of the other Bonds but it also has a hard time taking itself seriously. The scenes filmed in Egypt at night are really well done and the Henchman this time around is Richard Kiel as Jaws— who is a 7 foot tall metal toothed menace— but he’s sometimes played for laughs which doesn’t help. You wouldn’t find Oddjob in GOLDFINGER dropping a heavy block on his own foot.

Ringo Starr’s wife Barbara Bach is the Bond girl, in this case the Russian equivalent to 007 and she’s a horrible actress although I never noticed at the time. I also never noticed Moore’s womanizing which comes across as just plain creepy— maybe I got up and got popcorn during the love scenes, maybe it just went over my head completely— hey I was eleven.

The villain is an environmentalist who thinks it’s better to destroy the world and start over again. Maybe the Bond producers should consider the same thing, but it’ll take another thirty years (!) before they do.

An interesting development in the minor characters, Q who is in charge of coming up with the crazy weapons Bond uses seems to gain some real prominence as the series goes on, which makes little sense. He started as a working class guy in MI6 and now he’s standing with the highest ranking officials during top secret meetings.

Anyway, this is Moore’s best Bond film to date, and probably ever, there are rumors that one that is coming up in a few short years is better but I’ve never seen it so we’ll see how it plays out.

BOND will return in MOONRAKER

• BOND: Moore is never going to be Connery, time to accept that the series is doing James Bond Lite. ****1/2

• VILLAIN: Stromberg has a great voice but he’s not very threatening. ****

• THEME SONG: You either like Carly Simon or you don’t- I don’t. **

• HENCHMAN: Jaws could have been the best henchman of all time, it’s s pity they weren’t taking the series seriously anymore. ****
  OVERALL BOND RATING: ****

FREELANCER GUiDANCE - Handling Rejection

Rejection is a part of the creative lifestyle.
Nobody likes it, but handling it is a big part of whether or not you're even cut out for this.  The example I'm showing above is from Marvel Comics but this goes for any type of submission-- comics, novels, illustration-- you are going to send your work in and for some reason or another it's occasionally going to get rejected.  A few keys to remember:

1. It's NEVER personal.  They are rejecting your work, not you.  Learn how to separate yourself from your work and it'll be a lot easier to handle.  YOU are not your work, your WORK is not you.

2. Take constructive criticism.  The above letter is a form letter Marvel used to send out to slightly promising artists.  If your work showed more promise they might have hand written in some details as to what they thought needed work.

3. How much of a stomach do you have for this?  I myself got well over 200 rejection letters like the one above before I finally got hired.  TWO HUNDRED.  My routine was to send in a new sample packet every week so 200 means I did that for well over three years since sometimes I got more than one rejection letter at a time-- you see as I sent in samples I told the submissions editor I was wallpapering a wall in my studio with rejection letters so on occasion I'd get a stack of them.  My consistency with sending in samples (always new once I figured out what I was doing) showed them I wasn't going away.    It also showed that I could produce at least five pages a week working a full time job.

4. Keep at it or give up and find another career.   Some people prefer the life of a regular paycheck to the struggles of freelance.  Not everyone is cut out for this, but if you think you are then a little rejection isn't going to hurt you.

Next week:  I'll go over HOW to send in submission packets.

Andy Fish is a professional comic book artist and freelancer who's been doing this for a long time.  He also mentors and teaches other artists looking to make the jump to pro.  You can contact him (where he will answer not in the third person) at andy@andytfish.com

KOLCHAK PAPERS: Episode #9- The Spanish Moss Murders

Airdate: Dec 6, 1974

Directed by Gordon Hessler. Written by Alvin Friedman and David Chase

Guest Cast: Keenan Wynn, Severn Darden, Randy Boone, Johnny Silver, Ned Glass, Richard Kiel, Virginia Gregg, Brian Avery

The monster

From IMDB: A research experiment in dream deprivation produces a corporeal Cajun boogeyman covered in Spanish moss.

One of the best episodes in the series in no small part due to the writing of David Chase. This one has many of the things we’ve come to love about Kolchak with the added bonus of the first really scary monster in the series. Jack the Ripper was suitably eerie, the Lady Vampire was aggressively scary but she was lit way too brightly to give it the right atmosphere. With the Moss Man we have a monster we see only peripherally and then only in the dark which keeps him the stuff of bad dreams.

