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Tiny threads, barely noticed

June 12, 2013
Comics, Personal, Reckons

I rarely read single-issue comics these days. The main thing I miss every month are the tiny moments of continuity.

Back in November, the BERG lot got (understandably) excited that Little Printer made a cameo in Avengers Assemble.

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(nicked from Matt’s Flickr feed – sorry Matt!)

For those who don’t know their Avengers, that’s Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark talking to a few heroes including Carol ‘Captain Marvel’ Danvers. It was written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, a favourite of mine since I read her Osborne miniseries a few years ago.

DeConnick also writes the excellent Captain Marvel series, which I’m just catching up with in the collected editions. An issue was published in January revolving entirely around the schedule spat out by Danvers’ own Little Printer.

BMizOh1CIAAiVe3

It’s a neat, self-contained tale. So far as I’m aware, it’s the only other time the device has appeared. I love the idea of Stark buying a bunch of LPs, farming them out to various Avengers and quietly running their lives for them through a tyranny of till receipts. The idea of heroes responding to them in ways not a million miles from how I use mine is a wonderful, subtle way of bridging the human/hero, reader/character divides.

This, for me, is continuity working at its best. Not another Crisis, or Death Of The Family; just Wayne Enterprises satellites and Sisko’s baseball. Tiny pieces in a joined-up world that allow readers to imagine so much more.

Care more

June 11, 2013
Personal, Reckons

Saw this in a toilet at a trendy Hackney drinking establishment.

photo (2)

Except, on closer inspection, it was stuck up badly, crumpled around the edges and a little bit beaten up.

photo (1)

And the room it was in had a wet floor, a bin collecting a little bit of mould and an extremely dirty mirror. There are proverbs about that sort of thing.

It also reminded me of Chris’ comment about the flickr redesign. I’m fine with improving things as you go, but sometimes it’s worth sweating the small stuff. People notice.

Bye bye Paper Science

April 30, 2013
Comics, PaperFuture, Personal, We Are Words and Pictures

Dropped off my final copies of Paper Science at Gosh Comics today, which feels mighty strange.

I really miss wrangling that thing. There is little as satisfying as having a huge box of newsprint delivered, colours screaming off of the page, fabulous stories printed within. But there is also little worse than having a box of comics waiting to be sold, dragged from one poorly-promoted small press fair to another, every inch of profit eaten away by train fare, miserable sandwiches and rickety tables.

Paper Science 1

The numbers don’t lie: the subscription was absolutely brilliant for the anthology, in terms of finance, promotion, enthusiasm and general confidence. For that I didn’t need to leave my laptop. After that, the best things Paper Science did (in terms of audience, profit and reach) were get stocked at Gosh comics, appear on a table at MCM Expo, and get taken to ELCAF. Almost every other event, no matter how much fun at the time, turned a little bit of money into a lot less money. I’m told that that is the standard definition of ‘publishing’.

As for the anthology itself, I’m more proud of it than anything else I’ve done. It’s an excellent collection, filled with brilliant work by people who are getting better and better with each passing story.

Tomorrow my company – newly rechristened We Are Words and Pictures – enters its second year. The only goal for 2013-2014 is ‘make one thing as good as Paper Science’. Feels like a good challenge.

Week 38

January 21, 2013
Haar, Matthew Sheret, Personal, Week Notes

My Grandad died last week. William Dibben, Keith to his friends, played a big part in bringing my sister and I up. Twice-a-week most weeks he made sure we got home safe and sound, cooked us dinner, and did whatever he could to help us with homework.

He introduced me to Star Trek and The Animals of Farthing Wood. He sat with me when I came home and saw the second tower fall. He broke his collarbone in the search for instamatic camera shots when I told him about The Polaroid Press. He cared deeply for his children and their children, and I’ll miss him.

Grandad was a man familiar with blurring the boundary between work-life and social-life, and he seemed to get the best of both worlds. I’ve learned a lot from that. Personal projects will be stepping down a gear for a few weeks as I visit family, but work continues. Here’s Week 38…

Always be beaming

January 1, 2013
Personal

Beam engine halfway

I got a little wooden beam engine for Christmas. It’s lovely. Sunday afternoon was spent making it, slowly understanding how the whole thing slid together.

It’s a great little contraption. It’s also really nicely suited to its task, which is showing you how a beam engine works.

I’ve seen these things up close a few times, but (like so much else) I only started to really grasp why they work by sticking bits together.

M with engine_3

Pictures and video by Anne (thanks!), whose photography tumblog is brilliant.

