It's a silly thing but I am happy with how it came out.
Originally released in 2002 under the title "46 Years", "50 Years" is a recollection of memories and events as they relate to Ralph Hodgdon and Paul McMahon and their life-long love for each other.
This is nothing like a comic con, it's much more grass roots and no one dresses up and no big studios are here promoting the latest super hero movie. Graphic novels are taken seriously here and there is a huge variety of content to see from commercially published books to those made at the copy centre to children's stories, to political tale, horror, sci-fi, slice of life, humour... you name it.
There wasn't a lot of original artwork on sale so what i saw was really good and many artists were there in person to sell their books. Book stores and local comic book stores were well represented. I noticed there were a large number of formats being sold from limited edition beautifully designed hard covers and boxed sets to self published works. Almost no toys, movie posters or any of the other trappings of conventions now aimed at the general public over serious art fans looking to see more than just big commercial efforts. There seemed to be more English books this year but they also just might have stood out to me more since i usually don't see English books normally for sale. The people there were mostly men as these things usually are but not too much of an imbalance. The artists were really diverse - racially, age-wise, and it was a very open and welcoming and atmosphere. English and French were pretty evenly balanced as well.
I was given No Man's Sky as a gift (thanks Mike!) after being very curious about it for a long time. One question I had about it was how "combat heavy" it was and most of what I saw about the game seemed to suggest - a lot of it. That turns out not to be the whole story. One reason I was given this game is it has a "creative mode" which lets you keep out of multi -player, combat and the ins and outs of trading and building things and lets you just explore and enjoys the created worlds. Totally my kind of thing.
I have learned how to play much better over the last 100 hours of play and really like it! I made a base near a lake and then put an underwater base in that lake that I can travel back and forth to. I did go on a couple "missions" that didn't involve contact with other players and I found them... interesting. I came across an abandoned ship underwater and went on a search for it's crew and I started to look for a lost alien named "Artemus" and another named "Apollo" related to to finding the first alien but stopped actively pursuing it when I was told I needed to make space in my base and look for technicians etc to continue the search. Maybe someday. I completed... ? The Atlas station mission only to find it can't be completed definitively.
Since starting a few months ago the game has had 2 huge updates, one for a mission I wasn't interest in and another mission involving collecting fossils. I wasn't interested in the mission group thing but I could still collect fossils, make and display specimens on my base and found that super fun. Hello Games seems pretty motivated to keep the game growing and changing.
None of this takes away from the game as I play it. maybe if I were interacting with others it would be annoying or hinder game play but it's easy for me to ignore since none of those things will affect my outcomes. If you are looking for multi-player action and combat or running a small village on strange planet, those options are open to you but I can't speak to how well that works or how involved it is. I am happy playing as I do!
This version is recut, new graphics, where possible, with better sound and upscaled to HD. It was filmed on zero budget with an old video camera and a mono microphone from the Radio Shack so I’ve tried to improve it where possible but tech is only so magical, even these days.
The goal is to give people who were not able to go to this wonderful place and a sense of what it was like and to remind the world of Boston’s gay history and a world that is now gone and lost.
Ralph had written on a publicity page that there were 7 issues of this comic but actually, there are only 6. I have one page where the dialogue box on the bottom of the page is completely gone and will have to ask Ralph's friend Dan if he has a version that says what it is so I can recreate it.
The image about is pretty typical of the problem I have with some pages. Since it was hand typed I can't just find the same font and redo the text. it looks more authentic like this, anyway.
My friend Ralph had a long, maybe 10 year project, he worked on. It was a sequel to his favourite film, Gone with the Wind and he wanted to tell that story basically as a graphic novel or comic book and include as many old Hollywood stars from the film's era into his new story. They had to be around and available to David O Selznick when a second movie would have been made. He used the technique he used in making his renowned paper doll books, drawing out each page on letter sized paper, inking it and then making a copy of the cleaned up artwork to paint with watercolours. This had the extra step of typing out the dialogue for the thought balloons and then attaching them to the finished art before making colour photocopies to produce the final version of each page.
Sadly my friend did not understand you can't sell a new story based on someone else's copyrighted work so this giant effort could never been professionally published and it was a huge disappointment for him. He showed its and pieces of the work to people but almost never the entire thing despite people, like me, begging him to. I wanted to scan the original art and put into a self published book using the company Blurb so he could see what it might have looked like as a "real" book and even have copies made for his friends. That wasn't something I could get him to sign on to though.
Now, after his passing his good friend Dan has spent a lot of time scanning a copies of the entire project he managed to get Ralph to give him so that i can fix it up and make that blurb book and a PDF version for his loved ones.
This will take a LONG time. I did take the page I thought might be the most challenging and make it usable. I worked on the colour and straightening out the scan but the most difficult part was the text, especially the long list of movies stars listed. Some of the names were unreadable. So I removed all the text except the title by hand and recreated the art beneath it so as to have a clean image to put more readable text over. I hand typed the replacement text and researched names I could not read well to be reasonably sure they were the names Ralph wanted and then re-arranged the placement of them so the names could be a little larger and easier to read when printed.
On top is the finished page so far and below is the original scan and the page after I removed the text. This isn't nearly the most interesting or exciting page in the book but I think it will be (I hope) the one needing the most work to prepare it for printing. I would have had a full age just for the names so they could be a decent size but this is as far from Ralph's original design I am willing to go.
One of Ralph’s passions was paper doll books and up until his death he sold them at conventions. His books were amazing, detailed and hand painted in a way you could almost feel the cloth of the costumes. Another passion of his was "Gone with the Wind". He wrote and illustrated a sequel with100s of drawings and it took him about a decade. His story followed directly after the film and he integrated period actors who he thought might have been used if this was actually made at that time. Again, the work is amazing.
He and his husband Paul MacMahon (1933-2011) lived a couple blocks from me in Dorchester, Massachusetts so I would often visit for supper and talk about films and look at their (mostly Paul’s) frankly ridiculous collection of memorabilia. They were together for about 57 years and married the last 7 after that became possible in 2004. Ralph kept Paul’s ashes in his old chair with his teddy bear, something he had his whole life, next to it. Their story inspired me to make the documentary film "50 Years", which they both spoke of their lives separately and together up to just after getting married.
After Paul’s death, Ralph and I became even closer as friends and I visited him when I could. Having moved to Montréal, Québec made it a little difficult but we managed to talk on the phone, exchange letters and have our visits that would take all day as we caught up on each other’s artwork and projects and personal lives. I don’t know many artists or "creatives" and my talks with Ralph are precious memories for me and likely won’t happen with anyone else. His passing is a loss for me on many levels.
It’s a loss for more than myself, though. Ralph was a piece of gay history who guarded that history by telling his story and guarding the photos Paul had taken as a journalist over the years, a legend in the paper doll world and a good friend to everyone in his life. This is a hole in the world that can’t be filled.
Good bye my longtime friend. The last 40 years were not enough.
Ralph as a child