Sleep Research was another big trend in the 70s and institutes like the one depicted here often got mainstream news coverage with pseudo science theories as well as actual discovery of the process of REMS and sleep levels on the human brain.

HOW’S THE MONSTER: This might be the best “monster” makeup in the series. Richard Kiel who played the giant Native American ghost in the BAD MEDICINE is under the costume.

Captain Siska tries to convince Carl he’s OK.

WHO’S THE COP WHO HATE’S KOLCHAK? Keenan Wynn is Captain “Mad Dog” Siska who starts out trying to change his anger into an “Im OK you’re OK” group therapy type of response, but Carl is too much for him pretty quickly. He’s one of the best cop adversary’s in the show because of this depth. He’ll be back in a later episode.

WHO ARE THE ODDBALL SIDE CHARACTERS? Along with Wynn we’ve got Severn Darden as the doctor running the experiments— he plays the same creepy kind of doctor he played in two of the Planet of the Apes films, Ned Glass is great as the building super and Virginia Gregg was a regular on DRAGNET and she was the voice of the mother in PSYCHO and she’s welcome here playing a gardener at the Chicago Botanical Gardens.

Carl hunts a Moss Monster

KOLCHAK DIALOGUE:

Carl Kolchak: [voiceover] There's nothing under the sun that I fear as much as I fear dentist appointments. I was on my way to one, envisioning the agony to come, when the police radio delivered me from that cruel and inhuman fate.

KOLCHAK RATING: 5.0 - This one goes into the top five.

NEXT WEEK: We take a Holiday Break from reviews to watch the first Kolchak Movie! I don’t work from Dec 23- Jan 4th and neither should you!

In Two Weeks NEXT UP: THE ENERGY EATER - talk about keeping the monster hidden!

From My Personal Collection...CAVE GIRL!

A-1 Comics #96 1953

Golden Age Comics can sometimes be hard to collect— here is CAVE GIRL #12, or so you’d think— it’s actually A-1 Comics #96! Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Terrific Cover by Bob Powell and the color on this one just pops!

A-1 Comics #116

Ten issues later you get CAVE GIRL #13— wow if you were a kid in the 1950s waiting for the next exciting adventures of Cave Girl you better have some patience. Yup, this one is A-1 Comics #116.

A-1 Comics #137 (1955)

And another year later she’s back this time with the title of AFRICA, THRILLING LAND OF MYSTERY #1— Number 1?? Yeah my head hurts— but once again I love the art by Bob Powell and the color just sends this screaming off the newsstand rack!

Bond....MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974)

Roger Moore’s second outing as James Bond is not much of an improvement from his first and there are growing pains evident.

The director attempted to make Moore as savage as Connery could be— which matched the books— but as I stated in my review of the last film Moore is too much of a gentleman to pull it off. When he threatens Maude Adams with a broken arm we don’t buy it— we don’t like it either. Bond’s constant distraction with the ladies gets really old for me too.

But there is enough in here to make it an interesting take; Christopher Lee as the title character is great as he was in virtually anything he was in. The little guy from Fantasy Island is the main henchman, and although he offers little in way of an actual threat he’s a character that has some interesting aspects to him. It would have been so great if they’d made him an actual mini version of Oddjob from GOLDFINGER, which was the original intention. Lee’s Scaramanga has an island hideout complete with a live action shooting gallery with some interesting characters as wax figures including Al Capone and James Bond himself— luckily Scaramanga had enough foresight to not order the Sean Connery one from Sharper Image and got one that looked like Moore instead because that’s going to be an important plot element.

Overall, it’s not the best Bond film and it was the biggest bomb at the time, but it’s got some good stuff in it too. Interesting side note, this was by far my Favorite Bond Film when I was a wee lad. This is why we should never let kids vote.

Bond will be back, this time Moore finds his own, in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME.

BONDERISMS

• BOND: Moore is better in this one, but he’s still not Connery and they need to stop trying to pretend he is. ****

• VILLAIN: Christopher Lee is suitably creepy. *****

• THEME SONG: A very 70s soulish number by Shirley Bassey. ***

• HENCHMAN: Nick Nack is pretty interesting but ultimately ineffective. ****1/2
  OVERALL BOND RATING: ***1/2