Pixels and baking

December 18, 2012
Matthew Sheret, Personal, Reckons
1 Comment

My Dad’s asked my sisters and I to make him a photo collage for Christmas. A proper one, in a frame, using scissors and glue and all that stuff.

Far and away the most frustrating part of it has been getting old photos reprinted – it’s expensive and time consuming without a good scanner at home. The second most irritating is the gaps, where all we have between us are old cameraphone images.

The prints look so bad – there’s one in particular of my sister’s graduation where she and my Dad look like they’re on a COPS-style show but never signed their image rights over – and as a result there’s a noticeable leap forwards of about six years between one pocket of photos and another in the collage.

Gradcops

I had a blog post ready to go a few days ago that basically said ‘I like pictures, but I’m bored of taking them with my phone. I like the personal/social space of Instagram, but I miss being able to share better images using a Flickr-like service. Also, I want a camera.’

(It took a lot longer to say all of that of course)

I deleted it because by the time it was ready to post I’d bought a new camera and flickr had released its new app. Then Instagram changed their terms of service, and suddenly I found myself back on flickr, uploading pictures via desktop, as if the last three years had never happened.

Moving (back) to flickr

Exporting my Instagram photos I see that same awful quality appearing again. I know those old images have little value for advertisers, and little value for me outside of the social context they were posted in. So I’m left knowing that the important part of the Instagram for me was the illusion of ambient intimacy.

That illusion is shattered when I say to myself ‘am I happy for anyone to buy the rights to this image?’ every time I hit upload. So the service stops being important. Doesn’t mean I won’t use it again, just that it doesn’t mean quite the same thing.

Meanwhile, you solve the image quality problem by taking better quality photos. So I bought a new camera. I have no idea how to use it properly yet, but to keep that Instagram spirit going I present to you a photo of some bread what I baked.

Third attempt

Ambient intimacy, right there, all up in your RSS feeds.

Minimum Viable Viking

December 12, 2012
Matthew Sheret, Personal
2 Comments

Back from a brilliant weekend in Oslo, where I managed to do more Scandowegian things in 72 hours than anyone would have dreamt possible.

Frozen lake

Saturday’s daylight hours were spent in the woods, yomping about in snow and Hildafolk trees to find this spot overlooking the frozen lake, where I drank what might have been the best-tasting whisky I’ve ever had.

Monday I hunkered down at AHO as an external examiner. I shouldn’t say much about that until I’ve pressed send on the formal feedback I’ve got in the next tab, but it was a really eye-opening experience and wonderful to see Mosse with her students in their native environment.

(I also popped in to see Voy‘s latest prototypes, and they’re working on some lovely stuff… obviously)

But it’s half an hour from Sunday that’s currently bubbling away in my head.

Viking Ship Museum

Jørn took Anne and I to the Viking Ship Museum, on Timo’s recommendation. It’s twenty minutes out of town, in a spartan church-like building. Three hulking shells of Viking longships sit inside, surrounded by plain white walls and the bare minimum of signage. Cabinets of smaller finds are kept to their own wing, dimly lit and with as little between the viewer and the artefact as the curators can get away with.

It was so serene. These thousand year-old vessells command the space, and visitors are asked to contemplate them more than they’re asked to learn about them. We joked that it was the minimum viable museum… and there’s something in that. There were no distractions, no ‘spooky-action-at-a-distance‘, just a terrific lump of timeshifted history.

Viking Ship Museum

Epic thanks to Jørn and Marie for making us feel so welcome, and to Mosse and Einar for having me over at AHO.

Soft edges and squealing

September 13, 2012
Matthew Sheret, Personal

I can’t remember which of the X-wing books it was in, but there was a bit where a character aboard a new Star Destroyer talks about the ‘baby’s squeal’ coming from the engines. It’s a sound that burns away as the vessel gets worn in, replaced by a reassuring hum. ‘New car smell’, but at sci-fi scale.

I was aware that it had to be based on a thing – maybe a car thing, maybe a naval term – but wasn’t conscious of it personally until I bought my Brompton. When I got that (her, sometimes, but most often it), the bike felt sharp. Sharp but silent. Over time the ride got softer, but a clack and squeak replaced the silence of the ride. It became a reassuring mutter.

Today marked my first punture. Quite a bad one – whatever it was tore the rear wheel open a bit – so in she went for a service. And now the silence is mostly back, along with most of the sharpness. The journey home was a much less comfortable ride than I’ve had all summer, to be honest.

And I remembered that ‘baby’s squeal’, the comforting sounds of things just working. Protesting a bit, perhaps, but mostly working. Is there a word for that?

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